In Search of the Beast in the Clouds with author Nathalia Holt

I’m a big fan of Nathalia (Nat) Holt’s books, and am so excited to have the opportunity to talk to her about her new book, The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers' Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda.

I first met Nat when her book Cured: The People Who Defeated HIV came out and I attended a book event at Dartmouth Medical Center. She is so smart and curious and in this episode we will be talking about the process of researching elusive history, where her ideas come from, and who gets to tell what stories.

Nathalia Holt’s website

Transcript below!

EPISODE 455 - TRANSCRIPT

Jess Lahey

Hey, AmWriters! It's Jess Lahey here. I am so excited to talk about a new series that I am putting out there on the Hashtag AmWriting platform called From Soup to Nuts. I interview and work with and mentor an author—a nonfiction author—who has subject matter expertise and a killer idea, frankly, that just knocked me sideways. This author really thinks this is the time and place for this idea. And I agreed, and I asked her—I begged her—if I could mentor her through this process in a series. We're having to work together on agenting and proposal and all the stuff that you've got to do, from soup to nuts, to get a book out into the world. This series, From Soup to Nuts, is subscriber-only. The first episode is free, so you can go back and listen to that. That's for everyone. But if you want to join us for the whole process and learn from her mistakes—and learn from the stuff that I'm working on right now too—you have to subscribe. So consider supporting the Hashtag AmWriting podcast. It helps us bring you stuff like this—these extra series—not to mention the podcast itself. Alright, it's a lot of work. Help us support our podcast and these extra bonus series. By becoming a supporter, you'll get a sticker for it. You'll get your hypothetical, figurative sticker for being a good Hashtag AmWriting.

Multiple speakers:

Is it recording? Now it's recording, yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. I don't remember what I'm supposed to be doing. All right, let's start over. Awkward pause… I'm going to rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.

Jess Lahey

Hey, this is the Hashtag AmWriting podcast. This is the podcast about writing all the things—writing the short things, writing the long things, writing the queries, the proposals, the poetry, the fiction, the nonfiction. This is the podcast actually, at its heart, about getting the work done. I am Jess Lahey. I am your host today. I'm the author of the New York Times best-selling The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation. And you can find my journalism at The New York Times and The Atlantic and The Washington Post. And today I am interviewing an author I respect deeply. I have known this author since she wrote her first book, which overlapped with some work that my husband does and some work that I had done in a previous career, and she has gone on to have a glorious and enviable career in nonfiction. My dream has always been to be one of those people that can, like, get curious about a topic and then just go off and write about that topic. And this is what she does. So Natalia—NAT—Holt, I am so excited to introduce you to our listeners. They are deep, deep, deep lovers of the nuts and bolts and the geeky details of the writing and the process. So welcome to the Hashtag AmWriting podcast.

Nathalia Holt

Thank you so much. I'm excited to talk to you today.

Jess Lahey

So we have a book on HIV—the first book, Cured, which is the way that I got to know you. Also, full disclosure, we share an agent. Laurie Abkemeier is our agent, and I think she actually may have introduced us in the first place. Yeah, your first book—yeah, your first book, Cured, about the Berlin patients. Really interesting—if you've never heard of the Berlin patients, listeners, just, just Google it. It's really a fascinating story. I'll go over—I'll go read Cured. Cured is all about the Berlin patients. And then we have The Queens of Animation—the women behind, sort of, the way Disney does what they do. And—and—and then we also have Rise of the Rocket Girls, which is another fascinating book out there about the women behind a lot of the math and the planning and the work that was done to get us into space. And so when I heard about your new book, I'm like, "Oh, NAT's working on a new book. Great! What women are we going to talk about this time?" And it's such a departure for you, and it is such a fascinating topic for you. And, well, for me, it’s like—it’s deep in my geeky, Jess-book-loving nonfiction zone. Could you tell us a little bit about it and where the idea came from for this book?

Nathalia Holt

Sure. The book is called The Beast in the Clouds, and it's about an expedition that the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt took in 1928 and 1929. And they went to China and Tibet in search of the giant panda, which at that time was unknown to Western scientists. And even in China, there were very few people that were aware of where this animal lived, what it ate—so little was known. So during this time period, the 1920s, you have all of these expeditions going to China, trying to find this black-and-white bear that no one is really sure exists. It's just a crazy period of history, because you have all of the other bears at that time—even polar bears—were known and even were in zoos. But the panda was not, and many people even thought it would be a ferocious bear. They thought this was going to be, you know, a combination of polar and black bears.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, yeah.

