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 wb easy

chicago this is nerd ad i'm greta johnson did it. We made it to another Wednesday, but we are here for a very important reason. As you may know, Pulitzer Prizes were announced this week, and we were absolutely thrilled to see that one of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature this year is Ernan Diaz for his novel Trust. As you know,

that was a nerd at Book Club pick late last year, which means I had the great pleasure of talking

with Ernan about his acclaimed novel. And we are going to play the conversation for you. So in case

you missed it, here it is. This is a book best enjoyed with as few preconceived notions as possible. So all I'm going to say is this. Trust is in many ways four separate versions of the same story. It is a novel. There's an unfinished memoir. There's a story of a ghostwriter and then a series of journal entries. It's about a wealthy financial trader and his wife

during the 1920s and into the Depression. It is about wealth and truth and who gets to tell their

stories. Ernan is with us now. Ernan. Welcome to Nurdat. Hi, Greta. What a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for having me. So I mentioned this is a book in a book in a book. It's such a

fun structure because there's a lot of puzzling that the reader gets to do, which I found

very satisfying. You're not handing anything to anyone on a platter in this book. I'm curious how you

came to the structure. That actually happened a little later.

Just to walk you through the whole thing, at first, it was a pretty straightforward novel in my mind about wealth in America and the accumulation of capital.

But the more I read toward the story, the more I thought about it, the more I delved into historical archives, it also dawned on me that this story more than money itself was around the myths

and narratives spun around money and who has a voice and who has denied one. So instead of

merely sort of thematizing the issue of voice,

I decided to enact it formally, hence sort of this choral structure that the book has.

In a way, the structure allows the reader to examine the terms and conditions,

if you will, that, yeah, that we scroll through all too

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