Unpacking Sex, Power & Identity: NYT-Recommended Novelist Daisy Alpert Florin on the Winding Road to Adulthood
Show Snapshot:
Calling all book lovers…Meet Daisy Alpert Florin, author of the debut novel and NYT editor’s pick My Last Innocent Year, a propulsive, evocative, coming-of-age story exploring sex, power, identity, and burgeoning adulthood through the lens of a sexual assault at an elite college. We dive into the incandescence and uncertainty of youth, the long and winding road to adulthood, and finding one’s voice in midlife. Plus, 90s campus culture, the book on the top of Daisy’s TBR stack, and other novelists who get women’s voices right.
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Quotable:
The main character, Isabel Rosen, who's a senior at the fictional Wilder College, modeled on my alma mater, Dartmouth, has a sexual encounter with a friend, or someone she thought was a friend, that she isn't sure when it's over if it was consensual or not. That is the jumping-off point for the book, which deals with questions of sex and power and consent and all these murky, thorny things that we go through in our college years.
Transcript:
Katie Fogarty 0:00
Beauties, I wanted to let you know what to expect from this week's show. We have a fantastic novelist who's coming on to join us, but I wanted to share that we will be talking about non-consensual sexual encounters and sexual violence, among other things. I wanted to put this on your screen so you know what to expect. Now on to the show.
Welcome to A Certain Age, a show for women who are unafraid to age out loud. I'm your host, Katie Fogarty. If you've been listening to A Certain Age for any length of time, you might have heard me mention that my mom is a librarian and my dad is a book-buying junkie. My childhood living room was lined with bookshelves arranged by the Dewey Decimal System. I am serious. I think we can all agree that that is totally extra. But as a lifelong reader and lover of books, I do believe that one of life's greatest pleasures is cracking open a book, diving into its pages and getting swept along in a story that pulls you into a vivid, singular world. And when you get to talk to that book's author? Heaven.
I am so thrilled to be sitting down today with Daisy Alpert Florin, the author of the novel "My Last Innocent Year," which was a New York Times Book Review's Editor's Choice. Reviewers called "My Last Innocent Year" propulsive, evocative and very hot, and a tightrope walk of a debut novel about womanhood, power and privilege. I tore through this dazzling book, and I am so excited for this conversation. Welcome, Daisy.
Daisy Florin 1:28
Well, thank you, Katie. Pleasure to be here.
Katie Fogarty 1:30
I actually just finished your book last night, I'm gonna admit, but I could not put it down. I so enjoyed it. It's a coming-of-age story, right? It explores universal themes, the incandescence and uncertainty of youth. You cover identity, desire, sex, power. But I know that the genesis of this story, what you and many other writers often refer to as, quote, "an inciting incident," is rooted in a personal experience. And I'm wondering, as a jumping-off point, if you could share with our listeners what made you decide to write "My Last Innocent Year."
Daisy Florin 2:05
Oh, yes, thanks for asking. I have been working on this novel for a very long time. It grew out of personal essays that I had been writing for several years, many of which, just coincidentally, took place—were stories that took place during my college years. I just turned 50. College was a while ago, but I found myself going back to that time, and I was writing about those years in personal essays. And after I wrote a series of essays, I sort of felt like I had more to say about college and the '90s and coming of age, especially as a woman in patriarchy, in academia, and how you find your voice. And I wanted to say more. And I wanted to write on a bigger—I wanted to paint on a bigger canvas, essentially.
But there—I did write an essay after the book came out that sort of hinted, talked about the way that one specific incident sort of sparked the novel for me. And I should say that the novel is not autobiographical. It does draw from emotions and feelings that, you know, that I had, that I was still sort of grappling with. But to be honest, if I wrote a novel or a memoir about what I actually did in college, it would be pretty boring. It was a lot of me like watching people and looking at people and talking to people, but some of the more propulsive plot points of the book are not things that happened to me.
But the opening scene sort of takes place with the main character Isabel Rosen, who's a senior at this fictional Wilder College, which is modeled on my alma mater, Dartmouth. She has a sexual encounter with a friend or someone she thought was a friend, that she isn't sure when it's over if it was consensual or not. And that kind of is a jumping-off point for the book, which does, as you say, deal with questions of, you know, with sex and power and consent and all these kind of murky, thorny things that we go through, you know, in our college years.
