Philosophically psychological with Jennifer Herrera

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Adam Sockel:

You're listening to Passions and Prologues, a literary podcast where each week, I'll interview an author about a thing they love and how it inspires their work.

I'm your host, Adam Sockel, and if this is your first time joining, thanks for being here. If you've been here since the beginning, thanks for coming back.

Today's episode is with debut author, Jennifer Herrera, who wrote a stunning novel called The Hunter. It is described as a riveting, atmospheric suspense debut that explores the dark side of a small town and asks: “How can we uncover the truth when we keep lying to ourselves.”

Really love this book. Bonus points that it's setting is a small town in Ohio where I'm at. Jennifer and I actually bonded over some shared Ohio-related history.

But this conversation that we have is all about her love of philosophy and psychology, which will make a whole bunch of sense when you read this book.

It's interesting because we talk about it almost like two sides of the same coin. She studied philosophy in college and then got into psychology a little bit after. And it's just interesting how she thinks about these things. It's a really kind of sprawling deep and wide conversation that I think you're really, really going to enjoy.

And I cannot sing enough praise for The Hunter. It's such a different type of thriller. We talk about the idea of formulaic thrillers in this conversation and how she as a thriller writer was able to avoid that. And I think you'll really, really enjoy it.

Along those lines and in honor of Jennifer's new book, I want to talk about one of my favorite psychological thrillers that's ever come out. It's a little bit older. It is from early 2019. It's An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen. I actually interviewed them both at my previous job. It's was a number one New York Times bestseller, so it's possible you may have read it, but again, it's a little bit old.

It is also a kind of psychological thriller that has to do with morality. There is a young girl named Jessica, who is looking to make some easy cash and she agrees to be a test subject in this psychological study about ethics and morality.

The study then goes from an exam room into the real world and the lines between like what's real and what's going on with her doctor tend to blur. And it was really interesting. It definitely is one of those books where you can't stop flipping the page. You want to know what happens next and next and next.

And so, again, if you are a fan of Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen in Anonymous Girl, I think you're really going to love Jennifer Herrera's new book, The Hunter.

As always, if you want to get ahold of me, you can reach me at [email protected]. I love seeing the things that you are all passionate about. And again, I give a free bookshop.org gift card to one person who sends me their passions every single month.

And also, if you want some customized book recommendations, just leave me your rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. Screenshot that and send it to my email, as well, [email protected]. And I'll be sure to give you some customized book recommendations.

You can also find me on Instagram and TikTok, same name, Passions and Prologues, where I do a bunch of book recommendations and thoughts on all sorts of stuff there.

Okay, that's enough housekeeping. I'm going to let you get to this really, really wonderful conversation with Jennifer Herrera, debut author of The Hunter on Passions and Prologues.

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Okay. Well, Jennifer, I am so excited to have you on the show. Before we started recording, we were talking about our shared history of Ohio, but I don't think that's what we're going to talk about today. But I never know-

Jennifer Herrera:

No, my passion is not Ohio.

Adam Sockel:

That's okay. It would be great if it was, but I never know until I ask this question. So Jennifer, what's the thing you're super passionate about that we're going to talk about today?

Jennifer Herrera:

Well, first off, thank you for having me. And what an excellent question, because I think what drives any creative person is passion. It's the thing that makes you wake up at 5:00 AM or makes you be bleary-eyed and still kind of going about stories in your head or your art in your head, as the world turns behind you.

And I think something for me that I think is a recent passion, but definitely informed, the book that I wrote is an interest in psychology and in particular union psychology. So yeah, right. So, this is kind of strange.

Adam Sockel:

No, I love this. Keep going.

Jennifer Herrera:

So, when I was in college — alright, so first off, we're going to come back to Ohio.

Adam Sockel:

Yes.

Jennifer Herrera:

So, I went to high school in this really small town in Ohio. And the population was 1300 for the whole town. And my school was just really small and it wasn't some place where I necessarily felt like I fit, like I felt really comfortable there, in part because my family was from Cleveland, moved to this small town when I was a little kid.

And in that town, everybody was related. They all kind of looked alike. They all had known each other for generations. And so, it was a place where I didn't quite fit in.

And so, when I got the opportunity to start taking college classes really early as part of some Ohio program I was like, “Yes, please, I will do that. I will do the thing that gets me out of this high school and onto like college campuses.”

