Richard Russo: "Bridge of Sighs" | Oprah's Book Club

Speaker 1 Hi, everybody.

Speaker 1 This is Richard Russo, everybody.

Speaker 1 Esteemed Pulitzer Prize author.

Speaker 1 It's great. Once you win that Pulitzer Prize, it follows you everywhere.
Isn't it great?

Speaker 3 First line of the obituary.

Speaker 1 All right, are we ready to roll here?

Speaker 1 Hello, everybody. A warm welcome to you.
Thank you for joining me for Oprah's Oprah's Book Club, presented by Starbucks.

Speaker 1 It is wonderful to be here in stunningly beautiful Seattle. Seattle, we love you.
Starbucks hometown.

Speaker 1 This is where Starbucks was born, where the very first Starbucks opened in 1971. Your cozy neighborhood Starbucks Cafe is the perfect place to sit down with a good book, good coffee, and good company.

Speaker 1 For this month's book club pick, Starbucks is pairing it with a vanilla sweet cream cold brew.

Speaker 1 It's a slow-steeped cold brew coffee accented with vanilla, topped with a float of housemade vanilla sweet cream.

Speaker 1 And my 117th book club selection is Bridge of Size, Bridge of Size by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo. Let's welcome Richard Russo.

Speaker 1 This novel is a layered coming-of-age story about the dreams, oh, the dreams both lost and realized of three friends from small-town America. The story is full of surprises.

Speaker 1 Gonna try today not to give away too many here. This audience has read the book, all 642 pages.
Thank you, Mr. Russo.

Speaker 1 Tell us why you loved it.

Speaker 3 I'm Quentin. Hey, Quentin.

Speaker 4 I love this book because I love the relationship between Sarah and Kayla. Kayla.

Speaker 4 And I particularly love how Sarah introduces Kayla to a whole new world, bringing her out of the projects and

Speaker 4 introducing her through art. I'm an artist myself.
I teach underserved students here in the South King County area of Seattle.

Speaker 4 And so I'm able to relate to that story because that's something that I do in my everyday life. Here, here.
I'll also just say that today

Speaker 4 is the anniversary of the death of Maya Angelou.

Speaker 1 It is,

Speaker 4 who I took creative writing with in 2001 at Wake Forest. And

Speaker 4 so I also see the parallel where Maya Angelou has provided and given a new world to so many different people all around the world.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, thank you for mentioning that.
It is our anniversary.

Speaker 5 Marcy, Marcy. Hi, I'm Marcy.
Thank you so much for having us here today. One of the things that really resonated with me was a scene with Mr.
Berg's Honors English class.

Speaker 5 I just love the way that he was able to get the students to think in a non-conformist way and how he influenced the trajectory of their lives from then until the end of the until the end of the book.

Speaker 5 The part that resonated the most for me was when he said that you'll have the majority of your learning in ages two to three, And everything after that, it's just looking for confirmation of things you already believe.

Speaker 5 Very insightful.

Speaker 3 Very insightful.

Speaker 1 Well, I've loved your work since Empire Falls. And even though Bridge of Size was published in 2007, I only recently discovered it for the first time.

Speaker 1 And I have to tell you, I was brought into the story, of course, by Lucy.

Speaker 1 Also, I grew up working in my father's store, which was the ENW market in Nashville, with a barbershop connected to the store. And my father's store reminded me so much of Ike's.

Speaker 1 And so I'm curious as to how you came to this name. What does the title symbolize in the context of the story, the bridge of size?

Speaker 3 Well, I think a lot of the characters in this book are

Speaker 3 Lucy, certainly, but not only Lucy, are at a point in their lives where I wouldn't say they're exactly despairing, but they're stressed, certainly, and they're thinking about where their lives are at the moment.

Speaker 3 And I think that just how high the stakes are for almost all of the characters in this book led me in a way to the Bridge of Size, because as some of you may know, Of course, Venice is a city of bridges.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Pontes, as they call them.
Yeah. But the story of the actual Bridge of size is one in which the courts were held on one side of the river and the kind of the dungeons, the prison,

Speaker 3 was on the other side. Yeah.
And it's called the Bridge of Size because if you were convicted in the court,

Speaker 3 you would have to cross the bridge of size.

Speaker 3 And the legend has it that, of course, you would sigh crossing that bridge because once you'd crossed it into

Speaker 3 the prison, you weren't coming out. It was pretty much over.
You wouldn't necessarily be executed, but you would spend the rest of your life there.

Speaker 1 In the dungeon.

Speaker 3 In the dungeon. And that's, I think that's, and that and the fact that Venice is one of my wife's and my favorite cities, and we visited there a lot.
And so I was probably just looking for an excuse.

Speaker 1 To call it, to use it.

Speaker 1 But do you think, obviously, you would know, but was it meant to reflect the emotional and

Speaker 1 psychological journeys of the characters in any way?

