So we are so thrilled to have Katie Kinnemora with us today, who is the author of our May book club pick audition.

And we had our book club episode yesterday.

And today we get to have this extra little bonus chat to hear more about the behind the scenes of the book and to answer some of the questions that we came up with during our book club chat.

So Katie, welcome.

Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. I think maybe the best place to start is I'm curious

how books usually start for you. Do they start with a character, a plot point, a theme, something else?

And what was the seed kernel of inspiration for this book?

I mean, I always say that I'm a really slow metabolizer of ideas. I tend to sit with an

idea for many years before I actually sit down to start writing. And in the case of this book,

it was exactly that I had finished a book in maybe 20, oh, I want to say 2018 or so.

And I saw a headline that ran a stranger told me he was my son.

And I immediately thought there's a novel somewhere in there, but I couldn't quite figure it out.

And I filed it away somewhere. and I wrote a different book,

which was called Intimacies, which was about a simultaneous interpreter. And that took, you know,

a few years. And it was only when that book was done that I circled back to that old idea,

which hadn't really gone away. And then I started looking at it closer and then I started writing

audition.

My feeling is that the books I really want to write, the idea just doesn't leave me alone.

So I can safely stash it away.

And even so three, four years later, if it's a good idea, if it's an idea that's going

to sustain the writing of a book, it'll still be there.

I have actually a very specific question for you about character. And so it's not directly

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