And so, when I was 15, I started taking college courses and they counted for a high school and college credit. And then soon I wasn't going to high school at all. I was just going to college full-time because it was so much better. And the thing is that then when I graduated from high school, I was a junior in college, which was insane.

But the bright side is, it gave me so much time to take every single class I wanted to take. I graduated with like 150 credit hours or something.

Adam Sockel:

Oh, my God.

Jennifer Herrera:

Like it was insane. And I studied philosophy and French, and Russian, Swahili for a while, everything. And for some reason I never took a psychology class.

And so, I discovered psychology really late in life, when on a whim I picked up this book Women Who Run with the Wolves. Have you heard of this?

Adam Sockel:

I have not.

Jennifer Herrera:

It's a book that was really big in the 90s, and it takes union psychology and it gives it this very feminist bend.

And so, for me, I think looking back, maybe one of the reasons I didn't take psychology was I was really intimidated by this like, all I knew about psychology was like Freud. And I was like, “That's kind of weird and I don't really like that. And he makes me uncomfortable.”

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. He makes everyone uncomfortable.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yes, exactly. I was like, “I don't think I want a penis, but do I?” And anyway, it was like a very, very weird place in my life. Yeah. I don't know if you have to edit that out or not.

Adam Sockel:

No, we're good. We're leaving it. It's great. It's fine.

Jennifer Herrera:

Fabulous. Fabulous. It'll live on for eternity.

Adam Sockel:

That's right.

Jennifer Herrera:

And so, I read this book and I was like, “Oh, my God.” Because not only was it talking about the human mind, which of course is fascinating, but it was also talking about stories.

So, she was relating the stories we tell ourself to the ways that the mind works. So, fairy tales, for instance, give you this strong sense of, they're called archetypes, right?

Adam Sockel:

Mm-Hmm (affirmative).

Jennifer Herrera:

These mythologies that persist across cultures. And so, these mythologies have a certain power in our lives because they're things that everybody thinks or everybody processes the world through, but that we're not always aware of. So, symbols in fact.

So like, a symbol for a snake can feel like transformation in some sense, because they're shedding their skin. Or like deceit and lying and by communicate or — okay. And the thing is that we communicate in symbols all the time is the idea. And we don't know it. And this is how our subconscious works.

So, this is why and how we gain access to the things that our body knows that our like consciousness isn't aware of. And I think this is really fascinating in part because I was a philosophy major and I went to grad school for philosophy.

So, I'm very aware of this sense and this assumption that you're like this rational human. You're this rational human. You are this Cartesian person who I think therefore I am.

Your mind is perfect, is the assumption. And this is this idea that your mind really isn't perfect at all. And there are lots and lots of ways that your mind isn't perfect.

See, this is what happens. I get started talking on something and you can't stop me.

Adam Sockel:

No, this is great. I love it. Actually, I want to ask you, so as a person who like, I went to a small liberal arts school, John Carroll here in Cleveland and it's a Jesuit school. And so, we had to take, much like most liberal art colleges, you hit a certain number of courses outside of what you're going to actually study.

And so, I did have to take philosophy and psychology. And I was definitely one of those people who I was like, the philosophy courses, I was just like checking a box. I'm like, “Yeah Übermensch, I don't know what that means, but I'm sitting here. And Socratic method, you're going to keep asking me questions and yeah, I get it.”

But I was just trying to — again, I don't know, I got like a B minus in and I was like, “Good enough, goodbye.

But I feel like (like a lot of people), I got more into like philosophical thinking because of The Good Place, the TV show that was on recently.

Jennifer Herrera:

That's so great. They actually did a great job with philosophy in there.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. And like there's actually a book that the creator wrote and I'll put a link to in the show notes where it's like, he talks about basically, he was like, “I had to learn, I had to take like a PhD level ‘crash course’ on philosophy.”

Jennifer Herrera:

Wow.

Adam Sockel:

But I want to ask you, this is a long walk to get to a question, which is what I'm going to do the entire time you're on here.

Jennifer Herrera:

Amazing. That's how my mind works as well.

