The Joys of Binge Reading

Juliette Fay is the award-winning, best-selling author of tender novels that raise questions of loss, regret, second chances, and the influence families play in life-changing decisions.

Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today, Juliette talks about her latest novel, The Half Of It, described by the critics as “an immensely satisfying page turner, perfect for fans of Josie Silver and Jojo Moyes.”

Helen and Cal enjoyed one perfect night, and then 40 years of buried hurt.

They’ve got one chance to make it right. But can the past ever be fixed?

Take A Break Free Book for the Beach

Our Giveaway this week is Take A Break With A Free Book. Get ready for the beach – or the winter fire – with Book Bundle 2 in my Of Gold And Blood series, Poisoned Legacy and Tangled Destiny which is included in the offer. with 60+ other great mysteries and thrillers.

That’s a full length mystery and a New York Christmas novella and prequel along with a library of selections.

An excellent range of choice there, so it’s highly likely you’ll find something you love.

TAKE A BREAK WITH A FREE BOOK

https://books.bookfunnel.com/takeabreak/jtcmnk059p (FOR IF THE BUTTON DOESN’T WORK)

And remember if you enjoyed the show, leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still by far the best way for others to discover the show and great books they want to read.

Links to things mentioned in the show

Books Juliette is reading now:

The Giver of Stars by JoJo Moyes. https://www.jojomoyes.com/books/the-giver-of-stars/

The Exiles by Christina Baker Klein:

https://www.amazon.com/Exiles-Novel-Christina-Baker-Kline/dp/0062356348

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman https://www.amazon.com/Eleanor-Oliphant-Completely-Fine-Novel/dp/0735220689

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld:

https://www.amazon.com.au/Romantic-Comedy-Curtis-Sittenfeld/dp/0399590943

Where to find Juliette Online

Website: Juliettefay.com

Facebook @JulietteFayAuthor

Twitter, @JulietteFay

Instagram: juliette_fay

Introducing author Juliette Fay Juliette Fay – tender and touching family stories

But now here’s Juliette. Hello there, Juliette. And welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Juliette Fay: Oh, it’s wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Jenny Wheeler: We’re talking about your latest book The Half of It. It’s a perfectly executed second chance love story. And I wondered right at the beginning, how would you define it in terms of genre fiction? Is it a romance, is it a second coming of age story? How would you classify it?

Juliette Fay: I would classify it as contemporary fiction. It’s not really a classical romance story in that there’s a lot more going on. It’s really about the entire life of the main character Helen Spencer, who’s 58 years old, and it’s about her relationships with her friends and her children.

There is a romance at the center of it, or a potential romance. But I like that phrase, second coming of age. I think that she’s at a point in her life where she really needs to make a course correction and that’s the crux of it.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting as the population in general is growing older, we probably have a little bit more time to regroup, and in fact, it becomes necessary if you’re going to just keep on living to have a chance to regroup, look back on your life, decide whether there are things you would’ve done differently.

Take stock a little bit, isn’t there?

Juliette Fay: Yes, absolutely. And one of the things that was so fascinating to me writing this story is that looking around there aren’t very many books with main characters in their fifties and sixties. It’s very few. I mean, you have to really dig.

It seems that there’s books of characters in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, and then twenties, thirties and forties. I Feel like everybody is in their thirties in most of the books. But your fifties and sixties are such a fascinating time because as you say, you get a second chance to think things through.

Maybe you’re retiring, maybe you have children, and they’ve gone off. I mean, it’s a real turning point. I think it’s such a fascinating life stage. I was fascinated to see that nobody’s picking up on that and so many readers are in their later stages in life.

And we want to read about ourselves, really.

The Half Of It – what does it mean?

Jenny Wheeler: The title, The Half Of is an idiom. I know, from growing up with that phrase, its means something like oh, you don’t know the half of it, and it would seem an interesting title to choose for a book. The general meaning we interpret is it’s actually much worse than you know about, and I wondered why you chose that title and how it relates to the book.

