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First Draft Episode #318: Chandler Baker
August 12, 2021
Chandler Baker, the New York Times bestselling author of Whisper Network, talks about her latest feminist thriller, The Husbands. She is also the co-author with Wesley King of YA novel Hello (From Here), out September 7!
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week, I'm talking to Chandler Baker, New York Times bestselling author of Whisper Network, we're talking about her latest feminist thriller, The Husbands. Chandler has also written several YA novels and is coauthor with Wesley King of the forthcoming, Hello (From Here) out September 7th.
I loved what Chandler had to say about what sustained her while she was working toward publication, including some ghost writing gigs, the false dichotomy of ambition versus motherhood, and on finding the book through conversations with friends, but maybe not a Pilates instructor.
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Okay, now please sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Chandler Baker.
Sarah Enni: Hi Chandler, how are you doing this morning?
Chandler Baker: I'm good. How are you?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing well. I'm so excited to talk today. I just spent my weekend reading The Husbands and I'm full of rage and questions for you [laughing].
Chandler Baker: Exactly how I want you to be feeling. I just want everyone to be so angry.
Sarah Enni: We are gonna build our way to The Husbands and start at the very beginning and learn a little bit more about you. So I'd love to hear about where you were born and raised.
Chandler Baker: I was born in Dallas, Texas, and I lived there for the first 10 years of my life, but I really consider myself from Sarasota, Florida. I moved there when I was 10 and went to high school there and my parents live there now. So when I go home, I go back to Sarasota.
Sarah Enni: How was reading and writing part of growing up for you?
Chandler Baker: I was definitely a big reader in elementary school and middle school. I remember in second grade my teacher having to go somewhere, I don't know where, excusing herself from the classroom and putting me in charge of reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to the class. I remember reading for a long time to the class, I have no idea where she was, but I just have this vivid memory of being in charge of reading.
And so I was always very proud of reading. I went through big phases. I went through a huge sled dog phase where I was just so immersed in what I was reading and I would read everything I could get my hands on. I feel like it went a little bit more dormant, maybe, in high school where I was reading whatever I had to read for school and just trying to get through it with all my various extracurriculars.
And in college, I really picked it back up again. There were times that I wanted to be a writer, I didn't really think it was an actual possibility, so I didn't pursue it seriously, but I was a huge journaler. I have diaries from probably sixth grade onward, and I probably journaled almost every day for that whole time period.
Sarah Enni: Amazing! I read an essay with you that was correlating getting into, or not getting into, college with discovering creative writing in some way, shape or form. Do you mind kind of telling me that story? Or how you came to expressing yourself that way?
Chandler Baker: I think something that I have discovered about myself that I don't really love, is that I am a big chaser of brass rings, or gold stars. I have been somebody, for a long time, that has always wanted to feel special, like exceptionally good at something. So in high school most of that was channeled into, for a while I wanted to get into Harvard, and then Harvard became Yale. I really wanted to get into Yale.
I was a coxswain on rowing teams and I was recruited as a coxswain to get in Yale. I was told I was going to get into Yale by a coach, then I did not get into Yale. And it was just devastating. I was crushed because it felt to me like I wasn't special. It felt like nobody was going to see me as this shiny person anymore.
And I found that very hard on my identity because, I won't say I don't think anybody would have seen me and thought that I was antisocial or anything like that, but I didn't feel naturally social. I felt like it was internally a struggle to socialize naturally. I'm sure it was for a lot of people internally and they were also portraying it as well. But you know, when you're in high school, you feel like your internal life is the only internal life.
So I felt that it was worth it to be that way, if I was special in this other way. And then I wasn't. I tried other ways to be special. I thought, "Okay, well maybe I will go to the Olympics as a coxswain." I didn't really want to, I was kind of pursuing that vaguely, but I just thought, "I've got to be really good at something."
And it was only, really, once I married. Something that I had been genuinely passionate about for a long time, which was books, with something that was also difficult to achieve, which was getting published, that I found that way to achieve something, in my own eyes, that was worthwhile. Because it wasn't just the brass ring. For a while, I think it was. For a while, I was just pursuing getting published because it was the gold star and I wanted it so badly my stomach hurt at night because I just had to get this thing, I had to get published.
But for a long time, I didn't get published. And I think during that process, I actually discovered that I loved the process of writing, and I loved what I was doing, and there was inherent value to it. And then I felt comfortable continuing to pursue it because I was like, "Okay, there's something here that's not just the end result."
Sarah Enni: I am relating very hard to do what you're saying. I am also somebody that really, I think, and tell me if this is your experience too, but I feel like whatever inherent skills I had, adapted well to the school environment in the U.S. I test well. I can stand in front of class and talk and not be intimidated by that. There's just a certain set of skills that I have and, by luck, that syncs up with the school system so you get used to being really rewarded in that way.
And then you discover that the real world hardly cares about that specific combination of skills so you're struggling to find something, or to find it within yourself, like you're saying, to just reach that. And both of us found ways to give ourselves homework for the rest of our lives, which is writing.