Adam Sockel:

Beautiful. So, as someone who both has like kind of recently got into philosophy and also in the past like 18 months got very big into like psychology and mental health and therapy and all these different things. And I'm much more in tune with like how my brain actually works.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

How does it, for you looking at the psychology of things, and obviously there's a lot of it in your book too, like from someone who has such a philosophical understanding of basically the history of how we have all thought.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

How do you look at psychology? Do you think you approach it from a different way than most other people, because of your background? I got there, finally.

Jennifer Herrera:

You did. And if you hadn't said, “I got there, finally” I wouldn't have registered that that was a long question, for the record.

Adam Sockel:

Well, good. It’s good to know.

Jennifer Herrera:

You gave yourself away.

Adam Sockel:

Everyone else will know. But I'm glad you didn't.

Jennifer Herrera:

I think that I approach my life as a recovering philosophic or something, which sounds terrible. I think philosophy is really problematic for many, many ways and I didn't know it for a long time.

I think one of the ways in which it's problematic is that it takes like a white male viewpoint and puts it at the very pinnacle of what it means to be human. I thought when I was in school that like Aristotle and Plato, I thought they were all like white men. They're not white.

Adam Sockel:

No.

Jennifer Herrera:

I had no idea. And I thought women clearly were just useless for thousands and thousands of years. And I as a woman had to come up and like prove everybody wrong.

So, it’s like it’s this inherited system where you're only talking about white men having done really great things. And the subtext is always and you have people who are like, “You are historically not good enough and haven't ever been.”

And so, I think that makes it so that I am always trying to dissect how I got to that set of beliefs, one. And two, how it shaped the things that I think about the world and about myself. And so, the psychology I think changes the philosophy, not necessarily the philosophy changes the psychology. Because I think that I'm always trying to figure out the world around me.

And for a long time, I thought philosophy was what could help me do that. That meaning of life stuff and this recognition of like, “Oh no, the starting assumptions are so, so flawed, that it's only the process that was useful.”

And in that sense, the process of evaluating arguments, I guess you could say is very useful in psychology. Because I'll read something like The Women Who Run with the Wolves, or I started reading a lot of You, which some of it is very weird.

There’s this whole book called The Red Book, which is basically about his dreams. And it just gets very out there, in a way where you're like, “Wow, you're like really, really into something here, that like maybe your mind is doing or maybe like you're losing your mind.” And I'm not sure Carl Jung, I'm not sure.

But I do think that it's given me this sense where I can look at arguments in psychology and evaluate them better where I'm like, well this is suspect. Like I did a ton of logic. I went to/at UC, Irvine, this department of Logic and Philosophy of Sciences, where always a grad student.

And so, yeah, I think in that sense I know why Freud is bullshit, because I can kind of like evaluate that in a better way. But mostly as the psychology is informing the philosophy.

Adam Sockel:

I feel two things. One, I feel like, you know how when people talk about extremely wealthy or extremely famous people and how they talk about how they've lost touch with reality and people are like, “Yeah, it's because there's no one in their circle that tells them like, ‘Hey shut up for a second.’ Or tells them no.”

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

I feel like a lot of times that's what happens with massively famous now, but probably also in their day philosophers.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

No one was telling Nietzsche, “Hey, maybe just take a minute and think about what you’re saying.”

Jennifer Herrera:

Nietzsche actually, I will say is one of the good ones.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. But I was just picking a random one.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Sockel:

Kind of showing my none — like I said, I didn't really pay attention at philosophy.

Jennifer Herrera:

Well, I have to tell you now because out of all of the philosophers I studied, I think Nietzsche is probably my favorite. And so, I have to just like put it as out there, that one of the interesting things I learned in Nietzsche … and so, I think partially, one of the reasons I like Nietzsche the best is because the person who taught my class was not from the philosophy department. He was from the German department. And so, he wasn't approaching the world as a philosopher, as somebody who like had that very strong viewpoint.

But so, Nietzsche had syphilis and he went crazy. And when he was out of his mind, his sister who was a Nazi took his writings and edited them to support the Nazis, which I feel like I always have to say because there's so much of his work that's like not his work.

But if you look at everything that came before that, you're like, “Oh, my God, this is incredible.”

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. See, this is good to know this, this stuff is like … I feel like there's a lot of people that we studied in various historical experiences that obviously, how we study them or how we learn them shapes our enjoyment of them.

So, a perfect example for me is like Franz Kafka. I remember reading in college because it was assigned to us, The Trial and-

Jennifer Herrera:

I love The Trial.

