It Will Come Back to You
Welcome to the final installment of our summer short-story series, where we’re meeting up every other week over video to discuss a new collection. This week, we discuss It Will Come Back to You by Sigrid Nunez.
AUG. 25, 2026
It Will Come Back to You
Rosecrans Baldwin: Hello, welcome. It is Tuesday, August 25th. It is our final installment of the Summer Tournament of Books—Summer Reading Short Story Collections—for our final installment. We have It Will Come Back to You. Andrew, you have read this book, I have not read this book. If you were to go off the top of your head, though I imagine you have prepared notes—what was your favorite story? What was your impression? What’d you think about this book?
Andrew Womack: I loved it. I would say that of all the books this summer, the Louise Erdrich is the one that I would recommend to probably most people, but this is the one that I would recommend to a few people. It’s crushing in a lot of ways—the stories in here are absolutely memorable. I’d say overall I have a couple of favorites I’d like to talk about. For the least favorite, I do have one that just kind of chilled me to the point where it was my least favorite, even though it was perfectly told—everything in here I thought was perfectly told, in my opinion. There’s just a couple in here I can tell I’m gonna remember forever, but probably one of the ones I keep thinking about is “Airport Story.” And I loved “Airport Story” because I have an airport story. I think everybody has an airport story, and that’s what’s so funny about it—at the end of it, you realize, this is her airport story, and it is awful, it is terrible, everyone’s got one. Mine’s not that bad, I’ll tell it to you. But it’s like at the end of it, you see all the people commiserating, talking about this horrible experience they’re having at the airport, and they’re all talking about their worst airport stories, and then her story gets that much worse, and you realize it’s her airport story—which is such a great title for it. So, my worst airport story…
Rosecrans Baldwin: Sorry to interrupt you, I just wanted to throw this out there—so, after you and I chat here regarding your airport story: what we’re going to ask is that folks who’d like to share a little bit about their experience with this collection use the React function, or the hands-up function, to let us know you’re interested in sharing, so that you and I and Andrew can talk about it. Throw up a hand, I’ll try to keep track of people in terms of who joined the line first. But Andrew, on that note—what is your airport story? God, I have so many airport stories. Okay.
Andrew Womack: I know, right? That’s what’s so great about the airport story—everybody’s got one.
Rosecrans Baldwin: It’s a genre, yeah.
Andrew Womack: My worst airport story is—I was flying, it was at Thanksgiving, it was in the winter, and I was flying from Austin to Altoona, Pennsylvania. It was kind of a last-minute thing, and I ended up taking, I think, four flights total, and two of them were kind of those little twenty-seat jets—the tiny planes. And toward the end of my journey, when I started getting up into the Northeast and getting on these smaller jets—of the two final legs, they were both small planes. The first of the two was when I experienced my first air sickness. I’d only ever taken large jets, so I’d never really experienced that before, and I was like, that was terrible, that was really bad. Nothing awful happened, but I realized why the bag was on the plane—I’d never really known why, and now I did. When we landed—I want to say we landed in Pittsburgh, maybe? Anyway, so we landed, and then I was about to take the final flight, and I saw this guy who was about to get on the same plane I was getting on, and he was drinking a giant Coke and eating a Snickers bar, and I thought, that’s a bad idea, you shouldn’t do that, buddy. And he was reading this giant Tom Clancy book, too—I want to say it was Tom Clancy. Anyway, we got on the plane for the final leg—he’d eaten all this, and I thought, well, at least I’m not gonna be sitting next to him. And I was sitting next to him. It was at the back, on the bench. And we hit just a pocket, and he ejected everything down my leg, all over me. I was appalled, obviously, and all I wanted was some human recognition, and he had that giant novel and was just shielding himself with it—which I wished he’d done earlier, but he was shielding himself just from my glare. That is my worst airport story. Another one—this was the second book this summer that I was able to experience by a pool, and that was very enjoyable, short stories by the pool are pretty perfect. It would have been the second story in the book, which was “Greensleeves.” I loved “Greensleeves”—I was just really taken with the way it unfolds, it’s very cinematic. You think you’re hearing these two people talk, and then it’s like the camera just starts to shift and focus on new pairs of people at what you begin to realize is a party, and the way the focus shifts around throughout the story, and then goes into an entirely different setting—a couple different settings. It’s just beautiful, and it is 100% cinematic, and as my son likes to say, absolute cinema. The storytelling in it is amazing. I want to also point out a story I was particularly blown away by, and you could kind of see it coming from a little ways away—it was “Curiosity.” That’s the one where the woman is working on the Lower East Side, at a cafe, and her neighbor is a prostitute, and she goes away for a bit, and she’s so curious about this person’s life that she goes over into her apartment. Does anyone remember this story? Yep. Crazy, right? That was absolutely crazy—loved how that one turned out, the way it was told, I thought that one was pretty perfect. But I do want to talk briefly about “The Plan.” That was the one I found to be absolutely chilling, so perfectly told—that was the one about the strangler. Oh my god, I was gripped by this story about the strangler.
Rosecrans Baldwin: That seems a little.
