Evolving AI, perfecting pacing, and creating an audiobook with Bruce Holsinger
Plus upcoming newsletter events and posts you may have missed
Today I’m thrilled to share a short interview with Bruce Holsinger, author of the July Oprah’s Book Club selection, Culpability as well as bestselling novels The Gifted School and The Displacements. I thoroughly enjoyed Culpability (you can find my full review here). It’s a highly discussable beach read, and while I flew through it, I haven’t stopped thinking about it—it’s quick and it sticks. A huge thank you to the Spotify Audiobooks team for arranging this interview for me. And, of course, a big thank you to Bruce. While I wasn’t able to chat with him in real time, he took the time to answer my questions so I could share them here.
I have a few newsletter announcements before we get to my interview, so scroll towards the bottom if you’re anxious to get to that.
First, I’m going to be taking next week off from the newsletter. Between illness and travel, I needed to hit pause to reset. I will have something fun dropping for paid subscribers on Friday, August 8th and then I’ll be back to my regular schedule beginning with a Sunday newsletter on August 10th.
Second, the next book I’m covering for Margin Notes is The Narrows by Ann Petry. That post will publish on Wednesday, August 27th and will cover the first chapter or two in depth. You don’t need to read or plan to read The Narrows to explore the Margin Notes, but if you like to read along, this is the month to pick it up. If you’d like to catch up on Margin Notes, here are my readings of Brandy Sour and The Hopkins Manuscript.
Finally, speaking of readalongs, I am hosting my first Substack readalong this September! We’ll be reading Possession by A.S. Byatt—one of my favorite novels of all time. I’ll be sharing details including the reading schedule soon so keep an eye out for that. This is not going to be a particularly long and slow journey. I’m thinking somewhere between 4-6 weeks depending on how I choose to segment the novel. While there are moments in Possession that slow readers down, at it’s heart, it is a romance and a mystery, and I find myself reading it quite quickly every time I pick it up. If you’re hoping to join in, I recommend tracking down a copy this month. You are welcome to use my Bookshop or Blackwell’s affiliate links, but I always see copies of this in used bookstores, so that’s a great option as well.
In Case You Missed It
Last month, I also hosted a one book Reading Well Challenge. You can find it all here: Part One | Part Two | Part Three
An Interview with Bruce Holsinger, author of Culpability
Sara Hildreth: Culpability is so timely...almost eerily so! When did you start working on it? Did you keep revising as new technology developed or were your themes and plot points simply prescient?
Bruce Holsinger: I started working on this book probably about two and a half years ago. And I kept revising. It was kind of difficult to keep up with the new technology as it came along. And with each new twist in the AI saga, I was going back for more: thinking about chatbots, large language models, how kids are interacting with them, how teens and tweens are interacting with them. And then there was a real turning point when I decided that this book would be about an automobile accident and autonomous vehicles. And from there, right around then, was when ChatGPT-3 took off. And so AI became a real theme of the novel.
SH: I remember reading about the ethics of self driving vehicles in a Nicholas Carr article I used to teach to my high school juniors and the questions around it have fascinated me ever since. Where did you come up with the premise for your novel? Are these questions you've been mulling over for a long time?
BH: Yeah, so I came up with the premise after I'd thought about the setting of the novel on the Chesapeake Bay as a place where this family would go to recover from something catastrophic that happened to them. And initially, it was a car crash. The son was driving. And then there was this kind of what if moment where I thought, well, what if the son himself is not driving? What if he’s just there in front of the wheel and it’s actually the car that’s driving? And so that’s the first kind of epiphany that brought me into this weird AI moment in the novel.
SH: As much as there is going on in this book—it is so fast-paced and filled with contemporary issues—it remains a family story at its heart. How did you make sure to balance the emotional moments and interpersonal tensions with the larger questions you wanted to explore?
BH: Balancing the emotional arc of a story, each individual character's arc with narrative can be hard. I love suspense. I read a lot of suspense. I try to write suspensefully, even if I’m not actually writing a suspense novel. And in this case, I was aiming for short chapters, so I do a lot of extra textual things.