Adam Sockel:

Love The Trial.

Jennifer Herrera:

But it terrifies me.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. It's super terrifying. And we read it. And then basically, the thing that we did is that our professor … I don't know if this is true, I've tried to find it factually — identify, our professor told us that the book was published after he had passed away. And the people who discovered it basically just found like sheets and sheets of paper.

And the concept of the book was that, if you read any chapter before any other chapter, like other than the first and last chapter, you can basically read the book in any order.

And again, anyone listening, I don't know if that's true, but we did this in our class. We basically-

Jennifer Herrera:

Oh, my God.

Adam Sockel:

And it builds layers onto The Trial because the whole concept of The Trial, for anyone who hasn't read it is like the bureaucracy of basically this guy gets arrested for what he never finds out he did wrong. And then he just spends the entire novel going through the bureaucracy of trying to have it taken care of.

And you can basically “read it” out of order. This is all to say I don't know if that's true, but because that's how I was taught it, I'm fascinated by Kafka now. So, I've read The Metamorphosis and all the different stuff. I'm just like, “Wow, what a genius.”

Well, the book wasn't published when he was alive. So, it's just like one of those things where it's, I do think-

Jennifer Herrera:

Wow.

Adam Sockel:

How we're taught, it really does … again, it's entirely possible that my professor — and so, I right now I'm talking out of my-

Jennifer Herrera:

Well no, now I'm thinking about, I'm pretty sure it was Kafka who wrote a short story that I loved. It was called the Hunger Artist. And it was all about this person who had the power to … is this right? Is this Kafka?

Adam Sockel:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jennifer Herrera:

Okay, great. I was like, my mind is deceiving me clearly. But it's all about this person who goes on hunger strike and everybody is so impressed at his self-control. And they wonder how far will he go in order for his principles.

And then the very last scene is he's dying. He's killed himself because he’s gone on hunger strike for so long. And the very last scene, somebody asks him something about — I'm going to ruin it for everybody listening. So, sorry guys.

Adam Sockel:

That's okay.

Jennifer Herrera:

About how he could do that. And he was just like, “I never really liked food.” And for some reason this has like stuck with me for years and years and years.

Because you think about people, other people and you're comparing yourself to others all the time, and you're like, how are they at a place where they have all of that self-control or they have the ability to do that thing I've always wanted to do, or they can abstain in ways I've always wanted to abstain and you're like, “Oh, we're just fundamentally like really, really different.” And you can't necessarily compare.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah.

Jennifer Herrera:

There's something in there that's very comforting to me. A guy dies at the end and that sucks. But like-

Adam Sockel:

I always find myself wondering when I am reading something that has been like studied to death, for example Hemingway's Hills Like Wet Elephants. It's a short story that again, it's one that I feel like everyone has read in their AP English class when they're in high school.

But basically, it's this book or it's a story about this couple that's at a train station. Are you familiar with this short story?

Jennifer Herrera:

I'm actually not, I haven't read any Hemingway ever.

Adam Sockel:

Okay. So, it's this couple who's on this train station and it's very, very short and it's about them deciding whether or not to get on this train. And the popular belief is that it's about whether or not they decide to get an abortion, which obviously would be very scandalous for like that time when he was writing about it.

But he never really came out and said that's what it was about. And so, I always think about these things, like other ones like Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is one, and like-

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah, that one I know.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. I always think about these stories that I love, but have been studied to death and I'm like, “I wonder if they really thought about it that way, or if they were just like writing a story and then it took on a life of its own.”

This is apropos of nothing but you're talking-

Jennifer Herrera:

But I also think it’s apropos of a lot of things because I don't think it's an accident that the things that I'm passionate now or the things that I never had a class about, I never took a class in creative writing. Outside of an English class, I never did any of that stuff.

And so, I think sometimes the study of things can destroy the thing itself. You know what I mean? Because you feel like it's been studied to death. So, it's like you're reading A Doll's House and you're like, “What can I say about this that's new?”

Like you don't get to enjoy it. In the same way as like when I first got my start in publishing, I worked for a small publishing house, Europa Editions. And they were just coming out with these books, the Neapolitan series by Elena Ferrante. And at this point, nobody had really heard about her. Or if you had, you were a very obscure person who subscribed to The New Yorker and had that life.

