Author Karen Dukess on Creative Setbacks, Midlife Resilience and Her Buzzy Novel “Welcome To Murder Week”
Show Snapshot:
Bestselling author Karen Dukess returns to the show to pour out a piping hot cup of mystery, murder, and Anglophile fun as we explore the pages of her genre-bending new book "Welcome to Murder Week"—a delightful mystery romp through the English countryside. Plus, we spill the tea on creative setbacks, midlife resilience, and the power of leaning into fun to unlock our best work. Karen was the first author to ever appear on A Certain Age. She returns to share a BTS of book publishing, “second novel syndrome,” and how writing a novel that didn’t sell taught her she truly is a writer. Perfect for fans of Agatha Christie, family dramas, and lovers of a good comeback.
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Quotable:
I think some of the most interesting novels are coming of age novels about people in later life, because it takes certain maturity and distance to be ready to grow out of the things that have been holding you back. I think a lot of people come of age when they're much beyond adolesence.
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty 0:00
Katie, welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty. Beauties, you have probably heard me say that my mom is a former librarian, my dad a book-buying junkie. My parents raised me and my three siblings in a New York City apartment with a living room stuffed with books arranged by the Dewey Decimal System. If you are old enough to remember a pre-Google world when encyclopedias and the Dewey Decimal System were the main ways to hunt for information, you have definitely tuned in to the right Gen X podcast today. We welcome back to the show a fabulous guest who truly has a special place in the long list of fabulous women I've interviewed over the years: author Karen Dukess. Karen was the very first author I ever interviewed, and fast forward four-plus years, at least 100 author interviews, and the launch of our sister show The Mid-Life Book Club, Karen remains a guest I think about often. During our very first conversation, Karen shared that when we get to midlife, we stop waiting for permission to go after our dreams and ambitions, and we give ourselves permission to get in gear. I think about this all of the time. Karen is back today to explore her latest book, Welcome to Murder Week, a rom-com whodunit double mystery English village charmer of a book that is the escape we all need from our turbulent times. Yes, we are cracking open the pages of this delightful book, but we are also getting into midlife reinventions, resilience, and rebooting our dreams again and again. Welcome back to A Certain Age, Karen.
Karen Dukess 1:47
Thank you. And I have to add, Katie, that I may have been the first author on your podcast, and you were the first podcaster to interview me for my first book, and you're the first podcaster to interview me for Welcome to Murder Week.
Katie Fogarty 2:02
I love that! I love that! I love that! I love that! So we are knitted together from these first-time experiences. And Karen, when you first came on A Certain Age in 2020 to talk about becoming a first-time author in your mid-50s, you shared that you sat down to write The Last Book Party when your fear of not doing it well had been replaced by the fear of not doing it at all. You gave yourself permission to go for it. Did you have to give yourself a similar talking-to to sit down and write Welcome to Murder Week?
Karen Dukess 2:34
I did, but in a different way, because after I wrote The Last Book Party, I spent about two and a half years writing another novel that drew on the years that I spent as a journalist in Russia in the 1990s. And writing that was difficult and sort of a slog of a process. I think I was suffering from second novel syndrome. You know, can I do it again? Am I a one-hit wonder? But I finished it. My agent loved it, and we were submitting it. However, just a couple of months after Russia invaded Ukraine, and a novel that was set in Russia was not something people were eager to publish. And I felt like events had changed so much in Russia—my novel was set in 2017 and in the 1990s—but so much was happening politically in the world that my novel felt anachronistic, and I felt uncomfortable with publishing it. So after a few rejections, I decided to just set it aside. I thought, "This novel, not this time." But it was pretty dispiriting.
Katie Fogarty 3:43
I bet. Two and a half years is a long time to work on something, to be excited, to focus, and then have to put it back in a drawer. Must have been really disappointing.
Karen Dukess 3:53
It was very disappointing. It was also somewhat of a relief, because I felt uncomfortable about putting that novel out into the world at that time. But I knew that if I was going to write another novel, that I was going to have to do something purely fun, that I was going to have to just write for myself. And that, combined with the experience of having—well, I think because of having something that I worked on that did not succeed, unlike my first novel, which sold very quickly—it ended up being really liberating, because I felt like, "Okay, if I'm going to spend a couple years writing a novel that now I know is not necessarily going to get published, this has to be something that I enjoy doing. It has to be something that just brings me happiness in the process." And so that's what led to this novel, which is quite different, I think, from The Last Book Party.