Andrew Womack: I’m really sorry! But it was chilling—it was beautifully told. And then the one thing I want to mention at the very end here, and then I’ll stop—I loved “It’s All Good.” I loved the whole Brad Pitt impersonator thing, it’s amazing. There’s a lot in there about dementia that was very beautifully told. It was in—it was in “A Mother-Daughter Story.” That was the last one I wanted to talk about, and the reason—I loved that one, I was just really taken with it throughout, following their story—but something that made me want to make note of it, was that when we started this back in June, talking about short stories and beloved short stories, this is probably one of my favorites: “Where I’m Calling From.” It’s classic, everybody loves it or detests it, I don’t know. How do you feel about Raymond Carver, Rosecrans?
Rosecrans Baldwin: Spent perhaps too much time reading him during undergraduate, but several of the stories are amazing. Perhaps because I’m like a publishing gossipy bitch, his relationship with his editor and his editor’s involvement in his stories I found fascinating, and his—wife? Second wife? Tess Gallagher.
Andrew Womack: Yeah.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Her poems, especially as he was dying—knockout. Also, he drove, when he was dying, drove around the country, rented a Jaguar, I believe, just visiting friends, which I think, if you’re gonna go out, it’s a fucking sick way of going out. But that’s—you asked me for my opinion, there’s my opinion. Yeah, Raymond Carver, extraordinary, no question.
Andrew Womack: There are so many stories, and it’s so memorable, right? So many of the bits in here—and that is what I feel like this summer and just my own experience with short stories overall, there’s always these stories that I feel like I can remember from beginning to end, and they just always stick with me forever. And in this one, it was “A Small, Good Thing.” In this book, of course, that’s what she’s known for, but in the Nunez, she talks about “A Small, Good Thing” in “A Mother-Daughter Story.” So to me it was just some sort of synchronicity—my most beloved short story, one of the ones I always think about, that just always crops up in my head, is “A Small, Good Thing,” and I loved that it was name-checked in here. And instantly I’m like, hey, Lyle Lovett, right? Because he was the baker in Short Cuts. So anyway—there you go, that’s my impression of the book, and the summer, and short stories, and just everything I’ve ever read, basically, in a nutshell, and it only took fifteen minutes.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Amazing. Okay, well, thank you, Andrew Womack. So those who might be interested in sharing their opinions, please raise a hand, and then we can get into the conversation about your favorite stories, about your airport stories, about how the summer has gone for you broadly speaking with regards to the Tournament of Books and these short stories. We can cover all topics, we’ve got a moment. We’re gonna start first with Kate. Hi, Kate, nice to see you. Tell me about either your favorite story or your overall impression, and let’s go from there.
Kate MacEachern: One of the things I thought about this collection was that this is an author—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Nope. Sorry, couldn’t hear you for a second. You’re great, you’re great, please go.
Kate MacEachern: One of the things that really struck me about this collection is that this author had a number of very short stories that were only maybe four or five pages, and it is rare, I think, for an author to really land a story in four to five pages, and I thought she succeeded in doing that. “Worried Sisters,” and “The Balloon”—there were several that were really, not microfiction, but definitely on the shorter end, and I thought they managed to bring an entire story to life in that world. But I want to mention “Imagination,” which did some really, really strange things, and did it well—for me, that was a really interesting and evocative story.
Andrew Womack: Yeah, that one with the teenager.
Kate MacEachern: Yes.
Andrew Womack: And—
Kate MacEachern: A teenager who would scream horrifically because the scream just wanted to come out of her, with all kinds of odd other behaviors that were just sort of—well, no, it was just what I should do, except it wasn’t.
Andrew Womack: I love that one, too. There was a part at the beginning—I loved how it was told, it was just very surreal—where it was talking about this specific way in which a person was described, as, like, an animal, I believe? That’s a beautiful one, I love that one too. I know what you mean about the short ones, the four- or five-page ones, and “Worried Sisters” I felt the same way—when I got to the end of it, I thought, wait, where’d we just go? Are we done already? Because it was, I think, four pages long. It really covered everything, it was like all you needed to know. That’s cool. Did you have anything else, Kate, or—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Well, thank you.
Andrew Womack: Oh.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, I was gonna say, Kate, anything else, or is that—
Kate MacEachern: That’s good.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Airport stories?
Andrew Womack: Okay.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Okay. Thank you, Kate. On to Peggy. Hello, Peggy, how are you?
Peggy M: Folks, I’m doing well, and reading these stories over the summer has really been a treat—it’s definitely added to my summer to come and talk to you all about them every couple weeks. This week I read three of the stories, “The Plan,” “Greensleeves,” and “Worried Sisters.” I liked all of them. I would put this as my second favorite collection after Louise Erdrich. And Andrew’s description of “Greensleeves” was outstanding, and it actually added to my appreciation of the story—I already liked it, but your comments about it being a cinematic story, following the camera, that was excellent. My favorite story was probably “Worried Sisters,” because it was a narrative arc I haven’t seen before, and I agree, it delivered in just a few pages. So—that’s it! Oh, and I do have an airport story. This was many years ago, I was traveling to the Canadian Arctic, so I got on a small bush plane to go up to the island I was going to. I went in and got in my seat, and a flight attendant, or somebody connected to the small airplane, came through the aisle and said, do you have everything you need? And I said, yeah. And she said, okay, great, and got off. And then they put the sled dogs on. It turns out they stacked the aisle from floor to ceiling with cages of sled dogs. So that was a very exciting plane trip.
