Hey everybody, how are you? Welcome to The Other People Show. I'm Brad Listy here in Los Angeles. It's good to be with you. Thank you for listening wherever you happen to be. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to the podcast. You can also watch the podcast

on the other people YouTube channel. Subscribe there as well. It's free. Today on the program,

my guest is J. Ryan Strottle, author of the novel Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper

Club. The whole concede of the story was comical, the whole spine. But as it got into it, I discovered, you know what? The last thing I want to read is a stock comic, elderly, Midwestern female character. That's not what the world needs right now. I know too many of these women, I can't disrespect them like this. If I'm going to portray a woman of a certain age in the Midwest, I want to get to know her and I want the

reader to get to know her. And so I decided to tell her backstory. And as I did that, I discovered,

okay, there's a lot more here. All right. That was Jay Ryan Strottle, bestselling author of

the new novel Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club,

available from Pamela Dorman Books. It publishes on Tuesday, April 18th, 2023.

This is Jay Ryan's third time on The Other People's Show. We've known each other for many years now.

And it was great to see him and have the chance to

catch up and to get to celebrate with him as he publishes this new book. Saturday night at the

Lakeside Supper Club is set in the Upper Midwest, much like Straddle's previous novels,

Kitchens of the Great Midwest, and the Lager Queen of Minnesota.

Saturday night at the Lakeside Supper Club portrays a world of an almost bygone

seeming era, a world of supper clubs, of relish trays, of brandy old fashions.

This is a novel about family, and in particular it's about restaurant

families. It's about love and loss and marriage and tradition. It's about the long arc of

human lives and human families. It's about how people find identity and lose identity through the work

that they do, how they find community in the workplace, and in the places that they live,

how they persevere in the face of terrible tragedy, how they deal with disappointment and conflict

and failure and the expectations placed upon them by

parents and other family members and friends. It's about the stuff of life. And it is a totally

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