“They were very present in my head since then,” Ryan says. “I was always aware of how they were progressing as people.”

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The book, which was written in 21 chapters, each from a different character’s point of view, was set in a fictional version of the small town in Ireland where Ryan was from. His mother, who still lived there, worked in a grocery store, and always told him he’d have to write a sequel.

“People would come into the store to ask about the characters speaking of them as if they were real people, asking, ‘How is Bobby? Is he OK,’” Ryan recalls.

“Heart, Be at Peace” answers those readers’ fervent questions, although Ryan regrets not writing it before his mother died.

“I did write it as kind of a thank-you to the people who invest their time in my books and because I also had such a fondness for the characters,” he says. “It’s a privilege and a joy to have people engage with characters I’ve created and to read books I’ve written. It seems unbelievable.”

While “The Spinning Heart” was set in the aftermath of the economic crash of 2008, “Heart, Be at Peace” is set a decade later when the town and its residents feel like they’re flourishing again while simultaneously facing a new threat: the encroachment of increasingly reckless and ruthless drug dealers. The story is again told in 21 chapters and brings back all the characters from the first one, although it can easily be enjoyed by someone who has not read “The Spinning Heart.” 

Ryan spoke recently by video about the book and his real life in Ireland. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. Your books are intimate, dealing not only with small-town life but also with socio-cultural or political issues, whether it’s the economic meltdown, the influx of drugs or the Syrian refugee crisis. Is that a conscious choice?

I’ve never sat down to write an issue novel, but those things are informed by my own experience. My stories are located in a very particular place, a fictionalized rendering of my home place, but those big things creep in because we’re all corks in the ocean. When I wrote “The Spinning Heart,” I was in the exact same position as loads of the characters, with huge mortgage arrears and personal debt and our income had suddenly been slashed.

I was working as a labor inspector for a government body, and our job was to make sure people’s employment rights were applied across the board. We had lots of cases that were very similar to the case of Pokey Burke, who in the book ripped off his employees.

Now I find it terrifying the impunity with which people deal drugs. Not long before I started writing “Heartbeat,” I was walking back to my house and a child offered me drugs. I said, “Are you selling drugs right here?” And he said, “Anything you want.”

When I said, “Effin awful,” he suddenly was threatening to burn my house down and kill my children. It’s as though the criminal world and the ordinary world have collided now, and this collision is horrible and messy and bloody. The world’s gone mad and people who make billions of dollars from crime are living it up and laughing at us.

Q. Was it easy to find the voices for the different characters?

I wanted to be true to the voice of my own people. A blog called Books and Bowel Movements once said that “The Spinning Heart” was the worst book ever written and after seven paragraphs of absolute invective she wrote that all I was doing was “using the slang and grit of his own people.” I forgave her for the whole horrible review because that’s actually what I was aiming for. 

I didn’t have to work very hard to be able to wield language in a way that reads lyrically or poetically because it’s how language is used where I’m from. There’s a beautiful cadence and rhythm in rural Ireland in the way we structure sentences because we retained Gaelic syntax and there’s kind of a joy in it. 

There’s an attempt to not be too direct and it’s lovely, the way people can speak for a long time without saying anything very much at all, but still the act of speaking is very important – those banal comments about the weather are done in such a way that the person listening feels connected to you for that moment. 

Q. Were you wary of finding the right path for the characters that everyone loved so much?

It was hard to come back to Bobby and his wife Triona because they’re the two main pillars. [Both books open with Bobby’s chapter and close with Triona’s.] Their relationship was very important to me especially because I based Triona on my own wife – she even did the voice of Triona for the audiobook.

I was so worried about getting it right with Bobby and Triona. I wanted to show they were still completely and utterly in love, with an almost fairy-tale kind of level of miracle rightness  I wanted it to be my own marriage, really. Triona’s voice needed to be as wise but still as humane and loving as it was in “Spinning Heart,” even though Bobby is still inexpressive, which is a bit selfish in a way. He must know how much it upsets her that he can’t express themselves properly to her. But they’ve developed a kind of silent language over the years. I wanted that to be expressed properly. 

There’s a lot of silence in both books – for two books that are composed of people speaking first person to the reader, there’s almost no dialogue. There are very few moments where people actually communicate in the books. And also everybody is saying things they wouldn’t say out loud. 

Q. When Bobby doesn’t come clean in the first chapter about a false rumor being spread about, his inability to communicate with his wife makes you want to bang your head against the wall.

I’m glad to hear that because I wanted people to feel that frustration. People say, “Just say it, Bobby,” but this is such a real thing for a lot of men. There’s a lot of myself in Bobby – there are loads of things that I find really, really hard to say, really obvious things that I should be able to say.

Q. Do you think you’ll go back to these characters in another 10 or 15 years?

I hadn’t considered it until I read a review in The Financial Times that said this book seems like “the second part of a tetralogy” and I thought, “That sounds like a good idea.” I don’t think I’m finished with this village and these characters. 

The NBC News correspondent and anchor writes about trying to make her way in a White world that often looks down on someone with her appearance. She also watches her parents try to adjust to a new culture while her father’s penchant for a hustle leads them to both an “American dream home” – and the loss of that house. 

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But Nguyen, who spoke recently by video about the book and her life, also goes back in time and traces her parents’ journey, from life in Vietnam before America went to war there, then during the violence of the war years, the tumult and danger after America left and then their decision to flee, as “boat people” in 1979, taking Nguyen who was then a baby, on a perilous journey out of the country and into the uncertainty of a refugee camp before they made it to America. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. In the book, you recall the childhood embarrassment of trying to pronounce English words because your parents didn’t speak much English and about hearing racist comments about your appearance even as a child. How has that shaped you as a journalist? 

I feel like it made me less judgmental because I recognize that people’s words matter, but so do their intentions – and I can appreciate people for who they are and that we all have such vastly different perspectives. I feel like I can give a lot of grace to people when I’m in a situation where someone might say something that’s not politically correct, or that could be perceived as insulting. I’m able to press pause, reflect, and think, where is that coming from? Is it meant to be malicious? Or is this someone who just hasn’t been exposed to Asian Americans or has a blind spot there? 

