The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Danielle Trussoni: New York Times Bestselling Author
In this episode, I chat with Danielle Trussoni, about her new novel, The Puzzle Master.
Danielle Trussoni is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Ancestor, Angelology, and Angelopolis, all New York Times Notable Books, and the memoirs The Fortress and Falling Through the Earth, named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. She writes the monthly horror column for the New York Times Book Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and winner of the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Fellowship, Trussoni’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
My conversation with Danielle unveils the roots of her literary passion and her long path to getting her first manuscript agent and publisher ready, to becoming a celebrated writer. We reflect on the way pivotal life events, such as the loss of her father and a terrifying brush with violence in her youth, have not only shaped her narrative voice but also provided a means for healing and understanding.
Enjoy!
Mandy
Danielle Trussoni
The Puzzle Maker, Danielle Trussoni
Two Nights in Lisbon, Chris Pavone
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with independent bookshop owners from around the globe, authors, publishing professionals and specialists in subjects dear to my heart the environment and social justice. To help the show reach more people, please share it with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to Episode 245. Podcast. You're listening to Episode 245. Danielle Trussoni is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels the Ancestor, angelology and Angelopolis all New York Times notable books and the memoirs the Fortress and Falling Through the Earth, named one of the 10 best books of the year by New York Times Book Review. She writes the monthly horror column for the New York Times Book Review and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and winner of the Mishnah Copernicus Society of America Fellowship. Tressoni's work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Hi, danielle, and welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:It's great to have you here all the way from San Miguel de Allende. Thank you, mandy. It's really a pleasure to be here with you and, yes, it's sunny and 70 degrees in San Miguel de Allende today.
Speaker 1:San Miguel is definitely on my bucket list. I loved your latest book, the Puzzle Maker. It was a real page turner. It's wonderful.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you. Yeah, I mean, that was sort of my goal with this book to have a reader sort of enter it and in the first 10 pages be absolutely unable to put it down.
Speaker 1:Well, you succeeded in doing that. It's a fantastic read. Let's begin with learning about you and what your life looked like before you started writing your first book Falling Through the Earth a memoir.
Speaker 2:Well, I always wanted to be a writer. It's one of those strange things. I came from a family that was very blue collar, working class kind of family. Nobody was a writer. Nobody even imagined that they could be a writer in my family and in fact I'm the first person in my extended family to go to college. But I was drawn to stories, storytelling and books from a very young age. I was that kid who you saw at the library sitting with a stack of books, who was maybe 10 years old, and just you know that was my weekend, every weekend, as I was completely in love with books, and so I found myself writing stories as a child. In fact, my father who, falling through you, mentioned falling through the earth, which was my first book my father kept a little notebook that I had started when I was maybe nine or ten, and it has fragments of stories that ended up going into the book I wrote about him, which is very strange. Clearly it was shelved somewhere.
Speaker 2:I grew up in the Midwest, my father was a veteran of the Vietnam War, and that's what Falling Through the Earth is about. It's a memoir, which is quite different from the rest of my books. I always wanted to write novels, but I felt that that story needed to be told in a very raw and kind of real way. Raw and kind of real way. So I chose memoir as a form to tell the story of my father and I. He was a tunnel rat in the Vietnam War. For those people who don't know what that is in the Vietnam War there were miles and miles of tunnel complexes that were built by the Vietnamese all the way back in the 1950s when the French were in Vietnam, and they were used during the war as a place to store weapons documents. They had hospitals underground, and so certain soldiers were sent down to go in and explore these tunnels, and my father was one of those people. Of course, he came home completely traumatized.
Speaker 2:I was born after he returned, after the war, but the man that I knew had severe PTSD my entire childhood, and so this is a memoir about growing up with someone like that, but also learning to sort of find peace in the relationship with someone who's so damaged. So that was my you know, that's just my you know a very like nutshell version of my childhood. But one thing I knew, even as a teenager, even as a young adult, is that I needed to write that story about my relationship with my father because it had so shaped me and storytelling was my only way of making sense of it. So it took quite a long time to write that book, but by the end of it I had learned a skill. I had learned how to tell a story and I had learned how to have the sort of rhythm and discipline of writing which set me up for writing novels.
Speaker 1:I think that's the gift about getting older is that things that you've lived through, everything you've experienced, starts to make sense. And with that in mind, I was wondering is your dad still alive? No, he's not.
Speaker 2:He passed away right around the time that the book was published, actually, so that was a strange confluence of events as well. I lost him and then I became a writer, kind of at the same time.
Speaker 1:So it's almost as though your father's death birthed you as a writer.
