Good writers borrow, great writers steal, Jake was thinking. That ubiquitous phrase was

attributed to T.S. Eliot, which didn't mean Elliot hadn't himself stolen it. But Elliot had been

talking perhaps less than seriously about the theft of language, phrases and sentences and paragraphs, not of a story itself.

Besides, Jake knew, as Elliot had known, as all artists ought to know,

that every story, like every single work of art, from the cave paintings to whatever was

playing at the Park Theater in Cobleskill, to his own puny books, was in conversation

with every other work of art, bouncing against its predecessors, drawing from its contemporaries,

harmonizing with the patterns, all of it, paintings and choreography and poetry and photography and

performance art, and the ever-fluxuating novel

was whirling away in an unstoppable spin-art machine of its own. And that was a beautiful,

thrilling thing.

Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dome. My guest is novelist Gene Hand Correlates.

Gene is the author of many books, including You Should Have Known, a novel that was adapted

into last fall's hit HBO limited series The Undoing, which starred Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.

Her brand new novel, The Plot, is both a story

within a story and a moral conundrum played out as a suspense thriller. It's about a struggling

writer who stumbles upon what by all accounts is the greatest story ever, or at least in this

case, never, told. The problem is it belongs to someone else. In this conversation,

Jean talked with me about what a story really is and why the boundaries of ownership can get so

murky. She also talked about some of her other books, two of which 2009's admission and

2017's The Devil and Webster were set on college campuses and delve into the lives

of school administrators trying to negotiate with a changing world. She has a lot to say about the

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