Speaker 3 Probably. Yes.
I said, well, I wouldn't want you to think that authors know what they're doing

Speaker 3 when they write these books. Most of my books take me about anywhere from three to four and a half years to write.
This was the four and a half year one. Uh-huh.

Speaker 3 And during that time,

Speaker 3 We're basically feeling our way along,

Speaker 3 trying to figure out what's going on with these characters.

Speaker 1 Which is always so fascinating to me. Doesn't that fascinate you? Because when I sit down to write something, I generally know what I'm going to write.

Speaker 1 I know why I'm going to write it, because

Speaker 1 I write my own speeches. It's never like I'm just waiting to figure out

Speaker 1 what the speech is going to tell me

Speaker 1 it wants to do. So, what's your writing process?

Speaker 3 That's the illusion that a writer,

Speaker 3 if you spend four or four and a half years on a book, the last final illusion is to convince your readers that you knew what you were doing from the beginning. Yeah.

Speaker 3 You can buy that if you want, but I don't recommend it because that's just not the way it works.

Speaker 1 So you've been called the patron saint of small town fiction. I would agree with that.

Speaker 1 Do you think that this small town of Thomaston is a reflection of American life or is it a reflection of the life that you grew up with?

Speaker 3 In Gloversville, yes, yes, to both of those. I love small towns, Oprah, because they offer something that I think is so important.

Speaker 3 If you live in a big city,

Speaker 3 chances are that you live in a neighborhood full of people like you.

Speaker 3 I remember when my daughter Emily moved to New York and she was working with a literary agency at the time, but she was living in Brooklyn and she could tell by looking at the other people on her subway car, she could tell where they were going to get off.

Speaker 3 Because

Speaker 3 most of those people looked like her.

Speaker 3 They were probably the same age. They had the same amount of education.

Speaker 3 All of those things became identifiable as to where they were going to get off in Brooklyn. The thing that's wonderful about small towns, especially if you're interested in class, as I am,

Speaker 3 The interesting thing about small towns is that the richest and most powerful people in the town have to cross paths with the poorest and the most disenfranchised and the most in danger.

Speaker 3 They simply cannot escape each other. And so you have the Mrs.
Whitings of the world from Empire Falls who are taking, who are breathing the same air as

Speaker 3 like that poor boy, John Voss, who ends up shooting people. Yes.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 that's why I think cities, I mean, an awful lot of fiction, an awful lot of American fiction, not just American fiction, gets written about cities because that's where a lot of things happen.

Speaker 3 But my God, small towns are just gold mines if you really want to understand America.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. I choose a lot of books that are based in small towns because you really get to understand the essence of who people are.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And everybody knows everybody's business and everybody's connected.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I think one of the reasons why this story is so relatable is because you write about

Speaker 1 that struggle that so many people have in staying in their hometown or leaving their hometown. Anybody here grew up in a small town?

Speaker 3 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay. Here's a great line from page three about Lucy and Sarah's choice to stay.

Speaker 1 You say, some people upon learning how we've lived our lives are unable to conceal their chagrin on our behalf, that our lives should be so limited, as if experience so geographically circumscribed could be neither rich nor satisfying.

Speaker 1 When I assure them that it's been both, their smiles suggest we've been blessed with self-deception by way of compensation for all we've missed.

Speaker 1 I think that's so interesting, and it brings us to your question. James?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I grew up in a small town of 3,000 people in Canada. The type of town that assumes your identity even before you know that.

Speaker 6 I didn't come out until my 30s, yet I think people knew long before I did. It's the town that raised me.
My mother still lives there.

Speaker 6 It's a part of me, but there's this theme of self-exposure that we have no control over, intentional concealment, this hiding in plain sight,

Speaker 6 and also this tension between origin and becoming. And so the question I have for you is, what does it take to leave the town that raised you?

Speaker 6 And when we come back, do we ever get to be the true version of the person we became?

Speaker 3 Good question. James.
Good.

Speaker 3 James.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I would begin by saying that that's what I did.

Speaker 3 I mean, I left my small mill town in upstate New York.

Speaker 3 At my mother's insistence, really,

Speaker 3 she had a plan for me, and we followed basically the diagram for her plan. And for a while, it kind of worked.
We left upstate New York for Tucson, Arizona,

Speaker 3 and I found a new life there. I think that one of the things that surprised my mother, who tried and fought so hard for us to, as she put it, escape this place.

Speaker 3 One of the things that surprised her the most

Speaker 3 was that I would find my way back there. I mean,

Speaker 3 I've never lived in Gloversville since leaving that place. I go back and I visit.
I still have family there. There are still people that I love there.

Speaker 3 But I've never lived there. But I would also say, if this kind of answers your question,

Speaker 3 is that if you read my novels, I think it would be almost as fair to say that I never left. Yeah.
So I live

Speaker 3 my imaginative life

Speaker 3 among people that I didn't know I loved until I was, I mean, all that time I spent in Arizona,

Speaker 3 I did

Speaker 3 a BA in English, an MA in English,

Speaker 3 a PhD in English, always with the idea that I would become a professor.