But certainly, my family and my friends, everyone I knew had no idea. And I remember reading her books and just feeling such awe because you felt like, “Oh, my God, this is incredible and nobody knows about this yet.”

And your opinions got to be your own because you couldn't just google something. Like you couldn't just say, “What does the violence in the Neapolitan series mean?” And then google tells you 40 opinions.

And I think that is what's exciting about literature and especially about new literature too, is that it's not out there yet. So, you get to be excited and get to feel passionate to bring it all around, get to feel passionate about things.

Adam Sockel:

Man, I could not agree more. One of my favorite things about having spent much of my career in the book world and having a platform where I got to promote books and so, therefore I got sent advanced reader copies and I sent advanced reader copies, is being able to … I got really good at like reading a book beforehand and going to either my director or like one of our publishing people and just being like, “This is going to be a bestseller.”

I'll never forget, the first person I ever interviewed was Marieke Nijkamp. She wrote a book called; This Is Where It Ends. It's a young adult book about a fictional school shooting. She's Dutch. Which is very interesting about why she wrote … because they don't have those.

But basically, they were driving with a friend in United States and a school shooting was on the radio and they were just like, “This is insane.” And then they ended up writing the definitive book about a school shooting.

And I remember reading it and I stormed into my director's office. I was like, “This is going to be a New York Times, best-seller.”

Jennifer Herrera:

Oh, my God, you called it, that book was huge.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. There's just sometimes, like there's another one, A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza, that same thing. Like it was their debut. I was the first person who ever got to interview her. And that didn't make me special. It just happened to be I was at a event that she was at, that was like far enough out from the release date that she hadn't been interviewed yet. And like same thing.

And you're right. I love being able to read stories. Yeah, I love reading historical things that have been dissected to death, but you're right. It's almost like you can't form your own opinion on it because they're already there. So, it's exciting to be able to do that for new books.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah. And you're embarrassed, say that like nobody else liked a book that you fell in love with and you're like, “Oh, I guess this wasn't a good book after all.”

Adam Sockel:

Yeah.

Jennifer Herrera:

And not recognizing too, and I think this is where philosophy comes in and like in particular the way that philosophy is studied in the U.S., it's just, there's this idea of like this right opinion, this structure that is deciding who's worthwhile and who's not worthwhile, which books are good and which books are not good. And in fact, that's what publishing is right now.

But there's the sense of like, well what are the assumptions that that structure is making? And how does that filter who we think is worthy and who we think is not worthy? Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

So, at what point along the lines did you get interested in psychology and then like how did you … because you mentioned the things that you're like interested in now, aren't things you like were taught/studied.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

How did you find your passion for it, and then how did it start to kind of affect the way you look at stories and your life and stuff? And then we'll get into how it affected your new book in a second here.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah. I think that we are at a time just like generationally where we think about our minds in a different way than previous generations did. I think first off, like everybody's gone to therapy or a lot of people have gone to therapy or know what therapy is, are not embarrassed about therapy.

And I think that one of the things that — so, we're all sort of taught in terms of how we tell our own stories about ourselves is to start with the beginning. Start with what our family was like growing up. Traumatic things that may have happened. We know the word trauma. We talk about that.

And then to understand the influence that those things had on our life later on. Like this is something that I think is very, very culturally embedded right now. And you can see it too in a lot of the books that are really popular.

I think about Colleen Hoover all the time, as I think anybody in publishing does because she's so wildly popular, she's so wildly popular. And I think something that people have recognized about her books is that there's a lot of this sense of some sort of trauma, gives somebody a problem and then the problem is solved by the end. But it's always based on some kind of past trauma coming out.

And you look at something like on the other end of the spectrum, The Body Keeps the Score. Which was a huge, huge best-seller, which you wouldn't have necessarily thought would be a best-seller because it's so dense. I don't know if you've read this book.

Adam Sockel:

I have not.

Jennifer Herrera:

But it is like, oh my God, it is one of the densest books that I've read outside of Academia. But it sold millions of copies, like millions of people wanted to wave through to understand how is it that trauma stays in our bodies and what can we do about it.

And so, we're in this cultural moment where we're really thinking about that. And I think as somebody living in that world, who’s like just very curious. I always wanted to know why.

And then I, on a whim picked up this book, really The Women Who Run with the Wolves, which I knew was a big deal years and years ago, but it was sort of before my time, so I missed it. And getting this sense of she was creating this connection between stories and between psychology.