Speaker 2:It completely did, and the story that I tell about this is that his obituary was published in the local paper the same weekend that the book was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, and the editors of the New York Times Book Review had chosen his photograph without knowing he was going to pass away. Obviously had chosen his photograph to be on the cover of the book review. So for me it was just this karmic moment, almost where I was saying goodbye to the person who allowed me to become a writer in some ways, and then, on my way, you know, like here's your career, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1:that on its own is an eerily beautiful story. Now you live in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where, as we are recording this interview, the San Miguel Writers Conference is underway.
Speaker 2:It is. It's a wonderful conference to all of those listeners who ever want to visit us here in San Miguel de Allende and maybe combine writing and reading with a nice trip. I encourage you to come. It's a five-day festival and we bring incredible writers to speak every day. This year. We have Molly Ringwald, who is, as well as an actress, a fabulous writer. We have Silvia Moreno-Garcia, we have Christina Baker-Klein and we have Chris Pavoni, and we have Mexican and Canadian authors coming too, because the theme of this festival is bringing Canadian, American and Mexican writers all together. So it's a wonderful. It's a wonderful festival.
Speaker 1:And what is your relationship with the Writers Festival?
Speaker 2:I do the, I do the programming for the speakers. So I get to go out and knock on doors and say, could you please come? We'd love to have you. And then, when they're here, I make sure that everybody is having fun. So it's a great job. I get to take wonderful writers out for dinner and make sure that their accommodations are comfortable and all of that.
Speaker 1:Oh, I know what that's like. It's tricky and it is a lot of work figuring out all the schedules with PR teams, marketing people. It takes a lot of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's hard. Luckily, there's a whole team of people that are taking care of that. But yes, it is especially because writers are so in demand. I think you know Christina Baker-Klein and Molly Ringwald all of them and Chris Pavoni too. They're all asked to do events all the time. And so what makes this special? Right, you know, and? But I have to say that I too, obviously I'm an author and I go to these conferences and festivals. This one is one of the most special. I think that the town of San Miguel de Allende and the culture here and the restaurants and the people is just so special that it really makes an amazing week.
Speaker 1:And what drew you to relocate down to San Miguel de Allende.
Speaker 2:Well, all of those things that I just said, the weather I can put the weather up on top because I was living in New York. And in February in New York, there comes a point where you say I just need some sunshine. And I was invited to do an event with the San Miguel Writers Conference and my husband and I decided to come and see what it was like. And we were here and we were like this is such a beautiful place, why don't we try to live there for a while? And so we did and we fell in love with it.
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds fantastic and, incidentally, my eldest son and his fiance are getting married in San Miguel early next year, in 2025. Oh, wonderful, and I asked them if they could plan the wedding. One side of the writers conference.
Speaker 2:I can tell you when it is. It's President's Day week. I think I'm going to be there. Oh, my goodness you will have to come.
Speaker 1:Yes, I would love that. Okay, let's get on to your latest novel, the Puzzle Master. Protagonist Mike brings life changes dramatically after a football accident leaves him with a rare medical condition called Acquired Savant Syndrome. In an article in the National Library of Medicine, daryl A Treffert describes this condition, quote, as in which savant abilities suddenly and unexpectedly surface in neurotypical persons with no special prior interest or ability in the new skills, accompanied by an obsessive interest with and compulsive need to display the new abilities. End quote. When the idea for this book emerged, what came first? Mike Brink's savant syndrome, puzzles or something else entirely?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. The puzzles came first, really, and also the character of Jess Price, who presents this puzzle to Mike Brink, the character in the book. I knew that I wanted to write a story about someone who was confronted with a mysterious puzzle that brought them into an ancient mystery, something that seems completely outside of 21st century New York, where this is set and we begin with an incarcerated woman named Jess Price who hasn't spoken about her crime to anyone for years, and then one day she draws a puzzle, she draws a cipher and it's very mysterious. Her therapist doesn't know what to make of it and so, of course, they call one of the world's most famous puzzle solvers Mike Brink, and you just mentioned his backstory about how he acquired this skill. That part of this equation came later.
Speaker 2:I had written a whole draft of this book without him having that ability. He was just a smart puzzle solver and I started to think about it and I knew I wanted him to have a kind of compulsion to solve and need, and also I needed for that character to have the stakes be higher, where it's not just something he's good at but it's life and death, for him Acquired savants, as I think you mentioned in the quote from Dr Treffert. They have a need to display it and the way that their brain interprets their skill, whatever that is. For some people it's playing the piano, drawing, mathematical skills. These savants and abilities are across the spectrum. There's many different kinds, but for Mike it's solving patterns and puzzles and it manifests itself in their minds and for some people, almost the way that risk-taking or danger or the high we feel from falling in love or some sort of liminal, amazing experience. Each time he solves a puzzle he feels that in his body and so he needs it and he wants it, and so that becomes sort of the driving force for him.
