The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Tova Mirvis: We Would Never
On this episode, I chat with author Tova Mirvis about her novel, We Would Never, a psychological exploration inspired by a real murder case she discovered on Facebook.
Mirvis reveals how true crime reporting always left her hungry for the human story beneath the headlines, and how she carefully crafted characters who start as a typical family with typical problems before spiraling into darkness.
Having written a memoir about leaving Orthodox Judaism and her marriage, Mervis brings profound insight into the gap between our public and private selves. "What does it mean to not be the person you were expected to be?" she asks, a question that resonates throughout her fiction.
Mirvis says of writing We Would Never, "It taught me about the willingness to go dark," and the craft of creating suspense. Her insights into character development, the ethics of fictionalizing real events, and the thin line between ordinary people and extraordinary acts offer a valuable perspective for writers and readers alike.
Ready to explore the shadowy corners of family dynamics? Listen now, and discover why fiction reveals what true crime can never tell.
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson-Beverly and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes 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 306. Tova Mervis is the author of the Book of Separation, a memoir, as well as three novels Visible City, the Outside World and the Lady's Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in the Boston Globe magazine, the New York Times Book Review, poets and Writers and Good Housekeeping, and her fiction has been broadcast on National Public Radio. She lives outside of Boston and her latest novel is we Would Never Hi. Tova, it's lovely to see you again and have you on the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you, I'm so happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Well, let's begin with learning about you. Where did you grow up, and when did writing first become more than just an interest? When did it start to feel essential to who you are?
Speaker 2:I grew up in Memphis, tennessee, and I'm actually a sixth generation Memphian and so, being part of Memphis and part of a very small, close-knit Jewish community, there has always been so much a part of who I am. And I left Memphis to go to college and I always was interested in I think I was a reader. I love to read, especially novels. I was one of those kids who was always buried inside a book and then, when I was in college, I started taking a few creative writing classes. I didn't really have any sense that it was what I wanted to do, but it was something to explore. And when I was, I guess, maybe towards the end of college, I started writing what I thought would be a novel about Memphis, about the community I grew up in. It was a highly early draft. I would never let it see the light of day right now it lives buried somewhere in my files but it was my first interest in thinking about fiction and how you tell a story and how.
Speaker 2:Stories can, I think, help illuminate our own questions about who we are and where we fit into the world that we are raised inside of. And do you remember if there was a moment or a teacher or a mentor who inspired you to become a writer. And just being around her, listening to her talk about what fiction can do, how it was a way to delve into who people really were. It just spoke to me and so I took a few classes with her and something happened in my family when I was a junior in college.
Speaker 2:There was sort of a big family drama and a rift that happened in my extended family and that was really when I started to write. I felt like somehow I couldn't understand what was happening. It was, you know, this very stressful family situation and I felt like somehow my immediate impulse was to turn it into a novel, to write fiction about it, and I felt like somehow taking reality that felt so unwieldy and complicated and trying to think about it as a story on the page. I always feel like that family moment was really when I became a writer, when I felt like fiction was somehow the window into a world or was the entryway, that I could find some sort of a way to think about things or a way to forge understanding. And Mary Gordon was the teacher who I told her what was going on and she just said write your way through it and that to me. I've never forgotten that really.
Speaker 1:That's wonderful advice and I do believe that reading well-written fiction helps inspire empathy within the reader and, as a writer of fiction, I think that when we're writing each character, especially from the different characters' point of view, it helps us to become more empathetic and more compassionate toward others.
Speaker 2:Exactly, I feel like writing. I feel like the central tenet of fiction writing is empathy. I mean that to me, I feel like writing is really this act of imaginative empathy. It's, you know, so much of my impulse to write fiction comes from this urge to understand. You know what is it like to be someone else. You know to. You know, we all live inside our own worlds and our own heads. But what is it like to be someone else and our own heads? But what is it like to be someone else, to be in their experiences, to sort of imagine our way out of our own bodies, our own worlds and into someone else's? And I think anything I write, certainly in my new book, but really in all my novels. I feel like that curiosity about people is what makes me want to write. I want to know what people are really thinking, not you know who we are on the outside, kind of our performance self, our facades, but all the complicated inner messy spaces that we all have. And that's what fiction really illuminates.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely agree with you there. Across your novels you return to themes of inner conflict. Definitely agree with you there. Across your novels you return to themes of inner conflict, faith, tradition and personal transformation. In Invisible City, a woman's quiet unhappiness simmers beneath her daily life. The outside world explores religious structure and spiritual doubt, and the lady's auxiliary enters the insulated world of Orthodox Judaism. Now, in we Would Never you step into the aftermath of a murder. What emotional or philosophical threads have carried across these stories and wound their way into this new novel?