Katie Fogarty 4:52
Karen, when you say "write for yourself" versus writing for, like, somebody else, a different kind of audience, do you mean the reader? Do you mean to the people who might be buying the book, the agents? Who did you envision that you were writing that second novel for, the one that you had to shelf?
Karen Dukess 5:09
I often think about writing for my sister Laura, who is a voracious reader, but she's not a writer. Actually, in this case, I think it was both my sisters. I have two older sisters, and they are voracious readers, and they're smart readers, and they're eclectic readers. And I don't think I feel from them a sense of expectation of what I do. So when I think of writing for them, I don't feel uptight. I think when I was working on the Russia novel, I was suffering from a combination of second novel syndrome, which is a thing, and also I was writing a very personal book that I was drawing on these six years I spent living in Russia and years before living there when I had studied Russian and studied Russian studies in college. And I put a lot of pressure on myself, you know: "This is my Russia book. This is where I make something of that experience." So I think when I was writing that book, I had sitting on my shoulder all the people I knew in Russia, people who had studied Russian, people who had read the first book, and I imagined their expectations about the second: "Was this gonna be a success?" And it was just a weighty thing. With this second book, when I felt like writing for myself, it was, "Okay, I'm just gonna have fun with this. I want to write a story that is fun to write, that amuses me, that gives people pleasure to read." That really was my goal with this book. Once I got going, the book ended up having a serious side to it that I almost didn't anticipate. But the impetus wasn't serious. The impetus was fun, and it was incredibly liberating. And I just sort of indulged my own sense of humor. I was like, "I think these things are funny. I think this is fun. I'm gonna just kind of go with it." And I was just, like, so happy to discover that other people find it funny too.
Katie Fogarty 7:00
It's amazing when we give ourselves the goal of having fun, how we can actually succeed, you know. Like when you take away expectations and pressure, and "Will it sell as well? Will it get snapped up when my agent puts it out there?" and to just enjoy the process is something that, you know, sometimes we don't give ourselves permission to do. I think for myself, when I launched this podcast—and I've told this story on the show before, so longtime listeners might already know it—when I launched the podcast, my friend Lisa, who's an incredible, you know, sort of high-powered corporate trainer, does lots of stuff in big companies, said, "What's your desired outcome?" And I said, "To have fun." And she was like, "Hmm, I feel like you need a different one." And I truly went into creating this podcast simply to have fun with no expectation that it would do anything else. And then quickly, you know, I had my first sort of inbound sponsor come on—a menopause company—and I booked 16 ads almost overnight. And I was like, "Oh, maybe I have a different goal." You know, it's also to continue to grow the show and, you know, to connect with listeners and brands that want to help women with solving challenges around midlife. So anyhow, it just brings me back to that moment when I was like, "The goal of this podcast is to enjoy myself and connect with amazing women." So you hit your goal. You had fun. You created the book that made you laugh, that made your sisters laugh. What came next when you brought it to market with your agent? Why is this about to be a book on shelves in June?
Karen Dukess 8:31
Well, I think one thing that is really nice is that my agent and I share a sense of humor, and it's funny with literary agents, because authors think so much about finding an agent and getting an agent to like them, but it's also so important that you like your agent, that you connect with each other, and you're on the same wavelength. So I have that same feeling with him that I have with my sisters. Like if I think something is funny, they're probably going to think it's funny too. And so I felt comfortable and just kind of letting myself go with this book and took great pleasure in that he enjoyed it so much. It's a funny book, though. I mean, it's a—so Welcome to Murder Week is a mystery, but there's no actual—well, actual—it's very meta. There's no actual murder in it. It's a story about a young woman that finds out that her late estranged mother, before she died, had booked the two of them on a murder mystery weekend in England, spending a week in a village that was staging this fake murder mystery. And so she can't get a refund. She doesn't know why her mother wanted her to go there, but she goes, teams up with two other solo travelers—Americans—and they solve this fake murder mystery. And while they're there, they solve the real mystery. So there's no real murder in it. There's a fake murder mystery and a real family mystery and a little romance, as you mentioned. So it's an odd hybrid of a book. So honestly—
Katie Fogarty 9:55
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it's an odd hybrid of a book. I'd say it's an excellent hybrid of the book. And in fact, when I was prepping for the show and I was spending time with the book, I saw that you had a great sort of cover quote from an author that I love, Katherine Newman, who was the very first guest on my sister show, The Mid-Life Book Club. And she came on to talk about her New York Times bestseller Sandwich, and she says, "Welcome to Murder Week is an aching family mystery wrapped in a comic whodunit with a delicious dose of travelogue and romance to boot. It is as genre-defying as it is delightful," which is such a phenomenal way to have your book described. What was it like to knit these different types of genres together?