Q. This is partly a memoir, but the most dramatic things happened to your parents either before you were born or when you were a baby. Did you interview them, or did you base this on stories you’d heard growing up?

I pieced together my own memories of what my parents had told me, but I also worked with a co-writer who really helped, extracting information and details from my parents in a way that I don’t think they ever would have shared with me. I think your instinct as a parent is to protect your children, so you don’t go into the finer points of something that might have been scary or traumatic for you. 

Q. What surprised you about your parents’ lives that you didn’t know before working on the book?

Our parents have these incredible lives before they just become mom and dad to us. So this was such a beautiful gift to have this opportunity. 

Learning how my dad was a hustler from his earliest days as a kid helped me connect a lot of dots about who he was. And then learning about my mom in her teens and early 20s having the courage to leave her little seaside village and go to Saigon and try to make her own way during the war, working for American companies, practicing her English.

I always joke that the Vietnamese Americans you meet are Type A++ because it took that mentality to think, “We’re going to hire a smuggler and we’re getting away on a boat.” We know all these bad things have happened, but why not us? Why not have some hope? It’s a mix of desperation with the hope that fuels the belief you’re going to get somewhere better.

Q. What did your parents think of the book?

I gave both of them early drafts and I tried to explain why it’s important for me to include the ups and downs of what we went through – had we not gone through some of those financial hardships, if we had a comfortable life, if we kept our American dream house, maybe I wouldn’t have stuck it out in journalism. Maybe I wouldn’t be here talking with you today as an NBC News correspondent and anchor. I might’ve felt like it was safe to go home.

My mom read the book and was very interested in what it was like for me growing up, what my early jobs were like, the experiences that I had that she didn’t know about. My dad read the book for all the parts about himself. This is what my mom tells me. That’s very on-brand for him. Maybe with time my dad will be able to see from beginning to end why I included the financial difficulties.

Q. Do you see yourself in them?

My parents are built to see the silver lining in any situation. That’s the thing that I inherited from them. When they recount being attacked by pirates while on the smuggler’s boat trying to leave Vietnam, their takeaway is, “Well, thank goodness, nobody was raped or shot or thrown overboard.” They know that people had it so much worse. They don’t let themselves get mired in the trauma.

Q. Do you see your parents differently now?

I am able to give them so much more grace now. When I hear about family dynamics from fellow Vietnamese Americans and other Asian Americans, I know how tough it is when you are parented by people who were raised in a different country with different cultures, different values, and different ways of showing affection. I feel like I got off pretty lucky, and I’m really grateful to my parents for everything that they have done for me. 

Q. How is it different for you as an American parent?

When you are bicultural or multicultural, you get to take the best parts of all of those cultures and customs and parenting styles so there is a toughness and a resilience that comes from parents who have high expectations, who show they love you, but don’t always tell you they love you. That is embedded in how I parent, but I also know how important it is for kids to hear those words – “I love you,” “I’m proud of you” – and so that is also how I parent.

I didn’t have that growing up. What is so funny is that my parents raised me as Vietnamese parents, but with my daughters, they’re now Vietnamese American grandparents, so there’s a lot of “I love you” and “Great job, I’m so proud of you.” 

And I think, “Who are these people?” But they’ve evolved as well. 

Inspired by this, Leslie went and wrote that book: “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.” Despite a seemingly endless parade of Beatles books, Leslie offers a fresh take, telling the story of the band through the duo’s relationship and the story of their relationship through the songs they were singing. 

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In a video interview from London, Leslie said most previous tomes recount the facts of the story without doing the music justice – “which is what this is all about and you can’t understand them without understanding the music” – or failed to explore the pair’s relationship “with depth or emotional intelligence.” 

He was initially hesitant to pitch a book, since he wasn’t a music writer. Still, as a journalist, he’d written two books about human behavior that were relevant to understanding the Beatles’ genius: “Curious: the Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It” and “Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes.” 

“The idea of how curiosity leads to creativity and how you can have productive conflict was central to their music,” Leslie says. Even early on in Liverpool, “when they were kind of crap musicians, they already had the personalities” that would create this unparalleled future.

After his essay went viral, providing rave responses from musicians and music experts he could use to pitch a book, he realized “even though I didn’t really have music credentials, I’d invented my own credentials.”

The book recounts the Beatles’ history but shifts the emphasis in important ways. First and foremost, this is a book about their friendship and how it shaped the Beatles and, really, the world. He writes of a moment early on when Paul was being pressured by his father to get a real job and John issued an ultimatum to turn up that day to play or be kicked out. “In the end, he chose me,” Leslie quotes Lennon as saying, and then adds his own take: “Paul didn’t choose the Beatles or rock and roll; he chose John. It’s as if Lennon wanted McCartney to come and be an orphan with him.”

Later, Leslie explores Lennon’s LSD and heroin abuse, his laziness and his violent outbursts. Writing that “we’ve underestimated the extent to which Lennon’s mental instability created problems,” he credits McCartney not just for his musical genius but for his ability to handle his best friend and keep the band together.

He says he dug into this idea after hearing Aimee Mann on Diana Erickson’s podcast “One Sweet Dream” discussing the “Get Back” documentary. “She says she felt that no other band would have tolerated John’s issues and behavior and would not have let him stay in the band,” Leslie says.

The book also makes much of how Lennon and McCartney often wrote and sang eyeball to eyeball, “staring into each other’s soul,” as Leslie says during our interview.

Leslie breaks down many of the songs and examines their influences; while readers might wonder why he doesn’t cite obvious people like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry more, he counters that “every book has done that. I felt that the influence of doo-wop and especially the girl groups has not been talked about enough.”

The fact that Lennon and McCartney were so open to the latter’s sounds is relevant he argues because it ties in to how open they were to their more feminine side, arguing that the duo were also curious, vulnerable and tolerant in ways that most young men in or out of rock music were not in the early 1960s. “And that is inextricably linked to the music they created,” he says.

