Louis Bayard, "The Wildes"

In this episode Brett sits down with author Louis Bayard to discuss his latest book, 'The Wildes" based on Oscar Wilde and his wife and children. They talk about  creating fiction from fact, the research behind the project, and the complicated relationship between Wilde and his wife Constance. 

Louis Bayard: https://www.louisbayard.com

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Transcript

Brett Benner: 0:00

Hey, everybody. I hope you're having a good week. Before we get into our interview and I'm very excited to have Louis Baird here today, who is the author of the wilds. I just wanted to go over some other book business, which is yesterday, the Booker prize announced its short list of titles, which are orbital by Samantha Harvey, James by Percival Everett held by and Michaels. Creation lake by Rachel Cushner, the safe keep by Yale Vander. Houdin. And Charlotte woods Stoneyard devotional. I'm really personally happy with this. Grouping for the most part, I will say. Held by in Michaels. I remember reading it, thinking it was beautiful. And I couldn't tell you what it was about. And I stopped creation lake but I feel like I need to go back. And finish it at the very least, but I will say the other four titles I am just thrilled about. So I don't know if you're a Booker people or if you're following it. So let me know your thoughts about that. The other thing is a few books come out today that I wanted to bring to your attention. One is Ramana alarms entitlement, which I'm sure you're going to hear a lot about. The other two books are we solve murders by Richard Osman? Richard Ozmen of course wrote the Thursday murder club. This is not a Thursday murder club murder book. Instead it is a new series that he started about a father and daughter, detective team. And then the last book that I wanted to talk about was called frightened the horses, a memoir by Oliver Radcliffe, That is the story about a trans man and the origins of his story. Now to today's talk, I loved sitting down with Louis Baird and a little bit about him. In the words of the New York times, Louis Baird, reinvigorates, historical fiction, rendering the past as if he'd witnessed it firsthand. Is a claim. Novels include the pale blue. I adapted into the global number one, Netflix release, starring Christian bale, Jackie and me ranked by the Washington post is one of the top novels of 2022. The national bestseller courting Mr. Lincoln, Roosevelt's beast. The school of night. The black tower and Mr. Timothy, as well as a highly praised young adult novel lucky strikes. His reviews and articles have appeared in the New York times, the Los Angeles times and salon. And he is a contributing writer to the Washington post book world. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. And in terms of this particular book, the wild. It has got to start review from Kirkus. It is one of Oprah daily's best books of the fall. It is also one of the New York times 24 works of fiction and poetry to read this fall. So enjoy this conversation with Louis Baird. I'm so, I'm so thrilled you're here because first of all, I just have to, I've been such a fan of yours for so long and, and it really wasn't until I started to look back that I realized like how long it actually was, which is so weird. Cause you know, we're both only 35. So that was shocking to me because it was like literally all the way back to endangered species.

Louis Bayard: 3:10

Get out.

Brett Benner: 3:12

Yeah, you have a

Louis Bayard: 3:13

copy. Oh my God,

Brett Benner: 3:14

and like, I don't know if you can see, I see the yellowing now. Yeah, it's because it's been sitting in our library forever. But I also, the funny thing is, I have this copy of the pale blue eye that is the original book of the month clubs. Yeah, but it's like Book of the Month Club and it's like when, back when they hadn't that. Yeah, well, when they made them and they made them smaller and like I had, you know, they made them a little smaller than average books. They, I don't, I don't know why they did that, but yeah. So,

Louis Bayard: 3:45

do they still have Book of the Month Club?

Brett Benner: 3:46

Oh my God. Yeah. It's huge. It's huge. Okay. All they do now is on their spines, they have their little imprint. And I think if you take the dust jacket off, they have their imprint on the, actual board inside.

Louis Bayard: 3:57

Well, if you go back to endangered species, Brad, that's, that's far. That is far.