Speaker 2:Right in so many ways. You know, some people laughed when they heard what I was. You know we Would Never. It was sort of a murder mystery in some sense. My friends who know me well, or my writer friends were like a murder. Really I don't think of that as being like your territory and on one hand, yes, there is a murder and it's a mystery, but really that wasn't the piece of it that was so compelling. It was in some ways I feel, like it's my same kind of novel, it's my same preoccupations, just with a different kind of plot. There's a plottier part to this book, but I think through all my work I'm interested in those inner struggles we have, who we are on the outside and who we are on the inside, the parts of ourselves that we let people see and the parts we tuck away. And that sense that there's this underworld or an underside to all of us, I think, is what keeps me coming back to stories. I feel like that's sort of like my fictional wound in some sense. Maybe we all write from a kind of wound or a question or unresolved place, and I think that question of do you match who people see you as, do you fit in what happens when you veer from who you are supposed to be. And for me those questions are my fiction because they're also my personal questions.
Speaker 2:I wrote a memoir about leaving the Orthodox Jewish community I was raised in and getting divorced, and really the book of separation. That memoir is so much, I think, about change. What does it mean to not be the person you were expected to be? Or what does it mean to decide at the ripe old age of 40 that you don't want to be the person you imagine you are going to be? You want to do something different. And what happens? Not just inside yourself but in all the relationships around you. And so I think I come back to those themes and look at it from this angle and then that angle. But it always comes back to people, to people and all our complicated pieces of our lives. And I draw on my own life, I draw on my own questions and my own imagined versions of other people.
Speaker 1:It takes a lot of courage to know, first of all, when to leave a marriage, and it also took you courage to realize and leave the Orthodox Jewish community, so I commend you on that. Going through a divorce on its own can be traumatic, but when you did both together, that's a lot.
Speaker 2:I think any leave-taking, any kind of change, has pain and trauma, even if that change is for the better, if it's something that you've decided, even if you're the one making the decision to leave.
Speaker 2:I think all leave-taking comes with loss. Even leaving worlds that don't fit for you or don't work, there's still parts that do. It's never black and white and it's never all or nothing, and so for me, leaving this close-knit world that shaped me, that my entire family is part of, it took years of, I guess, living with a quiet, nagging doubt about who I was and what I was supposed to believe. But I knew that to act on it would really topple all the structures of my life and I had to be ready to do that. And I think in writing about it, one of the things that was so gratifying about writing a memoir was hearing from so many people who had similar experiences. They weren't leaving my particular religious world and their marriages were different and their families were different.
Speaker 2:But I found that in memoir, when you are willing to tell a vulnerable story, I think it invites other people to be vulnerable and to tell their own versions of those stories, and I think the people I heard after I wrote a few essays based on the book and when the book came out I started getting emails from people who had left all sorts of religious communities or even just close-knit family structures or marriages or people working with, leaving neighborhoods.
Speaker 2:Just any change, any sense that I'm going to do something different. And I think it's really the most gratifying experience I've had as a writer. That feeling that you know it's so vulnerable to put a memoir in the world. I mean now I feel like, oh, how did I have the stomach to do it? I don't even know how I did it. Now it feels like so just to imagine putting something so personal and painful out in the world. But those emails, they just would come every day, someone saying I read your book, here's my story, and they really it reminded me why I write in the first place. That sense of one story invites another story.
Speaker 1:And also that sense of putting your book out in the world and having people read it and acknowledge it. That's kind of like the icing on the cake, I feel. That's when you know you've completed your story. Yes, we Would Never is based on a real murder you first read about on Facebook. We Would.