And that scene isn't, you know, isn't a replica of something that happened to me, but it's sort of based on a similar encounter that I had. The circumstances were different, the players were different. But where I also had trouble putting a name to what had happened. It was something that I felt bad about, and felt bad about for a really long time, but I wasn't really sure what to call it.
And actually I had tried for years as I was writing these personal essays that I was talking about. I loved to kind of write about that experience and capture that experience, and I never could get it quite right. It was one of, like, the great frustrations of my life. I probably tried for a decade to tell that story, because so much had been lost to memory, so much was murky to me, and I just couldn't really put it down on paper. So I kind of decided to fictionalize it like, let's just write about the feelings. The feelings, but all of the particulars of that opening scene are invented. And once I was able to do that, the rest, you know, that's, I won't say the rest of the novel just came together.
Katie Fogarty 5:45
This is such a beautifully constructed and fascinating novel. I doubt it just sort of flew together. But it's so interesting that, you know, you said you spent a decade trying to articulate or sort of wrap your arms around it and sort of share the story that you had personally. In the book, when we meet Isabel Rosen, she's grappling also with this sort of confusion, you know, was the sexual encounter that she had with Zev—her, you know, her friend or erstwhile friend. Was it coerced? Was it consensual? And throughout the book, we see her returning to this experience and still not quite understanding or being able to fully define or name it.
You know, so much of the theme of this book is about a woman finding her voice. When Isabel is struggling—I don't want to give too much of the book away, because I want everyone to read it—but her roommate, Deborah, when she comes back, kind of jumps in and names this act as a rape, right? These words are put in Isabel's mouth. They're kind of almost planted in her mind, and they shape not only how she sees the story, but the story that you tell throughout the book.
"My Last Innocent Year," you know, do you think that Isabel grows in this story and is able to see herself more clearly and see like the agency that she has in her life? Was that—was her constant struggle a mechanism that you made deliberately, or was it simply because it is so hard sometimes to unpeel these sort of gray areas?
Daisy Florin 7:11
Yes, I mean, that's a fantastic—I love the way you asked that. I was really interested in the gray areas, as you say. And I definitely do hear from readers who feel frustrated by that, who feel frustrated by, you know, by the way Isabel isn't able to name exactly what happened to her. But then I hear from readers who say, "Yeah, that's exactly what it feels like. That's exactly, you know, how that experience unfolds for me," for so many people.
I think that the reason I ended up having success telling the story in fiction is because when I write essay, and I do still write essays, I always feel the need to arc to meaning, you know. I have to sort of come to a conclusion or sort of stake my claim on one side of the question. And in fiction, in this novel, I really was able to just stay in those gray areas. And that felt really good to me. I think I live in gray areas. I think it makes me a good novelist or a good writer, but if I am a good novelist or a good writer, but it's—
Katie Fogarty 8:28
You are both of those things. As I said, I just finished this book. I want everyone to hit "Add to Cart" instantly, because it's mesmerizing. I thought this was a phenomenal read.
Daisy Florin 8:39
But thank you so much. I, you know, I think it can be a hard way to live, and sometimes I'm like, "Oh, I could do it this way, or I could also do it that way, or I think I feel this way, but I can also see that side of it." And so like Isabel's friend, Deborah, who has a very strong opinion on what has happened that night between Isabel and Zev. And, you know, just sort of gives it this bold label of rape. I too have friends who I turn to in my life to—I say, you know, "Just tell me what to do." Or, "Can you just tell me what to do?" And there—I have friends who are happy to take that role, and I am happy to have them, but I think that it's very much about—it's certainly about finding her voice, and as she's coming of age as a writer, those were things I wanted to explore. How, you know, because what happens after this scene that we've talked about is she has a—you know, she has a professor. And I don't think it's giving too much away to say she falls into a love affair with this married professor. And I also wanted to talk about mentors, and specifically bad mentors, and how I think women in particular can be derailed by bad mentors.
Katie Fogarty 10:00
Yeah, that's so interesting. We are heading into a quick break. When we come back, Daisy, I want to pick this up.
Daisy, we're back on the break when we headed into it. You let our listeners know that Isabel winds up falling into a consensual, clearly consensual, relationship with a married professor. It's clear because he makes her spell it out. It's sort of a very gripping scene in the book. It's super, you know, sexually charged, and it's—I thought it was so interesting, given that earlier in the book, she had struggled to kind of name what was happening to her. And here she sort of walked through this naming, this sort of claiming by her professor.