And to me as a writer, I think that's fascinating because we're always trying to understand ourselves. And in part the reason, and I guess I could talk, I'm always trying to understand myself. Because you're always making decisions where you're like, “Why did I do that thing? And that was like a really bad choice. I made a really bad choice just there and I don't get why I did it. Like it wasn't rational.”

And so, trying to like find a rational explanation isn't necessarily the solution. And so, wanting to understand those things and wanting to understand how do I as a person working in publishing and as a person who really loves books, like you can't see my bookshelf right now, but it is packed, it is a problem how packed that is.

One of the things that really interests me is why do I love the stories that I love? Like it’s, why do other people love the stories that I love? And sometimes it's like, I can't even talk about it. It's not objective, it's not an idea.

So, I wanted to understand this connection between the stories that I love and the psychology of me and to understand how they interact to change me as a person.

And I read this book and it floored me, first off because it like dismisses all of these very masculine ways of viewing stories, which I never thought of. This idea of like the hero's journey being kind of problematic in a lot of ways. And these are like stereotypical … this isn't-

Adam Sockel:

Yeah.

Jennifer Herrera:

This isn't every man and every woman, but men's stories proceeding as like a monotonically increasing function. So, it's like you have an inciting incident and you build up and you build up and you build up and a climax in the end.

Someone at this talk I was talking to about last night, she's like, “Oh, it's like an ejaculation.” Here we are, back to penises.

Adam Sockel:

Yep. Full circle.

Jennifer Herrera:

She's like, “Men's stories are like an ejaculation and women's stories are cycles.” This idea like every woman has a cycle. We have a lot of like cycles that women go through with their lives, like lunar cycles.

And so, understanding stories in terms of cycles and understanding your life in terms of cycles and it took off so much pressure, I think to think of my life as like, I constantly have to be improving and have to be changing, and I have to be getting to a place.

Versus here's a five-year cycle where I'm going to become a different person. And then in five years I'm going to become another different person. And so, there were a lot of ideas like that hidden within the book that changed the way that I saw the stories that I told and the stories that I consumed.

Adam Sockel:

That is so thoughtfully presented. And I really do love that because I've often thought about, again, like having a long career in publishing and book promotion. Like part of the thing that I had to do at OverDrive was like, we promoted books of all genres.

So, it was really great because I wouldn't think in the past that I was a romance or cozy mystery person. Spoiler alert, I am. If a book is well written, I will read it.

Jennifer Herrera:

Same.

Adam Sockel:

But same my favorite type of books, I always like to say I love small stories with big emotions. And the way that I can best describe it is Wendell Berry is one of my favorite authors. I don’t know if you've read anything he's done.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

But he's a pastoral, like he writes agrarian, his fiction is set in this tiny town in Kentucky. His non-fiction is literally like he writes essays and poems about nature. His family has lived on the same farm for like five generations in Kentucky. And he'll write like beautiful prose about like the soil. And for a long time, I was like, “What?”

And I love other, there's like The Finder of Forgotten Things by Sarah Loudin Thomas is another book that I adore. And I think about this stuff all the time and like I finally realize; I love these books that force me to slow down. And they're like older people looking back on their life.

One I think about it all the time is Lilian Boxfish Takes a Walk, like all these books that I'm always recommending to other people, it's people who are in their 70s, 80s and 90s looking back on their life.

And I'm like, “It's because I'm a deeply nostalgic person who works in tech and has to like, constantly (like you said), I'm constantly like, “Oh that posted great, but what's the next thing I can write about to get to get in front of the next group of people that we're going to sell our product?”

And it's like, when I stop working, I'm like, “I want to slow down and then I want to think about things that have previously happened.” And it's like, this makes sense why these are the types of books that I love.

And then the book that I'm currently querying, the main character is an older man who's looking back and it’s like my Jesus, I am such a parody of myself, but I do think I've stopped asking people, “Do you see yourself in your characters?”

Because like to your point, you're always examining your own mind. Like when you're writing something, even if it's people who are entirely seemingly unrelated to you, you're going to write your own mind into these characters, it's going to happen and you just can't-

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah. Of course, and your own mind is just like this vast place. It's not as though you have this singular personality, that you're just one person. You're many, many people, like you were talking, like you're this tech person. And then you're also this person who's this old man, like looking back on-

Adam Sockel:

A hundred percent.

