Episode Notes
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan are the authors of four novels, most recently The Heir Affair, which was published this summer by Grand Central and is the sequel to their bestseller, The Royal We. Much like the two of them, the books are witty and hilarious, following the lives of a fictitious, modern-day British royal family from the perspective of a young American woman who falls in love with the heir to the throne while both are studying at Oxford.
And it’s fitting that Heather—a 1999 Notre Dame grad, by the way—and Jessica should write about royals because they are something akin to internet royalty themselves. They are the creators of Go Fug Yourself, the iconic website that bears witness to “fantastically ugly” celebrity fashion. Their work has also appeared in publications ranging from New York magazine to Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, W magazine, and Glamour.
Heather and Jessica talked to host Ted Fox about their new book and how they work together as a writing team as well as what makes for successful characters and the challenges of writing a sequel. The three made some time at the end to discuss the do’s and don’ts of covering celebrity fashion, too.
As for where they started, Ted had the opportunity to see just how well Heather and Jessica know each other’s writing.
LINKS
- Heather and Jessica’s two royal novels: The Royal We and The Heir Affair
- Heather and Jessica’s website: gofugyourself.com
Episode Transcript
*Note: We do our best to make these transcripts as accurate as we can. That said, if you want to quote from one of our episodes, particularly the words of our guests, please listen to the audio whenever possible. Thanks.
Ted Fox 0:00
(voiceover) From the University of Notre Dame, this is With a Side of Knowledge. I'm your host, Ted Fox. Before the pandemic, we were the show that invited scholars, makers, and professionals out to brunch for informal conversations about their work. And we look forward to being that show again one day. But for now, we're recording remotely to maintain physical distancing. If you like what you hear, you can leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Thanks for stopping by.
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan are the authors of four novels, most recently The Heir Affair, which was published this summer by Grand Central and is the sequel to their bestseller, The Royal We. Much like the two of them, the books are witty and hilarious, following the lives of a fictitious, modern-day British royal family from the perspective of a young American woman who falls in love with the heir to the throne while both are studying at Oxford. And it's fitting that Heather--a 1999 Notre Dame grad, by the way--and Jessica should write about royals because they are something akin to internet royalty themselves. They are the creators of Go Fug Yourself, the iconic website that bears witness to "fantastically ugly" celebrity fashion while giving those of us introducing them an opportunity to really practice enunciating. Their work has also appeared in publications ranging from New York magazine to Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, W magazine, and Glamour. Heather and Jessica talked to me about their new book and how they work together as a writing team as well as what makes for successful characters and the challenges of writing a sequel. We made some time at the end to discuss the do's and don'ts of covering celebrity fashion, too. As for where we started, I couldn't resist the opportunity to see just how well they know each other's writing. (end voiceover)
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, welcome to With a Side of Knowledge.
Heather Cocks 2:10
Thank you, so happy to be here.
Jessica Morgan 2:13
We are delighted to be here with you today.
Heather Cocks 2:16
To be considered knowledge ...
Ted Fox 2:17
That's right.
Heather Cocks 2:18
Lovely treat. (laughs)
Ted Fox 2:21
So, your new novel, The Heir Affair, it's the sequel to The Royal We, which Entertainment Weekly called, quote, "a breezy, juicy novel that's like The Princess Diaries with fewer made-up countries and more sex--the kind of book you can imagine Pippa sneaking into Kensington Palace." As I wrote in my own Goodreads review several years ago, "I never would've guessed I would love a book about a fictitious royal family so, so much." So normally, when I talk to a novelist or a biographer, I ask them to read a passage from the book to start, but I want to do something a little different here because you two write together. So I've picked three short passages from The Heir Affair that I'm going to read to you and then see if you can tell me which of you wrote it--or was at least, who was most responsible for it in its final form. And in coming up with this idea, I subsequently realized there is absolutely no way for me, for us, to check this if you guys can't remember. So it's really just an excuse for me to read lines from your book at you that I really enjoyed, so I hope that's okay.
Jessica Morgan 3:23
Yeah, go for it.