But the book—we watch Isabel sort of gain and regain and lose her voice. And there's that theme of silence that we talked about. But there's also a close relative that emerges as a theme, and that's secrecy, right? This sort of repeating element in the book. Characters are hiding affairs, the nature of relationships, even behaviors and actions that are taken that require exposure. Really, I don't want to give too much away. So the book really asks Isabel to re-examine all these different experiences that are shaping her. And the character Isabelle does this in real time, right? She is looking and examining things that are happening to her in college. She also does it with a little bit of distance, because the book does toggle back and forth between her college and adult years.
You wrote this book with a time and distance of age and experience and maturity. I sometimes ask this question at the end of the show, but I want to ask it now. Could you have written this book when you were younger, or did it take getting to midlife?
Daisy Florin 11:42
I mean, absolutely, it took getting to midlife. 100%. I wrote this book in the fever that was my 40s. You know, I—it took me that long to kind of figure out that I indeed wanted to be a writer, that it was something that I possibly could do. You know, I had spent a decade raising kids, and I just felt like the time—I was ready to sort of look back on who I was and how I had gotten to where I am. So a lot of that came out in the essays, that was a lot of what I was grappling with in those essays.
And you're right. The book—it's Isabel is looking back on the experience of her, you know, this final semester of college. But you can always tell throughout the book that she's looking back at it from a distance of, let's say, 20 years. I'm not really specific, or I guess I am. But anyway, I won't give that away. It's about 20 years, and that is what I was doing also. And there was no way that I could have told this story without having that layer of the kind of wisdom that you gain when you're in your 40s.
You know I was—I did start writing the book in 2015, which was before #MeToo, and the Trump years, and all the things that went on culturally that caused women to look back at experiences and to speak up about experiences. So I was already working on the book when all of those things started to happen in the culture, and that certainly lent an urgency to the writing. I sometimes think, would I have been able to finish the book if the world wasn't sort of intruding on it? And every day I woke up and there was something else that people were talking about and that I wanted to layer into the book, but I was already doing that work. I was already thinking about what had happened to me and how I saw it differently now, with the benefit of distance, and then we just all started doing it collectively. And that definitely helped you see that.
Katie Fogarty 13:50
You see that in the book, though, because you did share at the opening of the show that the book was kind of rooted in the '90s, around the time that you went to college, that you were at Dartmouth. We see a lot of like '90s references, music, you know, Lilith Fair. There's a whole bunch of things that will be fun for anyone who grew up in the '90s or went through it to experience. You also talk about Monica Lewinsky a little bit in the book. She's alluded to as a, you know, as a person who's part of a news story. Was she always in the book? Or did you put her in when these things were popping up with the #MeToo movement? Did you want to go back deliberately? Or had she already been in there?
Daisy Florin 14:28
That's such a good question. I actually graduated from college in 1995, so when I started writing the book, I knew it would be in the '90s. That was just what I was going to write about. It's what I was interested in, and also what I'm able to do. I wouldn't be able to write a novel, you know, set in a college today. I have no idea how to do that.
Katie Fogarty 14:49
I mean, either. I have two college students, and I have no idea. It's like, so—
Daisy Florin 14:54
No idea, but so—and I wanted to go back to the '90s. I wanted to, like, sort of bring that experience back to life. But so I think I was writing sort of vaguely in the '90s, maybe 1995, you know, because that was when I graduated. And what happens is, you write for a while before you figure out, before you start to, like, really zero in on what you actually want to say. So after I'd been writing for a while, I thought, "Well, I'm kind of interested, I'm interested in culture. I'm interested in, you know, in how literature and politics and history sort of talk to each other." So I thought, "What could I layer in that like everyone would be talking about in 1995?" And in, you know, in that case, it was really the O.J. Simpson trial. The trial was really what people were talking about that time. And I thought, well, could that be sort of the backdrop? And that didn't feel like the right backdrop. So then I, you know, was like, "Duh, you know, Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton." So I just, I ended up moving it ahead three years, so that the novel takes place in 1998, when I was already out of college. But it was really fascinating to go back to that time, because, you know, I was out of college when that was going on. I'm the same age as Monica Lewinsky. I was definitely aware of it, but like to look back on it and to really sort of dig into it as sort of a project was really interesting. We've definitely come, you know, around on how we see that whole experience.