Jennifer Herrera:

On the rolling hills.

Adam Sockel:

People won't see this unless I put something on Instagram. I'm literally wearing like a derby hat, like you would see like a 78-year-old man wearing in Ireland.

Jennifer Herrera:

That’s true. I almost said something about your hat when we got on the call.

Adam Sockel:

I am who I am.

Jennifer Herrera:

I love it though. But I think like, and then there's this union book about the unlived life. I think it's called like Loving Your Unlived Life. And it's this idea that for every choice we make in our lives, there's a choice that we didn't make.

And how the older we get and the more choices we make, the more doors close behind us. Me choosing to work in publishing means that I'm not going to work in Academia anymore. That side of my life is done.

And once we get old enough to have so many closed doors behind us is like when we get these crises of like, “Oh, my God, who am I? And I feel trapped, I feel trapped. Oh, my God.”

But that's going to happen no matter what you do, no matter how charmed your life is. Like you are having an unlived life that is beside your lived life. And it's like, how do you reconcile the fact that there are two sides of you, the life that you have and the life that part of you wants.

And so, these books and these ideas work with how do you … and in this case, he recommends writing about the life that you wish that you had, so that you can work through that world that you feel like you get both of them.

Like through creative writing you're able to live your unlived life and in part you're able to see it as less of an idealized space. Because like I'm sure the book that you've worked through, like this character is not totally happy with their life all the time and they have problems and they have conflict.

And if you can view that side of your world as not being perfect, then you're less sad about not living that and you're in fact able to live aspects of it through your creative work.

Adam Sockel:

So, do you think that you apparently wanted to be an NYPD detective? So, this is my smooth transition to your book, The Hunter. And like, hearing you talk about-

Jennifer Herrera:

It's getting very deep.

Adam Sockel:

All this stuff. I'm like, “Oh, my God, I totally understand a lot more of the book now.”

But do you think like all of this influenced your book because it is very suspenseful and there's a lot of mystery and there is like potentially murders that people are investigating. So like, how did this all fold into writing your own book?

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah. So, when I was in college I studied all these languages and because I did that, I was actually recruited by the FBI at one point. So, I don't know if I still have the letter, but I was very excited about this. I showed it to everybody. But I don't think-

Adam Sockel:

What the FBI probably wants you to do.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah, exactly. They're like, “Please take that thing that we sent you in confidence and post it everywhere.”

So, for a long time that idea was in the back of my head, but I knew at the end of the day, I'm not the sort of person, I'm not great at rule following and I'm not great at regimented things.

And so, that would be a terrible idea. And I have a lot of moral qualms about that whole world. Probably wouldn't be a good idea. But it's still in the back of my head this knowing the world in a different way.

And I think if you're a law enforcement agent in the FBI or an NYPD or whatever, and if you're a detective, you see the world in a side that I don't as a person who like works at a computer, I'm never going to know the world in that way.

So, I think there's a curiosity there that I'm into. But I think the deeper thing, and this is about Leigh in general as a character, is she's somebody who's really driven by her intuition and she finds power in it.

So one of the things I wanted to do, again, as like a recovering philosophic is to have a detective who was a female, who wasn't trying to act like a man in order to have access to power. And again, like as somebody who was like one of the only women in her department several times, that's something I did. Like I tried to be more masculine generally because I felt (and it was true), that it gave me access to power.

And so, I wanted somebody who wasn't your Sherlock Holmes rational detective in that way, but who felt very, very like feminine to me. And the thing that feels the most feminine to me is the sense of being deeply tied to your emotions and to your intuition.

And so, she's somebody who's really, really driven by her intuition and she is not going to do something that feels wrong to her. And I think that's something that I really envy, because again, I'm still like working through that sense of like, there's something wrong with being emotional. There's something wrong with being really womanly.

Like I wrote an essay for CrimeReads that was about how I feel and there are reasons for this, but how I feel that when I exercise the most female parts of me, like sexuality or being a mother, that that makes me feel like I'm less safe. Like I'm less like worthy of the world’s respect and attention. And that ties into crime fiction because those are the people who are often dying. Especially people who exercise their sexuality.