Speaker 2:Never is based on a real murder you first read about on Facebook. You've said that news articles provided the facts but left out the why, the deeper human reasons behind the crime. Which character did was? I was on Facebook just kind of scrolling along and I saw that someone who I knew very tangentially had been murdered. It was, you know, horrifying. I was shocked and also really curious. I wanted to know what had happened and so I started Googling. This news story was a law professor in Tallahassee had been shot, and there was all this speculation. People thought maybe it was a colleague or a student. And then the last line in one of these news articles said that he had been in the middle of a very contentious divorce. And at the time I was on the tail end of this very contentious divorce and so I just thought, oh, I don't know if it's that student or the colleague, it just felt like that divorce seemed to be where the heart of that story lay. And so I followed the story for years.
Speaker 2:I was trying to write a different novel and I would take these long, long breaks from that other novel to just read about this new story, and I think what was so compelling to me was. You know, there is so much information online. I mean, there was a Dateline special. It became this true crime phenomenon and I could pull up so much information. There were YouTube videos. There were expert people who would talk about their theories of it. There was footage of so many things and I learned a tremendous amount, but nothing that ever gave me the why, the human story. There was speculation. This man's ex-wife's family was implicated in the murder and eventually they were arrested.
Speaker 2:Help me understand you know, what do you think about the night before you do something so horrific and how do you go to sleep the night after? And who brings up the idea, who says it and who? How do you react? And do you have guilt and regret, like all those pieces of the story are left out because there's no way to have access to them, and I feel like in so much of true crime that I sometimes consume I'm not a huge true crime person, really, but certain stories will get under my skin and I start to read about them and I think what keeps me coming back for more is almost a sense of frustration that no matter how much I read, no matter how many times I Google the news story. I never get that human side that fiction can give. I never get their souls or their inner lives. We're always kept away from that and that was sort of, I guess, in deciding to write we would never.
Speaker 2:I felt like fiction and family-driven, character-driven fiction could fill in those gaps and so that was where the idea for the book came. And, you know, I could create the characters I had to really. You know, I knew so much about the true life versions of them, but I had to put them aside and let them become characters, the same way that I create any characters, and some came harder and some came easier. But I think the hardest character for me to write was the character of Haley. So Haley is the character who is getting divorced and she's sort of known as the good girl in the family, the one everyone loves. She's soft-spoken, she doesn't really stand up for herself and when she's married she's sort of pulled between the strong wishes of her mother and the strong wishes of her husband. And that being caught between maybe it was hard for me to write to her, because I relate to her a little bit, the good girl sense, I have that good girlness so so deeply ingrained inside me, but she was hard for me to write because I wanted her to be both weak and strong at the same time. I wanted her to be someone who could be buffeted by other people's desires, but I still wanted the reader to feel her, who she was, and that it just took so many drafts.
Speaker 2:I, when I, every time I, when I write a book, I always started it's always called new novel one. That's always the first draft and every time it's always every single one. It's new novel, new, new novel, new, new, new novel one. And then every time I make a big change, I update that file number. So it was new novel one in the beginning and by the time I gave it to my editor it was new novel 58. So it just went through so many iterations of the characters and working out the dynamics and trying to make the characters. I guess they call it to be likable, but maybe relatable is a better word than likable.
Speaker 1:And she was so protected. So that becomes a big facet of her personality. And while I felt good for her because of that, it also made me feel uncomfortable, and I enjoyed that feeling as I was reading the novel. Oh, thank you. Did writing the novel bring you closer to an answer and, if not a resolution, did it at least shift the kinds of questions you were asking or what you felt mattered most? I often wonder that if someone is alive in the morning and then they die suddenly in the afternoon, does the ether change around them? Do they have a sense of something changing? I don't know. I often think about that. How about you?
Speaker 2:I think about that sense that you know, on one hand, we're just living our lives and we have no idea. We have no idea what is going to befall us. I think that's scarier than like you know the scariest true crime or you know the footsteps in the dark. I mean that scares me. But what really scares me is we don't know. We don't know what is going to happen next. We don't know what is going to happen all around us. And that idea, I think it's we have to live with that sense that we have. We don't have control over our own life, the people we'd love, that we would want to protect at all costs. We can't always do that. And that idea, I think, was important to me in writing this book. That sense that maybe one of the things that I came to understand in writing it was that I fully believe I would never do something like this. I really do not think I have it in me to hire a hitman. I truly, truly believe that about myself, but everyone I know. And yet I think that we don't always know what we might do in situations we cannot even begin to imagine. And that's have followed the Karen Reed trial. It's been a big, big thing in Boston. It's been going on for years. It's one of these stories, it's in the news, there's did she kill her boyfriend or not, kind of story and two trials testimony.