Katie Fogarty 16:31
Sure, her public persona has been transformed. You know, she—I mean, she is just, she's done an incredible job of sort of reinventing herself and staying true to herself, and, you know, calling out the fact that she was made a national punchline and sort of a joke, and she's really kind of—I don't know, transmuted or transformed her story in such a powerful way. I admire the way she's handled herself after being in such a difficult public position. And one of the characters in the book basically sort of calls that out, and, you know, recognizes that she was put in an incredibly difficult position at a very young age.
You know, I want to ask you, Daisy, you mentioned that you spent a good chunk of your 40s writing essays, kind of struggling with, you know, the looking back identity, trying to put your arms around, you know, what it is that you wanted to be sharing and telling. I think we see some of this struggle in Isabel, right? When she lands at college, she struggles with her identity. She's othered to a degree in her small, you know, homogeneous—am I even saying that word correctly? Homogeneous? I'm like, oh, my God. I'm recording this at the end of a day on Friday, and I've had a busy week. So my brain is like, how do you pronounce that word? That's also my midlife brain fog.
But in any event, she's othered, right? She is of a smaller religion. She's got a lower economic status than her peers. Her home life is something that sort of separates her out from her peers, who are really largely insulated by wealth and status. And at one point in the book, the other character who was, you know, the friend that she was involved with—this sexual, you know, moment with Zev—confronts her and asks, you know, "Do you really think I raped you?" And we watch Isabel have the experience of not being able to easily answer that question, even to herself in her own mind. And she says—and I wrote it down—quote, "My belief system was fuzzy, even when it came to my own body." And then she goes on to say, "Sometimes it seemed like Zev was the only person here who saw me, who really saw me, and maybe I'd let him fuck me to thank him for that."
And that sentence jumped out at me because it rang so true—not the specific circumstances, of course, because that has not happened to me, but the sort of sense of standing and sort of being detached from yourself, deciding who and how to be in a particular circumstance, you know. I remember being a young woman at, you know, work and like letting people say things maybe they shouldn't say. I remember being at parties, you know, I think that—I think it'd be very hard to find a woman who hasn't tolerated some level of inappropriate behavior, not at the level that Isabel experiences with Zev, necessarily, but I would add that—of Daisy, oh my gosh, I'm sorry, Isabel, I'm getting them confused. I'm getting you confused with your character—but that it'd be hard to find a woman who has not tolerated some level of inappropriate behavior.
Do you think that is something that we outgrow? I believe that getting to midlife makes us more solidly ourselves. We do not put up with this kind of, you know, horseshit any longer. What is your take?
Daisy Florin 20:11
Oh, I mean, absolutely. I mean, I think that, you know, me specifically as a writer, I have to take—I take a very long time to process things. So I'm the kind of person who comes up with, like, the perfect comeback, like, three days after something, or I realized, like a week later, like, "Wow, that person actually insulted me." You know, I'm sort of slow on the uptake there, but that scene that you're talking about where she has this confrontation with Zev, and he asks her that—that was probably the hardest scene in the book for me to write, by far. And I've been talking, you know, I talked to book groups and things like that, where they're like, "Wow, I really wish she had just told him off, or really just said, you know, said what she meant." And I'm like, "So do I! I wish she had also." But my experience has been that you don't always—you don't really rise to the occasion in those moments. It's like this fuzziness of youth, really. I think it's being—I don't know what it's like for men. I'll let men tell their story. But I think for young women, it is very, very hard when you are being challenged or confronted in that way, or at work, in a professional situation, for sure. And certainly, you know, I don't know what it's like now for young women coming up, but you know, for you and I, coming up, we were going through a lot of male gatekeepers. That's, you know, that's the professor who would write your recommendation, you know, or the boss you would have would be, you know, more often than not a man. And I think I wanted to capture that feeling of, you know, when she's with the professor—Professor Connolly, which becomes sort of the love affair of the book—that feeling that I think many women have had, of being behind a closed door with a man and something kind of shifts in the room, something shifts in the air, and you're like, "Oh, okay, that was weird." And you know, most of the time, you know, I've gotten myself out of those situations. I've sort of recognized them for what they are, and I've sort of, you know, put on my life preserver and gotten out of them. But this was the time where I wanted to just sort of push it like, "Okay, well, what if you did take the bait, or what if you did cross that line? What would happen?" Because that's what you have to do in fiction. You know, is you have to have your character make mistakes, and I had to have Isabel make a lot of mistakes that I maybe didn't make, wouldn't have made, but part of that—you were alluding to Isabel's otherness. You know, she's a Jewish student on a not very Jewish campus. She's from a lower socioeconomic background. She's lost her mother. And some readers have said to me, "Oh, I don't think any of this would have happened if Isabel's mom was still alive." You know, "If she'd been able to call her mom, you know, her mom would have been like, you're not going to do that." But, you know, she—
Katie Fogarty 23:11
That's a lot of pressure on moms, by the way, not for nothing.