Speaker 3 and had

Speaker 3 no idea at all that I would ever want and need as desperately to live my life imaginatively in various versions of Gloversville, New York. Never occurred to me.
So can you go back? Absolutely.

Speaker 3 You can go back and

Speaker 1 be fully yourself.

Speaker 3 And having discovered what you didn't know before, which was who the hell you are, right?

Speaker 6 It's really this notion of being a traveler like some of the characters, taking a step off the path

Speaker 6 and making a life elsewhere. But as a traveler, we can always come home.

Speaker 3 And that's what happens to Noonan

Speaker 3 in this book. He becomes a traveler.
He's the one who lives in Venice and thinks until pretty close to the end of the book that he knows who he is.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he carries his rage, his animosity,

Speaker 3 into his paintings.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 it's only

Speaker 3 when he changes that he's able to come back home as the person he was destined to be,

Speaker 3 as opposed to the person he was trying to protect, who was so full of rage, if that makes any sense.

Speaker 1 To me, this book raises the question: I don't know about you guys, you think about this, what's more important, ambition or contentment? And the question is: was Lucy content

Speaker 1 being

Speaker 1 in that community and never leaving?

Speaker 3 I love Lucy Lynch.

Speaker 3 And what I love about him, Oprah, is exactly what you're saying.

Speaker 3 He's an optimist, for one thing. And I try to.

Speaker 1 He's an optimist with limited ambition.

Speaker 3 Yes, and

Speaker 3 it's true. That's absolutely true.

Speaker 3 And he has found contentment

Speaker 3 in his life.

Speaker 3 And it's, I have to say, something that

Speaker 3 I envy.

Speaker 3 in him. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's it's I mean he's he's married to this wonderful woman, Sarah.

Speaker 3 He adored his father.

Speaker 3 He's, it seems to me that he's living the life that

Speaker 3 he was destined to live.

Speaker 3 Very different from, very different from Newman.

Speaker 1 Very different from Newman, Bobby McCarney. Is it admirable or naive or just a coping mechanism, his optimism?

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 1 All these. What did you think? What do you think, James? Was it admirable, naive, or just a coping mechanism?

Speaker 6 Well, I know people like Lucy who have not left.

Speaker 6 And there is an optimism. And I don't think it is naive.
I think it is a choice.

Speaker 6 Our world doesn't have to extend beyond the borders of the town. This town I grew up in has a start and a finish.

Speaker 6 You know when you're in town and you know when you're out of town, and you know everybody that's from there. And so I think for a a lot of people it is default.
It's maybe naive.

Speaker 6 But I think for Lucy it was a choice and he was happy and satisfied with that choice.

Speaker 3 Even though the town of Thomaston is small

Speaker 3 and he has been content there, he has had a journey too because he goes from

Speaker 3 Berman Court in one section of that town to another section of town that's slightly more affluent. And he ends up in the borough where what limited wealth there is in this town exists.
So

Speaker 3 it's not like

Speaker 3 he hasn't taken a journey at all. He hasn't gone to Venice, but he's gone somewhere.

Speaker 3 And that world isn't as large as Noonan's world, but it's larger than you would think at first glance because it's so centered in Ike Lubis.

Speaker 1 And it speaks to the fact that you can still have meaning,

Speaker 1 lead a really powerful, meaningful life. powerful for you, meaningful life, living and remaining in a small town.

Speaker 1 On page 65, Lucy says, in America, my mother claimed that the very luckiest were insulated against failure, just as it was the unavoidable destiny of the luckless to remain thwarted.

Speaker 1 I still remember how much this upset me. There wasn't supposed to be any limit to the benefits of hard work and honesty.

Speaker 1 And her saying that there were limits implied that she didn't believe in America, or worse, in us.

Speaker 2 I know your time is so valuable to you, dear listeners. So I thank you for joining my conversation with the much beloved and celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo.

Speaker 2 His sixth novel, Bridge of Size,

Speaker 2 is my 117th Oprah's Book Club selection.

Speaker 2 Coming up, our audience has questions that explore small town life, self-exploration, and finding meaning, themes which run deep throughout this compelling story.

Speaker 2 Maybe you left your hometown, or maybe you chose to stay. Do you ever think about life if you had made a different choice? We're going to answer that question.
Stay with us.

Speaker 7 This episode of the Oprah podcast is brought to you by Booking.com. Listing your vacation rental and Booking.com opens the door to more guests.

Speaker 7 Booking.com is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the world.

Speaker 7 That makes it the place to list your vacation rentals if you want to earn more with consistent bookings, reach new markets, and turn hosting into a steady income.

Speaker 7 Over the past 25 years, they've helped more than 1.8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. So why not help them find yours?

Speaker 7 You can manage your bookings and have control over your property's calendar and finances. It's hosting on your terms.
The best part? Getting started is super easy.