The book examines dozens of songs, both Lennon-McCartney songs and solo numbers in the context of this relationship. Leslie is adept at capturing what’s special about the production and vocals in bringing the songs to life: “Ticket to Ride,” he notes, has “the stuttering hesitant beat becomes a tambourine-fueled canter” while “If I Fell,” he says, features “a lurching chord changes makes us uncertain where we stand within the song’s harmonic world” and its intro “makes us feel Lennon’s uncertainty as well as hear it in his words. Falling in love, it shows us, starts with falling.”

Sometimes Leslie writes about the collaboration and competition, from McCartney bringing in the tape loops that added the most surreal touches to Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” to McCartney remembering decades later Lennon’s compliments for “Here, There and Everywhere,” saying it was one of the few times his partner publicly singing his praises. 

But he also explores the songs’ lyrics, noting that Lennon’s solo song “Instant Karma” is an attack on the superstar McCartney (“Who in the hell do you think you are”) while “Jealous Guy” is a humble apology, which is unusual both for rock songs and for Lennon. On the surface, that one sounds like a romantic relationship song, but Leslie writes “the person who was the object of John’s jealousy perhaps more often, and for longer, than any other was Paul McCartney,” before detailing those emotions. Then he notes that the song is one of the only times Lennon whistles on record and quotes an early McCartney interview, when the Beatle said that he and his songwriting partner would whistle ideas at each other: “John will whistle at me and I’ll whistle back at him.” 

Even later songs like McCartney’s “Coming Up” (“you want a friend you can rely on, one that will never fade away… You want some peace and understanding… I know that we can get together”) and Lennon’s “(Just Like) Starting Over” (with lyrics like “spread our wings,” “my love,” and “another day”) are examined through this prism. 

“I knew I wanted to write about ‘Coming Up,’ because that song was a catalyst for John to go back to recording and when I read the lyrics, it sounded like Paul was writing to John,” Leslie says. “I’m not saying the only or the definitive interpretation of each song. It’s not like I was going mad looking for these connections, or maybe I was going a bit mad, but they both said at different times that no song has just one meaning.”

“Paul said only years later that he understood that “Yesterday” was written about his mother and that “Let Me Roll It” was written about John, even though everyone knew about that one at the time,” Leslie adds. 

During our conversation, Leslie brings up a quote from the book where McCartney says, “Music is like a psychiatrist. You can tell your guitar things that you can’t tell people. And it will answer you with things people can’t tell you,” noting that “the last part is important because in it he’s saying he didn’t always understand the meaning of his lyrics until after he wrote it.” 

Leslie hopes the book “restores” a full appreciation of McCartney’s musical genius, but wanted to do that “without diminishing John.”

“I made a point of asking musicians I respected what they felt was so special about John’s songs,” he says. “There was this sense that Paul’s songs sound as if they have always existed, his melodies emerging from the flowing river of music over time, but that John’s songs seemingly come from nowhere, as if they’ve arrived here from another planet.”

Ultimately, he says, it was their uncanny ability to meld their personalities that makes the Beatles’ songs still sound fresh today. As he writes, “Music, for John and Paul, was never just about music… for them almost everything was understood through music.”

But while “The Life of Chuck” is about loss and death, it is somehow a feel-good movie that embraces sentimentality as it celebrates living. Its centerpiece is a joyous scene (albeit one laced with poignant undertones) where Chuck (Tom Hiddleston) and a stranger named Janice (Annalise Basso) dance in the street to the drums of a busker (played by a dynamo who goes by the moniker, The Pocket Queen). 

The film also stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Benjamin Pajak (as middle school Chuck), Mia Sara and Mark Hamill, with pitch-perfect narration from Nick Offerman. 

Flanagan, who’s developing a TV series based on King’s “Carrie,” spoke by video about how King’s story and his own personal touches set up such an expectation-defying film. 

“I was lucky enough to make it independently, so I didn’t have to worry too much about how a studio or even the audience would react,” Flanagan says, adding wryly. “I don’t envy Neon having to market the film.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. Why adapt this particular story?

It was certainly not the most obvious one to see on a screen. I read it in 2020 at the beginning of the lockdown, so that apocalyptic opening hit close to home when I was feeling anxious and despairing and scared. But by the end, I had tears on my face because I was feeling optimistic and grateful and joyful. The story was so wise and earnest and utterly uncynical and beautiful.

I’ve never exclusively considered Stephen King a horror writer: There’s “Shawshank Redemption,” “Stand By Me” and “The Green Mile;” even “It” isn’t about a killer clown, it’s about friends whose love for each other makes them brave while “The Stand” is about ordinary people finding courage to stand up for what’s right. 

He has always been an optimistic humanist. It’s just that he usually sets that against the contrast of incredible darkness. This story, more than anything he’d ever written, just had the love. It made me look at my life a little differently. It made me wonder if I was seizing enough joy. And if I would walk past the drummer or would have the bravery to put my briefcase down and dance like I didn’t care what people thought. 

I wanted to make this film for my kids. I know they’ll have the same feelings as they get older when the center doesn’t hold and the wheels come off and they’re scared of the world they live in. If I’m not here still to offer them any assistance or comfort, I wanted this movie to exist to provide that feeling.

Q. How did you handle the sentimentality, humor and hope in a movie about death and dying?

The tone of the movie needed to be one of gentle love and acceptance, regardless of the specific moment of the story we were in. It didn’t matter if the stars were burning out and the sky was falling. It was important that the movie never tried to manipulate the emotional experience, so the music we use while the world is ending is the same we use later while they’re having a pleasant conversation during a sunset or when Chuck is a kid in school learning how to dance.

My intention was to take the wild emotional swings and hold them in a way that communicated to viewers that it’s all OK. I wanted to try to capture the story to lift people the way it lifted me, even if it’s just for those couple of minutes while the characters dance. And I know nothing works for everyone, but if people stick with it, maybe they’ll react the way I did when I read the story. 

Q. Carl Sagan and Walt Whitman – and the unlikely connection between the two – are integral to the characters’ lives. Was that all in the story?