Daisy Florin 23:15
It's true. It's true. That's true. But I did have to isolate her in these ways, because, you know, to make her vulnerable to this kind of relationship.
Katie Fogarty 23:25
Yeah, it's interesting, because when readers said that this wouldn't be happening if it was her mother. I was, of course, joking, but sometimes I think that people—women who make very unfortunate choices in their romantic life. And I'm not saying that Isabel was making a choice, necessarily. But in my experience, have been people who have strange relationships with their dads, you know, where they're perhaps looking for, you know, just sort of a male—the male love, the adoration, the gaze that they might be missing in their own personal lives. And Isabel has such a beautiful relationship with her father in many ways. I mean, there are challenges to it. I don't want to give them away. There's a secret between them as well that gets revealed at the end of the book, but for the most part, he is, you know, endlessly supportive. And did you give any consideration to that when you were creating the father character?
Daisy Florin 24:23
Yeah, I mean, her dad is named Abe, and he owns a store on the Lower East Side, an appetizing store, which is a kind of Jewish specialty food store. They sell smoked salmon and fish and cream cheeses and things like that. So you guys can look up "appetizing store." That's the kind of store he owns. And he kind of just came to me as a generally benign figure, you know. I did problematize him. You know, as you said, there is a secret. He's a flawed person. He can't quite give Isabel what she needs. I don't think he even knows what it is that she needs, but I think he's aware of not being able to give her what she needs. You know, I think he is aware of his limitations. So she does have this support in him, but it's, you know, it's not the kind of relationship where, you know, she would get on the phone with him every day, you know, to tell him her problems. And I also think that's a little bit what it was like in the '90s. We maybe didn't call our parents, like, every single minute, you know, like maybe our kids are calling us, you know, we just didn't have—I certainly didn't have, you know, if I wanted to call my mom, I'd have to go to the pay phone and use my calling card and call her at the office. And you know what I mean, it was like—
Katie Fogarty 25:47
Yes, there was a lot more distance. Even if you were close to your parents, there was a lot more physical distance because you weren't, you know, FaceTiming them and giving them tours of your dorm room, or, you know, walking across campus with them in your pocket, and you know, I hear you. I went to college in the '90s too. I remember pay phones. Daisy, you and I are generation—time in the phone booth, right? We're generation pay phone. I get it.
I want to ask you about something that you write in one of your final chapters. Isabel's lover, who you've shared is Professor Connelly, is reading one of her stories, and he asks her about a specific line. And you know, she was 17 when she was writing, or the character was 17, and she says that she and her friends are "girls in the bodies of women." And this sort of catches his attention, and he asks her, "Is this how you see yourself? As a girl in the body of a woman?" And this question triggers Isabel in this part of the book to think more deeply about the concept of womanhood, you know, adulthood. And she concludes—and I wrote it down—quote, "I always thought there would be boundaries or milestones, something to mark the transition, but I was beginning to think the process wasn't binary and like consent existed somewhere along a vast continuum. The lines were only there until you cross them."
I love this. How do you define like womanhood, adulthood, like, have you crossed that line for yourself? Do you feel like we ever, quote-unquote, "arrive"? Are we always fully—like, is the line moving? Do we, you know, are we ever fully grown?