Speaker 2:The other element very little bit one thread, because I think writers pull from everywhere is that I have a son who has he's not a savant, but he has a strange ability to read very quickly and remember things. When he was little, right Like now it's maybe a little bit different because he's in a field that's really hard. He's in college, but when he was like eight or nine he would just glance at a book, not even really read it, just sort of glance at it, and then he would take the test and it was perfect, Like he had just remembered it, and I was always fascinated by how that was working with him, because I don't have anything like that ability. And then I've seen, as he's gotten older, him working around it right. Sometimes that's a good thing, Sometimes that's hard for him, Sometimes it makes him feel awkward in social situations, and so I wanted to explore I mean, that was the emotional pull. I wanted to explore a character who has a talent but doesn't quite know how that talent fits into themselves and their way in the world.
Speaker 1:You bring up a great point, Danielle, and that is that our children teach us so much. Their curiosity reminds us to be curious.
Speaker 2:It's fascinating, I think, toni Morrison. Someone asked Toni Morrison once should I have children? And she said have one. And I actually have three. So I'm very busy, but I think having a child as a writer yes, it cuts into your time, like you have less time to read. Sometimes you have less time to write. Your schedule is not as free, but I am continually discovering beautiful, complicated human traits from my children and they delight me every day. So I feel very strongly that having a child is a good thing for being human, but also for being a writer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I equate it to the way I feel about fiction. I think reading fiction and having children, they both help us to develop our empathy. Okay, let's talk about a couple of your other characters, because I was taken with your character, thessaly Moses, who is the therapist for inmate Jess Price, and I was wondering when you first saw these two women, were they as you wrote them, or did their personalities change as you develop the manuscript?
Speaker 2:Strangely enough, they were exactly as I conceived of them. As I mentioned earlier, jess Price was one of the first characters to sort of come alive in this book, and I saw her as this damaged woman who had been through an incredibly horrific ordeal. Her boyfriend died in front of her, essentially, and she's accused of a crime that she doesn't understand how it happened, and so her reaction is to go inward and to just clamp up and not talk at all. But her therapist is this wonderfully empathetic, smart African American therapist who has been trying for years to understand her, and I love that dynamic between women. I feel like I've seen that before, you know, in different manifestations, but I don't know if I've seen it between two women, like, quite like that. And so those characters were they just came to me fully formed that way.
Speaker 1:I love the way they pranced onto the page. It's great.
Speaker 2:It's so unusual actually For me. I'm usually developing characters for a long time. So you know, with Mike Brink it took a long time for him to become a round full character.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and look at him now.
Speaker 2:Now he's, you know, he's really established himself, he's not leaving.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's there to stay. In your October 2023 essay for Crime Reads titled what Are Thriller Authors Truly Afraid Of, you wrote about a life-changing event you experienced in fifth grade. Can you share that event with our listeners and how it influenced your writing and anxiety about religion?
Speaker 2:So when I was in fifth grade, I was in Catholic school. I had been in Catholic school since first grade and part of the program was every morning from, I think, 7.30 until 8, there was mass, and all the little children would go and sit in the pews, and we would do that every day, and then one day after mass, the students exited. It was about eight o'clock in the pews, and we would do that every day, and then one day after mass, uh, the the students exited. It was about eight o'clock in the morning. We went into our classrooms it's cold, remember that and everyone was sitting down.
Speaker 2:I had to go to the bathroom and so I got. I asked to go and I was in the restroom, which was sort of at one end of the school, and I heard shots. I didn't know exactly what it was. I mean, my father was a hunter, so I had heard gunshots before. But I was very confused and I came out of the restroom area and the principal of the school, a nun named Sister Rose Francis, came running from the church into the door and she took a broom and she, you know, barricaded the door. What had happened is that a gunman had come into the church and had shot the priest, a lay minister and a janitor and was in the basement of the church trying to get into the lunchroom where the cooks were preparing lunch. All three of those people that were shot had died and it was just a kind of life-changing moment for me because before that point I had never really questioned death or violence or any of those things and also the way these things happen.
Speaker 2:It's strange because it folded into religion for me, the way these things do, and even I didn't realize that that was the case. But then as an adult, when I started writing novels, inevitably there was this confluence of mysticism, religion, imagery from religious paintings and murals and violence and it didn't fully like dawn on me that this was perhaps something that I was taking with me from my childhood until actually, the Puzzle Master right, the new book, when I'm like, here I am again, you know, exploring religion or mysticism in some way through violence. And how is that? You know exploring religion or mysticism in some way through violence. And how is that? You know, how is that possible?