Speaker 7 In less than 15 minutes, you can register your property, and nearly half of partners get their first booking within a week.

Speaker 7 If you've already listed on another site, Booking.com makes it easy to import your property info and get going right away.

Speaker 7 Whether you're looking to earn that extra income or fill those vacant weekends, head over to Booking.com to see how you can get started today.

Speaker 7 The reach is global, the bookings are consistent, and the control is yours. For the bookings you've dreamed of, list your property on booking.com.

Speaker 2 This.

Speaker 2 I welcome you back to Oprah's Book Club. We're in Seattle, the home of Starbucks, and I'm talking with legendary author Richard Russo about his sixth novel, Bridge of Size.

Speaker 2 It's a layered coming-of-age story about the dreams, both lost and realized, of three friends from small-town America. Let's get back to our conversation.

Speaker 1 Kiera in our audience has a question about one of the recurring metaphors in the novel. Kiara?

Speaker 8 Bridges are featured prominently throughout the story.

Speaker 8 First with the narrow bridge that Lucy is afraid to cross and then again with the famous bridge of size

Speaker 8 and they come up throughout the novel many times.

Speaker 5 I'm curious, what do they represent

Speaker 8 in the novel?

Speaker 3 I guess most people find themselves crossing bridges.

Speaker 3 I think it's more a metaphor than anything else to get from one place to another.

Speaker 3 It may not be a physical bridge,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 we pass through

Speaker 3 some kind of bridge. I think the most important bridge in some ways in this novel is the smallest of the bridges, not the bridge of size, but that first bridge that

Speaker 3 Lucy Lynch has to cross over and he's afraid to do unless he's... Even when he's held in in the trunk? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And that is traumatic.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 That impacted him in ways that he didn't even realize.

Speaker 3 And is still impacting him at the end of the book. At the end of the book.
He doesn't realize that. Because as a result of that, I mean,

Speaker 3 the trunk that he is locked in, and you learn towards the end that Bobby Marconi himself is not free of blame in terms of what happened. He was there.

Speaker 3 And he was there. And as a result of that, Lucy has lived with these spells his entire life.
And he's also learned a piece of wisdom that he wishes in some ways that he hadn't learned, is

Speaker 3 his belief is that

Speaker 3 some people have to pay to cross the bridge and other people don't.

Speaker 3 I'm not sure that the novel bears that out, Oprah, because I think the ending, the actual ending of the novel suggests,

Speaker 3 And certainly Robert Noonan seems to believe, that in the end we all pay to to cross that bridge.

Speaker 3 But from Lucy's point of view, it sure doesn't seem fair that some people have to pay and other people don't have to pay.

Speaker 1 So who is Lucy? Is it a composite of other people you knew or is he completely made up?

Speaker 3 Lucy is certainly more made up than Noonan

Speaker 3 is.

Speaker 3 Lucy and his father are based on people from my own childhood.

Speaker 3 I had a much beloved, adored uncle who had a milk truck.

Speaker 3 He delivered milk throughout Gloversville, New York. And he would let.

Speaker 3 When milk was in bottles. Yeah, when milk was in bottles, right, right.

Speaker 1 Did you all realize milk used to be in bottles?

Speaker 3 See, you see people in the audience going, what? What? What?

Speaker 1 He used to deliver milk and bottles to your door, yes.

Speaker 3 And he would let me, Auntie's.

Speaker 1 Not in my neighborhood.

Speaker 3 We had our own cow.

Speaker 1 It was my job to take the cow out to the pasture every day. But anyway, go ahead.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 he would allow

Speaker 3 my cousin and me to surf the truck.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 So that's a detail that did come from my own life. But there were on

Speaker 3 one side of the family, it did seem to me that there were these wonderful,

Speaker 3 generous, optimistic, and yes, naive human beings,

Speaker 3 where on the other side of my family,

Speaker 3 there was a kind of ingrained cynicism

Speaker 3 that was more likely to put people in motion.

Speaker 3 I think one of the things about Bobby Marconi becoming Robert Noonan is that that begins with motion. He has to go.

Speaker 3 He has to leave this place. Leave the town, yes.

Speaker 3 In order to discover who he is. He's not going to discover it there.

Speaker 1 As is the case for a lot of people having to leave small towns.

Speaker 1 I mean, which made me think about, you know, I was born and raised for the earliest years of my life, a small town in Cosiezco, Mississippi. Who would I have been? Do you all ever think about this?

Speaker 1 Who would you have been if you had stayed? Do you think about this, James?

Speaker 1 Who would you have been if you had stayed? I would be in Mississippi with a grocery store that everybody came by the grocery store. I would be the town

Speaker 1 place where everybody gathered, and we wouldn't just sell vegetables and food and stuff but it would be the gathering place and I would be doing exactly what I'm doing now. I would be honey.

Speaker 1 Say honey come on over here let me talk to you.