Chandler Baker: Yes, absolutely. And you have to find a different value to it because, like you said, the real world doesn't really care. I still went to an Ivy League school, but people don't care. I became a lawyer because I thought it was going to be something people cared about. People don't care. And most people don't care that I'm a published author either. And that's fine. That's great. And you've just gotta be happy in your job. You've got to do it for other reasons, in any job really.
Sarah Enni: I love that. Okay. Well, there's two tracks here that you kind of introduced that I want to talk about. And one is the struggle to get published, the long journey to being published that we all share. And then deciding to study law and going into the corporate law world.
Let's talk about law first, and then I'll kind of track the creative writing process. But I'd love to hear about how you got drawn into that.
Chandler Baker: I think, like you said, I was always somebody that excelled at school and I was also pretty practical. I felt like I needed to follow a trajectory that was tried and true. I didn't really think that being a writer was a realistic career path. I wanted to be responsible. I wanted to be responsible to my parents. So the whole time that I was in college, I knew that I was gearing up to go to law school. And I went to law school straight out of college, so right after.
Sarah Enni: What did you study in undergrad?
Chandler Baker: Health and societies which is kind of like extra bioethics, I would say, in public health policy, kind of one of those liberal arts mish-mash majors. I graduated a semester early from college and during that time I spent that time writing because we saved some money with me graduating early my parents said I could stay up there for that semester.
So I stayed in Philly for the semester in my apartment with my friends, but I spent that time writing and teaching the LSAT to make a little bit of money and kind of gave that to myself to write. So, yeah, that was nice.
So I went to law school and just considered that that was gonna be my path. But the whole time I was kind of pursuing writing, I didn't give it up. I got an agent within my first couple months of law school. I always felt like I was getting just enough on my journey to publication to keep going, parallel to my legal studies. And it was only a little bit, but it was just what I needed to keep doing it. And so, yeah, I did.
Sarah Enni: That's so interesting. Like many of us, I feel it's pretty common when high school hits, there's a lot of homework, the reading sometimes falls away. And I love that it resurged for you in college. That's another time when a lot of people get sidetracked by the demanding schedule of college and reading, but you found your way back to books and to writing during that time. That's so interesting.
Chandler Baker: I mean, there was so much great YA coming out at that time. That was when Lauren Oliver (New York Times bestselling author of Panic, the Delirium series, and Before I Fall) was coming out. That was when John Green was coming out (#1 New York Times bestselling author of many young adult novels, including The Fault in Our Stars and Printz-winning Looking For Alaska, joins to discuss his new essay collection, The Anthropocene Reviewed. He is also one half of the vlogbrothers on YouTube and co-creator of educational series Crash Course. Listen to his First Draft interview here).
That was Gayle Forman (#1 New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay and Where She Went, as well as We Are Inevitable, Frankie & Bug, and many more), all of those great books were coming out. I mean, it was just a deluge of amazing YA that I had never experienced. So I was loving it.
I don't know if you were pursuing writing during this time, but there was Miss Snark, the blog at the time, which I found so fascinating. I got involved on message boards, like the Verla Kay Blue Boards. I got involved on Absolute Write's purgatory thread. So I made a lot of online friends and I felt like that was very sustaining. So I kind of had this whole online universe that felt very new and fresh and kept me sustained towards those goals.
Sarah Enni: It's funny, I definitely was around the same time. And everybody had a blog and it was this alternate world that you could access and that was feeding you creatively and so separate from the rest of your life, which now it feels so integrated into my life. It's funny to think back to that, it was like, "Let me log on and just leave the real world behind for a minute."
I want to ask about the early time of writing, because I understand that you got into ghost writing for a little bit. Can you talk to me about that? That's a really interesting thing that I think is more common than people might understand, and it's sometimes hard to talk about, so whatever you can share about that experience, I'd love to hear about it.
Chandler Baker: I know the reasons that I got into it, which is, I felt like I needed some validation. We tried to sell my first book and it didn't sell. And I felt somewhat embarrassed around my law school classmates that knew I was pursuing writing, even around my parents that knew I was taking time away from my studies to pursue writing when clearly everyone was rejecting me.
And I just thought, "Well, if I can't sell my own work, if I could get somebody to pay me something, then they would know that I have some value as a writer." And I don't know that that's the best reason, but I did get hired on to write. I think the first thing I got hired on to write was a middle grade series that had been going on for a long time.
So I wrote, I think, three or four books sort of in the middle installments, they were super cute. I'm still really proud of them, and they do really well, no thanks to me. They were already doing well and they're just fun. And honestly, it was a great experience. It was like being paid for boot camp of writing a novel, having to meet those deadlines, understanding the structure that the editors were looking for, going through edits really quickly. So I don't regret it at all.
Then I took on a little bit of additional work for James Frey's company, Full Fathom Five. And then at some point I was taking on more things and my agent was finally like, "Okay, you need to think about your own work again, this is taking away from your own work. And the thing is your own work. So if it's becoming a detriment to you pursuing your own creativity, then you set it aside."
So I felt like that was kind of his 'come to Jesus' talk with me. But I don't regret doing any of the work for hire because I do think it was a way to get paid for learning, in a very real way. And I personally needed that validation to continue and I needed to hold up something to my friends and family to say, "Look, I'm a real writer."