Whitman is in the foreground in the story, but I added Sagan. I’m a Carl Sagan fanatic. Steve’s story and this movie are a prism for your own life, and I kept bumping up on the themes that Steve was putting out about time and our place in the cosmos and how we’re simultaneously so small but so extraordinary. It seemed to echo Sagan’s writing. I’d seen The Cosmic Calendar on “Cosmos” when I was a kid, and it really resonated with me then but also felt in harmony within this story we were telling. 

Q. Let’s talk about “Back to the Future.” There’s a middle school dance with a “Back to the Future” theme. It looked like Chiwetel Ejiofor even wore the same jacket as the musicians from the “Johnny B. Goode” scene… and is carrying a guitar.

“Back to the Future”  was a defining movie from my childhood. It also points to the film’s structure. And I always loved the idea that Marty McFly went back in time with this incredible power to change things, but all he ends up trying to do is put things back where they were to begin with – it wasn’t about changing the future, it was about appreciating the present. We went a little crazy, actually – Trinity Bliss, who plays Chuck’s dance partner, wears a dress very similar to Lea Thompson’s dress, and her boyfriend wears a Marty McFly vest. So the scene felt like a cheeky Easter egg, but it also worked also thematically. 

Q. Narration is often used to paper over storytelling gaps, but it worked great here. How much of that was King’s words and how much of that was Offerman’s delivery?

So much of King’s prose is so beautiful and brought so much meaning to this story, I didn’t know how to match the impact without these words. I needed them in the movie, but I also hate improper use of voice-overs in movies, and with the wrong narrator, this would have become incredibly pretentious. 

Evan Bolter, my director of photography, had shot the “Last of Us” episode with Nick Offerman and suggested him. The second I imagined his voice reading it, I knew he’d be perfect. We didn’t have any money, but we sent him the script and he loved the writing so much that he did it. 

Q. If you opened a door and learned when you were going to die, would you run off and pursue far-flung fantasies or strive for normalcy and security?

Tom Hiddleston and I were debating whether we’d even want to open the door. I would love to say that I would not open the door, just move on and live my life to its fullest on my own. But I know me a little better than that, and I wouldn’t be able to resist opening the door. 

If I did, my hope would be I would spend as much time as humanly possible with my kids. I would travel the world with my family, creating experiences for them and for me that are distinct and unique and not based on a screen – although I would spend plenty of time toward the end trying to watch as many of my favorite movies as possible. 

After writing the story, however, Choi realized that the premise involving Louisa and her parents, Anne and Serk, could offer her a way in to exploring two separate stories that had fascinated her. The first was about the experience of Koreans living under Japanese rule from 1910-1945, and the second was North Korea’s long-running, unchecked secret campaign to abduct people from the coast of Japan and relocate them against their will inside the communist nation.

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“I get really fixated on things and then I’m dying to put them into novels,” Choi, whose previous novel, “Trust Exercise,” won the National Book Award, said in a recent video interview. “So in a funny way, I backed into this book.”

The novel starts with the original short story but then flashes back to the younger days of the parents, describing Serk’s World War II-era childhood as a Korean in Japan and Anne’s rootless life in America. Spanning decades, the book explores the way this couple copes (or doesn’t) with their individual dislocations and emotional rootlessness and how it impacts their daughter while weaving in the political background that so compelled Choi.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. Each character has communication issues and seems dislocated from themselves and their origins. Were you striving for that?

That definitely falls under the heading of intuition more than premeditation. I’m always surprised myself by the way certain things come together thematically without me having thought about them ahead of time. 

It seems logical when you pick it apart – who would marry a guy like Serk, but someone else coming from an analogous situation where they don’t have much of a family surrounding them either. I didn’t think all of that stuff through in advance, but the characters did end up evolving, so they’re all estranged from something really critical. Anne is not equipped to learn more about Serk than he’s willing to share, and he’s not willing to share very much.

And such parents end up producing a child like Louisa, who feels more motivated to study French and pass herself off as a sophisticated New Yorker than to figure out who her actual relatives might have been. 

A certain amount of this comes out of personal experiences, though it’s exaggerated and it’s very different. Unlike Louisa, I am obsessed by my origins and have spent a lot of time doing research into my father’s and grandfather’s life and family in Korea. 

Q. How does that fascination tie in here?

My Korean grandfather was a successful writer and a public intellectual, but he propagated the idea that Korea was better off under Japanese domination and that Koreans should stop trying to fight for their own separate identity and history. Later, he was branded a traitor and a collaborator. 

One reason I’m fascinated is that my father never wanted to talk about my grandfather. It was a devastating experience for my father and he never wanted to discuss it. He wanted to come to this country and be completely brand-new, like Serk. So, I am really motivated by this idea of secrecy and shame and people who suffer bad luck when the tides of geopolitics turn.

Q. You write about Louisa’s inability to understand silence as a kid. That silence is a reflection of her parents’ dislocation. Would it be better if they were less good at it?

Maybe it’s my bias, as an American or as a writer or maybe just as someone with my personality, but I’m always for openness in communication and sharing. 

I’m personally provoked by that idea of silence from when I was a child and my father would be evasive or dismissive, saying, “You don’t need to know about that.” Now I think there’s also a way in which I think that people are entitled to their silence. I haven’t really thought about it a lot. But your question is thought-provoking. 

Q. In Japan, Louisa and Serk go see “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Did you choose that because of the themes about feeling alien or about abductions or about obsessing about the unknown or because you liked that movie as a kid?

That scene in a completely overcrowded Japanese theater is a childhood memory of mine and one of my most visceral memories from being in Japan. I just wanted to use that memory but again, sometimes you choose something and then it turns out the subconscious writer’s brain was directing you toward the thing that’s going to really resonate. After I wrote it, I realized it works really well symbolically. Usually, it’s in the revision stage I see that but there’s an equal number of times I look at something and say, “Oh, this doesn’t work at all.”

Q. The chapter when Louisa is in college and traveling through Europe, where a terrible experience turns into a life-altering one. What did you hope it would convey?