Ted Fox 3:24
So the first one, I'll give you the chapter clue, this is from chapter two. This is Bex, the main character, just narrating. "An email from my mother waited, updating me on various shenanigans with the Iowa Business Council--Mom had taken over my late father's fridge-furniture enterprise--and passing along the hometown gossip that Laundry Bill from Bill's Laundry had caused a scandal when he had an affair with Diner Sue from Sue's Diner, who was married to Cowboy Lou, who owned a hair salon."
Jessica Morgan 3:53
That is 100 percent Heather Cocks. I didn't touch a word of that.
Heather Cocks 3:57
Although I'm sure that Jessica and I went around once or twice about, like, Would it be called the Iowa Business Council, the Business Council of Iowa? Like, I'm sure we fell into, like, a Google wormhole about that because that's just who we are.
Ted Fox 4:10
I love that. I love the build of the different businesses in that one. Okay, so, selection two, also from chapter two. These are--I'm purposely not spoiling the book for anyone who hasn't read it, so ...
Heather Cocks 4:22
Thank you, I appreciate that.
Ted Fox 4:22
"Over the last several weeks, I'd written a hundred texts to Freddie that I'd deleted instead of sending--partly because I'd waited too long to know what to say. 'Hey, we saw a sausage roll that looks exactly like Cousin Nigel' didn't seem to cut it after all this time."
Heather Cocks 4:37
Jessica Morgan.
Jessica Morgan 4:40
That was me.
Ted Fox 4:40
Well, this is great. So now it's like we have a tiebreaker--(laughing) whose writing was I most drawn to at the beginning?
Jessica Morgan 4:47
In this one chapter that Heather, I believe, started.
Ted Fox 4:50
So we're moving ahead to chapter three.
Jessica Morgan 4:52
Oh, okay.
Ted Fox 4:53
Really jumping ahead now. This is Queen Eleanor, the queen. "'YOU WILL ALL BE SILENT.' Eleanor's voice exploded through the room as if she barked into a megaphone. 'This family'--she paused for emphasis--'answers to something greater than bonds of our blood. Our priorities cannot be so quaint. We maintain control. Never complain, never explain.'"
Jessica Morgan 5:17
That is Heather. But I will say we worked on this scene a lot.
Heather Cocks 5:22
Yeah. And I honestly--it's interesting to me that you picked the first two that we both immediately knew because so much of this book actually is both of us. Which I know sounds crazy because people see that, like, a book was written by two people, and they think, Well, one of you wrote half of it, the other wrote half, one of you wrote some characters and one of you didn't. And that's really not--we would start a chapter, like when Jessica mentioned that chapter two, I think I started chapter two. So I started typing, and sort of roughed it out, and then would send it to her, and she'd go through and edit through what I wrote. She'd add, she'd subtract, she'd changed the direction, she'd tweak sentences, you know, and those go back and forth a few times. So by the end of it, it really is like we've both written every single word. But yes, every so often there'll be, like, a particular joke that we remember. And it's usually that we remember that the other one did it because it's like, Oh, I remember the first time I read that. Like, I remember when I read the sausage roll-Nigel joke, and I was like, That's good. And it lived in the book in different--because we redid the beginning a little bit in the middle of our first draft, and it was like it was in a different context. I think I remember being like, No, she wrote that, and it really made me laugh, so we're gonna put this in here somewhere. But yeah, a lot of times, it's really just sort of a marriage. It's like a blend of, you know, who chose that word, I don't know, because there were six other words in there at one point, and we've discussed it.
Ted Fox 6:38
And that was--I mean, that was exactly where I was hoping--as much as I just wanted to read those things to you, that's what I really wanted to get at. You two have written so much together now, and you described there, Heather, the approach--would it, I don't know, would it feel foreign not working on something like this with a co-author now that you've, is it four novels that the two of you have written together? Is that right?
Jessica Morgan 7:02
Yeah. I sort of like don't understand how people write a book by themselves. (Ted and Jessica laughing) It seems very--I mean, like, obviously, I get it, I've written a novel, I know how to do it. But like, I feel fortunate in that you're working on something, and you're writing a book together, when you hit a section where you're like, Ugh, I don't know how to fix this ...
Ted Fox 7:26
Right.