Karen Dukess 10:40
I think the reason it's genre-defying is that I didn't think about genre. I didn't think, "I'm going to write a mystery." I didn't even expect to write a mystery. The book was inspired by a trip that I took to the Peak District in England with my sister Laura. We spent a week in the village of Bakewell, and we walked all over the place. And I had traveled in England before, but I had never been in the English countryside, and I felt like I had walked into the pages of my favorite novels. And I felt like I had walked into scenes from every British village mystery I had seen on television, from Midsomer Murders to Father Brown or Grantchester. And so everything I saw—it just—I was in this silly mood like, "Oh my god, there's a vicar!" "Oh, there's a tea shop!" or everything, even The Great British Baking Show. My sister and I were walking across a parking lot at one point, and there was a woman in a little uniform, and we thought, "Oh my goodness, she's a parking lot attendant," which we had never heard of, except for we watched The Great British Baking Show and one of the contestants had the job of parking lot attendant, which we thought was hilarious. So all these things were just so much fun. And there was a walk that we took, a hike that features in the book that is now called the Jane Eyre Trail, because Charlotte Brontë had visited there, and there's a house that is believed to have inspired Thornfield Hall, where Mr. Rochester lived. And so these things are what—when I came back, I just felt like, "I want to write a book about Americans going to this area and having this play between what's real and what's not real." And from that, I got to the idea of the fake mystery, and just had a lot of fun.
Katie Fogarty 12:27
It's such a fun romp through all things British that Americans love to love, right? The Great British Baking Show, Agatha Christie, I mean, the countryside, which does, of course, conjure up, you know, Jane Eyre, the Brontë sisters, even, like, the moors and meadows of Jane Austen, really are almost like a starring character in the book. It's very, very evocative and atmospheric, and it's very charming and fun. I, too, am not necessarily a big mystery reader, although I did have like a real—I loved Agatha Christie when I was in middle school. I think I went through so many of her books. So this was such a wonderful walk down memory lane for me. We're heading into a quick break, Karen, but when we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about some of the themes in the book. We'll be back in just a minute.
Karen, we're back from the break. When we went into it, we talked about how the book is such a fun romp through the English countryside. You really feel like you're in these picturesque little settings, these little villages, these little shops that are peopled with all these characters that Americans love to love when we watch British shows and when we read a novel set in the countryside. Many of the main characters in Welcome to Murder Week are at a crossroads in their lives. Right? Your main character, Kath Little, has, I would say, a semi-stalled-out career. She's recently lost her mother, which is putting an end to, or what she thinks is an end to, a complicated relationship. And she teams up with two other people in the book to solve the mystery of the non-murder, the fake murder. Wyatt Green, who is at a sort of a turning point in his marriage. He's unhappily working in his husband's business. And a woman named Amity Clark, who is a divorced romance writer struggling with writer's block. Was it a deliberate choice for you to put all of these characters into a moment of transition?
Karen Dukess 14:21
Yes, I love books that put together people who ordinarily wouldn't come together, that the evolving friendship between Kath, who's in her early 30s, Wyatt, who's around 40, and Amity, who's around 50, would never have crossed paths, and yet they share this cottage, and they become a little team, and they become good friends. So I love that idea of putting people together and then having them each go through something, but also why Wyatt's and Amity's stories sort of teach Kath something too, because the main story is Kath's story. So I had a lot of fun with those characters.
Katie Fogarty 14:59
Yeah, and so without giving too much away, another big theme of the book is that it's truly a double mystery. It's the fake murder mystery that brings everyone to the English countryside, right, this sort of week-long chance to feel like you are Hercule Poirot or somebody, you know, in an Agatha Christie novel solving murders. And there's the mystery of Kath's mother, why Kath's mother had bought this ticket to this trip before she died, the mystery of why she behaved as she did throughout Kath's life, her failure to mother, her failure, at times, to be present, to prioritize men over her daughter. Why was it important for you to create this sort of double helix mystery in the book?