My full, rough first draft included none of that, and my agent said that we never got to see Louisa living her life away from her parents.  The instant she said that I wanted to write about Louisa in college, a time period that’s so transformative. I thought of that section as ‘Louisa Down and Out in Paris and London’ because Orwell’s book is a favorite of mine, there’s such a sense of adventure and fearlessness underlying his difficult experiences. I wrote that entire section very quickly, which I think captures how I felt about Louisa finally getting away from her family, frightening as it is for her – and I’m glad the reader can feel that momentum in the pacing.

Q. There is a jump forward and we see she’s married with a baby. The book is filled with such leaps and gaps. What does it say about what we know and don’t know about the lives of our friends and family?

I loved the idea that as a young woman Louisa makes exactly the same mistake her mother made, but since she’d never want to admit this, the developmental process of that mistake is elided in her narrative – it’s just, boom, suddenly she’s a college dropout with a baby.

I love when writers make enormous time jumps and trust the reader to reorient and keep going. It always thrills me. I also dislike over-explanation, and the sense that the author is trying to account for everything – every event, every causal relationship. But I also like leaping over big chunks of time for the way it captures the experience of life, the feeling I often have in my own life, that intervening time has fallen away and I’ve found myself in some totally different situation than I expected.  

We don’t experience our lives as these smoothly developing narratives and we also don’t experience the people to whom we’re closest with anything like total understanding – to us they’re also these assemblages of chunks of information, sometimes not at all connected.  And this book is a lot about gaps, darkness, things misunderstood or never known.  

Susan Choi presents “Flashlight” with Viet Thanh Nguyen

When: 7 p.m., June 6

Where: Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave

Information: https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-susan-choi-presents-flashlight-w-viet-thanh-nguyen

After being introduced to each other by a journalist, they decided to team up, and after the COVID lockdown, they returned to start shooting. However, while spending a day off at the beach, they met Edivan Guajajara, co-founder of Mídia Indígena, Brazil’s leading Indigenous-led journalism collective.

“We were starstruck,” Greene says, adding that soon they agreed, “We need to be directing this film together.”

With Leonardo DiCaprio signing on as an executive producer and Oscar-winner Fisher Stevens as a producer, the resulting film, “We Are Guardians,” tells the story of the Indigenous forest protectors of the Amazon as they try to stave off the loggers and farmers who are destroying their land and damaging the environment far beyond the Amazon’s borders. The film plays at Laemmle Monica Film Center June 6-12.

The film is shot verite style, emphasizing the work of people on the ground, but it explains the science and points blame at those the film argues are complicit in the rapid and devastating deforestation, including local and national officials, then-president Jair Bolsonaro, and multinational corporations such Cargill, JBS, Walmart and more.

Greene, Grobman and Guajajara (through an interpreter) recently spoke by video about the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. Edivan, was your community open to this project and for you to work with Chelsea and Rob? Or were they wary?

Guajajara: We had a little bit of fear because where I’m from had been one of the bloodiest territories in the region because of the invaders and the loggers for the previous five years so media outlets wanted to know what was happening but whenever a team came, they would do a story, but would never return and nothing would be done about it. So some people inside the territory were indeed suspicious. 

It didn’t change overnight, but through time. They saw Chelsea and Rob were committed to showing what was really happening. And the documentary is an important tool for the visibility of our fight and for recognizing the Indigenous leadership of the area.

Greene: Other people extract stories and don’t return, but we came back four years in a row and spent quality time and returned on all our promises, and we’re still helping the communities get supplies.

Grobman: Edivan connected us with his community and helped us navigate those relationships. But he was also a real leader in the storytelling elements of how he sees this fight and how he sees what’s going on in the Amazon. He helped us understand what was going on from the Indigenous perspective because it really is a different way of looking at the forest and the world.

Q. The film notes that more than 600 Indigenous people have been murdered in the last decade over this land. But it also shows the Guardians increasing their formal training for stopping the invaders. Some tactics, like using drones, seem safe, but is there concern about increased confrontation?

Greene: There are statistics showing that Indigenous territories and protected areas that have some sort of guard, groups of people doing territorial monitoring have fewer instances of invasion and deforestation. Even if the Guardians don’t have the same power as the police, they can report it to the police and there’s a presence there. Of course, there are instances of tragedy, but the trainings will help – they’re learning techniques of violence de-escalation. They have women who go in first and try to talk to the invaders. Using the drones obviously helps them record the deforestation from afar and then report that to the police and then they can decide if they need to go there and how to approach that. 

Q. The film also spends time with some Brazilian loggers and farmers, hearing their side. Why was it important to humanize them?

Grobman: To understand what’s going on in the Amazon, you need to understand many different sides of this issue. The film is trying to make a statement about the interconnection of all of us, that we all are a part of this, but we also need to listen to one another. 

These people are in an unfortunate situation, and they need a different way of living that requires education and systemic change. It’s not necessarily their fault. So we wanted to give voice to the people that you might quickly label as the enemy or perpetrators of this destruction when, in fact, like the bigger multinational companies are the real perpetrators.

Greene: There’s no solution without the inclusion of the people who live in those communities. 

We also reached out to representatives from politicians, the bigger ranchers and companies like Cargill and JBS. We did manage to get some interviews but they didn’t feel authentic or compelling.

Q. Bolsonaro is a major villain in the film, yet it’s also clear the problems pre-date him and go far beyond him. The film shows him losing the election. Is that cause for hope or is the system too deeply poisoned?

Greene: Last year was the worst fire season since 2019, and we’re in the worst drought the Amazon has ever seen. So we’re at a climactic tipping point where the Amazon can’t produce enough rainfall to support the tree species that live there. And deforestation, which decreased a lot after the election, has continued. We’re still in a capitalistic system that’s fundamentally broken so we’re cutting down our very life source.

Q. Is there any hope? The film shows Indigenous women running for, and winning, seats in Congress?

Greene It’s a really positive and inspiring step. These international companies and banks pay the men in office to erode environmental laws, so we need women in leadership, especially Indigenous women.

Guajajara: This is positive. The president has no power to transform things. And I think this movie, which shows our people as guardians, is a very positive factor. It shows we can do things a certain way; we can show right from wrong. Just the fact that I’m speaking to you, connecting with people from outside of our region is already a big thing. Of course, we won’t change the world in one day or with one film. But this movie shows that we all need to be guardians.