Jessica Morgan 7:26
You can just send it off to the other person and be like, How are we going to do this? I'm obviously--and as a writer yourself, I know that you know this--like, most writers, it's not as solitary as it looks from the outside because most people have a lot of friends that they have to do beta reads of their books, or they bounce ideas off them. Nobody really ever writes a book alone. But I think that for me and Heather, we're very fortunate because we don't have to have that preliminary conversation where we're like, Okay, so in this book, she's in love with this guy, but they have this fight, and he is doing this and she is doing this and her mom is doing this, and like oh my God--okay, so anyway, here's the situation. I can just be like, Oh, this part sucks, like, what are we doing? (Heather and Ted laugh) [She gets all] the backstory. I remember I had a conversation with a friend of mine and Heather's, the author Robin Benway, who is a genius--like, she won the National Book Award, she's great. And, you know, I do think it is useful sometimes to get a perspective from someone who's really outside. Because we had, I was working on a section of the book where, I can't really tell you what's going on because it's a spoiler, but I couldn't figure out, like, a logistical perspective on it. I was like, I can't figure out how so-and-so sees such-and-such happening because she's not there, but she has to know about it. And I remember Robin being like, Well, I mean, it's probably on TV, and I was like, Oh my God, you're right, it's totally on TV! So sometimes you even, I think as a pair, you get really in, or as a solo writer you get I think really into your own space and you can't see outside of it. And that's when outside perspectives are great. But I think for us to have, like, another brain to bounce ideas off of is super helpful.
Heather Cocks 9:01
It's kind of the best of both worlds. Because if I haven't had the book for two weeks because Jessica's been working on it, it's just enough of a brain break that I do feel like a bit of an outside perspective because I'm getting this whole batch of text fresh. And it's kind of, it might be roughly what we had in the outline, or, as most often happens, we've realized that our outline was paced crazily, and we have to compress. And so she's realized, like, Oh, we got to get to this bit sooner, and so here's how I got us here. And so there are still plenty of surprises in there. So it's like it's my book, we have a shorthand with each other with it, we don't have to go over, we know everybody's motivations, we know the plot, we know where it's going, but I haven't seen it yet. And so I can kind of, it's like I can bring a fresh eye or she can bring a fresh eye to the thing that I'm working on without being a total outsider. So it's been really a blessing as far as that goes.
Ted Fox 9:49
I would imagine--and listening to the two of you, it's clear--that you work, there's a lot that you're in sync on when you are writing a book and you can give yourself space from the project when the other person can work on it, which helps. Do you ever have those moments where you really are, whether it's on kind of a meta level in terms of plot development or a specific scene, where you really are fundamentally opposed on how you think something should be executed? And if you do, how do you, working as a writing team, how do you work through that to get it to a point where you're both happy with it?
Jessica Morgan 10:24
Um, yeah, yes. I mean, there have been a few plot points where we, like, really kind of disagreed about it, but it's not like a combative disagreement. It's more like, I don't know if we should do that, maybe we should do this--I think we should do this, and I think we should do this. So it's more like a conversation. And one of us usually ends up talking the other person into it. Sometimes we end up talking each other into the other person's point of view, and then we have to, like, come back around again. (Ted laughing) So that's a mess. And sometimes it's more of a situation where, like, Heather will suggest something, I will say, No, and then she knows that my ...
Heather Cocks 11:05
(laughing) She doesn't snap it like that. Give yourself credit.
Jessica Morgan 11:09
She knows that my process is that sometime then later I will be like, Heather, we should do blah, blah, blah. And Heather will be like, Um, yeah, I told you that like six weeks ago. (Heather laughing) I'll be like, Oh, I forgot that, you're right! Anyway, I think we should. (Jessica laughing)
Heather Cocks 11:22
We both do that. And a lot of it is like, for me especially, plot is actually the part that I am the most uncomfortable and nervous with. Like, if you handed me a plot and [it] was like, Just sit down and write a bunch of words, I'd be like, Great, super. But the actual ins and outs of plot are hard for me. And so I'm never going to be the person who elbows into the room and is like, This is the plot, this is what we have to do, like, I've solved it. Because I'm always more like, What if, does this make sense, is this crazy, like would this even work? And so I think we both kind of approach it from that way. So if I have an idea of something, and she has an idea for something, and they're kind of at different ends of the poles, we both naturally tend to be like, Well, what if we did this? Let's talk it out. Does that make sense with people's motivations? And then what are the pitfalls that we're going to run into? And then if this was your idea, like, Here's this and, like, Here's my concern about that idea, but let's talk our way out of it, let's see if we can talk our way out of it. And often, like, yes, it takes a little bit longer, but just that conversation of, you know, Okay, let's say we did do that--let's follow it through, and let's make sure we're not setting ourselves up for a trap later. That often ends up lending itself to making the decision and in a way where we're both like, Oh, yeah, okay, yeah, we kind of do have to do this thing because the other one is going to get us into trouble.