Karen Dukess 15:42
Well, I knew I wanted the book to be fun and the fake mystery was just sort of the loopiest, silliest part of the book. I had a lot of fun creating these characters who are themselves having fun because they're acting the parts. But I also knew I didn't want to write a book that was just fun and silly. I wanted a book that had some emotion to it, and some heart to it. And I was interested in the idea of, why do people love these murder mysteries so much on television? Like, what's so satisfying about watching them? I mean, sometimes they're pretty bleak, but yet they're always resolved in the end. And so I was interested in taking that appeal of something where the story is figured out and order is restored, and contrasting that to the messiness of real life, when you often just don't understand people or you misunderstand people. And for Kath, her journey with her mother was something where the way her mother was affecting the way she was living her own life, but in many ways, her interpretation of her mother was wrong because of things she didn't know. And I—that's just something that interests me, and that the narratives that we make for ourselves, we are the way we are because our parents were this way, or because this thing happened, that sometimes those things are true, but sometimes they're not, and it can be very damaging to live that way.
Katie Fogarty 17:06
Yeah, absolutely. It probably sounds vague to someone who hasn't read the book. You don't want to give anything away, because it is a double mystery, and people need to read it to solve it. That's like half the fun. And, yeah, that's why it's a page-turner. And I read this during—you sent me an advanced reader copy, which is very kind of you, and I got to read it a couple weeks ago, just during, like, the bleak, kind of cold winter days in New York, and it was really fun to get into bed every night with a cup of tea, which I don't normally do, but I'm like, "Why not? I'm in England. I'm like, romping through the countryside. I can have some bedtime tea and read this book." And it was a super fun treat. And interestingly, I was reading this book right around the same time I was reading a memoir for my other show, The Mid-Life Book Club, and that memoir is called Why Didn't You Tell Me? And I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it's written by a woman named Carmen Rita Wong, and in it, she is trying to solve the real-life mystery of this enormous secret that her mother has kept from her, which has unspooled in many ways over the course of her own life, in which she shares across the pages of her book. And Carmen learns her mother's biggest secret. There are many smaller secrets revealed throughout her story, but she learns it in midlife. It was a lot to grapple with, and it's, you know, life's work to kind of reconcile what you've learned and how she thought her life was and what was truly revealed to her in the end. And one of the questions I asked Carmen on the show is like, "If you had learned this when you were younger, could you have understood why she behaved as she did?" And I want to ask you about your own character, Kath, you know, if she had learned her mother's secret at a younger age, could she really have understood the ramifications, or is midlife the time when we can be better open to empathy, understanding, forgiveness, and all the things that we see Kath experience?
Karen Dukess 18:52
That's a really interesting question. I think that had she learned it sooner, I think it would have affected her, and that she may not have made the conclusions about her mother that she made that affected the way she was choosing to live her life, and she wasn't living a very exciting life before this trip happened. But I think that she may not have been old enough to really accept certain things about it. And it's interesting, because your question makes me think of the fact that so often the best coming-of-age novels are not about—I think "coming of age" is often used to refer to something about adolescence, or late adolescence novel about a girl coming of age—but I think some of the most interesting novels are coming-of-age novels about people in later life, because it takes certain maturity and distance to be ready to actually kind of grow out of the things that have been holding you back. I think a lot of people come of age when they're much beyond adolescence.
Katie Fogarty 20:02
100%. I mean, I feel like our first conversation was about, sort of, you were sharing that you were a late-blooming writer. It was something that you had loved when you were young, and you would set it aside and in some fashion, to have a successful career doing other things, but that you were able to sort of resurrect your love for fiction and creative writing later in life. And I've interviewed other sort of "coming of middle age" novelists and writers over the years, and it's so fascinating, we step more wholly into our fully formed selves and have the ability to look at things that came behind us in our past and make sense of them anew from the vantage point of midlife. If you had had that disappointment of having to set aside your second novel, which took two and a half years, which is not a small amount of time, if that had happened to you when you were younger, do you think you could have handled it as well? Could you have allowed yourself to have fun? Or would it have been a different kind of process to get to book number three?
Karen Dukess 21:01
I think it would have been very different. I mean, I got very lucky with the first novel, and then I sold it very quickly, like my agent loved it and sold it back to us.
Katie Fogarty 21:12
Because none of us have sold well, not many of us—I haven't. So first novel.