Nathalia Holt

So that's what the Roosevelts are going to. And so the expedition ends up being torturous, deadly. They're going through the Himalayas. They're not very well prepared. They lose all their food. They're attacked. They get lost. Just every crazy thing happens to them. But it's also a journey of transformation. They're documenting all of the ecology around them, and it really ends up changing their own worldview. And so it was such a fun book to research and to write. And I spent a lot of time also going into many of the other ex—many of the other members of the expedition, which was—which was fun, and maybe a little bit different than other books in this genre. But yeah, for me, you know, it's scary to be writing a part of history that is very different than what I've done before—but it's also fun.

Jess Lahey

Where'd the germ of the idea for the book come from? Because I had never heard this story before. I guess it had just never occurred to me—like, where do we—how do we know about the panda bear?

Nathalia Holt

Yeah, it's not a topic that has been written about much before, and I came across it while I was researching my last book, which is called Wise Gals, and is about women that helped form the CIA. And as part of that book, I was looking into the Roosevelts' role in World War Two. And it's so confusing when you research the Roosevelts, because they all have the same name. It's just Theodore and...

Jess Lahey

Actually, I have to tell you, Tim's a huge fan—my husband, Tim, who you also know, is a big fan and has read a lot about—and he's like, "Well, which Roosevelt?" So you—and I'm like, "Oh, that's a really good question. I don't know which Roosevelt... like, the adventuring ones." He's like, "Well..." [unintelligible]

Nathalia Holt

Yeah, there's so many of them, and they all have the same name. And so as I was trying to parse out son and father—who are both named Kermit Roosevelt and both served in World War Two—I kind of stumbled across this expedition that the elder Kermit Roosevelt had taken. So he and his older brother, Theodore, who were the sons of President Theodore Roosevelt, and so it just kind of—it came from there. Just sort of came from wanting to learn more about it. And I always love a challenge. If there's a topic that's difficult to research, that seems impossible to find anything about—I'm there. I want to know everything.

Jess Lahey

Yeah. So, okay, so here's a—really a question that I—well, first of all, you and I are both research geeks. I just—I have said I could just keep researching books and not actually write the books. I just love that process. So aside from the easy answer, which is Google, like, where do you start with a story that hasn't been told yet? How do you start diving into that story, and where do you find information?

Nathalia Holt

It's difficult, and it depends on the topic. For this one, I went through a number of different archives, and that was great. I was able to get old letters that the Roosevelts had. But I really wanted to bring in other voices. I was really, really persistent in my desire to bring in Jack Young, who was this young, 19-year-old, Hawaiian-born translator and naturalist on the trip. And I was fortunate enough that I was able to track down some interviews he had done with another author back in the 1990s, and I just was persistent. I just pleaded until I got these tapes and was able to get all these interviews with him. And then I also contacted his daughter, who lives in Hawaii, and was able to get his unpublished autobiography. And it gives such an interesting perspective, because Jack Young went on and became a very impressive person and really deserves a biography all of his own, but he was also very close friends with the Roosevelts. They had a real connection—a real bond. And you get a different sense of the story when you're hearing it through his descriptions of what it was like, because he is young, and he is sort of really documenting things for the first time. And then, in addition, I was so lucky with this book because I was able to also get the field journals from a scientist that was on the expedition, as well as all the writings from another naturalist. So it was fascinating, because there were so many different accounts of the same events, which really lets you go into detail about what it was like, what people were feeling, what they were seeing. And I don't think I've ever had that before—where I have so many different accounts of the exact same events.

Jess Lahey

That's really cool, because it gives you that ability to, you know—if we went with just Jack Young's account, then you've got the Jack Young lens. And as you well know, history gets to be told by certain people, unless someone like you comes along and says, "Oh, wait, this account has not been brought to the surface," whether it's the women who are the animators at Disney, or whether it's the women who are part of NASA. So how do you—if you go into something like this and you have a limited number of perspectives—it sounds like you had a fair number of perspectives going into this, but since the documentation happened—usually tends to happen among the more powerful, the more privileged people—how do you manage getting a full perspective on an event like this expedition when you may have limited perspectives?