Brett Benner: 4:02

Well, here's what I want to, we're going to get to the book in a second, which is, it's, it's so, so, so, so good. But, because I have you, I want to take. I want to take it back and take you back a little bit. But, for our watchers and for our listeners, so you graduated from Princeton, with an English and creative writing major, and then you went to Northwestern and you got your master's in journalism. This is what I found fascinating. You were a staffer at the U S house of reps and you were a press secretary for representative Phil Sharp, who's a Democrat in Indiana. How has that experience being in politics and, and, and why did It was an accident, like all of my career, it was accidental. I had gotten this Masters in Journalism. By the way, it's where I met the man who is now my husband we also met there. And, You met at, wait, wait, you met, you met at the, which, where did you meet? At, at, at,

Louis Bayard: 4:52

uh, Medill, uh, Northwestern University at the Medill Charles Master's program. So I just, I thought I was going to be a reporter and, work for print newspaper back when that seemed like a thing to do. And, I couldn't, no self respecting newspaper would hire me. So the only job I could get. as a press secretary, for this, this guy named Phil Sharp. interestingly, his opponent that year was a young Mike Pence. That's how long ago this was. But anyway, so I, I started at 17, 000 a year, which was, which wasn't a lot even then. And, Then I came back and worked for Eleanor Holmes Norton for about a year and a half as a communications director. she's a, for those who don't know, she's the local DC delegate to the house. And then also just some flackery for, for nonprofit groups and stuff like that. But what the, the, the best part of those jobs is they made me realize I don't want to make a career in politics. It just, it just, it just doesn't float my boat. It's weird. I still live in D. C. I live on Capitol Hill, just, you know, a few blocks away from the Capitol, six blocks from the Capitol to be specific. But I don't really want to be part of that, that world. I, I, I realized that pretty early on.

Brett Benner: 6:00

It's funny because I was talking to my son. He's a, Pauly Sai, a Spanish major. And he's in Madrid actually doing study abroad this semester. And I was saying that we were talking today and he was like, well, ask him about the whole press secretary thing because, um, I think that's something I would like to do. And I was like, well, I'll be sure to ask him, but see, he's not doing it anymore. I don't know. That's not a bad job

Louis Bayard: 6:21

yeah. It's not, they're worst jobs to have. And it is a kind of fiction writing really, isn't it? Right. Every press release is fictional exercise. guys.

Brett Benner: 6:28

Are you a history buff?

Louis Bayard: 6:30

I am. I am. I'm as an English major, but I, I, if I hadn't been, I would've been a history major and I love history. I always have, but it, it had never occurred to me to combine those two interests until, until I did Mr. Timothy. But, I've always been fascinated by history. Yeah.

Brett Benner: 6:46

Yeah, so this is, it's interesting, like your first, your first two books, Fool's Errand and Endangered Species, which we just talked about briefly, were, you know, effectively like romantic comedies that are set in DC. Yeah. Um, and then, You started to make this switch and I don't know if it's a niche necessarily that you found taking these historical figures But is it something you just kind of fell into your thought? Okay, this could be an interesting route to go as you started the first book

Louis Bayard: 7:10

Well, I should add that the first two books were published by a gay and lesbian press called Allison books Which is no longer which has been out of business for some time. Their offices were In Hollywood, California right across the street from Grumman Chinese Theater. Oh, really? Overlooking Hollywood High. Yeah. But yeah, I had this idea of, of wanting to get out of, you know, the, the, the gay and lesbian ghetto at the back of the Barnes and Noble. I wanted to get to the front of the store. And I had this idea of, writing a book about Tiny Tim who, and that was, there were two reasons behind it. One is I loved Dickens. He was probably my favorite author growing up and I hated Tiny Tim. I always hated him as a character. I just didn't believe him. I thought he was lying. So I thought, well, it'd be interesting to make him a grownup and, and, and explore what it's like to be Tiny Tim. You know, when all that, when the crutch is gone and all the sentimentality that, that, that surrounded him has gone, what would that be like? And, and then I thought, Oh shit, if I'm going to write this, I need to do a lot of research in Victorian London. And I was, I was cowed at first because it just seemed, Like such a large task. But as soon as I jumped in, I realized how much fun it was to explore these lost worlds, to reanimate these lost worlds. And, so that's. That's kind of where it came from. It was again, an accident that I ended up there. It's just, it started with Dickens and Tiny Tim, and then it just went from there.