Jessica Morgan 12:32
And I think we're also at a point right now, or at least certainly for this book, where sometimes we would be like, I don't know if this is gonna work; let's write it, and if it's like a disaster, we'll fix it.
Heather Cocks 12:42
(laughing) We've definitely done our share of that, as well. Like, Oh, we just have to keep moving, and it is hard for me to do that--to be like, Keep moving and not know if you've gotten it right. It's hard. But we've had to do that, too. And sometimes we are right, and sometimes we're not.
Ted Fox 12:58
As far as I know, neither of you are members of the British royal family. How do you write a book about being a royal when you are not yourself a royal? And I'm wondering--it's interesting to me in particular because Bex, our protagonist, Rebecca Porter, she's from Iowa, and she's married into this. And a lot of what runs through both books is trying to navigate that being an outsider in a world that has very particular expectations that you're not a part of. And I'm wondering if that helps in terms of just being a writer trying to get a foothold into that world that is a--seems like a very particular kind of world, I guess you could say.
Heather Cocks 13:36
Yeah, I think it definitely helps to be writing at it from the point of view of the person to whom it all seems a little bit new and a little bit strange because we are having to make certain leaps. Like, the royal family will always be opaque on a lot of levels. And so we can do all the research we want, we can go to the palaces, we can take notes on what the rooms look like, we can read, we can look something up in a biography or whatever-- you can look up a floor plan on the internet, which we've done. But at the end of the day, there are certain leaps you're just going to have to make. And so we sort of felt like by doing--we did as much research as we could to build the world, to get people that far with us, where it's like, Well, if this feels real to you, we've done our job, and you're immersed in this, then you're going to take some of those other leaps with us, and you're not going to really think about the fact that we can't possibly know what the queen's inner chambers are like. Or, you know, what are those setups that are always going to be behind closed doors that are never going to be, we're never going to know. Are there secret passages where Kate and William live in Kensington Palace? I don't know. Probably. I mean, I like to think so. But you know, if you can build the world around it, they'll go on the rest of that journey with you. But yeah, it's definitely a lot easier having your protagonist be the person who doesn't have all the answers because obviously we don't, either.
Ted Fox 14:53
I've heard you two talk about this before: You also have a lot of experience just covering the royal family. Did you cover, was it--I was about to say Frederick's wedding. (Ted and Heather laughing) You covered Harry's wedding, was that right?
Jessica Morgan 15:05
Yeah, we went and covered it for Cosmo. Obviously we were not in the wedding; we were outside of the wedding. Yeah. So we did go over for that.
Ted Fox 15:14
Have you gotten feedback over the years from British readers in particular in terms of how true to life or how true to their experience of observing the royal family [the books are]? Because I think it's interesting hearing you, Heather, talk about, you know, there's a certain degree of it being opaque that will always be there that in some ways, also, you know, then can work to your advantage of, Well, no one unless they've actually lived it can really come in and say, Oh, no, this isn't right, this wouldn't happen. But I'm wondering about people that, you know, the monarchy is part of their country, have you heard from them over the years in terms of their reception of both books?
Jessica Morgan 15:52
I would say that, just like as an FYI, Heather is actually herself a British citizen, so she grew up in England and her dad is British. So we had an in-house expert in a sense, although she was a child when she lived there. And for The Royal We, a very good friend of mine and Heather's is herself British, so she read it to give us like a--it was really just to make sure that we didn't screw up any of the vocabulary. Because we wanted our British people to sound as British as possible. No, you know, I don't know that anyone would really come to you and be like, You nailed it. But I do think maybe they would tell us if we really, really screwed it up.