Nathalia Holt

That is the real challenge, because it's easy to get the Roosevelts’ documentation.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nathalia Holt

I have all of their journals, all of their letters. I am able to get into real detail about what this expedition was like for them. Even the difficult parts—for them—they really documented that, and everything has been saved. For the others... it's much more difficult, and it really requires that persistence of being able to get the letters. Being able to get the autobiography was really key, because he goes into so much detail about what things were like. And these interviews that he did were also really, really helpful, because he goes into a lot of his feelings about what it was like to be with the Roosevelts on the expedition, about how he felt… Because his father was born in China, his mother was born in San Francisco, he himself was born in Hawaii—which, at that time, is not part of the U.S.—he feels like he doesn't have a country. He doesn't know where he is. So when he's in China, he can speak all of these languages, but he's still struggling to connect and be able to talk with people, because there are so many dialects.

Jess Lahey

Yeah.

Nathalia Holt

And so to be able to get into what that was like, and how he felt—just gives such a perspective—a different perspective of the expedition than perhaps what is usually had in these kinds of books. And he also talks a lot about the guides on the expedition, which was really interesting. There were a lot of women that were part of this expedition. Half of the guides, who kind of act as Sherpas—they, you know, they carry things, they lead the way, they guide the route, they make camp. And so there are just some great moments with these guides—especially the women guides—where they are just protecting from crazy marauders that have come down and have attacked the group. And lots of great moments like that. That was really interesting to document. And in addition, another thing I was able to get for this book is—there was actually some early video and a lot of photographs that were taken.

Jess Lahey

Oh my goodness.

Nathalia Holt

By one of the members. And that is just such an incredible thing—to be looking at video of this expedition in the 1920s—it's just amazing.

Jess Lahey

Okay, so geek question here, since this is definitely what our listeners like the most. So I haven't laid hands on the book yet, because it's not out yet—did you put photographs in the book? Were you able to get access to photographs, and did you put them in the book? And I ask that because whenever I write a proposal or we're working on a book proposal, we have to indicate whether or not there's going to be artwork, and that changes things in terms of budget, and it changes things in terms of permissions and stuff. And I was curious about—I’ve never dealt with that side of it before, but maybe you have.

Nathalia Holt

I have. I've always sent photographs, and I love it. Because I feel like it helps when you read the book—especially a book like this.

Jess Lahey

Yeah.

Nathalia Holt

You know, when I'm describing what they look like, and where they are, you want to see it with your own eyes. And so it's really interesting to be able to see those photographs. And I had so many, and it's always a challenge to parse out—who has the permissions? Where do they come from? Finding the photographs—this always takes forever. Fortunately, this particular book was maybe a little bit easier, because a lot of the photographs are out of copyright, that had been published at that time. So that was nice. But yeah, no, it was still just a mess, as it always is. It's always a mess to figure out who do photographs belong to. I feel like I would love to become a lawyer—just for that moment in researching a book.

Jess Lahey

That's a whole layer I've never had to go into. And it was easier for me to—rather than just say, "Yeah, I'd like to include this one thing," and then I realized the nightmare that's ahead of me in terms of accessing and getting permission and all that stuff. I'm like, "Eh! Let's just stick with what we got in the print." But, for something like this—and especially when you're writing about, for example, animation, or if you're writing about, you know, this expedition, and there's art available—you know, it sounds like it's really, really worth it for that aspect. I mean, that's definitely something I would want in this book. So I think I know the answer to this question. This is a heavily loaded question, but are you—when it comes to research and it comes to what you include in the book—are you an overwriter or an underwriter? Or do you land pretty much—like, when you're doing your editing, are you like, "Oh no, this was the perfect amount to include?"

Nathalia Holt

Oh, I'm a terrible overwriter.

Jess Lahey

Oh. So am I!

Nathalia Holt

It's really a problem. But I worked very hard on this book at cutting, and it was not easy for me, because I do always tend to go way overboard. I'm always over the word count that I'm supposed to be at—with the exception of this book, where I did a very good job of cutting it down and really trying to focus and not, you know, getting too distracted.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, we joke all the time with my other co-hosts and friends that my—like, my history sections in both of my books could have been half of the book or, you know... and all the stuff that ends up on the floor ends up getting told in cocktail parties. You know, "By the way, did you know how many, you know, kegs of beer there were on the ships that came over? I do. Can I share? Because I did all this work and I've got to put it somewhere." And there's this weird—there's this weird line between, "Look, look how thorough I am. Can I have an A+ for how thorough I am?" versus what your reader might actually be interested in. I keep some of my favorite notes from my former editor, and she's like, "Yeah, the reader... no. Reader doesn't care. Not going to care. You know, this may be really fun for you, but maybe not for your reader." So—but I can imagine with something like this, you know, the details of the flora and fauna and all that other stuff—it would be really easy to get off on tangents that are not necessary for the core mission.

