I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is The Nerd at Book Club. It's just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by. It is somehow the month of May, and our

pick this month is Idra Novi's third novel, Take What You Need. The story opens with Leah,

who has just learned that her estranged stepmother, Jean, died falling off a ladder while making a giant metal sculpture.

The book alternates points of view between Leah in the novel's present day and Jean before she died.

It is full of really interesting themes around chosen family and messy relationships and creativity

and the changing American cultural landscape. I think that is enough to say for now,

since of course this is a spoiler-free conversation. Idra, welcome to Nuredette. Thank you for having

me. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited to talk to you about this book. It's pretty short, but it's so

rich. There's so much to unpack about it.

Oh, thank you. I think, though it is 250 pages, I wrote over a thousand pages. Oh, my God. Did you really? Yes. I wonder if that speaks to how beautifully distilled it ends up feeling, because you really really like you did exactly what it needs to do

I think thank you you know I read I really wanted this novel because it is as you said about

sort of these divides in the country that I didn't want to editorialize you know and I looked at

authors like Claire Keegan who I think writes about divides in Ireland. And, you know,

I don't know if you've read Foster or small things like these, but her books sort of just pull you

into the scene and let the dialogue and the place sort of convey these sort of larger tensions.

And it's so clean, you know. And so I just looked for books like that so that I, like, you know,

...