Speaker 1 Yes, it's time for you to leave that man I gotta say

Speaker 1 you know it would be it would be that it would be the gathering place for people that that's what I think.

Speaker 3 Can I ask you a question? Sure ask me. Would that

Speaker 3 Would that have been

Speaker 3 a tragic thing?

Speaker 1 No, it wouldn't have been a tragic thing because I wouldn't have known that there was a whole nother way of being.

Speaker 1 I would have found a way to manifest my personality and be who I am

Speaker 1 in an environment that would be conducive to that. But I would have risen in that environment.
I do believe that.

Speaker 3 Yeah. That's a great answer because I don't think it would have been either.

Speaker 3 I mean, you are who you are, Oprah, and you have, my God, what you have done is just breathtaking and astonishing.

Speaker 3 But the other version of you, I suspect, would have been just as astonishing.

Speaker 3 I would have been the deaconess in the church.

Speaker 1 I would have had the whole thing, you know, all of that thing. Krista's here, and she said that she could relate to Bobby's complicated feelings about his father.
Krista?

Speaker 1 Hi.

Speaker 9 There was a passage that spoke to me, and it was when Bobby was reflecting on the different version of his father that he observed with Maxine as compared to at home with his mom.

Speaker 9 I'd like to read it.

Speaker 9 Was there one thing he wanted an explanation for or everything? Without warning, his father had stopped being a simple man.

Speaker 9 Did Noonan want an explanation for the kindness he'd shown this Maxine and her idiot kid, or for the mean-spirited bullying he'd offered his mother and his brothers and himself?

Speaker 9 The best guy, Willie had called him. In what reality was his father even a decent guy?

Speaker 9 It was as if the first 17 years of Noonan's life had taken place under a full moon that suddenly had waned, allowing his wolf of a father to take on the shape of an ordinary man.

Speaker 9 How had he managed to miss that transformation?

Speaker 9 So, this made me think of my dad.

Speaker 9 So, my dad left my mom for another woman after 25 years of marriage. And the person he is today is very different from the person I grew up with.
And so,

Speaker 9 I wonder, you know, if

Speaker 9 the real crime was the environment he created in my home,

Speaker 9 his, you know, short temper or lack of affection, or was it that he married the wrong person?

Speaker 9 And I think that the book asks the question: can you change, or are you always the same person at your core?

Speaker 9 But when you do change, which version of you is your true self, and how much of who we are is determined by the people in our lives?

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Y'all, I'm going to deeply sigh over the bridge.

Speaker 3 Oh, y'all.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 1 Deep questions here, Bridge of

Speaker 3 And I think in order to, I don't know if I have if that was exactly a question, but to comment on it,

Speaker 3 I would go

Speaker 3 to Noonan

Speaker 3 because I think

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 Noonan,

Speaker 3 when he becomes a painter,

Speaker 3 that's the first stage of something new for him. He becomes, by going to Venice, and learning to paint.
He's made an enormous change in his life.

Speaker 3 It's probably not as enormous, however, is the last change in his life, which takes place just before he comes back to America for his last, as it turns out, final show.

Speaker 3 And something very surprising happens to him there because he's painting that, what people think of as a self-portrait. He's painting his father, his rage against his father that he has protected,

Speaker 3 as if he might run out of it at some point. He's protected

Speaker 3 that rage. And throughout his paintings,

Speaker 3 not only that painting of his father, but other paintings,

Speaker 3 Hugh, his agent, refers to those paintings as being all worm because Noonan thinks of himself as somebody who's, if there's an apple there

Speaker 3 and there's a worm at the center of the apple,

Speaker 3 he's always after the worm. And as his paintings have gotten darker and darker, Hugh says that they're all worm.

Speaker 3 There's nothing else.

Speaker 3 But at the end, the astonishing thing happens

Speaker 3 that he decides to paint Sarah, this woman that he was in love with all those years ago.

Speaker 3 And he sets up the easel right next to the easel, the all-worm version of his father.

Speaker 3 And when he begins to paint Sarah,

Speaker 3 It's as if the light from that painting of Sarah is now shedding on his father and it changes his father's portrait. It's not all worm anymore.

Speaker 3 I think

Speaker 3 that's the big change in Noonan is

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 his love for Sarah, even remembered all those years ago,

Speaker 3 proves stronger. than his hatred of his father.

Speaker 3 So when you say, which is the real person, I'll just throw the question back at you, but I think the real Robert Noonan is the one we see just before he dies.

Speaker 1 And to add to that,

Speaker 1 because we all went, whoo, when you said, like, did your father marry the wrong person? You marry the person

Speaker 1 that is going to most

Speaker 1 help you

Speaker 1 evolve into the person that you need to be.

Speaker 1 And perhaps being with your mother, even if it was, you know, they were not compatible or he was not happy there, it helped him move on to a better version of himself.