Judy Morris: Wow.
Andrew Womack: So I have questions. Did—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Gotta go on mute, that is so good! Oh, Jesus Christ!
Peggy M: I’ll tell that story—it’s in memory of “Worried Sisters,” I tried to deliver the twist at the end.
Andrew Womack: Oh, God. Were they—did they bark?
Peggy M: Sled dogs are not friendly. When I got to the place I was going, the local people said, never walk past the dogs with food in your hands. And I said, alright.
Andrew Womack: Oh my god. Okay. No thank you. No thank you, Peggy. Oh my god. Okay, everybody think of your airport stories. Cool. Who do we have?
Rosecrans Baldwin: Thank you, Peggy, really appreciate it.
Andrew Womack: Peggy.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Andrew, unless you have anything else to add? Fucking shit, can you imagine?
Andrew Womack: I can’t. No, I’d be terrified. Yeah, just be terrified.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yay. Just, like, floor-to-ceiling sled dogs? Like, that’s extreme.
Peggy M: Yeah, that’s—
Rosecrans Baldwin: That is—
Peggy M: Hard.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I know what flight attendants complained about.
Peggy M: I think they were stacked three crates high, actually.
Andrew Womack: Oh my god. Oh, Lord.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Okay, we can just—should we just wrap right now, or do you think there’s more to come? I think there might be more. Tristan is next. Tristan Bullington, hi, nice to see you. Tell me about—or tell Andrew about your thoughts about this book.
Tristan Bullington: I’m really glad I get to follow the sled dog story, because it’s gonna go real downhill, real fast for me. Sorry. I thought this was just okay. I really felt like a lot of these felt like Nunez was like, I got an idea for a novel, wrote it, and then went, I don’t want to write a novel, but I want to do something with this, so I’m gonna publish it. I felt they needed to be developed more—it wasn’t that I was left wanting more, it was that I felt a lot was left out, and it was missing something to be complete. But I did like a couple of them. I liked “Imagination”—I thought she did a really good job of capturing how confusing it is to be fourteen, and how hard it is when you lack the language to describe what you’re going through but you’re still trying to, and just failing miserably, coupled with things you used to do as a little girl that are okay, that now are kind of unacceptable, because you’re fourteen and your body’s changing and whatnot. So I thought she captured that well. And that one, I was left wanting more—I didn’t feel like she left things out. And I thought “Curiosity,” which we’ve talked about already, was good. At the same time I was reading this, I was reading Lonesome Dove—I’m still reading Lonesome Dove. In “Curiosity,” the neighbor ends up being a prostitute; in Lonesome Dove, the term for prostitute is a sporting woman. So I kept thinking about that—oh, she’s a sporting woman, she’s a sporting woman—and I’m probably the only person who did that, because I’m probably the only person who was reading this and Lonesome Dove at the exact same time. But it was fun to read polar opposites, nine hundred pages, five pages. Anyway, I thought it was just okay. I didn’t dislike it, I gladly read every story, none of them were horrible, but—I’ve read other Nunez, and I think she can do better. And I have an airplane story. When I flew back from Edinburgh earlier this year, I decided the book to read on the plane ride home was Sky Daddy, which is about a woman who sleeps with planes and wants them to crash with her. Do not—great book, don’t recommend reading it on a plane. That’s my airplane story.
Andrew Womack: I remember when we—that was on the long list, Sky Daddy was.
Tristan Bullington: It would have been great if it made the full list. It was so good.
Andrew Womack: I know there was discussion about it—why wasn’t that on the shortlist? I remember that. But I didn’t read it, I remember the synopsis when we were putting it together—sounded amazing.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I thought that was an excellent book. I think there was debate within the committee as to whether it was a shortlist book or not, but yeah, extraordinary book. Did not read it on a plane, does not sound like a good idea. Tristan, Andrew, anything else there, or should we keep it moving?
Andrew Womack: I mean, I have no—I love what you were saying about “Imagination,” and every time we have one of these discussions, I decide I want to go read the story again, and I do. So I just know, based on the last couple comments, that that’ll be one I go back to, as well as “Worried Sisters.” So, thank you.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Got it.
Andrew Womack: Cool.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Thank you, Tristan. On to Bryn. Hi, Bryn. Tell us what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling. How about this book?
Bryn Lerud: I’m finding now that listening to everybody talking about it is making me appreciate it a lot more, this book of short stories. I read this a couple weeks ago and took a bunch of notes, and I think my notes are sometimes more enjoyable than the books. Sorry—it’s like “Imagination.” “Imagination” was really fun, and it’s an example of the author juxtapositioning—whatever that word is—all kinds of weird things that don’t go together. So my notes for “Imagination” say: problem girl, bathing suit at a party, scream, olive pit. And then she goes outside naked and falls and breaks her ankle. And that story just ends there, which is fine, I don’t demand an ending for anything I read. But so many of them just didn’t end—they just stopped in the middle of something, which is okay, but when I was reading it, I just couldn’t connect, really, to them—an emotional connection to the story. Except maybe “The Rabbit’s Foot.” I really liked “The Rabbit’s Foot,” because it took, like, several different stories—this woman working in a hotel, and first there’s the mystique of the Duke who’s staying at the hotel, and then we get her whole backstory, which I also really found fascinating, but the two things didn’t really sync together—which, again, is okay, but it was kind of an off-putting experience for me. So, now I want to go back and read the whole thing again, but I probably won’t.