Ted Fox 16:35
Agreed. (Ted laughing)
Jessica Morgan 16:36
I'm sure there is stuff that we did screw up. Like, in fact I know there's a section in Royal We where someone says "sweater," and they should really say "jumper," and it's annoyed me for five years that I didn't catch that. But other than that, no, yeah, we haven't really gotten that kind of feedback that I can recall.
Heather Cocks 16:51
I think partly because so much of the book is from the outsider's experience, that it's that perspective that, you know, if you're living over there, your perspective is different. There is a part in Heir Affair that I think comes the closest to that where it's just sort of a--it's a description, and it's just sort of talking about how when you step back and think about the monarch's insignia that's on everything, and how, like, their face is on the money, their face is on the stamps, the ER is on the postboxes, the ER is over buildings, and it's so baked into your life. And then you think about--I was thinking about this in the context of my dad, who obviously was born when Queen Elizabeth's father was king. And so when we lived over there, occasionally you'd see in circulation, you'd see a shilling that had George on the back instead of her--very few and far between, usually like if you were in a pub, and you'd be getting change from, like, a slot machine or something, and it was like the old-school stuff. And I wish I had talked to him about that a little bit. So he would have been young enough, but he would have experienced it, and I kind of wish at the--you know, he's no longer with us unfortunately--and I wish I thought to have that conversation with him. Just because it's interesting to think about all the things that have to shift and that have to become a really new normal, and I think we're going to be looking at that with Queen Elizabeth at a certain point. And so there's a bit in the book where it sort of comments on how to live there and to have all that soaked into you, and how jarring it will be if and when all of those things have to change. That's like this closest sliver to I think what you're talking about of, like, how a British person might feel, like, living among the monarchy is portrayed. I think that's a valid thing to have observed. But interestingly, I was over there--shortly after my dad died, we were over there doing some memorial stuff. And it was, I guess it probably wasn't shortly after he died because it was after Prince George was born. And we were talking to some friends of ours who live over there, who have lived over there forever; they're like my dad's old pub mates. And they were like, What was that? They were like, We saw all those people outside the Lindo Wing, like, what a waste, what a waste of time and money all to get the same picture, all to get the same footage--like, it's just a baby. And I was like, That's your future monarch. (Ted and Heather laughing) But they were sort of like, I mean, like a lot of ado about--it's, you know, who cares? And that was an interesting perspective to me that I had not expected.
Jessica Morgan 19:17
I think the Americans in a way start--I mean, obviously this is a massive generalization that I probably shouldn't make--but I do think Americans have a ... Let me put it this way: Some Americans have a special interest in the royal family as like a soap opera that I don't think you have if you're British necessarily.
Ted Fox 19:34
Mm hmm. I think, too, just having read the book because, one, I mean, you know, my limited royal-watching perspective, it certainly seemed to work very well to me. And one thing that really impressed me--and The Heir Affair is fresh in my mind from just having read it and just having finished it--I think so much of it, too, comes from how fully you're able to inhabit the characters and make them empathetic figures regardless and just putting yourself in that position of, Okay, what would it be like to have all this attention thrust on you at all times and all your minor movements are tracked that way? And I think you do a really fantastic job with that. And one thing that I wanted to ask you was, kind of looking beyond Bex as the protagonist and even kind of that inner circle, is that I felt like the secondary characters are so richly drawn, and Queen Eleanor in particular. Like, I really felt in this book that I really had a sense for her and had some conflicted emotions about her and those sorts of things. And I'm wondering, when you're thinking about your constellation of your characters around your main character or your main couple characters, what are you going for with them? What makes for a successful character, pardon the pun, in your book when you're thinking about how you're crafting all these individuals?
Heather Cocks 20:51
I always like there to be a little something unexpected, I suppose. I think people are more interesting when they're not just one thing, which I know we've struggled a little bit with the Richard character, which is the father of the princes, because he is meant to be sort of a strict and generally unpleasant and duty-bound person. And we didn't want to do that thing where all of a sudden we were like, but you know, he's redeemed, there's a warm and fuzzy side that makes everything better. But we were like, he's got to have some shades. It's okay, if at the end of the day, he leans away from those shades, and he's still a jerk, but he needs some--there needs to be some hidden depths there, which I think actually are more ... we touch on them a little bit in each book, but you know, I do think everybody needs to have something, like a twist. You know, with Bea, Lady Bollocks, she is their sort of most prim and proper and disapproving friend. But she is not like that always. That is who she comes across to them the most. But you know, you start to peel away the layers, and you see that there's a core of someone in there who actually really cares, despite how she may show it. And so I guess that's it. That's most of what I think we tried to do, and sometimes it's just testing it out on paper and seeing what works. I just think you always want your characters to have flavors and shades because that's what real people do. And people can surprise you. People can surprise you, and you think, Oh my gosh, I've seen the human side of you, and then they turn around, they act like a total jerk the next day. That's normal, too. But yeah, I think just making them not just one-note, give them--give them a symphony, if you can.