Speaker 1 Just like many times you're in a relationship with somebody who makes you better because

Speaker 1 their behavior is so the antithesis of what you really want. And so you recognize

Speaker 1 this is not what I want. And so he moved out of that relationship and evolved into somebody that you don't recognize because he was was a different person with her.

Speaker 3 And also,

Speaker 3 people can get really sick of themselves. You know, you can, if you, if you, if you live the kind of life your father had lived with your mother and was was was unhappy about that,

Speaker 3 that's another way of saying that he was really sick of the person that he was.

Speaker 3 And when he had a chance to do something different, he did. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I would only say to add on to that, one of the things that to my mind has always been the thing that I love most about fiction writing is that it has saved me from, I mean, I still get sick of myself, believe me.

Speaker 3 But fiction writing, losing yourself in stories of people like Lucy Lynch and Bobby Marconi and Sarah.

Speaker 3 The four and a half years that it took to write that book, Losing Myself in Their Lives, was wonderful because it was a way to keep myself from being sick of myself. You know?

Speaker 3 That's the beauty of art. It allows you to not fall into that place of being trapped in yourself all the time.

Speaker 2 Just a quick moment to say, I'm so grateful you've joined us for this episode of Oprah's Book Club. When we come back, more of my conversation with Bridge of Size author Richard Russo,

Speaker 2 my 117th Oprah's Book Club selection. Next, we're going to explore the complex relationships between mothers and sons.

Speaker 2 And I asked something I've wondered while reading Bridge of Size, how did Richard learn to write so profoundly from a woman's perspective?

Speaker 2 We've got more thought-provoking questions from the audience after the break, so stay with us, book lovers.

Speaker 10 The holidays are back at Starbucks, so share the season with a peppermint mocha.

Speaker 10 Starbucks signature espresso, velvety mocha, and cool peppermint notes, topped with whipped cream and dark chocolate curls. Together is the best place to be at Starbucks.

Speaker 2 Welcome back, listeners. I am in the beautiful Emerald City of Seattle for this episode of Oprah's Book Club presented by Starbucks.

Speaker 2 In case you didn't already know, Seattle is the hometown of Starbucks, and I'm with an audience of readers. We're talking to best-selling author Richard Russo about his book, Bridge of Size,

Speaker 2 my latest book club selection. It's a sweeping saga that invites readers to contemplate life's biggest questions.
Let's get back to more of those questions from the audience.

Speaker 1 Karen in our audience has a question about the relationships between mothers and her children. Karen?

Speaker 11 One of the themes of the book that really resonated for me personally was the complicated relationships between mothers and sons.

Speaker 11 So my question is, how did your relationship with your own mother influence these characters? And did you find that the mothers took the brunt of the blame for the shortcomings of the fathers?

Speaker 11 And did you consider that with creating Lucy?

Speaker 3 I don't want to overgeneralize here, but

Speaker 3 I loved my mother deeply. I owe her more than I could ever express here, here, or anywhere.
But growing up, I could be a little prick sometimes.

Speaker 3 And I think that boys, especially my parents, separated, so there was only my mother. And whenever anything went wrong, there was nobody to blame but her.

Speaker 3 And I think that there were times, especially when I was younger.

Speaker 3 And like most boys, if there's only one, whoever's handy, you know, and and my mother, and my mother was handy. But I would also say that

Speaker 3 her

Speaker 3 dream for me,

Speaker 3 more than anything else, was responsible for the person who sitting here in front of you today. She was absolutely determined.
And some of her gifts to me were like that.

Speaker 3 Here's what we're going to do. She laid out the blueprint.
And by God, we followed that blueprint, you know, step by step by step, always.

Speaker 3 But some of the greatest

Speaker 3 influence that she had on me was lessons she was teaching me that she didn't even know she was teaching. For one thing, she had a very hard life.

Speaker 3 She worked in Schenectady an hour away from where we lived in Gloversville. She worked at General Electric.

Speaker 3 When she came home, after a hard day, she still had me to deal with, all the things that I would need in school the next day.

Speaker 3 laundry that had to be done, her own dinner that had to be cooked. And at the end of that long day, and it's now coming towards like nine o'clock before her day is done, and it started at six.

Speaker 3 And at the end of that long day,

Speaker 3 what she did, instead of turning on the TV, was she sat down and read.

Speaker 3 She never told me to read.

Speaker 3 She never suggested to me that it would be a good idea. She simply showed by example, this is what you do to reward yourself at the end of a long day.

Speaker 3 And made me, without ever even suggesting suggesting it to me made me into

Speaker 3 a voracious reader and I can tell you

Speaker 3 I think it's

Speaker 3 I'm not sure if it's true for every writer but I don't think you can be a writer without being a reader and and that's I mean that was her first gift to me the first of many many many gifts and

Speaker 3 both her example

Speaker 3 and her faith

Speaker 3 in our ability to change our lives

Speaker 3 was pivotal at every stage of my childhood, adolescence, and

Speaker 3 well into my adulthood.

Speaker 1 Thanks, Kieran. There was a famous model who was on the Oprah show many years ago.