Brett Benner: 8:32

And for, for anyone who doesn't know, I mean, like Pale Blue Eye has Edgar Allen Poe, The Night School, Christopher Marlowe, Roosevelt's Beast, Teddy Roosevelt, The Black Tower, Eugene Vidocq, am I pronouncing that correctly?

Louis Bayard: 8:45

Vidocq, yeah.

Brett Benner: 8:46

Vidocq. According to Mr. Lincoln, obviously Mary Todd Lincoln, Jackie and me, uh, Jacqueline Bouvier, And Len Billings, by the way, who I didn't even know was a real person. I had to look that up afterwards too. I thought I had, I didn't know it

Louis Bayard: 8:58

either until two years before I started writing that book. Yeah. Yeah.

Brett Benner: 9:01

So, and then of course the, the latest book, the wilds about Oscar Wilde and his wife. I have to read a, it's, And then we'll go into the book a little bit. It's the New York Times recently set in their list of 24 books to read this fall. In referencing the wilds. It's set in classic I don't even say Beyardian fashion. Is that what we're saying?

Louis Bayard: 9:21

I've never heard it pronounced. So I don't really know. It's the first time I've been turned into an adjective. It's the first time I've been turned into an adjective. Yeah.

Brett Benner: 9:27

Where you take a historical story and take a book. You know, an account of it, but I loved that. I was like, now you're, it's a descriptor now. It's a bit. Exactly.

Louis Bayard: 9:37

Future lexicographers note, it's, it began here.

Brett Benner: 9:40

Okay. So for our listeners and viewers, can you tell a little bit about the wild and the other thing I would love for you to do, because this is what I found surprising, but maybe not, is I was reading some reviews of the book, and some people weren't even aware of who Oscar Wilde was or what happened, which is shocking to me, but, but, hey, it is what it is.

Louis Bayard: 10:03

Yeah.

Brett Benner: 10:03

So I would love for you to tell what your book is, but if you can also just give a little nugget of the backstory of what, you know, led up to this.

Louis Bayard: 10:11

Yeah, the Wilds is about Oscar Wilde and the family that so many people don't even know he had. For those who aren't up on that, he was married. he had a wife and two children and he was very devoted to them all and they to them. but it's funny that the family, the story of that family has been lost over the years. The portrait of Oscar Wilde that comes down to us is this great gay martyr of Victorian London who did these very beautiful things. edgy and, provocative works like Portrait of Dorian Gray, wrote these wonderful plays, like Importance of Being Earnest, and then sort of sometime in his thirties developed, came out to himself, in effect, and fell in love, ultimately, with a young man named Lord Alfred Douglas. Um, a scandal erupted, uh, when Lord Alfred Douglas's father went after them. Uh, there was a libel case which, while lost, he spent, nearly two years in brutal prison. Hard labor in, in Redding Jail and elsewhere and, and was a broken man after it happened. So that's the martyrdom story that's come down to us through the years, but a lot of people don't know that in the wake of that scandal was this family, this wife and two children who had to leave England. who had to change their names, and who led very tragic lives of their own, in the succeeding years. And I thought, you know what? Their story hasn't been told that I know of in any kind of fictional or dramatic setting. So I just thought this would be a good way to come at it. the challenge for me was that it is so damn sad what happened to them all that I thought, God, I don't know if I want to dwell here, in this, in this world for the two years it takes me to push a book out into the world. So I, at some point it, it dawned on me that I could write it as an Oscar Wilde comedy because in Oscar Wilde's, Theatrical universe, tragedy and comedy are always intertwined. Almost all of his plays, comedy and melodrama are kind of woven together in really interesting and provocative ways. So I thought, work against the grain of the sadness by writing it as a kind of high comedy in an Oscar Wilde style. And then it just became enormously fun to write because that meant I could tell jokes. I could create these wonderful sort of Lady Bracknell kinds of characters and come at Oscar Wilde and his family the way that he himself would have as a playwright.