Karen Dukess 21:16
The Last Book Party, I sent it to my agent, initially, a little prematurely. I had a contact, you know, a friend. He was a friend of a friend, and so he looked at the novel and it wasn't even quite done, and he said, "I really like this." Yeah. So we met, and we talked, and his thoughts on how I might finish the novel really just clicked with me as exactly what I needed to do and what I had been thinking. So I went away for like, six weeks. I finished the novel, I sent it back to him on a Friday, and he texted me back on a Saturday, saying, "I devoured it. I loved it." Started sending it out to editors on a Monday, and I went to auction, like, two weeks later, and sold so fast—
Katie Fogarty 21:57
That is crazy fast. Doesn't happen for a long weekend, he's like, "Let's go." And then on Monday, he's selling it. That's pretty crazy.
Karen Dukess 22:03
So that is not the experience most writers have. A couple of failures before they sell a novel. So they kind of learn their lesson first. Like, "If I'm gonna really be a writer, gotta have a thick skin, gotta keep going, not give up." I didn't have that. I had the failure with the second novel. And I remember thinking when I decided not to publish—I wasn't going to keep trying and get a bunch of rejections, and I'm like, "I'm not going to keep trying with this novel. It's not going to happen now." And I remember being disappointed, but I also remember kind of saying to myself, "Well, okay, this is where I find out if I'm really a writer or not." Like most writers deal with the rejection first before the first novel, and I haven't, and so I'm either gonna pick myself up and do something different, or I'm not. And I did, because I was like, "This is part of being a writer." No, now, now I find out if I can really do it. But what I want to add is that I think, you know, when you talk about writers in midlife, kind of giving themselves permission and coming to terms with, you know, not being afraid to try whatever—that can happen again.
Katie Fogarty 23:11
Yes, we have—exactly—to keep going. So—
Karen Dukess 23:15
With this novel, I mean, I felt like with the first novel, I kind of discovered my writing voice, but with this novel, I felt like I almost discovered it in a pure way, because I really wanted to do something fun. And after the Russia novel, I kind of was like, "I'm putting aside serious," and I didn't even realize how much I'd had this sense of "I'm supposed to do something serious." And this novel really grew out of Facebook posts when I was in England with my sister, and we were having such a good time, and just like she was on the same wavelength that I was with this like stepping into the pages of English novels and scenes from English television shows. And so each night when I was in England, I was writing a Facebook post, and I was writing in the freest way, because it was just a Facebook post, and they were funny and descriptive, and I got, like, incredible responses from people that I knew well and people I didn't from those Facebook posts. And I think I was writing them without any sense of like "I'm being a writer now," or "I should be writing something profound about England." I was just writing from sort of joyful fun and a very natural sort of view of the world and my very natural sense of humor, and that is really the tone that I carried into the book. So it was almost like shedding away another layer of what I thought I should be writing, or how I thought I should write.
Katie Fogarty 24:26
Yep, and I think taking the pressure off—
Karen Dukess 24:29
Yeah, taking the pressure off, and also just letting myself be funny and light. Not that the novel is completely light, but it's not heavy literary fiction. And I think I didn't even realize there's a part of me that was sort of afraid to just write a fun book, because we think fun isn't necessarily serious, you know, it's not quality, it's just silly. But what I really wanted to do was just like, give people a good story, just write something that was enjoyable to read and made them feel something about these things I was thinking about, make the characters feel real. And so it was sort of another level of letting myself just do what I really wanted to do.
Katie Fogarty 25:06
I love that. So even in—you know, and I'm now beyond my mid-50s, and I still had to get beyond 60 to learn—
Karen Dukess 25:14
Well, I appreciate you sharing that that we don't, all of a sudden wake up one day and we've, like, solved life, and we feel endlessly, boundlessly confident and like we've got it all figured out. And even though you had initially given yourself permission, like you had to get back after it, and sort of remind yourself, "Huh? Like I get to keep going, I get to be creative, I get to have fun." And I appreciate you sharing that, because every single person listening to this, you know, life ebbs and flows. We have highs and lows. We've got days and weeks when things are going well, times when things are not. We need to kind of pick ourselves back up again and put ourselves back into action. And I really appreciate you sharing that story that you had to remind yourself, you know, even though you'd had that original success, that you could keep going after a disappointment like that and lean into fun and create something that was joyful and that flowed out of you so seamlessly based on Facebook posts. That's like, the most positive Facebook story I've heard in a long time.