Juliette Fay: I would say that “the half of it “means you don’t know a lot of things. The “half of it” means it’s a much bigger story than you understand. Not necessarily bad, but there’s way more going on here than you know about, when somebody says you don’t know the half of it, there’s way more going on.

And when Helen and Cal meet – should I maybe give a little quick intro about what the book is about?

Helen Spencer is 58 years old and she has just come to the conclusion that her life has not turned out as planed.

She can trace back to where things started going awry to a night that she spent in the woods with a boy that she loved, who loved her. They had this wondrous romantic night in the woods, and then the next day everything blew up and things have been going a little bit wrong ever since.

But she doesn’t want to delve into that. She just wants to keep putting one foot in front of the other. And she hasn’t seen Cal since high school. Then, one day they bump into each other, and Cal tracks her down and he wants to talk about what happened. And, the jacket copy says he doesn’t know the can of worms he’s about to open.

A domino effect from one decision

He doesn’t know “the half of it.” And what he doesn’t know about her, and she doesn’t know about him is what happened in the rest of their lives and how that one night affected them.

Both the domino effect of this one decision and what happened the next day, and how that’s affected both of them.

So they have a lot of catching up to do and they have a lot of working it out to do. I mean, there’s still a lot of hurt and anger from what happened.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, Helen is recently widowed, not so long ago, widowed, so that’s another part of her life that she’s taking stock of. Her marriage and how successful it really was, or satisfying emotionally, it really was for her.

Do you think that women are inclined to make these reviews of their life a little bit later than men do?

In the earlier years, they’re so consumed with serving other people’s needs. Husbands, children, just keeping things together. If they’re trying to work a job as well, and maybe they find it later in life that they start to look back and want to second guess themselves a little bit.

Juliette Fay: That’s such an interesting point that you make, and I think you’re right about that. I’m, everybody’s different, but men seem to have that classic, midlife crisis at around 40 and, they buy the car or they, whatever, start fly fishing or something like that.

Women maybe ‘take stock’ later than men?

And I think that you’re right, that many women are so busy just trying to keep all the plates spinning in their lives and often in the lives of the people they care about maybe children, maybe a spouse, maybe family members, that they don’t really take that time until maybe later in life when hopefully things quiet down a little bit and they can have that chance to say is this really working out as planned?

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, I did use that phrase ‘second coming of age’ because it seemed to me as I was reading the book, Helen is learning almost for the first time some of the things that are true about her and some of the things that she wants out of life that she hasn’t had already. That’s part of the journey the book takes, isn’t it?

Juliette Fay: It is. It certainly is. I started writing this book in the middle of the pandemic. It was really inspired by that first summer whenever we were all in lockdown and in absence of social connection and going out and doing things.

People seemed to be taking that pause in social interaction to take stock and review and ask themselves important questions. People of all ages were doing this. And I was fascinated by that. They were asking themselves questions like, is this the person I should be with? Or is this the job I really want?

Or should I move closer to my family or should I move further away from my family? What is it that I want from life? And is this it? I’m gonna say to you that I am pretty happy in my life. I’ve been married for 32 years, and I love my husband and I love my kids, and I love my community, and I love my job.

But what if you didn’t? What if you took that reflection and you said, oh, no, this is not where I thought I would be, or, this is not what I want. And Helen really hasn’t taken that look until now. And it’s tough for her because she has been serving others and she has a job she never really wanted.

And she was in a marriage that was lukewarm. She had children early and they consume her, but they’re older now, and so they’re off on their own. And she realizes there were things that she didn’t get that she wanted.

The mother – daughter bonds

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting her children, particularly the relationship with her daughter. It’s almost like the daughter now thinks that she’s got more rights than one might consider to tell her mother what to do and to run her life. So even in that respect, she hasn’t quite established her autonomy.