Brett Benner: 12:39

Yeah. And the thing that you do that I also think it's just, and you do this on all your books. What I love is it's your POV that you choose. it's kind of like what you did, you know, cause I, I just had recently read Jackie and me before and I'm taking that from Lem's point of view and kind of through his lens, but taking this. from Constance's point of view, the wife. And then, of course, we get into the kids, the two sons later. I just thought it was ingenious because, you know, so many people do know that story and kind of the sameness of, so what is the fresh spin on this? But, you know, this story of kind of It's not the woman spurned necessarily, but, but there is a bit that huge betrayal that takes place and following her as she starts to come to the realization of what's actually happening and What's going on with her husband? I think it's just I think it's fantastic.

Louis Bayard: 13:33

Oh, well, thank you I mean Constance herself is an interesting character. And again, she wasn't she hasn't gotten her due. I remember that 1997 movie about Oscar Wilde with Stephen Fry and Jude Law as I watched it yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. And that they had this, you know, this, they live this very bohemian, in this very bohemian world. You know, she wasn't just this house frow waiting for Oscar to get home. She had her own, uh, dreams and ideas and, and, and philosophies. And I just wanted to represent that, as best I could on the page. I mean, I'm all about finding the story that doesn't get told. So for instance, Len Billings, who is Jack Kennedy's best friend, but also a closeted gay man. I don't think a lot of people knew that. I know I didn't, for the longest time know that. in, in Courting Mr. Lincoln, I'm come, I'm looking at, the love triangle between Lincoln and Mary Todd and Joshua Speed, who many people speculated about his relationship with Lincoln. I think there's a documentary coming out, isn't there? If it's not already out. Is there? Yeah, yeah, about Lincoln and Speed. So looking, okay, what is, what would that have looked like to somebody like Joshua Speed? And to Mary Todd, who many people just know as the crazy First Lady, but had a very interesting, and again was a very interesting, accomplished young woman. So it's just about, you know, even with famous people, you find there are areas of their life as with Oscar Wilde that people don't know about. And that to me is the joy of writing historical fiction is you get to go into those places where the historical record sometimes just falls silent. And then you can go into those rooms and figure out what might've happened.

Brett Benner: 15:04

And how do you, find your subjects? Like, how do you, what, what speaks to you that says, okay, this is interesting to me, how does that happen for you? Is there any kind of or maybe it doesn't maybe it's just suddenly it just it just I

Louis Bayard: 15:15

won't say it drops from the sky Because I do a lot of googling and I do a lot of you know, reading on the on the side But yeah, I'm not sure how it happens. I something something latches in my head and I think oh That could be interesting. That might be interesting. I will say though that sometimes whatever, those ideas get shot down, uh, by my agent or my editor or somebody like that. So, I have a lot of ideas that never kind of amounted to anything, just because there wasn't, there wasn't a lot of excitement about it. Even with Oscar Wilde, I think, I think it took me, I had to really write the book before anybody knew what it was. Anybody, including me, knew what was there exactly. and then I think once it was there, yeah. cause I couldn't define it very well when I started. I just knew this is, I just had a feeling. I had an intuition about where to go with it, but I couldn't explain it very well, until it was there.

Brett Benner: 16:05

And is there. Is there any, is there any person or subject that you've started on and started to go down the road and thought, this isn't working, I can't do this?