Sarah Enni: Absolutely. And I think that's such a great way to phrase it, that you really got paid for an MFA basically, right?
Chandler Baker: Yes.
Sarah Enni: And an MFA that really teaches you how publishing works. I think ghost writing it's an unromantic pulling back the veil to be like, "Oh, people just need to meet deadlines. It doesn't have to be a perfect book." And to jump in in the middle of a series like, "This needs to happen, here's an outline, make it work." And you kind of get where there are practicalities to what we do, which is good.
Chandler Baker: And mimicking voices is really interesting. You would have to learn to fall into step with an existing voice and to do things the way they like it. So I think all of that's really valuable.
Sarah Enni: Well, thank you for speaking to that cause I think it's always something that listeners might not know. I also think it's good to talk about because I think it's a very valid avenue for people who are trying to pursue writing. And also, maybe you just need to pay the bills and do something a little bit more practical on the side while they're getting their feet wet.
So This is Not the End is the book I want to lead us to, if you don't mind talking about how that book came about.
Chandler Baker: So I had published, I think, three young adult books by that point. And that was my option book with Disney Hyperion. It was one of those things. Some books you have to really work hard at coming up with the idea of. This is Not the End, which is a book about a world where everyone can resurrect one person on their 18th birthday. And the main character, Lake, has to choose between her boyfriend and her best friend who have died in a car accident, while she's already promised her resurrection choice to somebody else.
And it all just hit me like a ton of bricks, like one flash of inspiration, knew the twist, everything. Love it. Great. But I did write the whole thing on maternity leave with my daughter. So, had my daughter and immediately started writing the book because I was going back to practice law full-time after it. And I really felt like I changed how I wrote, in a way, because I felt like I paid a lot more attention to the parents.
I was writing about these children passing away and what it must feel like for the parents processing that and how desperate they would be. And I was just much more raw writing this book about grief. I really felt that informed the book in a different way.
Sarah Enni: That's what I read, you wrote it in 12 weeks before going back to your very demanding full-time job. I love hearing people talk about, you know, obviously events in our lives affect our fiction. How could they not? I'm interested in what that was like for you.
Chandler Baker: It's funny, because I do, internally, not at the question, but I chaff so much at the idea that motherhood would change me as an artist, or even as a reader or consumer, you know? A lot of people say like, "I can't watch anything about a child death or writing anything about a child's death after having a baby.
And I feel that too, after having kids, and yet I don't want to feel that because I just don't want to be changed creatively in those ways. I don't want there to be places that I can't go. But sometimes it is good, like you said, that you can tap into this different creative well. And of course you're gonna be changed by major life experiences, as you should be. So it was good in the sense that I was writing again, instantly.
And I was showing myself that I could still write after having a baby because so many people kind of subtly, or overtly, would tell me that that part of my life was gonna go by the wayside. And that I wouldn't care about certain things in the same way. I wouldn't care about my career in the same way after having children. And I was very nervous for that to be true. And it did not turn out to be true for me, which there's some guilt about that sometimes as well, but it's just not true for me.
So to find myself writing and to still feel very centered by writing, I often say I feel very grounded by working and to still feel very centered. Not that it wasn't hard to work with an infant, of course it is, of course you're tired. But it makes me feel secure and safe and centered to be working on something that I can control.
Sarah Enni: I so appreciate you speaking to that because I don't have kids, and one of the things that is so scary about the thought of being a mom, and what I'm trying to pick apart in therapy is, there's so much messaging that made me unconsciously feel like becoming a mom, was gonna be like me, the person I understand, is gonna get shelved. And this new version of me, that has a completely different life, and priorities, and thoughts, and values, was gonna appear.
I mean, the messaging was internalized for me like that. And I'm hearing echoes of that in what you're saying.
Chandler Baker: Yeah, for sure. One hundred percent.
Sarah Enni: I think there's a lot of value in talking about it. And now I have actually people in my life who are having kids and I'm seeing like, "Oh, they're still them." But it's shocking to realize how much I'd internalized that there was gonna be a kind of death with that part of your life starting. It's heavy what we're putting on women.
Chandler Baker: And I still think that there is, even if you don't feel it, because I don't feel that death inside me, I still feel that fire in my belly. I do still feel a sense of outward embarrassment, and like not wanting to perform that ambition, alongside motherhood, in certain ways.
I feel like it always has to be submissive to motherhood or to be made clear that my children come first. And of course they do come first, but it's really not a binary choice, often. I shouldn't really have to be performing that, "Oh, my children come first." Because it's not usually a decision that needs to be made.
Sarah Enni: Thank you for talking about This is Not the End. I'm so struck by that YA novel, that was literally birthed as you're a new mom. The cover is so gorgeous. It's one that I just remember being everywhere when it came out.
But I'd love for you to lead me from, you wrote many YA books, Alive was your debut. Teen Frankenstein, Teen Hyde, Teen Phantom, This is Not the End. And then I'd love for you to talk about this transition to Whisper Network, which is your first adult novel. How did that came about?
Chandler Baker: I had written, This is Not the End and I had written my YA books, and they had done fine and they had come out, like many YA books do, to limited fanfare. And that's great. But I had been just thinking what I wanted to do next and where I saw things going. And I'd been having a lot of conversations with my agent about what I wanted to do.