In Culpability, there are examples of discussions between a character named Alice and a chatbot named Blair. You get excerpts from Lorelei’s book on the ethics of artificial intelligence. And I try to use those elements to help quicken the pace, moderate the pace sometimes, even slow the pace of the main narrative, but still using the emotional arc of the characters and the tensions between different members of the family to keep the story going.
SH: As soon as Eurydice was introduced into the story, I started wondering about the significance of your characters’ names. How do you go about choosing character names? Is there a deeper meaning behind any of these names?
BH: Sometimes characters’ names are really arbitrary. I’ll need one that starts with N because I already have too many that start with O, P, and Q or whatever.
And in this case, as I was in the middle of the novel, I realized, okay, I have Noah. I don't want it to be Noah building an arc, but most people won’t think it’s a pretty common name. And then Eurydice, Dissy for short, that came to me in a moment where I just kind of liked the sound of the name and wasn't really thinking about the mythology. And then I had the character Alice kind of comment acerbically on it, like she's a kind of precocious kid, so she kind of picks up on it at one point and says, well, that bodes well in this really sarcastic tone.
SH: Most of the story is told through the perspective of the father Noah, but we get snippets of daughter Alice's text conversations with a chat bot and mom Lorelei's philosophical writing. How did you develop each voice as you wrote? As the book became an audiobook, what were you hoping for in terms of how each voice came to life for listeners?
BH: So it was a big decision to write the novel from the single point of view of Noah. Usually, I'll be writing in third person from multiple points of view. And in this case, I really wanted Noah to be kind of mystified by his wife as he long has been, because she’s a real genius, and he’s kind of an average Joe. He’s also mystified by what’s going on with his kids, both his daughters and Charlie.
The conversations between Alice and the chatbot were, for me, those came kind of during the second revision process. And I just kept adding more of them. And I realized Alice's interaction with that bot, that is a real through line. It's a really important subplot, and became more and more important as I rewrote and revised.
And when I was thinking about an audiobook, especially about the really brilliant narrators who do this audiobook for Spotify, I really had in my head Alice, a real tween, she’s a middle child, she’s a bit of a brat. And then Blair is slightly older than her. She’s giving Alice therapy in some ways, but she’s also becoming Alice’s friend. And so I really wanted a kind of dark exchange between them, but also that would be very relatable. And I think January does a brilliant job with it.
SH: I know January Lavoy (whom I love!) has worked on your books before and I loved her reading of The Gifted School. After working with an audiobook narrator you love, do you get the opportunity to request them again?
BH: One of the things, if you’re lucky and you work with a publishing house that is collaborative, like Spiegel and Grau, you really get a chance to audition audiobook narrators. I think I got five samples for men, five samples for women, and was able to listen in detail to their excerpts.
January was one that I requested specifically, just because I loved what she'd done with The Gifted School. And Stacy Carolan is so talented, and he’s a fairly new audio book narrator. And I just loved what he was doing with the sample that he did of the prologue.
So I'm really thrilled to have them working on this book.
SH: Is there anything that are you surprised no one has yet asked about Culpability?
BH: Oh, I guess I'm surprised that no one has asked about the dog. We don’t meet the family dog until late in the novel. And I love the dog, and I always love dogs in my novels.
And in one of my earlier novels, The Displacements, a family evacuating from a hurricane had to leave the family dog behind in the course of evacuation. And so I’m always very emotionally connected to the animals in my book. So I haven’t gotten a single question about the dog, believe it or not.
A huge thank you to Bruce for taking the time to answer my questions and to Spotify Audiobooks for connecting us!
For questions, comments, or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out by emailing fictionmattersbooks@gmail.com or responding directly to this newsletter. I love hearing from you!
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Happy reading!
Sara
Great interview! I hope someone asks him about the dog, haha!
I'm so excited to hear about the Possession read-along! I noticed that you'd mentioned a few times that you were wanting to reread it sometime soon and I hoped that you might do something like this. I was planning to read it this fall anyway (my first reading) so this is perfect. Looking forward to it!