Louis Bayard: 16:12

Yes, I have an ancestor, who was an accused witch back in Hartford, Connecticut in 1616. It was 20 years before the Salem witch trials. There was a, there was a witch panic in Hartford, Connecticut. And she was eventually sprung because she was related to Peter Stuyvesant, who was the governor of New Netherland or whatever it was called back then. I thought, Oh, accused witch, this could be fun. and I've tried to get that book off its feet twice now to written 10, 000, about 10, 000 words each time. And each time it just won't lift off. So it's just one of those, I think every. writer has a book in the drawer and that is currently my book in the drawer. I'm still waiting to find a way into it. The Puritans are hard. That's part of it. They're not, they're not a lot of fun. So, yeah, you're not finding that you're

Brett Benner: 17:01

not, you're not finding the humor. Yeah,

Louis Bayard: 17:04

that would be the problem. I, I, it'd be very hard to find the humor there. So, um, but again, I just got an idea about it just a couple of days ago. I was like, Oh, what if I did that? So I may come back at it again, or it may just stay in the drawer forever. I don't know.

Brett Benner: 17:16

You spoke before about, writing this book with a sense of humor or incorporating humor into it. And it's, it's certainly there. I mean, I laughed out loud quite a lot, and especially with Lady Wilde is such a genius character, Oscar's mother. And, and she really did feel like such a cross between Wilde's Lady Bracknell, who you'd mentioned, and also the Dowager from Downton Abbey.

Louis Bayard: 17:40

I love it. I love it. Oh yeah. We'll see if we can get Maggie Smith to play her while she's still, that's exactly

Brett Benner: 17:47

right. While she's still kicking it. And I thought of that too, when I was watching that movie, because of, Vanessa Redgrave playing her in the film. But yeah, she's such a great character. Can you talk a little bit about The Sons? Sure. And, and, and also I think it's, I reading afterwards, and this is not give away anything. I just thought it was such an interesting bit that, can you also talk about, Your correspondence with, is it Vivan?

Louis Bayard: 18:15

Uh, Vivian's, Vivian's. Vivian. Yeah, yes, back in the days when boys were named Vivian, yes, boys were named Vivian. Yes, so they had two sons, Cyril was the older one, Vivian was the younger. And then, yes, in the wake of the scandal, after the scandal, they changed their last names to Holland. Cyril, went on to become a sniper in World War I, which was fascinating to me when I first learned it. and then Vivian just sort of hung on, became the sort of sole surviving heir of Oscar Wilde and then late in life, had a child named Merlin and his son, Merlin, is still alive, living in France, still working on his own, impending volume of Wilde's scholarship. so Oscar Wilde's grandson is alive and kicking and very much kicking. So one of the real thrills for me was, was reaching out to him and asking him questions, not about Oscar Wilde, which he gets asked a lot about, but about Oscar, but about Vivian, uh, Merlin's father, what was he like? Um, and that was, that was really helpful to me because Vivian gets his own act. The fourth act is all Vivian. So, it was, it was really wonderful to make that connection. And then just send him the book, in his French address and know that he, he'd gotten it. I don't know if he read it. He said he was going to read it on the train that following week, but I don't know if he did, or if it's up his alley. I mean, it is a work of alternative fiction. So. I don't know if that's something that he would enjoy. But I, I, but I appreciated his help and I appreciated, I guess I considered his blessing, you know, to, to go, to go ahead with this project about his, his grandparents.

Brett Benner: 19:46

And just the fact that to have that kind of link to it, it's beautiful.

Louis Bayard: 19:50

Oh yeah. No, I mean, I, I actually, when I sent it to him, I actually cried a little bit because I thought, Oh my God, I'm sending this to Oscar Wilde's grandson. It was, it was this very powerful moment for me.