Nathalia Holt

Yes, absolutely. But in some ways it was easier than my past books, because it only takes place over a year, which is incredible. Most of my books take place over decades, and the cast of characters is much smaller as well. And unlike some of my past books, I feel like I need to include everyone out of fairness—which is kind of a weird way to approach a book. I don't recommend it. That's not the way to do things. But yeah, if you're really just looking at a few—a handful of people—over a year, it's much easier to stay on track. So that was a good exercise for me.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, there's a—there's a line I love, where David Sedaris talks about the fact that what it takes for him to purchase something is if the clerk at the store has gone to the trouble to take it out of the case, to show it to him, and then he feels like he has to buy it because he—someone went through the trouble. And same thing for me. If, like, someone's going to go to the trouble to be interviewed, then cutting that entire interview, or cutting that whole through line, or whatever that person is a part of, is incredibly painful to do. And then I feel like—I feel obligated. So it's a difficult—it's a difficult balance, you know, between what your readers are going to actually want and what makes for a good book, versus doing right by the people who spent time talking to you. It's a hard balance to strike. Alright, speaking of being in the weeds and geek questions—so I'd love to talk to you a little bit. I was just—I'm mentoring someone for a little series we're doing for this podcast, sort of from soup to nuts, from the beginning of an—from the inception of an idea to getting a book out. And the very first thing she did was send something to me in a Pages document. And I had to say, "Hey, you might want to think about using Word or maybe Google Docs, because, like, I don't have Pages." So—some details about how you work. Number one, do you have a preferred app that you like to write in? Because I'm a Scrivener gal.

Nathalia Holt

I mean, I prefer Word because I feel like it is the most universal. It's the easiest to send to people... and so that's what I go with.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, I use Scrivener only because it allows me to blank out the rest of the world really easily. Okay, and then organizing your research. This is something—the question of organizing your research, how you know you're done researching and really just need to actually start writing the words—are the two questions that I get the most. Because the research could go—especially on a topic like this—could go on forever. So number one, given this voluminous research that you had, how do you organize your research? Do you use folders on your computer? Do you use folders in—you know—how do you do all of that?

Nathalia Holt

I do folders on my computer, and then I also do hard copies that I actually keep organized in real folders, which helps me, because then, if I'm going into a specific topic, a lot of times it can be easier to actually hold on to those documents and being able to see them. So I do both. Um, and...

Jess Lahey

Has everything pretty much been digitized in this area? Do you feel like—or do you have to go into rooms and, like, actually look at paper documents, and sometimes they don't let you scan those? So, you know, how does that work for you?

Nathalia Holt Yes, it's very difficult if they don't allow you to photograph them. Usually they do. Usually you can. So I have always had to digitize documents, and there's so many different ways to do it, but now it's much easier just to use your phone than anything else, which is great. Very happy about this development. And yeah, I think—I think maybe that's part of the reason why I do like to print things out is because that's how I was first introduced to the material, so it can be useful for me. But there's way too much material to print everything out. I mean, there's so many hundreds, thousands of pages even. And so it's always just going to be sort of key documents that end up making their way into the actual folders, and then the rest—it's just, you know, organized by topic. Make sure images are separate, by person.

Jess Lahey

So then, how do you know you're done? Like, how do you feel like you're at a place where I now know enough to come at this from—to come at the storytelling from an informed place?

Nathalia Holt

That is really a good question, and I'm not sure I can answer it, because I feel like you're never done. You're always going to be researching. There's no real end to it.

Jess Lahey

But you have to start. Well, and this—this takes—this is separate from the question of, like, how much research—how much research do you have to have done for the book proposal? Like take it for example, for example, The Addiction Inoculation, where I needed to learn, really, a whole new area... that was a year-long process just to write the proposal for that book, and then another couple years for the book. So, for me—and I'm very happy to say—I got to ask Michael Pollan this question, and he had the same answer that I feel like is my instinctual answer for this, which is when I start to say, "Oh, I'm starting to repeat. Things are starting to repeat for me," and/or, "Oh, I already knew that," and so I'm not finding out new stuff or encountering things I don't already know at the same rate. It's starting to sort of level off. Then I feel like, "Oh, I've got this sort of, like, you know, mile-high view of the—of the information," and I maybe have enough in my head to start actually being an expert on this thing.