Daisy Florin 27:28
I think I've crossed the line. I think I am, like, fully adult. But it's a really fascinating thing to think about, because, you know, I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine who's 64 and I'm like, "Wow, that is another transition." Like I can see how that will be different, and I will be thinking about things differently and looking at the world from a different vantage point. But you know, the book, as you said at the beginning, is a coming-of-age story, and coming of age is really about a loss of innocence. And I think that, in a way, adulthood or that threshold—and I placed the book very specifically in her final semester of college, because I wanted to talk about that period of time, really specifically, because I don't think we talk about it enough. You know, we talk a lot about going to college. Like when our kids go to college, we talk about them leaving the nest. But, I mean, I think you have kids in college. I mean, they're not really leaving the nest. I mean, they're still in the nest. They don't live here anymore, but they're still very much in my nest. But I think that moment of like moving out of college and out into the world for me was very fraught. I didn't feel ready for it. I didn't feel prepared. And I really struggled through my 20s to kind of get my bearings. And I think that's what I'm trying to get at in the book, that Isabel is really looking for answers. She's looking to the adults around her to see, "Oh, do they have this information that I will also get, and that will make me an adult? When is that information going to be downloaded to me?" And of course, we know it—it's never really downloaded, or it's downloaded in fits and starts and all at different times, and maybe it's the first time you see your parents cry or they fail you in some way. You know, it's kind of messy, and she's looking at the adults, and, you know, without giving too much away, the adults around her are all falling apart. And maybe that's what she learns in this final semester that to be an adult is to in many ways, you know, fall apart in different ways and at different times.
Katie Fogarty 29:49
Right, that when you're younger, you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, like they all have it together. Like, when am I going to get it together?" And you get older, and you realize that that's a continuous work in progress. So you said that you, you know, through your 40s, you're now 50, that you do feel like fully an adult, like, what—what roots you in adulthood? I'm just curious what makes you feel like you've arrived in that moment of time where—I mean, I feel like I feel the same way too. I'm just curious to hear what your response is.
Daisy Florin 30:20
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, just what comes to mind just at this moment is being able to look up to, you know, like my—the generation above us, my, you know, my father, in-laws, aunts, uncles, like that whole generation, being able to see them in some way and have an understanding of what—I don't know, to understand them better. And then also, of course, look at my children, who are like, coming up and becoming adults too and being able to understand them. It's like, I really—I mean they—we use that term "sandwich generation" too much, but it's more like my heart is in both places. I can sort of place myself, you know, in my 85-year-old father and my 20-year-old son. You know, I'm like, both.
Katie Fogarty 31:04
Right? It's such—I think it's such a delicious phase, because, I mean, for me personally, both of my parents are still alive, which I just—I treasure, and I know that's not going to always be the case. And my kids are delightful, like they're finally sleeping through the night. They're sleeping most of the day. Sleeping most of the day. In fact, you know, when you're young, like, you're—I wish they would sleep through the day, then you're like, "I wish they would get out of bed. It's noon." My son texted me today at like, 12:45. He's like, "Ian and I are getting breakfast." I'm like, "Breakfast? I've already like, I'm on—we're on different time zones."
Daisy Florin 31:39
Different time zones.
Katie Fogarty 31:40
I mean, it's, like, so hilarious, but, you know, I mean, I don't feel like we're fully done. I still, you know, one of my kids is out of college, one is still in college, and one is in high school. And my daughter, who graduated after six months living in Australia, researching dolphins, is back with a wildlife conservation job in New York, but she's living at home because saving the world doesn't pay very well. So, you know, I do still feel like a full-time parent, which is great. I, you know, I love it. So I feel like I'm in that zone where I still have—as you shared, you've got your toes in both worlds. You still have parents, you still have kids, and I feel like I've evolved to be feeling very solid.
One of my wonderful guests, and I'm forgetting who it was, came on who talked about getting to midlife made her feel integrated. Oh, I know who it was. It was Laura Cathcart Robbins, who wrote a book about her addiction called "Stash." It's a phenomenal memoir, and she talked about the fact that when she was younger, she felt like she was pretending to be different types of people. And as she got rid of her addiction to pills, and as she did a lot of hard work in therapy, she began to feel fully integrated and fully herself. And I just love that, because I remember being the Katie that used to go to work when I was, you know, in my early job, like, pretending to be corporate Katie, you know. And then like Katie with my friends, and like Katie with my parents, you know. And then all of a sudden, I'm like, "Just Katie," like, I get to be fully myself, and I don't feel like I have to—I don't know, there's just less pretense. What do you think, Daisy?