Juliette Fay: That’s really true. So as an oldest daughter myself, and my oldest child is a daughter, we tend to be a little bossy. And one of the things that I really felt… so Helen’s daughter is Barb. And Barb is happy. Barb is doing work that she loves. She has a husband who is wonderful. She’s just adopted a little baby daughter.

I mean, Barb’s life is going pretty great. And one of the things that Helen starts to pick up on is that her children realize that her life hasn’t gone that well and in different ways. They are all trying to avoid her fate.

Juliette Fay: Barb is really the one she’s the closest to. She lives nearby, she takes care of the granddaughter.

And Barb is the one who really is that bossy, oldest daughter who’s saying, mom, you need to change things. You need to be open to things and they really do have a funny. Almost backwards relationship. And yet, Helen is often saying to her daughter, I’m the mother, you’re not the mother, I’m the mother.

But it’s a very loving relationship. Barb nudges her to be happier.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve got a piece online that you wrote for Psychology Today about writing your way to a happy brain. It was a lovely piece, but it indicates that you might have gone through a similar kind of revision of your life, but at an earlier age. Would you mind talking about that?

It is online for everybody to see.

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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Writing your way to a ‘happy brain’ – Juliette Fay style

Juliette Fay: Yes. Right. It’s no big secret. I had my fourth child and I had quit my job. I was working part-time, so I was home with the kids and I was actually quite unhappy. I love my children. I love being with them. But I really felt like I was not using my brain. I used to joke that I was a wiper of spills, a wiper of bottoms, a wiper of noses, like I was a professional wiper.

And I felt very constrained by the fact that I didn’t have anything that was mine. And I tried a bunch of different things, like I knew and my husband knew that I was not happy and I needed to find something. And so I started writing and I describe it it’s a little bit like falling in love.

Like I couldn’t wait to get back to my characters. I couldn’t wait. I was about 40. And it was, I would say, a little midlife crisis of, okay, this is great. I’m very grateful that I have all these little, crazy people running around and my wonderful husband, but it’s still not enough.

I still need something else. And I was able to feed that need with writing. And it’s been a wonderful thing for the last, 20 years.

Jenny Wheeler: I think you say that even if you didn’t get published, you’d still do it. Is that right?

Juliette Fay: Yeah, I really, I, it’s just something I love to do. I can’t tell you how often people say to me, how do you have the discipline to sit in a room and write all day long? And my answer to that is, I don’t need discipline to write. It’s what I love to do. It’s like asking me how I have the discipline to eat a hot fudge sundae.

Like I don’t need discipline, I enjoy it. I need discipline to go to the grocery store and, do the laundry. I don’t need discipline to write. That’s what I like.

What was Juliette’s goal as an author?

Jenny Wheeler: Tell me a little bit about your journey. When you started writing, what was your goal? Did you have a long-term goal, like getting published or at the beginning, were you just simply doing it almost as your personal therapy?

Juliette Fay: I really, I had no idea about getting published, which is funny because I had always been a voracious reader. I have always been somebody who has stories running in my head. I make stories up in my head all the time, But it never occurred to me to really write any of them down. And so once I started doing that, and I wrote my first novel, and I only told a few people I just thought it was such a strange thing you go to a party, well, what are you up to these days?

Well, I’m writing a novel. It just sounded so strange. I really didn’t tell anybody. I was very secretive about it. I did tell a couple of friends who read as I wrote, I would hand them chapters, and at the end they said they really urged me to try and get published.

And so then I went on this journey of trying to figure out what is this publishing world? How does it work, how do I get in? And I have to say I feel that I was very lucky because there are many good books out there that didn’t see the light of day because the author didn’t have the luck of finding.

It’s very hard to get an agent. It’s very hard to get, it’s a tough business and it continues to be a tough business even once you’re in it. So I do feel that I was very lucky to get published.

Commitments to social justice

Jenny Wheeler: One of the books romances, we won’t give anything away by going any further into it than that doesn’t go anywhere, because of the young man’s calling to the priesthood and he keeps this quiet for quite a while so that when he finally ‘fesses up that he’s not going to be going any further with this relationship because of this calling on his life, the young woman is slightly gobsmacked.