Speaker 2:And I think what I have learned about these stories is that when we tune into them as true crime stories, they're after things have already gone to the extreme, it's after the story's gone off the rails. But if you rewind them back a few months or a few years, they're ordinary people. They're like us. These are stories. When we read about them they're crazy. You're like, oh my God, they did that but a few months earlier. There are people grappling with family dynamics, with parent-child relationships, with complicated marriages, and they're maybe not as far from us as we wish to believe.
Speaker 2:And that was what I felt in writing this novel. I felt like these people, these characters I was writing about. They start off as a family. They start off as people who maybe they're a little over-involved, they're a little much. They have their pathologies, like so many of us. They're overprotective, they have a secret, a wound. They have all this stuff, but so do so many people, and somehow they lose control. The story escalates and it escalates and no one pulls back, no one holds the reins, and that I felt like a lot of these stories that we read about now. They start off a lot more normal and then they go to these extremes, and that was how I came to understand this true crime story and so many of the other ones that we tend to follow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost like there's a tipping point. You know a clog gets stuck in the wheel. Yeah, exactly. And did writing the novel give you clarity as to what you felt was going on in people's heads throughout this story of the murder?
Speaker 2:I did. I felt like I didn't know that I could say it's what the real people were thinking, but I felt like it gave me a sense of what they could have been thinking or what a story like that could have played out. I felt like the book took five years to write and so much of that time you know, new novels one through through 58 were all about really burrowing deeper and deeper into their psyches. You know, how do we sort of create denial for ourselves? How do we create like sort of delusional ideas that we're going to get away with something or that it's justified? How do we turn a blind eye to things? So, just trying to really imagine my way into these characters and think of them as complicated people with a whole slew of experiences and histories and anxieties and pain, and sort of paint them as rounded as I could, yeah, Writing fiction from a real event must be a delicate balancing act.
Speaker 1:Did you ever find yourself wondering is this mine to tell? And how did you navigate the ethical and emotional complexities between fiction and creative nonfiction?
Speaker 2:I did worry about that a lot. You know I was taking a true story that I, even though it was in the news and all over you know the social media and the media. I knew that for some people it was a real story. It was in the news and all over. You know the social media and the media. I knew that for some people it was a real story, it was their lives and I think a writer always has to wrestle with that. You know, in every novel that I've written I'm working on a new novel now and I'm thinking, I've been thinking about it a lot, you know, these past few weeks there's that question of how much can you take from real life.
Speaker 2:You know, do you, can you take? Is everything fair game for material? Is everything? You know? Can you take things and change them? You know that people always joke. You know, oh no, when you have a writer in the family. You know there's a quote. You know you're doomed when there's a writer in the family. And you know what my father, when I was growing up, when you'll end up in my novel and I wore it. I wore it for years and now my daughter wears it. So I have that same feeling of you know she wants to be a writer and you know there's always a question of what is fair game or not. And I draw a distinction between memoir and fiction.
Speaker 2:I feel like when I wrote my memoir I was careful about what I kept out of the story and what I kept in, because there it was not transposed or disguised it was. You know, it was a version of my own life and I was really very wary of that. In fiction, I feel like there's a little more room because things are transformed. It's never one to one. My first novel, the Lady's Auxiliary, was about my own community and it was really fiction. I mean, there were pieces, bits and pieces. It was like a stew. I took things and changed them. But everyone, when that book came out, it was big news in Memphis and everyone played this guessing game of who were the characters and I thought they could match them up one-to-one. And I feel like, no, it's not. It's never one-to-one, everything is sort of filtered through your own experience.
Speaker 2:But I've carried that question with me and with this particular story I felt like, because it was such a public story, because it was on Dateline and there was a podcast, I felt like the story itself was sort of a public story. It felt like it was not a family's private story, in the way that if I had heard a story about my friend's family that no one knew about there, I would feel like there was a different set of questions. And then I changed the story.
Speaker 2:I started with the real version and changed many, many things, and one of the biggest changes I made was the man who was murdered. I knew him very little and I had friends who knew him, but my character in the book bears nothing, has nothing to do with him. There I made the biggest change because I felt like he was not going to be part of my novel. Anything I knew about him actually veered my character in the opposite direction, because I didn't want it to be a version of this man whose family has suffered a terrible tragedy, and so I wanted the book to depart from that as much as possible.