Andrew Womack: Yeah, I felt the same way about “The Rabbit’s Foot.” I was enjoying it every time I was in it, but yeah, it didn’t stitch up, did it? I’m seeing in the chat the observational aspect of it, the anecdotes—that they’re just kind of these passing things, they kind of dip in and then just sort of—
Bryn Lerud: Right.
Andrew Womack: Fade out, without further exploration. And yeah, you do see the Duke again, or whatever he was, the rock star.
Bryn Lerud: Right, then his other story about him sexually molesting somebody—
Andrew Womack: Right.
Bryn Lerud: Yeah.
Andrew Womack: And then there was, like, the Keith Richards thing in there, wasn’t there?
Bryn Lerud: Oh, that’s right!
Andrew Womack: Yeah, it was—
Bryn Lerud: Weird things.
Andrew Womack: Windows.
Bryn Lerud: Together.
Andrew Womack: Yeah, it’s like—overheard, and I think Emily said that in the chat, and I think that’s a really interesting way of putting it—it kind of drifted by, and then there’s something, you know, catastrophic, or some minor catastrophe, and then you don’t go there again. But yeah, “The Rabbit’s Foot” was very—it just felt very stream-of-consciousness, almost. Not exactly, but, you know.
Bryn Lerud: Did this—
Andrew Womack: The real question, Bryn, is—you have an airport story?
Bryn Lerud: Okay, I have one. This is right after the pandemic, so everything was kind of still weird—I mean, not like it’s not weird now, but anyway. I was flying from Portland, Oregon to Hartford, Connecticut, long ways. And somehow, I was always trying to get flights as cheap as possible, and I got this flight that went from Portland to Fort Lauderdale, and then change planes and go Fort Lauderdale to Hartford, which doesn’t really make any sense, and it was only, like, a half-hour connection time—it was stupid. But of course I missed my connection, and they said, well, you have to go from Fort Lauderdale to the Palm Beach airport, and then there’ll be a plane from there to Hartford. So I walked a long ways, and it was really hot, and then took a bus, and then a train, and then an Uber, and then finally I got to the Palm Beach airport, which is—which is the Mar-a-Lago airport.
Andrew Womack: That’s the one that’s no longer the Palm Beach airport, yes.
Bryn Lerud: I don’t know why I’m not even gonna say it, but it was, like, the ritziest airport I’ve ever been in. And, yeah, I went to the Mar-a-Lago airport to go visit my son in Hartford. That’s my airport story.
Andrew Womack: Well, we’re glad you made it out alive.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Glad you made it out alive. Which—as someone from Connecticut, I’m curious which insurance executives are making the trek from Hartford back and forth to Palm Beach.
Bryn Lerud: Oh, that’s—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Even being a thing, but—
Bryn Lerud: That’s an excellent question. I don’t know, my son was a graduate student at UConn, so he had nothing to do with insurance.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Sure, okay, go Huskies! Bryn, anything else? I mean, that’s—
Bryn Lerud: Yeah, that’s it.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Okay, well, thank you very much. Moving on to Kay. Hi, Kay. Thoughts, feelings, where are we at on this book?
Kay Nelson: Well, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings that are similar to other people. Like Bryn, this book kind of—it was okay, but then as you’re speaking about it tonight, I’m like, oh, I do remember that, oh, maybe it is a little bit better than I thought. I don’t know if I was just fatigued from reading so many short story collections—I had set a goal to read more short story collections this year, but I think next year will be maybe three or four for the whole year, and that’ll be enough. So some of the things I didn’t like about this book is that I felt like a lot of the endings—I’m like, what happened, I didn’t understand what the resolution was, and I do need an ending. Someone said they didn’t need an ending, I think Kay said she didn’t need an ending. But I’ll mention a story nobody’s mentioned yet—I liked “The Naked Juror.” Because—I’ve hardly ever been called for jury duty, I don’t know how many years I went before I finally got called, but I’ve never even made it into a courtroom, and I live in Chicago, just to give you an example, so there’s a lot of people there. But this woman—she’s, like, obsessed with it, she wants to really be on a trial so badly, it’s crazy, and she knows how the whole process works. But then it just kind of gets weird—she has the dream, and she’s naked, and she’s in the jury box, and she’s talking, and everybody’s listening to her, but there’s flowers, and wine, and cheese, and my notes say, question mark, question mark, question mark—I don’t know what that was all about. So overall I liked the book okay. There were a lot of stories that felt personal to me because I have an aging mother, and those are kind of hard to read. She does not have a crush on Brad Pitt, however, so I don’t have to worry about that—she likes Jeopardy. So I’m liking the book more as I’m hearing what people’s comments are—I kind of gave it three out of five stars before. And, like, the “Imagination” story—some people have given some great insights, too, like, that poor girl had some problems, you know? I wasn’t quite sure how you—
Judy Morris: It could be—
Kay Nelson: —fourteen and be at that point. But I think her mother had problems, too, like, the mother with the summer house obsession, when it wasn’t—you know, it was only a short distance away from their other house, and she had all—
Andrew Womack: Oh, right, yeah.
