Hello everyone, I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the Book Review Podcast, where we are continuing

to highlight great conversations from our decade plus archive.

I know we have many long-time listeners of this podcast or eager for new episodes.

Luckily, given that the holiday season is a great time to look back upon the year in

books, we will soon have our annual announcement of our top ten books of the year for you to

listen to, as well as a conversation with our staff critics about their highlights.

So stay tuned for those.

Today we have a conversation from June 2019 between former book review editor Pamela

Paul and Taffy Brodyser-Akner, a writer for the New York Times magazine, a star celebrity

profiler, and author of the novel, Fleshman Is in Trouble.

A television series based on that book is just premiered on Hulu.

Taffy did something that's practically and heard of for a novelist.

We served a showrunner on that series and wrote almost every episode.

Hey Taffy, thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me, Pamela.

Did you always want to write a novel?

Is this secretly your ambition and your just like journalism is your day job?

It was not secretly my ambition.

It was boldly my ambition and I was not good at it and I was not good at screenwriting.

And then I fell into journalism in a weird way.

I worked at a soap opera magazine.

Was it soap opera digest?

...