Speaker 1:And while we're on that subject, I would love to talk about Jonah and Haley. Can you speak to what initially drew them to each other and what pulled them apart? And did you always know how their relationship would unravel, or did they surprise you? It's interesting.
Speaker 2:I always had this phrase in my head that sometimes the things we love about people are the things we end up coming to really not like about them. I mean, in my own marriage there was some truth of that and, before I was divorced, that sense that sometimes the things we think are the perfect fit for us turn out not to be. And for Jonah and Haley. Jonah is a writer. He's kind of complex and dark and a little moody and quiet, a little remote, and one of the things he loves about Haley initially is that she's so bright and cheery, she's sunny Her nickname is sunshine, she sort of positive. She doesn't have that dark and stormy side as he does and he's drawn to it. And I think Haley is drawn Maybe. Maybe he represents something she wishes she was. So there's some way. There's a gap between them but there's some wish, I think, on the part of both of them and at first it works well for them. But A few years into that marriage that you know, for Jonah he begins to see Haley as a lightweight. He feels like she doesn't have the depth and he's impatient with her and one of their main struggles is really about whether Haley is able to stand up to her mother or not.
Speaker 2:I was interested in also the saying of you know, when you marry someone you marry the whole family. I think when you divorce someone you also divorce, often divorce the whole family. So that loomed very large for me and the idea that you know Haley feels like you know Haley has an overprotective mother. Her mother's very involved in her life, but Haley is able to see that that kind of overprotectiveness comes from a kind of love and I think when it's our own parent often we're willing to be a little more forgiving. But a mother-in-law is different. And so for Jonah he sees his mother-in-law, sherry, as being domineering, intrusive, controlling. He has no willingness to forgive her her flaws, and that is a tremendous area of conflict for them. I think it's probably their chief conflict in their marriage. And Haley is someone who is caught between. She wants to stand up for herself, she wants to please her mother and she wants to please her husband and she feels like she's being pulled in these two directions simultaneously.
Speaker 1:I enjoyed reading through their relationship. It was fractured, but it felt real, thank you. Now Sherry Hayley's mother returns to the pool for solace and contemplation. Jung described water as a symbol of the unconscious, a place of renewal and psychological rebirth. Were you thinking about that kind of symbolism when shaping Sherry's character, or did it emerge more intuitively?
Speaker 2:I think that's what I love about the writing process the way an idea kind of you know, speaking of water, kind of emerges out from like the water in your mind, this sort of like murky place. And I knew it was going to be set in Florida, and so I thought about swimming pools and then, all of a sudden, the pool became this place. I think probably my favorite scenes to write were in the swimming pool. I felt like the pool, I felt like it was this like primordial space, this unformed space, and Sherry swims every day, she swims back and forth, and something about the rhythmic nature of thinking I just always pictured her sometimes like a shark cutting through that water, sometimes, in that I feel like water is sort of this loosening of ourselves, and so I think, you know, it's always a mystery, like where ideas come from, where we get them, and it's, you know, today I was working on my new book and I had an idea. It was like one little piece, and I was like, oh, like one piece of my 5 million piece puzzle was put into place today and it's so thrilling. There's this like I had this like ecstatic feeling of like I didn't know that and now I do and of course though of course that was the piece and that you know, it's the part of writing where I feel like it's so much of it is it's buried in the subconscious and it comes up.
Speaker 2:And so the swimming pool to me, you know, I didn't explicitly think I'm going to choose a swimming pool for this reason, but I feel like our minds supply us with those things, and then there comes a moment when I start to think about the pool in that way, and then I did more with it and expanded it, and then, the same way with the cherry, has a garden that grows around the pool, and in an earlier draft it was just a little garden, and with each draft I wrote, the garden got bigger and wilder and I, you know, I started thinking about, like the landscape, and I think those really are the parts that I love, that sense of descriptiveness and certainly for this book, the climate of the book felt really important.
Speaker 2:I thought about the Florida land, like the hot, sticky, sweaty Florida climate, and I kept thinking about entanglement and the family is so enmeshed, and I thought about these gardens, that overgrown, and vines and how you can get tangled in them, and so I just you know, that's the part when I really feel like I. You know, there are a lot of hard days, a lot of days when I feel like, oh, I wish I did something different. Or frustrated days. But the days I love writing are those days when I feel the connection and the themes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, For me as a reader. I felt that the pool became almost like a living thing. I guess it was kind of like a pulse throughout the story. I loved reading that essence of water throughout the story. Thank you, tova. What did writing? We Would Never teach you about yourself. I was wondering if there was something this novel required of you emotionally, spiritually or psychologically that previous books did not.