Karen Dukess 26:12
Yeah, it's true. I've been ignoring Facebook. I'm like, "I think Facebook took down our democracy. I'm like, no spending time over there." But I do love Instagram, which is still about the same. I don't use Facebook very much anymore, but it certainly helped me with this novel.
Katie Fogarty 26:28
Right? And there are things in the—in the Facebook posts that like, pop up in the novel like that. You know, there's one chapter that begins much like one of my Facebook posts. But, you know, it's funny. I think a lot of times when, you know, I've talked to a lot of women who in midlife, are in a transition, and whether it's because, you know, their children are grown, or they're switching careers, they're trying to figure out what they want to do, I think a lot of women think back to "Well, what did I love when I was a kid?" Because it's like a very pure, natural kind of love. "What did I love doing before I was caught up in what I thought I should be doing?" And I didn't think of this consciously when I was writing this book, but I always wrote when I was young, and I wrote completely in a fun way and an escapist way. One of my happiest memories of writing was pretty silly thing when I was in 10th grade, a friend and I both read the novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and we loved it so much. And we watched the Hitchcock movie of it, which is the best film version of a novel, and we wrote together a parody of Rebecca, and we took turns writing sections of it. And I have a distinct memory of being in the bathtub at home and with a spiral notebook and writing my parody of Rebecca. And it was just so much fun, and we were just doing it for each other and having fun. And in a way, that's kind of what I got back to in this novel. Was just drawing on novels I had read and shows I had seen and my experience in England, and just kind of having fun spinning this story.
Katie Fogarty 27:56
Karen, maybe that's your next book. What? Rebecca-like? Parody Rebecca. Let's go. There have been so many Rebecca retellings I've yet to read one that I completely adore. But I do adore that novel, and it does appear in this novel. I think Rebecca's mentioned in The Last Book Party too. I think it might be my thing that I have to mention Rebecca never—
Karen Dukess 28:17
I feel like you're gonna get after this in some way, because it's not a coincidence that this theme keeps coming up. So when you think about the fact that, I mean, this book has been kind of called genre-bending, and you started off not intentionally working in one genre or another, and it sort of evolved to become a mystery that pulls other things in. Your first is, clearly, it's a novel. It's sort of a literary romp through Cape Cod. It's a really beautiful, also very atmospheric book. It really—both of your books that I've read, really, I haven't read the Russia book, obviously, but are very centered in place, like you really feel like you're at these different locales, which is almost like another character in the book, aside from the people. But when you look into the future and think like, "What could come next?" are you now a mystery writer? Is there another genre that you haven't explored yet that might be fun now that you're like committed to having fun as you're writing impetus? What could be coming down the pike?
Karen Dukess 29:10
Well, I'm working on another novel that is a mystery, and it actually—it continues with, it's narrated by one of the characters from Murder Week. So it's not—
Katie Fogarty 30:05
Ooh, can you tell us which one? Or is that like, under the cone of silence?
Karen Dukess 30:10
I guess I could say it's narrated by Amity. So—
Katie Fogarty 30:14
I love her! I'm so happy you said that she was one of my favorite characters, probably because she's in my age, and I was watching her kind of struggle with things and share her wisdom with other characters that are like a couple decades behind her. So that's fun. I'm excited.
Karen Dukess 30:26
Yeah. So the idea is that, you know this story, Catherine narrates the book, and that's really her story, although these other two characters who she's solving the mystery with have their own arcs as well. So the idea with this story is it's Amity's story, and Kath and Wyatt make an appearance. Sort of Wyatt more than Kath. Kath kind of takes a backseat, and it's in a different place. It's in California, but that's all I'll say right now.
Katie Fogarty 30:53
That is exciting! Well, but you know, maybe you'll be coming back a third time when that book comes out. So maybe I absolutely love that. You know, I want to ask you something, Karen. You mentioned earlier, sort of giving a prompt to the listeners and helping, like, pull them into the conversation. I hope everyone who's listening is thinking, "What did I love to do in my earlier days that I might let go of, that it's time to kind of resurrect and blow some air under the wings of that long, simmering passion?" You got back to creative writing again after, after doing it in the bathtub. Now you're doing it on a totally different level. But sometimes I ask people, particularly clients, when I do some public speaking, I also sometimes ask other people, and I ask myself this, in creating this podcast, "What would you regret not doing and not getting after?" And for me, when I asked myself that question at 50, it was I would regret not exploring my interest in creating a podcast and having conversations about topics that I care about, and I'm so glad that I did. So I would invite listeners to also ask themselves that question, like, not only what have I loved to do in the past that I let go of, but what is something I've never done yet that I really want to that I will regret getting to the end of my life and not having given it a try. So if I were to ask you that question, you've already—you've done your novel, so that can't be your answer. But what is something else that you would like to get to that you don't want to let time run out on?