Speaker 1 I'll never forget that she told me that she noticed the moment that she walked into a room and heads no longer turned when she came into the room. And you write this about aging.

Speaker 1 You say, then the change, as if one morning she looked at herself in the mirror and saw into the future that before long even the most desperate and befuddled of the sundry arms divorce would stop coming to her for solace.

Speaker 1 Probably she saw too where all the martinis had settled in the dark bags under her eyes, her sunken cheeks had breasts.

Speaker 1 Possibly it wasn't even the bathroom mirror so much as the one on men's faces where she did not register anymore.

Speaker 1 Or worse, she registered briefly, but then didn't pass the test. Sex had been the currency of her life and soon she'd be broke.

Speaker 1 If her husband had talked a good game, well at least he was still in business. That was something you could still do.

Speaker 1 Whereas, for all Sarah knew, her father may have even warned her about the day when she'd flirt and no one would flirt back.

Speaker 1 when men no longer would gather around her at parties for the privilege of looking down her blouse, when she'd have to face what little remained and face it alone.

Speaker 1 I want to know how you knew how to write this from a woman's perspective.

Speaker 3 If you'd read only my first two novels, I don't think you probably would have come to that conclusion because those first two books were about male misbehavior. I was a much younger writer then.

Speaker 3 And I didn't have a lot of major female characters in those books. But I don't think any male writer wants to publish a book with a lot of

Speaker 3 female characters

Speaker 3 and have a reviewer say, God, he doesn't know a damn thing about women, does he?

Speaker 3 And so I think my first couple books, I didn't allow as many female characters to come in as my later ones. But there was a point in my life

Speaker 3 where I looked around Oprah, and suddenly all the important people in my life were women. It was my wife.
By then, I had two daughters. My mother was still alive.

Speaker 3 So how do you write from a woman's point of view?

Speaker 3 One pretty good tactic, although it wasn't a tactic on my part, it just happened.

Speaker 3 Be surrounded by women

Speaker 3 and keep your eyes open. For God's sake, observe.

Speaker 3 You're never going to be a woman.

Speaker 3 You're going to have to indulge in your imagination.

Speaker 3 But that's really like almost anything else that writers write about.

Speaker 3 We write about people whose lives, whose lived experiences are much different from our own.

Speaker 3 I mean, one of my favorite characters is my sister Ursula from The Horse Child, who is an octogenarian Belgian nun.

Speaker 3 What business? Did I have at age 40 writing about an octogenarian Belgian nun? I was never going to be a a woman, never going to be a nun.

Speaker 3 I'd never set foot in Belgium

Speaker 3 and never been sold by my father to a convent. What possible business did I have writing about this woman?

Speaker 3 But that's the task, is to imagine lives different from your own.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the only way to do that is to use the tools at hand.

Speaker 3 And in my case,

Speaker 3 being surrounded by women at that stage in my life

Speaker 3 along the time of Nobody's Fool,

Speaker 3 suddenly there were women everywhere. And I wasn't so terrified anymore

Speaker 3 of being a writer who would be panned in reviews for not knowing anything about women.

Speaker 1 Well, you got it.

Speaker 3 Thank God.

Speaker 1 I think you have such a beautiful way of phrasing the big questions we all have about life. One of my favorite passages from page 620 is about the road not taken.

Speaker 1 You say, don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and yes, bitterness too.

Speaker 1 Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know we haven't been? Do you think most people feel cheated?

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 1 You do?

Speaker 3 Let me ask you.

Speaker 3 But not in their best moments.

Speaker 1 Do you guys think most people feel cheated? Hmm.

Speaker 1 Hmm.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 You don't wish you had two go-arounds?

Speaker 3 Another chance to

Speaker 3 try something different? No? Okay.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay, okay.

Speaker 1 Do most people feel cheated? Raise your hand.

Speaker 3 I think women do.

Speaker 1 You think women do?

Speaker 3 Oh, that's interesting. Okay, that's interesting.
Why?

Speaker 3 Why do women feel cheated?

Speaker 8 I think because we are cheated from the time

Speaker 3 from the time we're born, we have all of these societal expectations to squelch who we are and what we can do.

Speaker 3 And I think now that I'm in my 50s, that rooster has come home to roost, in a sense.

Speaker 3 And I think I realize it now more than I ever have. And I also don't care anymore.
So I talk about it a lot. So anyway, that's, I think we feel cheated because women are cheated.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 This reminds me of the passage of the book. This is on page 583 in your hymnals.

Speaker 1 You write that the men never felt trapped.

Speaker 1 They never wondered about the mountain road not taken, never felt as though some important part of them was withering as another flourished, never were greedy for what they didn't have and would never experience.

Speaker 1 But many of the women in the book did, of course, admit feeling trapped in their marriages, you know. But the men never felt trapped because they weren't.
Yeah. Because they weren't.

Speaker 1 So does that represent contentment or is that the essence of settling? What do you think?