Speaker 2:It did teach me something. It taught me about the willingness to go dark, to go to a darker place. There's a part in the book where Hayley wants to be a writer and she writes these sort of happier, sunny stories and Jonah says to her if you want to be a writer, you have to be willing to go dark. And I felt like when I first wrote that line I was like, who are we talking to? I wonder, you know? Who is this really? Who might we be talking about?
Speaker 2:I think that willing is to go into the dark places and to have characters who are going to plan a murder. I mean there's no way, you know. I feel like, oh, they're so nice, my characters. You know they're, they, they're nice, nice family, my characters. You know they're a nice, nice family, whatever that means, but they do. I mean it's not giving anything away to say that a murder was planned in this book and to be willing to go into that, to really to sit inside our dark impulses.
Speaker 2:And I think it also taught me something as a writer in terms of craft, about plot. I think my earlier books they have a plot, you know, kind of, you know they're not super plotty books, but it taught me the pleasure of plot, of having something big happen and creating a sense of suspense, and I think I learned a lot about how to move those, the sort of the wheels of the book, how they can of a book, how they can spin faster and how to create suspense and intrigue, and that for me, just as a writer, was a really fascinating discovery or thing to learn that I hope to pull into my other books. I think with each book you write, you learn something new. Each book feels like its own discovery, and so I think that the mechanics of plot felt really eye-opening for me in writing this book.
Speaker 1:I think, every artist, on every creative platform. The only way to grow is to throw yourself into something, dark or light or whatever it is, but to take that next step into something, and often it's going dark, and that does take courage. Tova, tell us about what you're currently reading, and is there a book, recent or something from long ago, that changed your sense of what a novel could do?
Speaker 2:Interesting. So I'm in the middle of so many books. I'm in this weird mode of like I'm reading, I get distracted, I pick up a different book, I don't know what is going on, but I'd say it's a funny mode. Usually I'm a finish every book, but I've just sort of had this like scattered few months of like books on the go. I really love the novel the Safekeep by Yael van der Woorden. It won the Women's Prize a few weeks ago and was a Booker nominee, and that book was really astonishing. It was.
Speaker 2:I think what I loved about it was how a book could take you by surprise. I thought I was reading one book and all of a sudden I was reading a very different book. The other book that I think is really taking me by surprise that I'm in the middle of right now is Orbital, which won the Booker Prize this past year, and it's a novel only in the loosest sense. It follows the astronauts as they orbit the earth in the space station and there's not a traditional plot and even the characterization is not sort of what you would expect, and yet it's the most gorgeous thing. I'm just. I feel like I'm reading. Maybe it's a poem, or I don't even know what I'm reading, but I just keep reading and reading, and it's these little shimmering moments of beauty all along the way, and that you know, those two books. To me, I think, just that sense of being immersed inside something beautiful is what I really is moving me right now as a reader.
Speaker 1:That's interesting because I had one friend who read Orbital and she said that it was life-changing for her. So now of course I have to read it.
Speaker 2:It's enthralling. I can't even say why, but it's funny. I've been reading with my pen in hand and I'm underlining. I don't usually do that, but I feel the need to underline parts of it. There's something astonishing, really, about its simplicity and its beauty.
Speaker 1:It would be remiss of me to say goodbye without mentioning the cover of we Would Never.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely beautiful. I love the cover. You know it's funny with the cover. When I first saw it it was a different version of that and I was like, uh no, I was like I don't like it. And then there was a lot of playing with it and changing things and I love. I love the color. There's the blue, the moodiness of the blues and the swim. I love that the swimming pool is on the cover, that in the garden, but I like that it has a darkness to it, which felt important to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it definitely captured the essence of what we've been talking about. Tova, thank you so much for being on the show. It was great seeing you in Santa Barbara and I look forward to the next book and the next time we get to talk to each other.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:It's such a pleasure to talk to you. You've been listening to my conversation with Tova Mervis about her new book.
Speaker 1:We Would Never. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. 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 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, and my executive assistant and graphic designer is Adrian Ottahan. Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.