And at the same time, when I started out as a writer, I was reading a bunch of YA books. I was in college and, at this point, I was in a book club. We were reading a lot of women's fiction. We were reading a lot of domestic suspense. I think it's natural for the ideas you have to bubble out of what you're consuming as a reader, or as a TV watcher.
So I just started getting this idea. Obviously, it was the beginning of the 'me too' movement in late 2017, and I got the idea for the title of Whisper Network in early 2018 and started to really build a story around it and talk about it with my agent. And I was like, "This is what I think I want to do next." And he thought it was a great idea. And we, honestly, we just went into warp speed because we were like, "This is the book. This is the thing that you should be doing."
I had written up a proposal for it in record speed. We were moving so quickly at that point. And you know, I think I got the idea in January of 2018 and we sent out a proposal on a Friday in March, 2018. And we sent it to Reese Witherspoon and heard back on Monday morning from her and had the offer, which I know it does not always happen that way. I had been around the block enough times to know that it wasn't always that way.
So I felt like I could really appreciate it. It was so close to what I was going through personally at the time as well. So yeah, there was a huge sense of catharsis bringing it to the table, it was the first time that I was really writing about the stage of life that I was in, which felt like this huge shift in my writing where it really broke things open for me.
Sarah Enni: That's incredible. There's a lot of YA writers who are exploring adult now, and that is such an interesting thing for me to talk to people about. For some of us, not everybody, but for some of us writing YA, as you get older and are obviously not young adult anymore, it's just processing what we went through at that time, and how we feel about it. And I do have a lot of friends right now who are thinking, "I'm not processing that anymore. I'm processing actually my late twenties or my early thirties. And how do I shift into discussing those kinds of things that are top of mind?"
Chandler Baker: I think the biggest thing about the 'me too' movement in my personal life was just the conversations I was having with the women in my life at that moment. I felt like every time I was going to lunch with a friend, or every time I was going to book club or something, it would always come around to the discussion of what we had experienced in the workplace, how we handled it, how we wish we had handled it.
And I think that the biggest thing I've discovered about my own writing from the last few books is that it's best for me when it's born out of these conversations with my girlfriends. So that's become a very important part of my process is talking to my female friends and really finding the book in those conversations. So it was really like a literal whisper network creating this book.
Sarah Enni: I'm so interested that you sold it on proposal because the Whisper Network, similar to The Husbands but in a little different way, it's got four main characters. It's a lot of interconnected stories. It's kind of an ensemble cast. It seems to me like it would be hard to anticipate how that would roll out in the actual writing of it.
What was it like to put the proposal together, knowing that you were gonna then kind of set yourself this task of a big sprawling interconnected network of women?
Chandler Baker: I probably shouldn't say this, but I've never NOT sold a book on proposal, not to encourage people to follow suit, but it's how I tend to work, I guess. It was a long proposal. It was a very long proposal because of exactly what you said.
So we went in intending to do a proposal of maybe 50 to 75 pages, and my agent and I would read it and he would send it to a couple of colleagues. We would get feedback and be like, "Oh, just a little bit more of this or that." Because we would have to be switching between all these points of view.
And I think by the time that we sent it, it was probably like 175 pages and like a 30 page synopsis. So it truly kept ballooning because it really was somewhat by committee, by a network. We wanted to get so much feedback from people. We asked so many women what they thought of these pages. And so many people would give us input before we ever went to sell it. And I'm very grateful for that. All of that input just kept adding things and adding things. So we went from like 50 pages with a 10 page synopsis, to like 175 pages with a 30 page synopsis, or something.
Sarah Enni: First of all, I love hearing that you sell on proposal. That's so important to talk about. And I would imagine that your long experience in first ghost writing, and then moving into your own fiction, I think when you're a proven entity and people know you can meet deadlines, there's an element of trust.
And that makes so much sense to me that it was like a 30 page synopsis. Cause sometimes people sell on proposal and they mean a brief outline and three chapters. But yes, having basically most of the book, and a huge detailed idea of how the rest of it is gonna go, makes so much sense for this.
Chandler Baker: And still so much changed. I mean, the first conversation with my editor was basically, before she even sent the offer, which again, all happened in a very quick amount of time, but she was like, "I want the whole ending to change. And will you consider this? And will you consider that?"
So I often think of my proposals as advertisements for how I want the book to feel. And I don't really feel beholden to them, to what the synopsis actually says, but I just want it to say what my aesthetic is for the book.
Sarah Enni: Ooh, I like that. Because that's a more accurate buy-in for an editor, you know the final product is gonna feel this, or evoke this.
Chandler Baker: Yeah, I think so. And the actual plot beats to hit that are, to me, less important and I won't necessarily know what they are until I've written them.
Sarah Enni: I love how you're talking about this new process for you, sort of crowdsourcing what is on people's minds, especially the women in your life, and then getting opinions from other people as you go and kind of ending up with something that is addressing a moment.
And then of course the Whisper Network ever comes out and is an instigator of many more. So it's kind of this feedback loop, which is what the best kind of contemporary fiction does, I think.