Brett Benner: 20:00

So back to construction. do you set out for yourself kind of a broad outline of the historical facts and then begin to insert how you, or how do you work it

Louis Bayard: 20:10

through? How do I work it? I do about three months of upfront research just to be able to walk around in this world. and then I kind of let the story tell me what I still need to know, which is often considerable. And I never do. learn enough in my own head. I was, I learned enough to, to tell the story, but I never become an expert, I should say, is what I mean to say. But yeah, the research sometimes drives the story. Sometimes the story shapes the research. but I, I, so I knew I wanted to actually, it was going to be a four act structure. Because that's, that's what Wiles plays were initially, except for, the importance of being earnest, they were written in four acts. So that's the model I was working on the whole time. And the first act is much longer because so much has to be set up and so much exposition has to happen. but then I got to the end of the fourth act and I realized, oh, this is kind of a bummer way to end it. So I thought, maybe we can get a fifth act in here, which makes it more Shakespearean, but, what would the fifth act look like? And it becomes a kind of alternative, world, uh, in which the, the Oscar Wilde story plays out in a different way. And that's as much as I want to say about it, but I love the idea of revisiting, revisiting the, basically the first act and giving it a new ending because, because the original ending was so damn sad.

Brett Benner: 21:27

Yeah, I, I loved that fifth act. I thought it was brilliant. And, uh, And strangely devastating at the same time, but also beautiful and not giving anything away, but I just thought, wow, this is, this is kind of ingenious and, and, it really, really resonates. I can't wait for people to kind of discover that, that last piece. No, it's, it's so great. Were there any surprises that came up for you when you were, investigating this or researching it?

Louis Bayard: 21:55

Uh, well, the fifth act was a total surprise. Um, I didn't even know it was coming until I, I, yeah, as I, as I described earlier, surprises. Uh, the more I learned, I mean I was surprised about everything. The fact they end up in, you know, Constance's And her two children end up in Italy. They're on the lamb basically, and they're living there and there's this shady Italian doctor that she meets. And, there's this woman, she was the, the Raja of Sarawak, the back in the days where there were white Raja, she was the Rani, excuse me, the Rani she was hanging out with her. And, it was just fascinating to me, like the, the peregrinations that they, they followed, and then how did, you know, how did Oscar Wilde's older son end up. as a World War I sniper. That's just extraordinary. You would never expect that to happen. And, and then to, to read about, you know, read their letters and read some of the stuff that they discussed. I should add, as you know, some, some of the letters are used as kind of interstitial documents, throughout the book, um, partly because we weren't sure how much people would know about Oscar Wilde, as you mentioned earlier. People have, carry a sort of levels of knowledge about him. So I try not to assume too much, but I think it helps to have a little bit of a familiarity with, with his scandal with Lord Alfred Douglas. And, and, and that's, that's easy to come by.

Brett Benner: 23:09

Well, it is easy to come by, but it's also shocking to me too, after, you know, learning that part of his problem, I mean, Oscar Wilde's problem was his own hubris to think that when he was suing for slander and then it didn't go through. If he kind of would have kept his mouth shut, he probably would have been okay. or at least maybe not in the long run, because who knows, you know, where that would have led, but he really kind of, Created his own downfall, so to speak.

Louis Bayard: 23:38

Oh, yes, yes. There was definitely hubris. That's, that's, that's the perfect word to describe. I think he felt himself untouchable because of course he was so famous, that he was one of the most famous men in England at that time. And it's hugely successful playwright as well. his plays were running simultaneously, you know, on the West end. And he was just, yeah, I'm sure he just assumed he, he wouldn't, couldn't be touched, by all of that, but, he sure was.

Brett Benner: 24:02

Do you think, let me ask you this, and I still wonder because it brings up so many questions just about their relationship, meaning Oscar and Constance. Do you think he really, do you think he loved her? Do you think there was a love there?