I see in your biography, it was just an interesting little hint there that both you and your husband served in Jesuit volunteer programs and social justice initiatives. You both had quite strong commitments in that area.

And I wondered if this was another little area of your life intersecting with your story.

Juliette Fay: So you’re talking about my first book, Shelter Me and yes, absolutely. I worked in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. I worked in a shelter in Seattle, Washington. My husband worked for legal services in Buffalo, New York, and we both knew many priests because of our work.

And I was fascinated by their lives. And how they could be very kind loving people and yet they kept themselves closed off to any romantic relationship.

It was something that it was interesting for me to explore. And, yes, absolutely, taking a little piece of my faith life.

And putting it, and I think that’s what authors often do. We interject our books with little pieces of things that we are interested in that, that come from our own lives.

None of my books are autobiographical in any way. But I sometimes say they’re autobiographical in a sense that. What the reader sees are the things that I’m interested in, not necessarily things that have happened to me, but themes and conundrums and conflicts and characters and settings that intrigue me.

And so that’s the way in which you’re learning a little bit about me by reading my books.

The ‘chickens come home to roost

Jenny Wheeler: There’s quite a strong sense of morality in them too. And I wondered, generally genre fiction is considered to be for mainly entertainment purposes. Do you have any other thoughts but keeping your readers entertained as your writing?

Juliette Fay: Sure. It’s interesting that you say that morality is big, I don’t know that I would say morality. I would say that my books definitely have a strong theme of giving and volunteerism and being a part of a community and being a generous person. And I think that all of my characters strive to be better than they are.

And that is what I’m interested in. I’m interested in growth. In a character when I read and when I write, I wanna see how the character is gonna get out of this mess and be a better person, toward the end. but first and foremost, I do want it to be entertaining. I don’t want it to be some sort of morality play about how we should all be good.

It really, I mean, there’s a lot of humor in my books. There’s a lot of crazy scenarios. I always say the three things I want a reader to do is laugh, cry, and lose sleep.

Jenny Wheeler: Morality is probably the wrong word. Perhaps integrity is better.

Juliette Fay: Integrity. That’s a good word. Yeah,

Jenny Wheeler: Because some of the things that Cal does as young man lack integrity.

Juliette Fay: That’s true. And he has to speak for that. Those chickens come home to roost and he has to face that even 40 years later. He wants to face it. And I think that’s part of the message of the book is if you have a mess to clean up, if you have an apology to make, if you have some, something to fix in your life.

Now’s the time. You can do that until the day you die. You have that opportunity.

Living life to the full – you don’t know how much time is left

Jenny Wheeler: And I think one of the lovely things is as it develops, they do. make the most of the time that they have, they manage to do that by the end of the novel. They live wholeheartedly, don’t they?

Juliette Fay: Yes, they do. They rekindle their friendship, which is really, as Helen says, the most important thing they ever were, they were friends in high school before that before that romantic night. And their friendship is really the most important thing.

Jenny Wheeler: As we’ve mentioned you have a common theme of women finding agency in their lives and your, this is your seventh novel, but one of the earlier ones, the Tumbling Turner Sisters. Was a best seller described by a critic as a “funhouse take on Little Women.: And that sounded fascinating too.

All of these sisters, tell us a bit about that book. It sounds like it was quite a breakthrough book for you.

Juliette Fay: It really was such a change of pace for me because it was my first historical fiction. The Tumbling Turners Sisters is about a family in 1919, living in upstate New York. Their father is injured and can’t work anymore.

They are facing eviction and their mother, who has always wanted to be on the stage, decides to turn them into a vaudeville act and they become tumblers.

They’re pretty terrible at first. But as their agent, this wisecracking New York agent tells them, pretty girls in short skirts sell, so they go on the road, which is a very unusual thing for young women to do in 1919.

Every week is a different venue, a different town.

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Juliette Fay – Tender & Touching Stories