Kay Nelson: —what it was gonna be, so maybe you can’t blame the daughter, maybe the mother had some issues, too. As far as airplane stories, mine pale in comparison. I used to travel for business all the time, I was in internal audit, and the whole time my flights were canceled twice—I can’t even tell you how many hundreds of flights. One time it was canceled at O’Hare, so I just went home. The other time, we rented a car and drove the rest of the way, because when you’re working on business, it’s so easy to just spend the company’s money and get there. But my one story is from 1987, which would not happen today. My grandmother died, so I had to catch a different flight home from Boston. I get to the airport, and I have to change my ticket, and somebody’s planning out their whole year of vacations at the ticket counter, booking this flight. Finally, the person at the desk was like, is anybody on the flight to Chicago? And I’m like, yeah, I am. Oh, come up, come up—they held the plane for me. They would never do that today. They held the plane, met me at security, rushed me through—I got on the plane, and everybody’s looking like, this is why we’ve been sitting at the gate waiting for some person. I just find that so amazing, because that would never happen today.
Andrew Womack: A celebrity in our midst.
Kay Nelson: Yeah, right?
Andrew Womack: Who, who is she?
Kay Nelson: I know!
Andrew Womack: She must be an influencer.
Kay Nelson: Definitely. They didn’t exist back then.
Andrew Womack: Read it now.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Hey, let’s just be clear, you’re coming from Chicago—was this United?
Kay Nelson: Yes, it was United.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Okay, well, respect, as United has sort of started to fade away. Okay, thank you so much, Kay.
Andrew Womack: Oh, I wanted to talk about “The Naked Juror”—I read that in a waiting room, actually, so I’ll just kind of associate it with that, nothing serious. So, anyway, “The Naked Juror”—I was just fascinated by how she wound up in a courtroom with this person she had this affair with, right? And that’s when you find out that she didn’t—I love the way it was revealed, that it was like, oh, it’s just somebody who looked like that. And then she ends up seeing him in the old neighborhood, right?
Kay Nelson: Right.
Andrew Womack: She goes—and I liked how it had the reveal, the fantastical nature of it, the way it could never have possibly happened, I just loved that. In the midst of doing all of this, Rosecrans knows this, none of you are gonna know this—I have been reformatting a lot of the old, we did a big migration of all the old website, The Morning News, over onto this new platform so that it can live forever. And there was this one piece—we had this writer named Matthew Baldwin, who wrote for us for many years, a very funny guy, and he wrote a story about his desire to finally get on a jury. So I was reading that in the midst of reading this book, as I was reformatting this old piece. And I also saw Tristan noted that apparently these people exist who want to be on juries, so I don’t know, they’re Matlock fans? I don’t know, I’m not sure.
Rosecrans Baldwin: —about is the 30 Rock joke, it’s just Rural Juror playing.
Andrew Womack: Rural Juror, yes.
Rosecrans Baldwin: That’s what—
Andrew Womack: I thought it was a joke about that at first, when I saw “The Naked Juror,” I was like—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Literally the greatest—that show had a hundred and ninety jokes per episode, and that is the most outstanding joke of all time. Kay, thank you so much, unless you have anything else you want to add?
Kay Nelson: No, we like the Rural Juror in this household, too.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Sick. Okay, thank you, Kay, appreciate it. Amanda, hello—Amanda, apparently airlines do still hold planes for people, what the fuck are you talking about, is that true?
Amanda Prokop: Oh, yes, I found out last year. You guys want to hear my airport story?
Rosecrans Baldwin: Please!
Amanda Prokop: Okay, so last year, flew to Barcelona, and the plane there, an hour and a half into the flight, something goes wrong—I kind of smell burning wires, you see the airline crew, the passengers, going in the back. They rerouted us back to JFK, tried to get us on another plane, that didn’t happen. We were running around the terminal—I never wanted to see that terminal again. Finally, next day, got a hotel room, got there. On the way back, our flight from Barcelona was delayed because of weather, and—American—held the plane, and JFK’d back to Charlotte so that we could get on the plane, because we were with the group and barely made it. So in some circumstances they do, and that was as fast as I’ve ever been through customs.
Rosecrans Baldwin: You made it! You got to Barcelona! You were there.
Amanda Prokop: Yes! Barely, but yeah.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Amazing! Well, thank you for that, and thank you also for reminding me that U.S. Airways used to be an airline. Amanda, this book—thoughts, feelings, where do we sit?
Amanda Prokop: I enjoyed this collection. There were a few stories that made me laugh, like the ending of “The Balloon”—the narrator wanting a gun to shoot that stupid balloon, I felt that way. And “The Naked Juror” gave me some flashbacks to when I had jury duty and was on a jury. And then I liked “Curiosity”—it was one of those synergy moments, where last week, on a couple online forums I’m on, we were talking about pieces of clothing, your oldest pieces of clothing, what stories do you have behind that—thinking about the narrator in that story, how she got her leather jacket. She’s got a whole story about how she got that leather jacket. I enjoyed that story.