Ted Fox 22:22
The mechanics of writing a sequel--this was something I was really interested in in just reading it, particularly I was thinking about it a lot in the first 50 to 100 pages. What do you go in assuming or can you assume that people know? Do you--is it, I go in writing this assuming they haven't read The Royal We, so I have to make sure I don't lose them? But you're also trying to balance not wanting to repeat too much. How do you strike that balance in terms of how much from the first book to include in the second to bring people along?
Jessica Morgan 22:50
So that's hard. First of all, I just want to say up-front, you should read the first book first, you are going to be confused. I have seen some people online who are like, I didn't read the first book, and I like this. And I was like, I'm glad you liked it, thank you--I think you'd like it better if you read the first one because you had to have been confused. God bless your heart for not saying that you were, like, very perplexed for the first hundred pages. The other thing is, like, the first book came out five years ago. So you have to sort of expect that even if the person had read the first book in the series, they're not gonna remember everything--like, a lot's happened in five years. So you do have to kind of reset the scene. And I have to say it's very difficult to make it not feel like a clunky exposition dump.
Heather Cocks 23:33
We went around on that one a little bit. I think originally we tried to put too much in the first two chapters, so we ended up sort of spreading it out across ... you'd think I'd remember. I've sort of--we wrote it, and we worked so hard at it, and then it came out, and I'm just, I've like released it. The first three [chapters], I believe, we stretched because you don't want to go too far with confusing people. But yeah, we had crammed a lot in the first few chapters, and then our editor was like, We can tease this out a little bit more. And she was 100 percent correct. Yeah, it's an info dump. It's hard.
Jessica Morgan 24:03
I mean, my joke was always that we needed to have--if it was a TV show, you know, it'd be like, Last week on The Royal We! And it would, like, get you back up to speed. And it's very difficult to do that in writing. And a lot of times, it does feel like you're on a soap opera, you know, and if you watch a daily soap opera, they're very adept--or sometimes not adept--but they're very accustomed to doing the like, Ooh, this person maybe hasn't tuned in for three weeks, so I need to have this character be like, I'm going to go have a meeting with so-and-so--my archrival!--I've never, I don't trust him after he tried to steal my business! (Ted laughing) And they're like talking to a person who obviously knows all this, and it's for the audience. So it is, you know, there were times when I would be writing some of these expositional dumps, and I'd be thinking, Oh my God this is so clunky, this is very hard to do elegantly, and then you just realize, Look, I read books that I think are great and that come to an expositional dump, and I'm like, Here comes the exposition dump. And I take it in, and then I'm like, Thank you, that's useful. And then I, like, move forward. So it is very hard to do it elegantly.