Louis Bayard: 24:14

I do. In fact, the very first document in the book is a love letter he wrote to her back in 1884, very early, I think it's 1884, and they're, very early in their marriage. Now I think it was very much a love match, and I should add too that for the first 30 years, his orientation seems to have been predominantly heterosexual, there's no record of him having, a lot of homosexual liaisons during that time. His, his, his romantic attachments seem to be to women like Lily Langtree, like Florence Balcombe and the affection he felt for his wife feels real. I mean, they, they had children very early in their marriage. So, I think it, it just, but over time he came to realize his true orientation. It was his friend, Robbie Ross, who was the, I think the first man that he had sex with. And once that door was open, he walked right on through. Yeah.

Brett Benner: 25:01

It makes you wonder too. It's almost like again, how things could have potentially been different and, and they were kind of. Potentially ahead of their time. This kind of cowardess kind of designed for living, you know Of what it could be it reminded me a little bit Did you read the house of doors by tan twang? yeah, some said mom and and and again, there was that thing of the the Kind of hidden life of this husband and certainly we know these exist and certainly they exist today and there's plenty of people that are in marriages or in relationships but it is fascinating to me to think, this man probably could have saved a lot of heartache and trouble if he just kept his mouth shut and tried to, you know, Or even

Louis Bayard: 25:45

Or even left England. Uh, people were begging Wilde to move to, Paris because he, it wouldn't have been an issue there. But he was very stubborn about that. He didn't want to, he didn't want to turn and run like that. Interesting you bring up Somerset Maugham because he did leave England. He never, he left and never came back. And partly because he wanted to live this life with his, with his partner, with his lover. And they stayed together for the rest of, Mom's life or the partner's life, but they were together to the end, but they, they, they realized we can't do this in England and we're talking now the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s. So it was a while before England was a hospitable place for, for gays. It was, uh, Sotomy was a crime until, until 1967.

Brett Benner: 26:25

That shocked me. When I looked that up, I was like, wow, that was a long time. I don't think people realized how difficult. It really was and how, it's not like today where everything's accepted and happy.

Louis Bayard: 26:37

Well, I mean, yeah, I think, uh, no coward, you know, he lived on a, like, was it Jamaica or somewhere in the Caribbean? They, they kind of had to find, or my mom lived in, um, the South of France somewhere, so they, they had to find their little enclaves, but it was hard to do it within England. It still happened of course,

Brett Benner: 26:53

Okay. Totally separate because I know we started to talk in the beginning. And back to our friend Angie Kim, who loves and adores you. And I'm not going to call you out and make you sing anything, but she said that, you're, you're quite a, a musical fan.

Louis Bayard: 27:07

I am. Yes. Yes, I am. Um, no, Angie and I have sung together. Actually. We, we, we, we entertained a whole book club one night. He's saying, I know him so well, Frances. Yeah. And appropriate because it was for the Lincoln book. So it was appropriate that

Brett Benner: 27:22

a

Louis Bayard: 27:23

man and a woman were singing about the same dude. Yeah. Yeah. I

Brett Benner: 27:27

love that. I love that. Well, this has been fantastic. I am so excited for you. I know you're an Indie Next List for September. You're on 28 books to read this fall from Oprah. You're in the New York Times 24 books to read this fall as well. So kudos and congratulations on all that. It's so well deserved. The book is, is just truly fantastic and a delight. Are you going on tour with it?

Louis Bayard: 27:51

I am indeed. I'm going to be in, uh, let's see, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, um, Philadelphia. Uh, yeah, kind of running around a bit. Uh, you can go on my website and there's a, there's a tour graphic there, uh, lewisbyard. com.

Brett Benner: 28:07

well, congratulations and, have a great rest of your day.

Louis Bayard: 28:10

Thank you, Fred. It was such a pleasure meeting you finally.

28:16

Thank you Louis. And just a reminder. All of these books are available on my bookshop.org page. So check that out. And if you've liked this episode today and like what you're hearing, please like, and subscribe. I would really appreciate it. Have a great week, everybody. Thanks, bye