Chandler Baker: I hope so. When my agent, there was a point though, where he came to me at the very end of our revision process when we were waiting to see if we were ready to go on submission, where he was like, "Okay, I just gave it to my Pilates instructor."
And I was like, "Okay, I think if we're at the Pilates instructor phase of this feedback, maybe we should go on submission." Mainly because I felt bad for the Pilates instructor who's just going about their job and all of a sudden they have a manuscript to read.
[Both laughing]
Sarah Enni: That is so funny. You're like, "Okay, I think we can call it." I love that. Last question, and this is gonna tie us into The Husbands. But I love how you're describing it being a collaborative discussion of a lot of different things. Not only talking about women in the workplace, there's new motherhood, there is actually a daughter getting social media abuse at her high school and how the school deals with that. There's a lot of different layers to aspects of what women are going through in the book.
And that's part of what makes it feel so rich, but I wonder how you thought about balancing all of those many different threads with kind of the central plot of the workplace and this one man, Ames, who they are kind of plotting against or trying to figure out how to deal with him. How did you think about the main plot versus all of the satellite issues that were going on?
Chandler Baker: It was not easy. I did a big corkboard with colored note cards and each one had a color. So I could at least see the balance of when I was using the different elements, for when the different women appeared as POV characters. And when I was using what I call the interstitials to tell the different story types, which are the format breaks in the story. I wanted it to feel somewhat balanced, but I also didn't want it to feel to me prescriptive.
I didn't want to feel like, at this point you have to have a format break, at this point you have to have this point of view character. So I did keep it somewhat organic that way. But really, it was just looking at it and eyeballing it and making sure it felt balanced to my eyes. And as I read, really, all by feel.
Sarah Enni: I love ensemble books and large kind of sprawling books, but man, even for smaller stories, you realize that one character is dropped off for five chapters or something like that.
Chandler Baker: Yes. So it's definitely moments of just banging my head against a wall being like, "Okay, I know I need this character to come back, or I know I need a format break here, but what are they going to do? What should the format break be?" So once you figure out the puzzle of it, then I'm always like, "Oh good. I'm glad I have to have them back." It's just getting there.
Sarah Enni: Okay, let's jump into The Husbands. Before I have you pitch the book formally, I'd love to talk about the reception for the Whisper Network, which was really big. It was kind of everywhere and it was widely covered and talked about.
I would guess that you got a lot of feedback and personal stories from women who had had this kind of experience in their life, or who were struggling with things like this. What was that feedback like? And how was that kind of making the cogs turn for you about what you wanted to tackle next?
Chandler Baker: Yeah, I did. I heard from a lot of women, and I still do, about their personal stories in the workplace. And so I feel so protective of my readers in that way, because I feel like a lot of people write to me with very, very personal stories.
Gosh, I still remember a woman came up to me after an event and told me about her husband being accused of sexually harassing and stalking a woman at work and she stood by him through this whole trial and this whole thing. And they had kids and then they got through it and then he was accused again, and she realized he did it. And it was just so painful to hear. And she had just, obviously, come to this huge realization and had this enormous guilt over how she'd handled, which was not her fault at all.
So there's incredibly powerful stories. One thing that kept coming up as I was having these book club discussions, I would go meet with professional organizations. A lot of lawyer, female organizations and women would ask, "Well, you know, what can we do to improve corporate culture for women?" And the answer kept being, "Well in order for it to improve, we have to have more women at the top of the corporate ladder." Okay.
And as we would talk about that, women would say, "Well, I don't necessarily feel that I'm not being offered the position. I feel like I can't accept more responsibility because I'm so overwhelmed at home with my level of responsibility there." And that struck such a nerve with me because there was a point after my daughter was born, where I had actually considered going to my bosses, the partners at my firm, and requesting a reduction in pay because I just wanted to do anything to reduce the guilt that I felt about failing at home, and at work. Or feeling like I was failing at home and at work.
And I thought, "Okay, well, if I ask them to pay me less then no one can be mad at me." And so I started just kind of thinking like, "What would it take to fix this? How do we fix this?" And that's really how The Husbands was born just out of those conversations with readers after Whisper Network.
Sarah Enni: And you mention in your author's note that desire to lessen the burden by getting paid less. And I was like, "Blah! Do not do that." And you did not do that, so I'm glad.
Chandler Baker: I didn't do it but I know a lot of women that have.
Sarah Enni: Can you please give us the formal pitch for The Husbands?
Chandler Baker: Sure. Nora Spangler is an overworked mom and lawyer, and she goes house hunting with her husband in a nice suburban neighborhood called Dynasty Ranch. And there she meets a group of high-powered women with enviably supportive husbands. She agrees to take on a wrongful death case for one of the community's residents, and as she gets to know the women as a result of this case, she discovers that, unlike her, they're not so overwhelmed and they don't appear to be hanging on by a thread. And as the case unravels, she uncovers a plot that might explain the secret to having it all, one that could be worth killing for.
Sarah Enni: Wooo! I love that. Excellent pitch. I love you talking about the evolution of the conversations after the Whisper Network kind of leading you to this domestic issue. That's sort of at the core modern womanhood, sounds like such a weird phrase to say out loud, but that's what we're talking about here.