Through it all, her best friend Adam supports but also confounds her in a way that makes clear that he’s the real answer she is looking for. Halfway through the book, the unnamed narrator – whose parents were immigrants from Iran and India – must go to Tehran after her father, who long ago moved back to Iran, has a heart attack. The book, which had already been exploring the immigrant-as-outsider experience, shifts in tone in this second half, as Rahmani explores what it’s like for a character who is now slowly realizing she may not feel perfectly at home anywhere.

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In a recent video interview, Rahmani said the book delves into American and British classic novels (and “When Harry Met Sally”), racism in America and Iran, the cultural differences between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and how she sees a similarity between arranged marriages and the way the wealthy send their children to elite colleges to manage their dating pool. 

Still, Rahmani strives to keep the book entertaining, to “explain without making the reader feel like they’re receiving an explanation.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Did you look at this as a story about romance and love, and everything else lends heft, or is it a story about immigration and bifurcated identity and the romance lends lightness to that?

I love that you put it that way. It’s absolutely both. There’s an attempt to be literary fiction, not pure romance. The part of me that is more analytic due to my PhD in comparative literature certainly identifies with that and having this be a way to explore a complicated and intricate cultural phenomenon. There’s also a real celebration of femininity throughout. But that’s not where I started. Primarily, my interest was, how do I write a love story? That was the challenge to myself from the beginning. 

I have a lot of different interests and sometimes I get bored with my own self, so in writing, I’m interested in setting myself challenges, questions that were almost like dares: how smart can a rom-com get? That was really a driver. And because that’s the genre, how do you get a reader to stay with you and feel the emotional impact of a foregone conclusion? Everybody knows the ending of a romance. You can tell within two pages that the two characters are going to end up together, so I was really interested in what outside the plot can surprise and create an emotional investment.

Q. Since you feel the viewers know the outcome on some level, did you purposely write it so the narrator doth protest too much when it comes to her best friend and the fact that they’re just friends?

My assumption was that readers would see through her. And I thought that was pretty funny – she thinks she’s so smart and she is acting so stupid on this really obvious thing. She is also a little holier than thou, so I really wanted to give the reader that power of seeing through her.

I was also flipping the power dynamic: She often orchestrates what’s going on, but then there are these huge ways she’s tripping up, which is where the humor comes from but where there are actually larger emotional repercussions to it for her. 

Q. Was it also important to you that she’s a sexually open (and promiscuous) character who also happens to be Muslim?

I grew up very differently than the narrator in a lot of ways, but what was important to me politically was complicating our images of who is a Muslim woman in America and making space for them all, even within the same person. There was a period where she wore a hijab. And there’s this period now where, by a lot of Muslim standards, she would be considered heretical. But there’s this culture of secular Islam that has existed for centuries, but that has been a bit lost in recent history, where you can embrace the emotions of being Muslim without practicing it to the letter. 

She also has a different entry point into Iran than I’ve had. But a lot of folks in the U.S. who have immigrant parents might feel this way, with that sense of simultaneous belonging and alienation that people feel when they go on these trips back home … but it’s not their home. I was interested in that friction and energy, which is both good and it’s bad.

Q. Writers often say the town or city they’re writing about is a character. But in this book, L.A. felt like it was a half-dozen different characters as the narrator travels all over the city. How conscious were you of geography as character and of L.A. being this sprawling entity with different possibilities?

I think of the novel as a love letter to L.A. There are a lot of ways in which I don’t identify with the narrator, but in my love for Los Angeles, certainly I do. One of the things that makes it so special is it’s so many different cities in one, so many different worlds. There are doors ajar for ways of life that I think are found in few other American cities, if at all. That’s changing, of course, as it gentrifies, but for now, the different personalities you see in the novel are what I think is great about the city.

In 2019, when his brother Tom, a firefighter who spent a week at Ground Zero in 2001, was dying of cancer, Kenney went to visit him one last time. As they were talking, a car pulled up carrying the other four brothers. When Kenney noted their arrival, his brother let his head and body slump as if he had just died. “Tell them they’re too late,” Tom said with a sly grin.

From that moment, Kenney’s latest novel, “I See You’ve Called in Dead” was born. 

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“My brother’s death was the catalyst,” Kenny says. “I was laughing but I was also so stunned and in awe that someone could have the humor and courage to do that in this moment. I thought, ‘I want to write a funny book about death.’ Which is not a pitch most publishers want to hear.” 

The novel’s protagonist is Bud Stanley a news service obituary writer struggling with wounds old (his mother’s death when he was a boy; this is autobiographical) and new (his wife left him two years ago for a better-looking, more successful guy; Kenney, 62, is happily married with two kids).

Early on a blind date goes horribly awry – the woman is 45 minutes late, then shows up to apologize and say she just got back together with her ex… who accompanied her to the bar. More depressed than usual, Bud goes home, gets drunk and writes his own obituary. 

“Bud Stanley, the first man to perform open-heart surgery on himself…” it opened, later claiming he was the Dalai Lama’s “younger twin brother,” the founder of Tears for Fears who “refused to take credit for the songs he wrote,” and a soft-core porn script doctor “fired for insisting on more plot and less nudity.” 

Caught up in the moment, Bud posts the obit on his company’s website. His death makes waves at the office, where he’s promptly suspended. Free falling, he ends up going with his best friend Tim and a woman he meets named Clara to a series of wakes and funerals, a “device,” Kenney says, for exploring the book’s real ideas – how we struggle with death but also how we often avoid fully living.

This interview, at a cafe in Brooklyn near where most of the book is set, has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. After your brother’s death, did you know what you wanted to say about death and dying?

Every day people die and we all walk around thinking we’re immortal. It’s certainly true of me. It’s very difficult to sit with the notion we are going to die.

We’ve all been to funerals and wakes and sit shiva and yet I don’t know how to think about it. I have no vocabulary for death. I go to wakes and feel incredibly awkward. I don’t know what to say. But I do know that it’s not good to say ‘The receiving line was really long and my legs are tired.’”

So I just wanted to ask questions. I don’t know anything.