Nathalia Holt

That's a good answer. That sounds responsible. I'm not sure that I do that, though. I think for myself, there's not a bad time to start, because it's going to change so much anyway, that for me, I almost feel like it's part of the learning process. Is that you start to write about it, and then as you go along, you realize, "Oh, this is not right. I'm going to change all of this," but it's all just part of helping you move along. And I think even from the beginning, if you start writing even just bits and pieces of how you want to write the scene, you want to think about this or outline it, that can be helpful, and it doesn't matter, because it's all going to change anyway.

Jess Lahey

That's true. I actually find I write—the way I write is very specific, in that each topic I'm going to write about in a chapter has a narrative arc, story that goes with it. So I—that narrative arc story gets written first, and then I drop the research in as I go along. But I remember, with The Gift of Failure, a book came out that had a key piece of research that then I had to go back and figure out, "Oh my gosh, this impacts everything." And so I had to figure out how to sort of drop that in. And I couldn't have done it at any other time, because the research didn't exist or I hadn't found it yet. So that's a tough thing to do, is to go back and sort of link the things to something new that you think is important. But the research part is just so much fun for me. Again, I could do that forever and ever and ever. Do you? So the other thing I wanted to ask... and this is selfishly... do you have large boxes in your home of all the research that you feel like you can't get rid of, even though you wrote the book, like, five years ago, ten years ago?

Nathalia Holt

I do not. I pare down.

Jess Lahey

You do?!

Nathalia Holt

After time, yes. It's hard to do, though, because it's hard to throw things away, and I definitely have folders that I keep. They're just full of things that I can never get rid of. And obviously it's all digitized as well, but there are things like that that mean a lot to me, that I can't get rid of.

Jess Lahey

Well, there's actually—this was a very selfish question, because I actually just went through and finally got rid of a whole bunch of stuff that... I felt like it was at the heart—it was the main research for The Gift of Failure, and I used it to mulch my gardens. I put—and so it was like this metaphorical kind of, like, knowledge feeding the thing that I care about the most right now. And so I used it to mulch all the paths in my gardens and create new garden beds and stuff like that. But I'm always curious about that. Like, I every once in a while see something on, like, "X"—what used to be Twitter—or someplace like that, like, can I get rid of the research from the book I wrote 25 years ago? Or is that too soon? Well, so when exactly does the book come out? Give us your—give us your pub date.

Nathalia Holt

It comes out July 1st.

Jess Lahey

Okay. And I have to say... cover is gorgeous. How did you land on that cover image?

Nathalia Holt

Oh, I really didn't get much say.

Jess Lahey Okay.

Nathalia Holt

The one thing I—I mean, you know, they have whole people that have skills that do these things, but one thing I was very passionate about was keeping the brothers on the cover in their expedition gear. So originally, the publisher had wanted them to be in suits on the front, and I just hated it. I hated it so much, because I feel like they need to be on the trail. You need to see them as they were on the trail. And so that's one thing I really pushed for. And I was fortunate that they—they listened, and they were okay with that.

Jess Lahey

Well, I'm just—I mean, this book is going to have such a great place alongside books like The River of Doubt and other, you know, really wonderful books that are about the expositions—that the expeditions that get taken by these historical fixtures—figures. And I'm just—I'm so excited for this book. I'm so happy for you about this book, because it is just—when I started telling people about the topic, they're like, "Oh, I would read that." And I'm like, "I know! Isn't that the best idea?" And that's part of the magic, is coming upon the really cool idea. And so I'm just really, really happy for you and really, really happy about this book and excited for it.

Nathalia Holt

Thank you. Oh, that's so nice to hear, especially because this was a very difficult book to get published. I mean, there was a real moment where I wasn't sure I was going to find someone that would...

Jess Lahey

Well, can you—I didn't want to ask it. You know, this is—having—doing a podcast like this, where we often talk about the mistakes, we talk about the blunders, we talk about the stuff that went wrong. It can be really, really hard because you don't want to bite the hand that feeds you, or you don't want to, like, make anyone think that this book wasn't anything other than a 100% lovely experience from beginning to end. But I would love to talk about that, if you're willing.