Daisy Florin 33:16
I mean, I think that's—I think integrated is a fabulous way to put it. Because, yeah, it's like, I can even think back on in my 30s, even where I was—I still didn't know who I was. And I was like, "Oh, I'm bad at that, and I'm bad at that," and I was just sort of always focused on the things I was bad at and trying to improve them. And now that I'm, you know, 50, it's like, "Oh, I'm bad at those things. And who cares? I'm going to focus on the things I am good at," which is pretty much, like, one or two things, and I'm just going to just do them really well, you know. I'm not going to, like, invite you over for a dinner party and, like, you know, help you decorate your living room. You know, those are things I am not good at, but I can tell you, you know, what to read, or what was, you know, on the front page of The New York Times today, or whatever it is, these weird things that I'm interested in.
Katie Fogarty 34:04
Right? We focus on what lights us up, and you're very good at novel writing. I so enjoyed this book. I'm not kidding. I read constantly, and I've been reading my whole life. I used to commute in New York City walking around with a book in my hand. I used to get stopped by strangers, like "That's a dangerous way to cross the street." And I've read a million books, and this one is very special. I'm so delighted you brought it out into the world. We're heading into our speed round. But I just wanted to say thank you so much for being on the show, and I really—for my listeners who love books as much as I do, I definitely want to recommend "My Last Innocent Year," and then let me know what you think. DM me or message me or share your reactions to the book.
All right, Daisy, this is our speed round. This is just how we close with a quick kind of high energy and it's just one to two word answers to some questions. Are you ready?
Daisy Florin 34:54
I'm ready.
Katie Fogarty 34:55
Okay, let's do it. What was it like to see "My Last Innocent Year" on a bookstore bookshelf?
Daisy Florin 35:01
Thrilling.
Katie Fogarty 35:02
I bet. Okay. Are you computer or old school analog writing by hand?
Daisy Florin 35:10
I do both, but I love to write by hand.
Katie Fogarty 35:15
Nice. Okay, I can't write by hand because my handwriting is so bad. Was this book a solo endeavor, or did you wind up workshopping it in a writer's group? I guess the question really is like, did you work alone, or did you get feedback from other fellow writers?
Daisy Florin 35:32
I got feedback from fellow writers, but I was pretty careful about who I asked, and once I got that feedback, I kind of went off on my own.
Katie Fogarty 35:43
Smart, okay, here's another one. Isabel Rosen feels so real. Who is another writer or what's another book that gets women's voices right?
Daisy Florin 35:54
Sally Rooney.
Katie Fogarty 35:56
Nice. Okay, what's on the top of your to-be-read stack?
Daisy Florin 36:00
On the top right now is Jessica Knoll's "Bright Young Women."
Katie Fogarty 36:05
Ooh, I want to read that too. Okay, your book has gotten some really amazing coverage. Got a great review from The New York Times. Your book tour took you to places like my favorite, favorite indie bookshop for my D.C. days—Politics and Prose. What's been a surprising or cool thing about debuting a book?
Daisy Florin 36:24
You know, being in The New York Times, I have to say, was a dream.
Katie Fogarty 36:29
I bet. The paperback version of "My Last Innocent Year" is arriving any minute now. What has surprised you most about publishing a book between the launch of that hardcover and this new arrival of the paperback?
Daisy Florin 36:43
How many people read it and have reached out to me about it.
Katie Fogarty 36:46
I love it. That's so cool. I love hearing from listeners too. I totally get it. It's so nice. Sometimes you just feel like you spend all this time creating something, and when somebody takes the time to share that they love and appreciate it, it does feel super cool. All right, finally, your one-word answer to complete the sentence. As I age, I feel...
Daisy Florin 37:09
Confident.
Katie Fogarty 37:10
Nice. Daisy, this was so fun. I love connecting with authors. I really appreciate your finding the time. Before we say goodbye, though, how can our listeners keep following you, your work and learn more about your writing?
Daisy Florin 37:20
I am mostly on Instagram. So you can find me on Instagram at Daisy Florin. And you can also go to my website, daisyflorin.com and sign up for my Substack, which I send out from time to time. And it's called "Girls with Feelings."
Katie Fogarty 37:37
Nice. Okay, phenomenal. I'll put this all in the show notes. Thank you so much, Daisy. This wraps "A Certain Age," a show for women who are aging without apology. I have exciting news. We have almost 200 Apple podcast reviews. Can you help me hit that number? Did you learn something on today's show? Do you feel seen, supported, excited? Was it fun? If so, please take five minutes to write a short review of the show over on Apple podcasts. Special thanks to Michael Mancini, who composed and produced our theme music. See you next time and until then, age boldly, beauties.