I would love for you to talk about, in addition to those conversations, you mentioned in the author's note Fair Play by Eve Rodsky. Do you mind talking about that book and how that kind of was at play in your life with your friends?
Chandler Baker: So I had gone on a little girl's getaway weekend with a couple of friends and I was pregnant at the time, and we got to talking about Fair Play, which we had all picked up independently. So Fair Play is about how to divide domestic labor in your household, sort of conflict free, or to reduce conflict. So you divide stacks of cards between you and your spouse, and you're supposed to take ownership of those spheres of domestic responsibilities.
I think it's a great system. I think it's a wonderful idea. I think what fascinated me about it though, was how my friends and I had just talked, and talked, and talked about it. And what was going on and why we thought it would work, or it wouldn't work. And how it was us having these conversations and we couldn't imagine that necessarily our spouses were at home having the same conversations.
So I just thought, "There's really something here." And when I didn't decide to ask for that pay cut, I had read another book called I Know How She Does It, which was kind of a play on the book I Don't Know How She Does It. And there were all these books aimed at women about how to manage home and work life. And I felt they were very much marketed towards women and women were being tasked with how to figure out this conundrum. And that figuring out was yet another thing on our plates.
Sarah Enni: I don't want to skip over the fact that you were seven months pregnant while you were having these conversations and talking about this book. So if I have it right, you were trying to finish at least a proposal by the time you were due.
Chandler Baker: Yes. So to back up just slightly, I had had another idea for a book and I turned it in. We had kind of agreed on it and I turned it in maybe the week before Whisper Network came out. And my whole team came back and was like, "This is not the book." So we agreed to just scrap the book entirely. And it took me a really long time. Like I had been throwing out ideas, and throwing out ideas, and throwing out ideas.
Then it was kind of when I got back to those conversations I'd had with Whisper Network, that I landed on this crazy idea that The Husbands is. And it felt like such a big swing. And at first when I had kind of voiced it, I think everyone thought I was a little bit bananas.
But then I started to kind of outline what I meant and what the conversation was around it. And then my editor, who got pregnant very shortly after me, really got it with her second child, we followed almost the exact same trajectory. So, it's been funny for us.
So yes, at that point I was trying to come up with a proposal. Cause I already felt very, very, very far behind, at that point, and sort of dejected because I hadn't been able to land on something that made sense to write next.
Sarah Enni: I do want to talk about that briefly just cause that's such a real moment that happens behind the scenes that we don't often get to hear from people who are successful, continuously publishing writers.
I just spoke with Nicola Yoon (#1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything and The Sun Is Also a Star talks about her new YA, Instructions For Dancing and her brand new publishing venture: co-publisher of Joy Revolution, a Random House young adult imprint dedicated to love stories starring people of color. Listen to her First Draft interviews here and here.) who had a very similar experience after The Sun is Also a Star, a book that just was not working.
She had to shelve it and move on to something else, which is a really emotional process, to have to put something to bed and realize that no matter how or where you are in your journey, that you're still gonna have moments like that.
I'd love to hear about what that was like for you, especially because I can imagine that the stakes were really high coming off something like the Whisper Network, which is kind of propelling you into not only adult, but into this very best-selling realm where there's a lot of eyes on what you're gonna do next. What was that time like for you?
It was confusing. On one hand when my editor voiced it, I did not feel sad. I think my friends thought, "Oh, you're in shock. The sadness is coming." But I think that was very telling, I did not think she was wrong. On the other hand, I had just quit my job. So I was writing full-time. And I mean, you know, we get paid when we turn things in, you don't get paid that often as a writer. So I knew this was at least a year setback.
So it was essentially probably foregoing a full year of a salary for me, which was really scary for my family. At the same time, I was like, "Okay, but long-term, I need it to be the right book that comes out." It was just both. So it felt right to me, it felt like the right decision. Then on the other hand, it felt really scary financially.
Sarah Enni: Are you the kind of person that always has ideas and is always kind of like putting things in a row, like what you want to write next? Or is this something that you're familiar with, the having to sit down and wait for a new idea to come to you?
Chandler Baker: I would say I have a lot of ideas, but I have become progressively pickier with my ideas. It's becoming rarer and rarer for me to get, when I know there's an idea I want to pursue, it's like the buzzy feeling. I don't know, it's a very nuanced feeling to know which feelings are the buzzy feelings and which buzziness lasts a little bit to know that that's the idea. So that feeling, I think, is becoming a little bit rarer for me as I go.
Sarah Enni: That's interesting. Also what that makes me think of is really understanding your intuition a little bit more and getting choosier.
Chandler Baker: Yeah, I think that that's true.
Sarah Enni: And as you say, you kind of crowdsourced responses from people. Let's see, you wrote, "As I wrote The Husbands, I asked every woman I came across one question: in your fantasy world, what do you wish your spouse would do for you?" What an interesting question. I can only imagine what kind of responses you got. What was it like to field all kinds of different responses to that, and what stood out to you?