Andrew Womack: That’s right, that’s how it ends, isn’t it—she finally gets the leather jacket from Trash and Vaudeville, I believe. Isn’t that the East Village? Am I wrong?
Rosecrans Baldwin: I thought it was in the East Village, but I could totally have no idea.
Andrew Womack: Yeah, I forgot that, that’s how she got it. I just—the airport story, your airplane story, the massive connection story—I wonder if it’s just, is it that airports and airlines and that kind of travel experience is the most relatable, shared vulnerability that people have, in some kind of—you’re very publicly being, like, corralled, you know? And it’s like, typically it’s nothing serious, it’s really just highly annoying, but we all get to share this incredible annoyance together. This is why it’s so relatable.
Amanda Prokop: Probably, yeah. If you fly, everybody has an airplane story, airport story—it all happened, yeah.
Andrew Womack: I don’t know, I haven’t flown in a long time.
Amanda Prokop: I hate it.
Andrew Womack: Planning to go to LA, but that’s a lot of—
Amanda Prokop: But then you were talking about your story, flying to Altoona—I was thinking, why did you not just rent a car from Pittsburgh? It would have been much easier.
Andrew Womack: Well, I—I didn’t even consider that. I think I was, like, twenty-two, so there’s your answer. Stupid, I was stupid, I was twenty-two, and—
Amanda Prokop: I’m familiar with that area, and I’m just like, oh yeah, you just get on Route 22, go across Pittsburgh—you’d be there in, like, two hours.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, Andrew, it’s been pointed out in the comments that you would have been too young to rent a car anyway. And also, you were a male at twenty-two, and your prefrontal cortex has the wisdom of, like, a thirteen-year-old, so—
Andrew Womack: I mean—
Rosecrans Baldwin: We’re up to, but—
Andrew Womack: Amanda is implying there was some sort of executive functioning happening, and it was—questionable if it was.
Rosecrans Baldwin: No, but it’s generous of her.
Amanda Prokop: Oh, no, no, because, I mean, at twenty-two, I just would have driven from Austin to Altoona—I’d be like, oh, that’s only two days, and just done it.
Andrew Womack: I didn’t want to go, was part of it, too.
Amanda Prokop: I don’t want to go there either.
Andrew Womack: It was Altoona.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Andrew, Amanda, this is way off track, we’re trying to talk—
Andrew Womack: Right, we do have the book, I’m sorry—and Erin’s here.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I’m sorry, but Erin has raised her hand, we have some comments here, we would like to get some thoughts. Amanda, do you mind if we move on from your travel?
Amanda Prokop: Yeah, that’s not—yeah.
Andrew Womack: We’ll talk shit about Altoona later.
Erin Cooper: (unclear)
Rosecrans Baldwin: That sounds good. Erin, hi, nice to see you. Thoughts, feelings about this book?
Erin Cooper: I did not love it, but I did like a lot of the stories. The one I liked the best is one that nobody’s mentioned, which is—“It Will Come Back to You”—the very last story. And I think in part because we’ve just had my mother-in-law here for a week, and we are in the process of trying to figure out—she won’t wear hearing aids—what is cognitive decline, which is really hard to tease apart. And I read this story right after she left, and was like—yeah. But I also really loved how it’s very intentionally pulling apart, like, a story, and everybody’s view of what happened—in this case, what happened between her mother and her mother’s friend, and what happened between her and her mother’s friend, and their relationships, and everybody sort of has a different take on it. What do people misremember? What are people lying about? What is just that we are fallible in our memory? So that was a story that resonated the most with me, but I fully feel like that was, like, a timing thing, too. So—yeah.
Andrew Womack: Now, in that one—
Erin Cooper: Overall.
Andrew Womack: —with the hearing aid, too, it—I like how it also created, like, she kind of got a superpower with the hearing aid, right? Remind me what happened, it’s kind of rushing through at the very end—was it, once she gets them, doesn’t she start to—
Erin Cooper: Yeah.
Andrew Womack: Is it she hallucinates—she was, like, hearing people’s thoughts or something like that, wasn’t it? Yeah.
Erin Cooper: Yeah. And I think, to me, I read this as, in part—Ting.
Andrew Womack: Mmm, the doll.
Erin Cooper: My mother-in-law and her disconnect from everything that’s happening is this—this moment where you see that there are so many things happening that you haven’t seen, or in this case haven’t heard, right? She thought she knew what was going on, and then all of a sudden there’s this other layer of information coming in that she didn’t know she wasn’t privy to, because she hadn’t recognized that her hearing is going. So then it’s this—I think it’s like, oh, all these things you can hear that you thought just weren’t going on, were going on this whole time. Which I think is the point with all the different viewpoints of the story—that there are always all these layers, and you don’t know what you don’t know about these. So—
Andrew Womack: Yeah, I was so convinced of the ex-husband, right—well, we know he did something wrong, we know he did something terrible, and then—wait, what’s going on, why is everything cool, apparently, with this guy? So that one shifted gears a lot, didn’t it?
Erin Cooper: Yeah.