Heather Cocks 25:06
And I thought this even just with one book that we had written, like, when we started diving into the exposition, I remember thinking, God, why did we make this so complicated? Like, it is hard to sum up all of the motivations and feelings and well, this happened--and I remember trying to sum up Bex's and Freddie's history from The Royal We and get at, like, [what it was] was really hard because you think, Well, am I leaving out, like, the important nuance that this is how they were feeling at the time and this is what, they were on a break and like, what am I leaving out that is gonna misrepresent that? But I also don't have two pages to be like, Okay, let's back up the truck. Like, we got to keep this moving. So I think their relationship in particular was a challenging one to sort of encapsulate in a way that was accurate but also breezy. And it took some tweaking--I mean, it really, and finicky tweaking, it wasn't like we just, like, stopped and rewrote the paragraph six times. Like, it would just be like, What about this word? Or maybe that word isn't quite accurate. It was--it's challenging, but it's worth getting right. We sort of had to chart out, like, What is important to know for this scene, do we need the whole story in this scene? And I think the one that we had done too early--we had done a whole bit where you found out what happened, like, at the end of the first book, you know, we literally picked up right with that moment. And like, who did they call first to talk through what was maybe going to happen? And we, like, went through that. And we ended up cutting that. Because we were like, you know what, maybe that doesn't matter. And we had a throwaway line from that character later that was like, When you called me that night, I couldn't believe it, you know--and that was how we ended up taking care of it. And that's in chapter four or five or something. And the confrontation with--when we reveal what happened with Eleanor that day, we'd had that early, so I was like, People aren't gonna wanna wait for that. And then we were like, Actually, people can probably wait one more chapter for that, and we can just tease out that something happened, words were had. So it took some--it took some sort of splitting it up and being like, Prioritize--what do people need to know now? What do they need to know to make sense of this scene, and what can we dangle to be like, Stay tuned, it's coming?
Jessica Morgan 27:08
I think you kind of forget sometimes that, like, when you read as a reader, especially when you're reading a book, you don't totally understand everything that's going on, and that's okay. Like, not everything has to be answered immediately. You can be like, Oh, I wonder, what's the explanation for this? I'll keep reading.
Ted Fox 27:22
Exactly.
Heather Cocks 27:23
Right now from my children, because we're trying to get them to watch more movies, and it's just a constant, What's that, was does that mean, what are they doing, what are they doing? And we're sort of like, If you would stop talking and listen, they might be answering your question in the movie right now.
Ted Fox 27:36
Right, right.
Heather Cocks 27:37
Which is totally fine; we all do that. We all have that instinct, but like, it's relentless with the two of them. They're twins and they're just like, if it's not one, it's the other. And you're like, It's okay, just let it unfold, you're not supposed to know that yet, everything's gonna be revealed, it's gonna be fine.
Ted Fox 27:51
We've talked about Bex's--her relationship, her past with Freddie. She's married to Nick, the second-in-line to the throne, and he at one point remarks, "The last time I left the house, a blogger wrote an entire article about how my casual trousers are too wide ... she used a lot of caps lock." And it does have echoes of your other life writing about celebrity fashion and red carpets, and a pal of mine here at Notre Dame who does a lot of the University's social media--her name is Liz Harter, she is a huge, huge fan of both of you, and I promised her I would mention ...
Jessica Morgan 28:24
Hi, Liz!
Heather Cocks 28:24
Hi, Liz!
Ted Fox 28:25
... I would mention her name. She wondered, and suggested I ask you, as coverers of fashion, how do you figure out where that line is in terms of critiquing people's style, what's fair, what's not fair? Especially given--I mean, social media is a razor's edge at all times now, and I would imagine that's kind of a hard ... I mean, talking difficulty and how much to put into a sequel from the first book, I imagine [this is] a difficult balancing act, and it's probably gotten more difficult since you started doing it, I would think.
Jessica Morgan 28:58
Well, Prince William's pants are always fair game. (Ted laughing) He's a public figure, and if he wears wide, dumb pants in public, I'm gonna write a capsy post about it. And you know what? He's a gajillionaire white guy and the most privileged person in the world. He can freakin' deal with me not liking his pants. (Ted laughing)
Heather Cocks 29:16
That says it all. Yeah, the royals are the most public of public figures, I feel like that is all fair game. But we do--you know, we talk about on GFY [Go Fug Yourself], we have like what we call the Britney Rule, which is when Britney Spears was having her acknowledged ... when she was having her very public breakdown. And like there was a 5150 psych hold, I think, and her parents were having a conservatorship, and she'd shaved her head, she was waving the umbrella--and like, we're not here to diagnose anybody, but that was sort of a, that was pretty well-confirmed what was going on with her. We were like, Okay, we're not going to touch this right now. Because whatever's going on with her, that's punching down. She's struggling in a legitimate way, and so making fun of her cutoffs is not--it's not sporting right now.
Jessica Morgan 30:05
Yeah.