Speaker 2:Because I'm really, you know, you know this Puzzle Master character. He really has nothing to do with religion or violence. So, yeah, I think that that experience really shaped me, and it's taken a long time for me not only to realize it, but now in my new book. I have a book coming out after the Puzzle Master called the Puzzle Box. There's not really that element in it and I feel sort of liberated because I think I realized it with this book that that's what was happening.
Speaker 1:And with that we've kind of circled back to what we were talking about earlier experiences from our past showing up again as we get older, but we're able to have a deeper understanding of them. I am so sorry you went through that experience. That must have been terrifying as a child. Do you ever speak to any of the other children that you were at school with at that time?
Speaker 2:So all of this happened in Wisconsin, where I grew up. I left that state fairly early in my early 20s, but recently I reconnected with a boy who was in my class. He was sort of my little companion. He was someone who they used to have these reading contests where they had, like, you know, you'd color in a square of a drawing after you read a book, and he and I were always like competing to win. He was very smart and really fun, and he reached out to me on Facebook a while ago and we have sort of you know, exchanged thoughts about it.
Speaker 2:I haven't sat down in person with someone. I would like to, though, because I'm really interested to see how other people that went through that experience metabolized it. For me, writing is a way of metabolizing experience. My memoir about my father allowed me to grow beyond that childhood experience in many ways and be able to also help other people. That book is taught in schools, and children read it and can see an echo of their situation in it, but I wonder how other people who don't have that ability to write and reflect in that way go through life.
Speaker 2:Yes, one hopes they have some other creative outlet, whether it be through music, dance or art, exactly some sort of expression right, some sort of way of making that narrative, some sort of expression right, some sort of way of making that narrative understandable, because it's really confusing for a child to understand that level of violence and fear.
Speaker 1:Yes, exactly, I mean look at your experience. It took you decades before you were actually able to understand the experience, and that came through writing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it takes us our whole lives, you know, for many things.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to something a little lighter, and that is I would love to hear your publishing story, from your first finished manuscript to finding an agent and landing a publishing deal, ah so it was a long journey.
Speaker 2:I started writing, as I mentioned, that that memoir about my father was the book I wanted to write. I never saw myself as a writer, as like a career writer. I just wanted to tell stories and I wanted to write that particular book and so I wrote some pages of that and they got me into the Iowa Writers Workshop in Iowa City. I was writing it as fiction at the time, interestingly enough, because I didn't really understand that it needed to be a memoir, and so I spent two years there writing a novel about my relationship with my father. Some of the sections were very much my life, right. I basically transcribed conversations and experiences with my father and then I got out of Iowa I, I graduated and I won a small prize for that book and then that prize sort of gave me the ability to find an agent. So this agent said, okay, I'll try to sell it, and sent it out to, I think, 25 editors and it was rejected by everyone and the the feedback that was coming back to us, to me, was that it was just unbelievable, right, even though it was pretty much a true. You know, a lot of it was a true story, the events of my childhood. For example, my father brought home a human skull from Vietnam and it was on the mantle of our living room that those sorts of details were so strange that it almost had to be nonfiction. But I couldn't realize that as I was writing it. I needed that feedback and also to feel that shock, right, the shock of oh, my goodness.
Speaker 2:I just spent like three years or whatever, writing this draft and it's not working. But, as many writers do, I put it aside and I decided to try it as a memoir. I took some of the same material that was in that book and I rewrote it and rearranged it on a 50 page sample. We sold that book with six editors bidding a couple of. It was a couple of years later. I, you know I spent a lot of time fixing it up, but still it shows you readers don't often think about the importance of genre or how you're packaging or framing that story, but for me as a writer, it taught me that the way that we present the story nonfiction, fiction, memoir, thriller, literary fiction all of these categories signal something for a reader and it was immediately acceptable.
Speaker 1:Pretty much the same story Was it difficult to put it back into first person.
Speaker 2:It was very hard because all of the devices that I had created in fiction to protect myself I had to tear away. So that book Falling Through the Earth, the memoir that was eventually published, is very much about my journey, even though it's about my relationship with my father. It's about how I grew through that relationship and I think with the novel I didn't want to address that as much. I wasn't able to address that and so it was very hard. It took a long time to write. You know there were times with that book you know this has never happened again where I was crying as I was writing because it was so personal and such a healing experience for me that it had to be that way. But you know that was the process and I'm very proud of that book. It's a unique book in my in I've written seven books and it's very unique considering what it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it definitely takes courage to write a memoir. Okay, let's talk about the Iowa Writers Workshop. How was this experience and what takeaways from this course did you find most valuable?