Andrew Womack: I did have some trouble following that one, which—I don’t know, maybe my own cognitive decline, I don’t know—but there was a lot in here about that, and I felt like that was almost a theme, too, not just in the book but over the summer. I noticed up at the top of the chat, Joanna mentioned a lot of generational stories in this one—there was a lot about aging in this. And I think that, certainly at the age of twenty-two, I definitely think about aging a lot—dealing with my own family, recently had a lot of health scares with a lot of people, and sort of entering this phase of life where we’re maybe confronting these things a lot more personally. I felt like this book did a wonderful job of making me think about what this is like for everyone, in new ways—not just my own narrow view of how this is making me feel, but opening my eyes into realizing what it might be like on multiple sides of the table. So, “It Will Come Back to You,” the story—yeah, absolutely beautiful, and I gotta read that one again, I gotta read the whole thing again, apparently. Because I loved it. It was so good.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Well, that’s a heck of a way to end a conversation on a book.
Andrew Womack: Well, did Erin—Erin, thank you.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I was gonna say, thank you, Andrew, thank you, Erin, thank you, everybody. We have a couple minutes left. Any further thoughts—I mean, this is sort of wrapping up these hangs we’ve been doing all summer—any comments, etc., you can raise your hand and we can go through there, or we can just call it a wrap, and Andrew and I and the various others will go off to our little boroughs and figure out what the heck we’re gonna do for the Tournament of Books this year. And I’m killing time, so I’ll tell—I’m on airplanes all the time for stuff, so I’m trying to think of an amusing one. Okay, here we go. My airport story, before anyone raises a hand, would be that—it was last summer, I believe, or the summer before that, where there was a software outage that caused the entire travel industry to shut down for about eighteen to twenty hours, and I was in—not London Heathrow, but Gatwick—and I was in a line of seven-hundred-something people, and the line did not move for about ten to eleven hours, and so you just stood there, and you formed these little groups of friends with the people standing around you. Near us was a professional violin player who’d been to London for a concert, and he would occasionally serenade everyone, and next to me was a young guy who owned an art gallery where I live, which is Los Angeles, and I have now become friends with this person and I go to all of his openings. And then there was a psychotherapist who had a new book coming out, and—oh, it was amazing, the conversation, I couldn’t have done anything, it was like I had drunk three pints of lager with her, sitting on the ground, and learned all of her publishing issues. And people were helping one another, we had no information from official sources, it was just a terrific exercise of solidarity. But I will wrap up with that. I’m seeing a question from Peggy—“ask me and Rosecrans”—let’s put the narcissism on blast—“Andrew, what one book author would you recommend to us all?” And Peggy gives us the grace of suggesting this may take us a couple minutes to figure out. Oh, geez Louise. Andrew, do you want to go first—a book author you would recommend to us all, not knowing everyone’s individual tastes?
Andrew Womack: I do have one, and it’s one that sticks with me a lot, I’ve read it a number of times, and you and I have spoken about it a lot—when we were in the Tournament of Books, it was a finalist, this was back when we were judges, and it was why we were kicked out, I think, because we were the only ones who stood for this book and nobody else did. Everybody hated it, and I love it, I still love it, and that is Remainder by Tom McCarthy.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Holy cow! Yeah, okay, wow, yeah, sure—Remainder, Tom McCarthy. Zadie Smith, in the London Review of Books, I think in, like, 2003, said it was the best novel that had been written yet in the twenty-first century. Tom McCarthy, who went on to write C, became a fellow at the Aspen Institute. Do you remember the conceit of the novel—this guy who gets brained by—
Andrew Womack: What?
Rosecrans Baldwin: —a piano?
Andrew Womack: He has a head injury, and then he receives a very large settlement from the head injury.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yep.
Andrew Womack: And then he spent—
Judy Morris: I’ve read that book.
Andrew Womack: You remember that one?
Judy Morris: Yeah, vaguely.
Andrew Womack: And then he spends his fortune painstakingly recreating the scene of the accident, just at a minute level, hiring actors and—it’s really, it’s brilliant, I mean, highly relatable—no, it’s not relatable, but it’s just, the way—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Well, I really feel for anyone who finds that relatable, but yeah.
Andrew Womack: No, I mean, it’s just the way he keeps going through, more and more and more detail. I don’t know, maybe in the current era—what is that show with Nathan? Does anyone know what I’m talking about?
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, I do, it’s on HBO—he had the most recent series where he became a pilot in order to prove out the theory. Is that what we’re talking about?
Andrew Womack: I think so. But he hires people, all these actors—
Rosecrans Baldwin: I didn’t want—
Andrew Womack: It’s almost a comedy version of that. But anyway, Tom McCarthy, Remainder, would be my pick, that’s a great one. And a second pick, actually mentioned a few weeks ago here, I believe—was it If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler? No, actually, that was separate, but I go back to that book again and again, so I consider that a definite go-to.
Rosecrans Baldwin: It’s a crazy question, there’s obviously no right answer. One author I return to over and over again for entertainment, for voice, for ideas, is Mary Robison. There’s One D.O.A., One on the Way—I can’t, sorry, on the spot I’m not gonna be able to remember all of her titles, but there’s just a humor and a levity and a style that is—if you like minimalist fiction that’s also voicey, it’s terrific. But let’s take it away from us for a second, Andrew. Judy, hi, I see a hand up, please.