Nathalia Holt

Oh, sure. I don't really have anything bad to say about anyone. I think it's—I think it's understandable that people wouldn't naturally think I would be the best author to write this. I haven't written other books like it, and so it was a difficult book to sell. It wasn't easy, and it definitely crystallized to me how important it was that I write it. I really felt like this was my purpose. I really wanted to write it, and maybe it's good to have that moment, because it really makes it clear that this is something you need to do, even if it's not easy, even if it's tough to find a publisher. And I was fortunate that I did. You know, luckily, there was an editor that—sort of at the last minute—believed in it enough to give it a go. And yeah, it's just—it always feels like a miracle when the book comes to fruition and is actually published. It just seems as if that could never really happen, and this one was a difficult road to get there, for sure.

Jess Lahey

Well, especially since a big part of the proposal process is trying to convince someone that you're the—you're the person to write this book. And in this case, it's not so much because you're a subject matter expert going into it. It's that you're a really good researcher, and you're a meticulous writer and a meticulous researcher, and most importantly, this story speaks to you. And I think, you know, some of my very favorite nonfiction books that I recommend over and over and over again—narrative nonfiction—it's clear in the reading how excited the author was about the story, and I think that's part of the magic. So I think you're the perfect person to write it. I don't know what they could have—because if you are—if you're fired up about the story... And as an English teacher, and as someone who's had to convince middle school students why they need to be excited about this thing I want to teach them, the enthusiasm of the teacher is part of what can spark the engagement for the learner. So I think that's a really, really important part of any book. Plus, you got to—you're—as an author, you're going to have to be out there talking about this thing, and so you better love the topic, because you're going to be talking about it for ages.

Nathalia Holt

Yes, absolutely. I mean, no matter what, this is many years of your life that's dedicated to a topic. But I think it's—it’s a good lesson in general, that you can write in one genre and one kind of book for years, and then it might not be easy, but it is possible to actually break out of that and find other topics and other things you want to write about. We grow. We all change.

Jess Lahey

Yeah, one of my—one of, as our listeners will know, Sarina Bowen, one of my co-hosts and one of my best friends—she’s—she has written romance forever and ever and ever, and she's like, "You know what? I want to write a thriller," and it has been a really steep learning curve and also a huge effort to sort of convince people that she can do that too. But it's also really, really satisfying when you show your chops in another area. So—and I had an—as I was going through sort of the details about this book, and reading about this book, I was thinking, you know what this would be really, really good for? An exhibit at someplace like the Field Museum, or like an exhibit of—oh my gosh, that would be incredible. Like, if this is a story that hasn't been told, and there's a lot of art, and there may be video and photographs and all—and journals—man, that would make for an amazing—if anyone out there is listening, that would make for an amazing museum exhibit, I think. And of course, everyone's listening to me.

Nathalia Holt

That would be amazing.

Jess Lahey

Everyone is listening to me...

Nathalia Holt Oh, well, they should.

Jess Lahey

All right. Well, thank you so, so much. Where can people find you? And is there anything else you'd like to talk about that you're working on or that you're excited about? Besides, you know, just getting this book out into the world?

Nathalia Holt

You can find me at nathaliaholt.com and on Instagram and Facebook and X @NathaliaHolt. And yeah, right now I'm pretty much focused on this book. I have something else percolating, but it’s still away a good days. So it’s the fun research part. Isn’t that...?

Jess Lahey

You will notice I did not ask you what's next, because to be asked what's next when you haven't even birthed the thing you're working on now can be a little irritating. So as someone who's aware of this inside baseball, I didn't even. Later on—privately—I would love, because I'm a big fan, big excited about your work, and love, love introducing people to your work. So I think—and also, one of the things we talk about a lot on this podcast is having books that are exemplars of good research, of good storytelling. I have a stack of books that I keep near me when I need to dissect something to get at—oh, this person did a really good job with, for example, historical research, or this person did a really good job of using their expert voice, and I need to tap into that today. I think your books are—would be excellent, excellent selections for our listeners, for their pile of exemplars for really well-done research and telling other people's stories—historical stories that occur in a sort of in a modern context. Your books are really dissectible, and I know that's super high-level geek stuff, but they’ve really helped me become a better storyteller as well.

Nathalia Holt

Thank you. That's so kind of you. I really appreciate that.

Jess Lahey

All right, everyone—go get the book, read the book. Don’t forget to pre-order, because that really matters to us authors, and don’t forget to review it wherever you purchased it, once you have read it. And Nat, thank you so much. And I apologize for calling you Natalia at the top of the hour. I'm so just so used to doing that—Nat. And until next week, everyone, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.

The Hashtag AmWriting podcast is produced by Andrew Perella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output—because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.

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