Heather Cocks 30:05
There's something happening there. And we've not had to invoke it very often. But you know, we did like when Rihanna was going through the domestic abuse with Chris Brown, we were like, you know, if she turns up two days after the Grammys, and she's wearing terrible boots, like, these are the least of her problems at the moment, and we're just not gonna go there. You know, I think right now, were Kanye out in public, we would not be discussing that. Because I just think, you know, everyone kind of has to be in on it, I think, a little bit. Like, celebrities are really--their public image is crafted, it's very often an art. A lot of these paparazzi, there's a lot of medical buildings in Los Angeles, and for the paparazzi to suddenly know exactly which one someone's emerging from at a certain time of day is not super easy. And I'm not saying that everybody calls them on themselves, but when you're a celebrity, I think by and large you know you are going to be seen. You probably at times when you're leaving the house, you know if you go to a certain place--if you're at The Ivy, paparazzi live outside that restaurant. If you're on a red carpet, obviously, it's completely--like, this is all image-crafting. And so I think it's, by and large, I think everything is fair game. You know, it's fair game right now that you could make fun of me for wearing a t-shirt with a hotdog on it. (Ted laughing) Like, what am I doing? And I'm at work at a professional ...
Ted Fox 31:29
I was gonna say, I really classed it up with a polo shirt. I had my MTV The Challenge t-shirt on earlier and I was like, I said to my wife, I was like, Should I change? I was like, I feel like Heather and Jessica would be okay with that, but I'll put on the polo shirt.
Heather Cocks 31:40
Love it. I forgot to change. My shirt, underneath the hot dog, it says "Laundry Day" on it. And the reason I'm wearing this is to remind my children that they need to do their freakin' laundry today. And I was like, If I take it off, I will forget to put it back on and message will not be received, so we're just gonna run with the hot dog. And whatever, everyone take your shots, it's fair. Yeah, I mean, I think that's basically it is we just try to make sure that we're not punching down. And obviously, we are not perfect at this, and occasionally it will happen, and then you realize later and you're like, Dang it, that wasn't--I shouldn't, that was maybe not okay. And all you can do is just sort of own it and try to do better the next time and hope that people will give you the grace to figure that out.
Ted Fox 32:20
So, my last question goes back to the opening of the book. It opens in a really unusual Airbnb where Nick and Bex have gone to disappear from the public eye. Can you please describe the Airbnb and please tell me that it is actually real?
Jessica Morgan 32:36
It is real. It is a real Airbnb in Scotland in this place called Wigtown that is Scotland's book capital, and it's an apartment above a bookstore. And part of the gig is when you stay at the b&b, you also get to run the bookstore for the week. So you can, like, do whatever you want with the bookstore basically. I mean, you can't, like, give out the books for free presumably, but you can do the shelves how you want, you can do the window how you want like you're a bookstore owner for a week. Isn't that charming?
Ted Fox 33:04
It's amazing.
Jessica Morgan 33:05
No, we have not been there. Obviously, no one's been anywhere for a while. But it is, like, very booked up. No pun intended. And yeah, it is a real bookstore. It's called ...
Heather Cocks 33:17
Called The Open Book.
Jessica Morgan 33:18
Thank you.
Heather Cocks 33:19
We changed the name of it, I don't know why. I guess at the end, we were like, Well, I guess we're taking some liberties with describing the living quarters. And we wanted it to feel sort of old and quaint and whatever. And we didn't want the actual owners of The Open Book to be like, Wait a minute, we modernized the kitchen. Like, we didn't want them to be offended because we weren't trying to--we think it's great, but we did have to sort of make up some stuff. So we changed the name of it. But I think in the acknowledgments, we wrote the name of the place and we were like, Please, everyone try to go stay there and tell us how it is. It sounds awesome.
Jessica Morgan 33:48
Well, and apparently, so in Wigtown, they have a big, giant book festival every year, and it is--they couldn't do it this year because of COVID. So I think all of the booksellers there are having some financial concerns. So check out Wigtown booksellers. And if you're listening to this in Scotland, buy your books from the Wigtown people I guess.
Ted Fox 34:10
Heather Cocks, Jessica Morgan, this was so fun. Thank you so much for making time to talk to me today.
Heather Cocks 34:15
Oh, it's our pleasure, thanks for thinking of us.
Ted Fox 34:18
With a Side of Knowledge is a production of the Office of the Provost at the University of Notre Dame. Our website is withasideofpod.nd.edu.