Judy Morris: Oh, yeah, just a quick question—how did Remainder end? I remember reading it, but I can’t remember the ending.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Judy, if we give away the ending, well, who might read it?
Judy Morris: Well, I remember I really didn’t like it. What I’m feeling tonight is that I’m just not in sync with you guys—I really expected the Nunez to be my favorite, and it was probably my least favorite. I like her, we went to the same college, and I feel this connection with her, and I thought this book was so—not any good, it was just mundane, and I kept wanting more from the stories, and they just didn’t do it. So it was my least favorite of the six, and that’s pretty bad, because I hated the Louise Erdrich. So, that’s—it’s been very interesting, I’ve really enjoyed this sort of deluge of short stories that I would not have read otherwise. So I thank you for that.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Well, we thank you back. As we always say, the conceit behind the Tournament of Books is that no one is qualified to say one book is better than the other based just on their subjective interpretation.
Judy Morris: Absolutely.
Rosecrans Baldwin: The value is in reading and discussing and thinking and parsing out what we all value, and also getting—I don’t know about you, Judy, Andrew, Erin, Amanda, everybody else—I know that my values change, and what I find interesting and cool is up to interpretation year by year. I was gonna say, when someone’s asking me what to recommend—I’m literally sitting here with a bunch of these volume books, and I’m pretty sure the last time I mentioned that, someone in the chat was like, f off, those things are horrible. So, it’s each to their own.
Erin Cooper: We just finished the fourth one, like, thirty minutes before we started.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yep.
Erin Cooper: And partway through I was like, I don’t know if I’m still into these, and by the end of the—
Rosecrans Baldwin: I know!
Erin Cooper: Like, oh my god, I cannot wait for the next one.
Rosecrans Baldwin: The fourth one is mostly about managing a commune, you’re like, where’s—what’s going on, can we have any kind of character involvement?
Erin Cooper: So weird, and that’s why they’re so good!
Rosecrans Baldwin: I know.
Kay Nelson: I haven’t read the fourth one yet, but I love those books, I can’t wait, they’re not coming out fast enough for me.
Erin Cooper: The fourth one, all the way to the end—
Kay Nelson: It’s on hold at the library, yep, yep.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I will say, if people are looking for recommendations for books—when we had the twentieth anniversary of the Tournament of Books, we deliberately slated a list of books that were just all the books that had won the Rooster, and that got a lot of conversation. So if you’ve not become a die-hard fan of Skippy Dies, or Cloud Atlas, or any of the weird little books that have found their way into the TOB and made some people hate them and some people love them, I think maybe that’s a place to start. I can’t—it’s been too long, I can’t do all the names off the top of my head. Andrew, can you? I would be impressed.
Andrew Womack: Are you talking about—
Rosecrans Baldwin: Twenty-two.
Andrew Womack: You’re talking about the Super Rooster?
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah, the Super Rooster.
Andrew Womack: Super Rooster, the big bird. Super Rooster was—yeah, that was when we had sixteen winners, so that meant we were able to do—we could have a tournament of champions.
Rosecrans Baldwin: And all the judges were previous judges.
Andrew Womack: Yes.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Yeah.
Andrew Womack: So, at this point—
Rosecrans Baldwin: It’s great.
Andrew Womack: Yeah, and at this point we’re on our way to whatever the double Super Rooster is.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Oh, God, we are.
Andrew Womack: Ms. Krantz gets really nervous when I talk about that.
Rosecrans Baldwin: I get—yeah, man, it’s too much.
Andrew Womack: Because that’s thirty-two years of the Tournament of Books.
Rosecrans Baldwin: The merch will be really good, that’s all I know, because Andrew does the merch, and Andrew does great merch. Okay, it’s 7:01 PM Pacific, whatever time zone you’re in, we have exceeded the time we always talk about here, so throw up a hand for any further comments, otherwise, Andrew, I feel like we’re gonna wrap this up.
Andrew Womack: That’s it.
Rosecrans Baldwin: Well, Andrew, I’m gonna make a comment, and then leave it to you for the final word, but I just want to say, on behalf of myself, on behalf of the Tournament of Books, on behalf of—I don’t know—the vibes of this summer, what a fun thing.
Andrew Womack: (crosstalk, unclear)
Rosecrans Baldwin: No! No! Dolly forever! RIP, but Dolly can’t die, you know what I mean? Dolly is literally among the people who should live forever as a constant living presence in our hearts and our minds—Dolly Parton is number one.
Andrew Womack: It makes me—exactly, couldn’t agree more. Thank you, everybody, it was such a fun summer, I had a blast, I got to read a lot of short stories and forced you all along to join me on that journey, so thank you so much for enduring it. Everyone who attended any of these events, all of you who are here tonight, thank you so much, you made this so much fun for me, for Rosecrans—thank you. We’re gonna be back soon with another thing—we’ll have, of course, the long list in November. Last year we did a Halloween thing, I don’t know if we’ll do a Halloween thing again this year—if people want a Halloween thing, let me know, email me. Otherwise, we’ll be seeing you again with the long list in November. And that’s it.
Rosecrans Baldwin: May all the sled dogs fly you home, you know? It’s like Ram Dass just telling us, we’re all just sled-dogging each other home.
Andrew Womack: Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody. Take care. Appreciate it.