Chandler Baker: They were so varied. I would say most people just wanted basic things taken care of like changing a light bulb, like noticing that light bulb needed to be changed. Oh, a big one is women leaving clothes on the stairs for the kids that need to be taken up the stairs, and men just walking past them every time, like not realizing they needed to be taken up.
Just the not seeing things, I think, is the biggest thing. Needing it to be pointed out before something gets done about it. But then there's, of course, the more romantic ones like, "I wish we were better gift givers or more thoughtful about those kinds of things." But I think overall my takeaway was everybody's family functions differently, right? There are families that do one thing well, and don't do other things well.
You'll hear, "Oh, but my husband always does the dishes." Or, "My husband always does the laundry," or whatever. But then there's something that doesn't work for them. Everybody's different and functions differently.
But I think the point is like, the proof is in the pudding, and we've seen this through the pandemic. That the lion's share of domestic labor and unpaid labor is, and it's not just for moms, by the way. Women are caregivers just in general, for aging parents or whatever it is. It's still falling on women. We know this because statistically how much they're leaving the workforce. We know this from surveys. These are facts that we know.
Sarah Enni: That leads me to the character of Nora who is the main character of The Husbands. And her husband Hayden I thought was such an interestingly drawn character and maybe a guy that we haven't seen so much in fiction yet, who is important to analyze in fiction.
Because he's not a bad guy and he's not a bad dad. And Nora is very clear throughout that she loves him and wants to be married to Hayden, but he is also the guy that is doing better than his dad did and thinks that that's enough. And he wants her to delegate tasks to him, which, as you just established, is just putting the ball back in her court, kind of.
So it seemed to me like you, as an author, that's a challenging balance to find this character is gonna be bad enough that you want Nora to go down this path, but not so bad that you don't understand why she's married to him. How did you kind of draw that character?
Chandler Baker: That is hard because Nora is in love with him and she feels very connected to him and romantically they're great. It's just this one little thing, as she says, that is actually a big thing. So yeah, I really tried to just drive home that they have these aspects of their relationship that they really connect over. That he was open to things like couples therapy, that he is an emotionally available guy. That he is sort of Dad 2.0. That he feels like he's trying.
I felt like, in this context, I'm not interested in talking about, or exploring, guys that aren't trying. I don't know any women personally that are married to those type of guys anymore. All my friends are smart, outspoken, feminist women, and they wouldn't be married to men that were not trying to do their part. So I'm not familiar with that dynamic. And yet, there is still this kind of delegation aspect in a lot of the relationships that I'm familiar with.
Sarah Enni: And you wrote in the author's note as well, that writing this book was cathartic for yourself and your husband. And thinking about these things, having the book as an externalization of stuff that's happening in a domestic sphere, what was it like having conversations with him and thinking about the representation of men in this book generally?
Chandler Baker: I always say, Nora is not an avatar of me. And certainly Hayden is not an avatar of him. I think with women, in particular, with female writers in particular, so many people are attempted to be like, "You are your main character."
Sarah Enni: We're always writing biography.
Chandler Baker: Yes, exactly. Which is not to say there's not a lot of emotional truth for us as well. Cause there are things that I do poorly in our marriage. There are things that my husband Rob does better than Hayden. It's all mashed up. And it's something that, I would be lying to say if he's not worried about people reading Hayden and thinking that he is like a bad husband or a bad father.
I only have a few men that have read this book, so far, and I have had many more girlfriends read this book. And I think the read from men versus women is so different. Men have read it so much more harshly. The men that have read it, have read this book to be very harsh. And they felt a little bit more attacked by it, which is so funny because with Whisper Network, they could say, "Well, I'm not a sexual harasser, this book isn't about me." And with this, I think they're like, "Well, I might be in there a little bit."
The whole thing is communication. I feel like I read all these books or articles about how to have a better division of domestic labor and the answer to all of them is communicate. And I always think to myself, "But like, communication is what's so difficult about it!" Because it feels so personal. It's like telling somebody that to be good at math, they just need to be good at math. So we've had dozens of conversations about this book and some of them are easy, and some of them are hard. And that's just a microcosm of what this discussion is.
Sarah Enni: What it's about, yeah, exactly. And I do want to talk around the ending, cause I don't want to spoil it, but how did you think about wanting to be emotionally true, but also have a satisfying ending for the reader?
Chandler Baker: I knew the ending ending from the very beginning of the book. I mean, I didn't know exactly what the scene would be around it, but I knew where it wound up. My big thing was, I just didn't want the men to be the victims. I didn't want readers to walk away feeling like that was what I thought of the end.
I wanted them to feel, like you said, saw that there was a problem and supported a solution, whatever that might be. I'm happy with where it wound up. I feel like it might be controversial, but...
Sarah Enni: I think that's part of the fun of it. You put the book down and you're like, "Oh my gosh, who can I talk to you about this?" Perfect book club book. I want to ask about, and sorry, you're giving me so much time, we're gonna start to wrap up here. But I do want to ask about the screenplay about being able to write the adaptation. Can you talk to us about how that came about?
Chandler Baker: I'm so excited and nervous. So yeah, we sent it around and I was lucky that Kristen Wiig was one of the first people that read it. And I talked to her really early on in the process and she was just so lovely. She is obviously a very talented writer herself and she just said, "I hear that you want to write the screenplay. And I just want you to feel supported as a writer. And I want to know how I can help you make this happen." That was so kind and generous of her.