Q. Did you learn anything?

I would love to say I’m some sage now and understand things about death but death still scares me and confuses me. Death makes us ask, “How am I supposed to live?”

The pain doesn’t go away but you have to live. And with the profound emotion there can be a little window into beauty. 

Another brother of mine died seven weeks ago. 

Q. I’m so sorry.

His death was weirdly beautiful. He was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and knew he had about a year to live. He was in no pain. We talked almost every day and visited and had some fantastic times together. He had a sense of the wonder and joy of life. 

It was very strange because I was asked to write his obituary. But even though I’d just spent three years writing this book I froze up completely. How do you sum up someone’s life and bring them back to life with your words?

Q. Bud talks about how hard it is to convey tragedy in words. You do it by focusing on something beautiful during a wake for a woman and her young son who died in a car crash. You linger on small pleasures for parents, who think they have all the time and tomorrows we expect: “Talking of the day, of lunch, of coloring, of nonsense, the parent listening, half listening, not listening… [She puts him] in his car seat, buckles him in, burying her face in his neck, a little kiss.” 

Why was this so crucial to the book?

The book was largely done and I was walking one afternoon and was struck that the wakes and funerals were all for older people. I thought, ‘That’s kind of cheap. Life’s a lot crueler than that.’ I was taking the easy way out. I told my editor, who’s a young mother and she said, “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.” But then she read it and said, “You have to include it.” 

It would have been disingenuous to gloss over how brutal life can be. We’d had a couple of wakes and funerals that were a little funny and I wanted one to grab the reader and say, “This is serious business. Respect this.” 

Q. The plot device is all about death but the book is ultimately about figuring out how to live. 

There’s an order of nuns that practice the notion of memento mori, which can translate as “Remember that you will die.” The idea is that this makes life beautiful. That’s counterintuitive to my mind but I find it interesting. 

So the point of the book isn’t the wakes and funerals, it’s that this character is just flitting through life and is not awake. It’s about male friendship. I once had a ton of friends and acquaintances and I have very few friends now. And I think friendships are important. 

Q. Bud talks about having to stay in the pain to make it go away. Does it go away or just become manageable?

I tried running from pain, pushing it out of my mind, drinking it away, eating it away, it’s always there. If you sit with it and try to understand it you can learn to live with it – it’s with you every day but you can get to where it doesn’t cripple your life. 

Q. The book is funny, but it’s more weighty than other novels, not because of the deaths but because depression haunts or has haunted Bud, Tim and Clara. 

I have struggled mightily with depression at different points and I think it’s still a subject that makes people uncomfortable. It’s hard to talk about. Getting through the day with sadness is an interesting topic. It’s hard to be a person. I’m not sure I could get through the day without making fun of the pain and myself.

But I hope people laugh. I like troubled, wounded people who are trying to get through the day, and there’s awkwardness and hilarity there. I really hope to make people laugh but I also hope to make them feel. There’s a lovely symbiosis between the two.

Q. You also largely subvert our expectations about learning life lessons and romance. 

This is not a plot-driven book, it’s a fairly quiet story without a major revelation at the end. I wanted something subtle because that’s what happens in life. When the eye doctor is testing you and they say, “Better or worse,” for each small shift in acuity. That’s the day-to-day for most of us. We always have the chance to change a little bit, whether it’s a perspective or habit or the thoughts in our head that seem so set in those deep grooves with a narrative. That’s what it’s about.

This was a mom who carefully packed delicious school lunches – but with an implicit message: “All that food, bought and prepared, just like the love that we were told was there for us to grab and have – it would be embarrassing and gross, pathetic, if we ever actually wanted, needed, asked for whatever sustenance or comfort it (either the love or food) might provide,” Jude tells us. Later she notes that the people with whom we share genes will “hurt us, maim us, leave us flayed open.” 

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So while Jenn, the oldest sister, tightly holds herself together by controlling everything, Jude, her sister Fred and her brother George have been unraveling for a while now. Their mother’s death merely gives them the chance to fall apart together.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

 Q. Jude is the narrator, but she’s somehow omniscient, able to tell us things her siblings felt or did that she couldn’t know. It’s an unusual form but really effective. How did you choose that? 

It was sort of my way to cheat. I love the first person, but I’ve come to be deeply devoted to a multifocal novel. So this is how I get to have my cake and eat it too? 

I tell students one of the thrills of fiction is secret sharing, but a secret only feels important if it has weight for the person who’s receiving it. So I love the idea of the narrator telling a story for whom they have immediate and intense stakes. 

Also, I think all gossip is us telling on ourselves. I wanted Jude to tell us she’s telling a story of her sister, but, of course, she’s telling us also the story of herself. 

I was also playing with the idea of fiction, of telling a story. I was thumbing my nose a bit at autofiction. Of course, she can’t know what her sister’s sex life is like, but who cares? That’s what imagination is for.

Q. Chekov’s rule dictates that if you introduce a gun early on, it must go off at some point. You kept referring to Fred, who is emotionally frazzled, taking the gun with her when she went out. Were you consciously keeping the reader on edge by doing that?

I love the idea of an object or an action as scaffolding that ultimately ends up being not that important. The gun was your red herring, although I did have it go off because that’s the rule. I’m excited by formal choices.

Q. Were you at all tempted to break the rule and not have the gun go off?

You’ve sort of caught me. I love thumbing my nose at rules, but I did feel here like I had to follow this one. 

At one point, I thought the gun would be used on George, but what was interesting to me about writing the book was that I came to love George too much. I start from a place of being annoyed by all the characters and highlighting their most awful parts. But by the end, one of my directives for myself is that I love them all. I’m proud that almost every one of my friends who’ve read the book says George is their favorite. 

But this might be my failing as a writer – I’m such a mushy person that at the end of the day that I couldn’t have the gun used on George even though I’d planned on it. I wrote a different book. I do know that some people are going to be really pissed by how the gun is used. 

Q. Fred is a novelist who writes about her family, but now Jude is the one telling us her story and acknowledging she is making stuff up. Is she to be trusted, or is she exaggerating for writerly effect?

