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i'm really excited to be here today with stephen roly stephen is the bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus. His second novel, The Editor, comes out April 2nd. He has worked as a freelance writer, screenwriter, and newspaper columnist, a graduate of Emerson College. He currently lives in Los Angeles. So welcome to Stephen. Thanks for being here. I'm so thrilled. Thank you. So the editor was fantastic.

I couldn't put it down.

Really, I'm not just saying that.

That was really great.

So the editor revolves a lot around the fictitious relationship with Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Mrs. Onassis in the book, and your narrator, James Smale.

So I was wondering how you picked her as the focal point sort of of this interaction and how

you came up with the idea for the whole book.

Yeah, it's a little bit of an unexpected follow-up, I think, for those who read my first

book, Lily and the Octopus, which was about a man sort of reckoning with the sort of impending

death of his dog and grieving that relationship.

But in order to understand the editor, I think we have to sort of backtrack and talk about Lily

for one moment. Please. Let's talk as long as you want. Let's talk about it. And, you know, that was a

book that I wrote, never expecting to publish it, let alone at becoming a bestseller or translated

in 19 languages. And now there's a movie

in development.

That was just a small project, I thought, when I was writing it.

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