And she introduced me to Dee Dee Gardner at Plan B who introduced us to MGM and that's where we wound up. So in that part, it was pretty seamless. And yes, now I'm embarking on this journey. And I have been doing a lot of studying, a lot of reading screenplays, outline, having creative conversations. It was just really important to me to try to do this myself.
I feel like it's a big swing, but I tend to really trust myself in these situations, for better or worse, I guess. But that really is how I feel. I do think that I can do it.
Sarah Enni: As you mentioned, one thing I noted about your work is that you so delight in having these big casts and a lot of things going on all at the same time. And then screenplays are, of course, they're so limited. It's such a different beast, as you say. So how are you thinking about preserving some cores of the book and what you can leave behind. How you thinking about the adaptation process?
Chandler Baker: I mean talk about sort of the headbanging headaches. So it is clearly just such an exercise in subtraction because you have so much less space. And this is a mystery and you have to take out so much surgically and still hope that the mystery makes sense. That there's enough in the core of the mystery to make sense. So I have been outlining and just going through cutting, cutting, cutting, seeing what can be combined.
I've been ruthless. Characters are disappearing. Scenes are gone. Combined. Taking the mystery down to its bones. But it's really fun because you get to rewrite the story with the benefit of a lot of time having sat with the story. And you're like, "Oh, I could fix this thing."
Sarah Enni: That's a dream. A bit of a dream if you could go back and ret con your own book. Once it's as far along as The Husbands is, you're like, "Well, there it is."
Chandler Baker: Exactly it exists. But no, it's a second chance. So that parts great.
Sarah Enni: I wonder what you can tell us, if anything, about what's next on the docket for you?
Chandler Baker: I have another two books with Flat Iron, so I am writing another adult book right now. I'm trying to turn that in next month. I'm not gonna say what it is yet, because I'm just, you know...
Sarah Enni: Superstitious.
Chandler Baker: I'm not a superstitious person, I say. And yet it's like a preservation of energy. It's like a witchiness to some degree.
Sarah Enni: I like that.
Chandler Baker: So, another adult book, which will hopefully be out next year, all things going well. Oh, I also have a YA book coming out in September that I co-wrote with Wesley King.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I'm sorry I neglected to mention that. Do you mind? I would love to just hear the pitch for that book so people can have an eye out for it.
Chandler Baker: Yes. Hello From Here is a book that we wrote during quarantine. We were set up on a blind date, Wesley King and I, and it's about Max and Jonah two teenagers that meet. She is a grocery deliverer, and they meet during the pandemic and start a sort of long distance love story. So it's sweet and, hopefully, thoughtful. And we really enjoyed writing it. That's out in September.
Sarah Enni: Will the next two with Flat Iron both be adult books?
Chandler Baker: Yes, the next two with Flat Iron will both be adult books. I just finished a Christmas story with Amazon that will be out in December, just turned that in yesterday. Just trying to do all the things, you know?
Sarah Enni: Yes. I mean, god speed.
Chandler Baker: We all are, right?
Sarah Enni: Exactly, exactly. Oh my gosh. I so appreciate all of your time. I would love to hear, honestly, actually I would love to hear from you advice maybe for, as I mentioned, a lot of people I know in my sphere are in YA or middle-grade and are thinking about jumping to a different medium. Many of them talk about adults.
So I would just love to hear about what advice you'd have for someone who is interested in trying that out and aging up in what they're writing about.
Chandler Baker: I would just say to do what I said I did, which is, think about what you are talking about with your friends right now. What are the topics that are resonating with you that no one's asking you to talk about? What are you venting about? What are you ranting about? And start there. Because I think those are the things that are going to be interesting.
I think the joy to me, personally, of aging up has been processing this in real time and getting to connect with readers in the moment about what they're going through and having these conversations. And it's just been so rewarding to have that experience. So, I think, if people do that and aren't afraid to write their most embarrassing, most personal, most specific thoughts, they will strike a nerve with people.
Sarah Enni: Yeah, I mean, when I was younger, I didn't really understand or respect or appreciate the terminology national conversation. Since, basically, 2016 or so it's become very clear that a national conversation is constantly going on and it's very important on a lot of these issues.
But it does take bravery to insert yourself into that. So I'm grateful, and all your readers are grateful, that you decided to do that. Especially these topics of highlighting women's internal lives and trying to get a little more space for that.
Chandler Baker: Well, thank you. Thank you. I enjoy doing it.
Sarah Enni: And thank you for all of your time this morning. Sorry about our technical difficulties. But this was such a fun conversation.
Chandler Baker: Thank you, Sarah. You know, I love your podcast. So I've been a long time listener. Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much to Chandler. Follow her on Twitter @CBakerBooks and on Instagram @ChandlerBakerBooks. You can follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram) and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram).
First Draft is produced by me, Sarah Enni and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith. Thanks to social media director, Jennifer Nkosi and transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson.
And as ever, thanks to you, men who notice the folded clothes on the stairs, for listening.
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