Speaker 3 Well, I think Sarah

Speaker 3 is the character there through whom a lot of that gets investigated. Towards the end of the book,

Speaker 3 she leaves Lucy and is not sure she's coming back.

Speaker 3 And it's because she's trying to locate her mother, who she knows has died.

Speaker 3 But she's trying to locate her mother, I think,

Speaker 3 for her mother. If her mother were alive, she might be able to explain some things about Sarah's own life that she has never been able to understand and is trying to understand now.

Speaker 3 And so she goes on this, she goes on this seemingly bizarre quest

Speaker 3 for an answer to a question that she thinks when she first arrives on Long Island,

Speaker 3 she thinks

Speaker 3 she may be on a quest that's simply impossible to

Speaker 3 succeed in, only to discover that, no, there was a reason that she was there, a very important reason that she was there. And her sense that something

Speaker 3 was missing,

Speaker 3 when she first starts out of that journey, you think, oh, God, this is a lunatic quest. No good could possibly come of this.

Speaker 3 And yet, the longer she's away, the longer she's away from the life that she wouldn't trade, she wouldn't trade her husband in. She wouldn't.
She knows that in many respects that she's been lucky and

Speaker 3 lived a fortunate life. But

Speaker 3 that unanswered question, I think she does feel a little cheated. And I think that

Speaker 3 she doesn't know what it is, but there's something missing. What on earth is it that

Speaker 3 is missing? And if you don't at least suspect that there's something missing, you're not going to find out what it might be.

Speaker 1 And this line I love, too. This is on page 563.
The line of gray along the horizon is brighter now. And with the coming light, I feel the certainty.

Speaker 1 There is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them, are phantoms.

Speaker 1 The one life we're left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy and then to shatter them and it never, ever lets up. Blame love.

Speaker 1 Blame love. Thank you, Richard Russo.
Thank you so much. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Thank you. And this fantastic Seattle audience, thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 3 Thank you for your questions. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 This is my favorite thing to do, talk about books. Bridge of Size is available wherever books are sold.

Speaker 1 And did you have to go back and read it yourself to remind yourself of what you'd written after I call?

Speaker 3 I absolutely did. You did.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 what I would like to tell you now, Oprah, is that as honored as I am and believe I am so honored that you have chosen this book for your book club, you also gave me a wonderful, great gift.

Speaker 3 Because after Bridge of Size, this book was a struggle. It's my longest, my most most complex book.
It has the widest angle lens. It has the most characters in it, and the most time elapses.

Speaker 3 That's what makes a book big.

Speaker 3 And I had not thought about this book since it was published, because I had other books. Once a book is published, you can't help these people in this book anymore.
They're on their own.

Speaker 3 And so I wrote other books, and this was never a book that

Speaker 3 Hollywood was interested in. And so I had no particular reason to revisit it.
And Oprah, I read this book as if someone else had written it. I had forgotten almost the whole thing.
Wow.

Speaker 3 And I was, and I was, it was just such a gift to fall in love with these characters again. It's as if someone else had written the book.
I can't thank you enough.

Speaker 3 I don't think, but for this, I would have ever given another moment's thought to this novel. novel.

Speaker 1 The Bridge of Size.

Speaker 1 You fell in love again with Lucy.

Speaker 1 You fell in love again.

Speaker 1 That is so great. I didn't know I did that, but I'm happy.
I'm happy to be able to do that for you, okay?

Speaker 1 Before we go, I want to share that I recently published something tailor-made for you avid readers. So delighted to tell you about it.
It's my book lover's journal. And here's what's great.

Speaker 1 Has over 100 prompts, like the first book that made you feel seen and the book that reminded you of what matters most, all designed to enhance your reading experience.

Speaker 1 It's a great gift for book lovers and I hear book clubs are using it when they meet, which makes me so happy. I write about some of my favorite books and first sentences.

Speaker 1 Don't you love a good first sentence?

Speaker 1 Do you struggle with that first sentence?

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 usually

Speaker 3 what happens is that the first sentence of the book appears in the first draft on page 375.

Speaker 3 And you think, oh, God, that's it. That's the sentence.
That's it. That's the sentence.

Speaker 3 It's not the first sentence that I write.

Speaker 1 It's somewhere in the middle.

Speaker 3 It's years later. I tell you that, oh, my God, that's the first sentence of the book.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 There's a whole book about first sentences, actually. I love it.
So thank you so much for being here. Thank you all.
Oprah's Book Lovers Journal available anywhere you buy your books, audience.

Speaker 1 You're all going to get a copy.

Speaker 3 There you go.

Speaker 1 Thanks again to our fantastic partner, Starbucks, for supporting Oprah's Book Club. Next time you head to your neighborhood Starbucks, bring a friend and your copy of Bridge of Size

Speaker 1 and try this month's pairing, the Manila Sweet Cream Cold Brew. Go well, everybody.
Thanks so much. Thank you.