So much of the story is about how the stories that we tell about ourselves and one another cloud our vision and leave us with blind spots that keep us separate from one another. Jude has her story of her family, but because Fred has told the story of their family and made it something else, Jude, who has read all of Fred’s work – and said she felt she knew Fred better then before – is hijacking that because she has been told her family’s story back to her by Fred.

Q. How biographical are the sibling and parent-child dynamics, emotionally if not factually?

One of my favorite things to say about fiction is it’s not our job to tell the facts. It’s our job to say how it feels. I grew up in Florida. I’m the second of four children. Before my parents read it, the thing that made me nervous was the feeling in this book that did feel really true to me. I think we’re always wrenching from somewhere deep inside ourselves, and this was the deepest and hardest wrenching, and that all felt true. 

Q. The siblings’ mother is just infuriatingly awful, tormenting her kids. I could not find any empathy for her. Did you?

I did come to love her in a way. She is not a good mom, but she’s a great lawyer, and I’m sure she’s good at other things. The word mom is a really hard word for her to live inside of, and that has real consequences. I wanted her to infuriate you, but I also think that she’s still a human and she deserves our empathy and sympathy.

Q. One character tells Fred that her novel got “everything wrong” about her. Do you think Fred got it wrong or was that character simply hurt? Or did Jude put those words in her mouth because of her own hurt about how the family is portrayed?

I had a novel that accidentally upset a friend in this way that I found surprising. There have been people I’ve been worried about hurting, but this was totally off my radar.

Anybody who has their story told back to them thinks the storyteller got it wrong. Jude thinks Fred got it wrong. 

A friend who writes nonfiction says she once described someone as very beautiful. And the woman got mad, saying, “I’m more than beautiful.” When you see yourself in language on the page, you’ve been flattened, and that feels untrue, because you are more than anything that language can say. But that’s a lot of what this story is about.

She chose not to read the story, preferring instead to ponder the unusual idea that a woman could have a son who is a stranger. She mentioned it to a friend with older children, who said, “That’s just what parenting is. Every time my son comes home from college, it’s like a stranger has come back into the house.”

And so, the “emotional core” of Kitamura’s new novel, “Audition,” was born. “People can have this intense familiarity and intimacy with their children – and this powerful sense of estrangement – and they are designed to coexist,” she says. 

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At the start of the novel, the unnamed narrator, a successful actress, is approached by a young man, Xavier, who believes he’s her son … except she’s never had any children. Still, the man insinuates himself into the actress’s life by becoming an assistant to the director of the play she is starring in.

In the play, the actress is struggling with a moment in the middle when everything shifts and the character changes so dramatically that it seems as if she becomes someone else, a stranger to herself. 

And echoing this in the novel, there’s a moment in the middle when everything shifts and the actress does have a son, this Xavier, and he wants to come back to live at home, throwing the domestic life she and her husband have established out of rhythm. 

While Kitamura doesn’t let the reader know what is or isn’t real within the novel, she did, however, discuss all these ideas in a recent video conversation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. In the novel, the narrator thinks she and Xavier are being judged by strangers in a restaurant and then later in the street. Was her perception correct or was she, as an actress, too self-conscious and in her own imagination?

It’s hard to say because everything is very much inside her head. It was important to me to try to establish this idea of interpretation as being key to the book. I am interested in the way that we form ourselves in relation to external judgment or assessment, whether we like it or not, and how variable that assessment and interpretation can be.

Q. Did this change the way you observe people in similar scenarios?

It’s so funny because the truth is, I’m really not that observant. My children and my husband are more observant than I am. We’ll always be walking down the street, and my son will say, “Can you believe that?” And I never see it. I’m in my head. 

The only place where I feel myself to be observant is when I’m writing. There, I feel like I’m able to apprehend at a pace and with the sensitivity that I unfortunately am not able to do in my everyday life. That’s one of the reasons that I love writing so much.

Q. Is she an unreliable narrator to us – or to herself?

She experiences herself as unreliable, particularly in the second half of the novel. There is a lot of her questioning what might’ve happened in the past and questioning her understanding of who she is. I think that transmits into an unreliability to the reader.

As she’s cycling through different roles in her domestic life, she sees that it’s a script and sees the essential flimsiness of it. She even says that the construct of the family that’s enacted has a faulty script. That feeds directly into the kind of instability that she feels in her life.

Q. Do you worry about whether the reader will connect to a character for whom reality changes halfway through the book and who feels disconnected from herself?

You need to be able to get the reader to identify with your character, but not always relate to them. With this story, I hope the reader is willing to make that jump with me. But I knew it was a risk. It’s not the standard way of telling a story, and it’s not the standard form for a novel. 

One of the things I thought about when I was writing was, What is the purpose of plot?

There’s a sense in contemporary fiction that writers are less interested in plot, that there’s something about the construction of plot that feels too artificial. I love plot and have read genre books my entire life. Plot is very difficult and an extraordinary tool that is foundational to storytelling. But in this particular case, I wanted to see if I could take structure and form and use that to do some of the work that is typically done by plot. 

There’s a meta-textual quality where the structure of the play she acts in is a guide to the structure of the novel itself. So the sense that the novel is performing the play in some way, in a funny way. So, in the middle of the book is something that I hope feels almost like a plot twist, even though it’s not. There’s no kind of event that has happened. There’s no revelation in a way. It is a shift in form, but I’m hoping that that creates the kind of energy that you need to get the reader from the start of the book to the end of the book.

Q. Did you want the reader to feel off balance when the second half begins?

It was a hard book to edit, because obviously I know things about the first half that the reader doesn’t necessarily know. I hoped it could be interpreted in a couple of different ways, so that this question of which is reality and which is theater, and which is not, could be read either way. You could think the first half was real, or you could think the second half was the reality, and that required writing scenes and moments and sentences that had the capacity to hold two meanings at once.

David Lynch was a big influence on the book, You can find psychological explanations for a lot of what is happening in any Lynch movie. But on some level, that’s almost not the point. The point is the strangeness of it. When I was writing the book, I wanted that strangeness, that moving in between worlds that he does all the time. The novel to me is about experiences that are incommensurable in some fundamental way.