Speaker 2:So it was an extremely wonderful thing to have happened, because I was, you know, a young woman who had no network of writers. As I mentioned, no one in my family was a writer. Nobody really even understood what that meant and I, you know, would seek out other people who wrote, but no one was writing consistently or professionally. So going to the Iowa Writers Workshop was wonderful for me because I met people who were as serious about this process as I was. It also gave me two full years to do nothing but write. I think for a young writer or anyone who wants to write seriously, what you need is time uninterrupted as much as possible, so that you're not working full time doing something else and then doing this on the side. So that was really great. It's interesting because there was a panel here yesterday at the San Miguel Writers Conference with five writers and the question was asked about MFA programs and one person said, oh, I'm so glad I didn't go to one, because she felt that it would have sort of made her more like other writers, like her individuality and things that make her special as a writer would have been sanded down.
Speaker 2:And you know there's a lot of complaint that workshop stories are very mediocre because they're what everybody likes. It's like art by committee and, interestingly for me, I was at that time writing the story about my father and I didn't. I've never written short stories, I've always. That was a novel and so I was outside of the mold anyway and I always got everyone. No one knew what to do with me anyway, so I wasn't. You know. Nothing was sanded down or made by committee, because everyone just either sort of kind of shrugged their shoulders like what's this? You know she's turning in pieces of a novel. I don't even understand the narrative arc here because we don't have the beginning or the end. We have this little piece in the middle. So that was pretty good for me, I think.
Speaker 1:It sounds like it was more about the community of being around like-minded people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess I mean looking at it retrospectively, modeling myself on writers who were successful. When I was there, we had visiting writers, we had the faculty. We had so many interesting and successful writers coming through that I saw really for the first time in my life that writing is something I could do every day, and then it's something that I could do my whole life and it wasn't going to be just those two years where I was in school. So that was really special.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's talk about books. What are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:I am currently reading a Chris Pavone novel. Actually, I just got it yesterday, so I've just started. He wrote Two Nights in Lisbon, which was a bestseller, I think a year ago or two years ago. He's here at the Writers' Conference, so I'm giving him a plug. The book I'm reading I think was his second novel and he writes international thrillers with female heroines.
Speaker 1:And they're all really wonderful, so I highly recommend all of them. Do you think we'll be hearing from Mike Brink again soon?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, I actually am so excited to say that another book with Mike Brink is coming in October of 2024. It's not that far away. It's not a direct sequel. It's a totally new story that you can read without reading the Puzzle Master, and it's set in Japan. Mike Brink has been asked by the Emperor of Japan to open a puzzle box, and I know that we're not on video here, but I have a puzzle box here that I'll show you that I got. I went to Japan myself.
Speaker 1:This is what they look like oh, I wish my listeners could see that is beautiful. And if you?
Speaker 2:can see. They kind of move. They're mechanical puzzles so they move like in increments, like that. And in the puzzle box that Mike Brink opens there's 72 little panels. And in the puzzle box that Mike Brink opens there's 72 little panels and he has to find out how to open it. And when he does, big mystery ensues.
Speaker 1:Oh, that sounds mysterious, and I do love Japan. You've lived in quite a few countries, haven't you?
Speaker 2:I did I lived in France for three years. I lived in Japan for two years. I've lived in Mexico now for three years. I lived in Bulgaria for a while. I really enjoy not just traveling, but I like sinking into a culture and getting rhythms, like I wake up and this is the coffee shop I like to go to and these are the people that I meet and know because I've been there.
Speaker 1:Oh, I completely agree with you. Even if you live in another English speaking country, there are so many cultural activities and rituals to explore. That's what I love about living in other countries and, like you said, you get your own rhythm. It's such a valuable experience to have under your wings Very valuable.
Speaker 2:I think it's another empathy tool, right, because you start to see that things are very different than what you might think.
Speaker 1:They are yes, absolutely, danielle. Like I said earlier, I absolutely love the Puzzle Maker. It's made me want to read your other books and, oh my goodness, I can't wait to read the next one. But thank you so much for taking time out from the Writers' Conference to chat with me today. It's been great.
Speaker 2:It's been such a pleasure for me too. Thank you, Mandy, it's really. I'm so happy to be here with you.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with Danielle Trussoni about her new book, the Puzzle Maker. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop Podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson-Beverly, Theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy, Adrienne Otterhahn, and graphic design by Francis Farala. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.