Karen Dukess 32:17
That's a tough one. I mean, I do feel like, since I did get started with novel writing late, I want to do as much novel writing as I can. I don't know if there are other things. I mean, I'm someone who's tried a lot of things later in life, like I learned to ski in my 40s. I went scuba diving in my 40s, wrote a novel in my 50s. So I kind of feel like I'm finally doing the things I really want to do.
Katie Fogarty 32:45
Well, that is a phenomenal place to be in.
Karen Dukess 32:50
It is, you know, I have regrets that I, you know, I look at younger writers and I think, "God, if I had gotten going earlier, I could have like, six novels out by now, or seven or eight." But on the other hand, I had great life experiences in the time that I wasn't writing novels, you know, I was traveling, I was working as a journalist and a speechwriter. I was in a writing class years ago when I was working on The Last Book Party, and there was a young woman in the group. She was like in her 20s, late 20s, and there were some little details, something I had in one of the one of my chapters that I was sharing, and she said to me, like, "How do you come up with these things?" And I just was like, "I don't know. I lived a life like I knew some things from because I had been places and met people and had experiences." And I kind of look at all of my life as like material. So I didn't have to go research everything if I want a little detail like I could just draw from my repertoire of stuff I've done. I regret that I didn't have the confidence to write when I was younger. I was just so timid, and I don't like that. I don't like that I wasted so many years that way. But on the other hand, I was also doing other things at the time.
Katie Fogarty 34:04
And you're drawing on this rich life with experience and perspective and wisdom and travel and highs and lows. And I'm a big believer that we are right on time, and you are and I am. Could I have done this show earlier when I was in my 20s and 30s? I was offered the chance, but I wrote the morning news in New York, offered the chance to go on camera. And I was like, "I couldn't do that." And I'm like, I probably could have but I've got my mic, and I'm having the conversations that I want, and I truly feel that I'm right on time, and we're doing what we're meant to be doing now. So Karen, thank you so much for coming back on the show for having this conversation, for writing this delightful book, Welcome to Murder Week, which I can recommend getting into bed with a cup of tea with. Even if tea is not your thing, it'll make you feel like you're there. Before I say goodbye, though, where can our listeners find you and follow your writing? Keep up with all things Welcome to Murder Week and learn when your newest upcoming novel is set to drop?
Karen Dukess 35:03
The best places to find me are on Instagram at Karen Dukess, I post about my own book, but I'm a voracious, eclectic reader, and I post about other books all the time. And I also have a Substack you can find, I guess if you Google "Karen Dukess Substack." It's called "Keep Calm and Carry On." And that's a writing about things British, things mysterious, things literary as including my book, those are the best places to find me and on Facebook, but I don't really post there very often anymore.
Katie Fogarty 35:34
And unless you're dropping hints about your next novel, Facebook exactly, not where you're sharing. Karen, thanks so much. I'm going to link out to all of that in the show notes. Thank you for coming back to talk about Welcome to Murder Week. Thank you for being not only my first author guest, but my most recent.
Karen Dukess 35:48
Thank you. It's a pleasure.
Katie Fogarty 35:52
Beauties, thanks for sticking around to the end of the show. I have a couple of fun things to put on your radar. A Certain Age has been lucky enough to host guests that often give us discount codes and to partner with brands that have special offers for A Certain Age listeners, from beauty and menopause products to meditation apps to fabulous nutrition and wellness products. You can find every special offer, every discount code in two places. Head to theacertainagepod.com website, find the shop button in the navigation bar, all the discount codes, all the special offers are there. You can also find them on Instagram. Head to @acertainagepod at the link in my bio, you will see every discount code, every special offer. You can also find all the books featured on A Certain Age podcast, including Welcome to Murder Week. We have a link on the website. We have a link in our Instagram bio, because we have an indie book shop over on indie bookseller, bookshop.org. All the books are there. You won't miss a one. Thanks for coming to hang out today. We would love your Apple Podcast or Spotify review. And as always, special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly, beauties.