So, there is something there of an unlived life in Leigh, but it's aspirational for me. It's this idea of like, wow, like wouldn't it be really powerful to like be that intuitive and to have faith in that, have real faith in that, so that you don't need to play other people's games, to play this institutionally privileged person, to play as that person in order to feel powerful.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. And I feel like one of the reasons I love the book so much is because being in publishing, I know you have had access to these books. I feel like if you are a talented writer in the suspense thriller area, there's a opportunity to write very formulaic books that people will still buy in mass.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

It’s like-

Jennifer Herrera:

And they want to some respect.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah, exactly. But I feel like what I loved about your book is it hits all of the notes of a thriller where it keeps you being like, “Wait, what's about … wait what's — wait, hold on … wait a minute. What's going on?”

But there is this like other layer to it and like I said, having spent now an hour chatting with you, I get it, it's because you have this background where you've thought about how the mind works in like multiple ways now and these different like philosophically and psychologically and I feel like that it's so evident in the work.

And I'm curious for you as a person who is constantly seeking greater knowledge about these different things, did writing this feel cathartic or did it make you be like, “Okay, I want to write 15 more books now.” What was the feeling while you were going through it?

Jennifer Herrera:

Both, I guess.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah, that's fair.

Jennifer Herrera:

Because I think one of the things — at first it felt very cathartic. This idea that there are a lot of complications that happen in Leigh's life and in Leigh's personal life, but the story is the story, the mystery is the mystery.

There’s some deaths. There is a plucky detective and there's a resolution, you get the comforting arc behind there.

Adam Sockel:

Absolutely.

Jennifer Herrera:

Which I want, when I read a book. But there's also like all of this like messiness and this way in which Leigh over the course of the book is able to understand some of the things that she doesn't understand about herself. And some of the things that she's repressed.

Like in order to be a detective, and I talk to a lot of people who work in fields where they have to have really high walls up. Where they're dealing with a lot of like tough shit. She has these really high walls that she's built around her life, to make it so that she can repress a lot, because she's dealing with so much and she figures out how to be okay with taking those walls down.

And I think that is very cathartic and I feel like that is a complete story and I'm very happy with that story.

But I also feel like as I was saying before, women's stories are very driven and women meaning a broad category, not necessarily pertaining to women in particular. But women's stories are cyclical. They're moving through these cycles that last for X number of years and then you move to a new cycle.

And so, I'm still very interested in figuring out like Leigh's next area of growth and how through looking through the lens of a murder because I love a good murder, how she becomes a different person still. And luckily the publisher has agreed. So, there will be more books in this world.

Adam Sockel:

The best news. That's the best. I love that so much.

Jennifer Herrera:

You heard it here first.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. That's fantastic. Well, I absolutely loved it. Again, this is my favorite thing about doing this podcast is again, getting the book early is a nice perk as a book podcaster, but then reading it and it has always been my favorite thing to talk to authors.

And honestly, a lot of the stuff that must have been like my favorite conversations with people has been stuff that was not recorded. It was like after the fact when I would nerd out about it.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

But it is like getting to hear you talk about these different parts of the book and the story and like your own mind being like, “Oh, okay, I understand a little bit more.” It's so great.

And so, I always leave the podcast with one last question and it's to let you give a recommendation to people. It can be a book; it can be, I've had someone say like, “Go for a walk.” The first episode I ever did with Mallory O’Meara about Powerlifting, she recommended a protein powder. So like, what's something that-

Jennifer Herrera:

What protein powder did she recommend?

Adam Sockel:

Oh, I will find it. It was-

Jennifer Herrera:

I'll go look.

Adam Sockel:

It's amazing. It's like a woman created company, but the protein itself is like specifically created for like non-gendered purposes. Because Mallory's whole point of, she's like, “It's so gross.” So, like so many protein powders, it's like, “Yeah, it’s got creatinine, it's got this specifically built for women or specifically built for men.” So, I'll find it and I'll send it to you.

Jennifer Herrera:

Thank you. I’m going to look into this.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. But so, what is something that you want to recommend to people that you think they should know about?

Jennifer Herrera:

This is such a big, powerful question.

Adam Sockel:

I know.

Jennifer Herrera:

And I will stop myself at one, but I'll stay on theme. I'll stay on theme. I think that I would recommend The Women Who Run with the Wolves, in part because it was so powerful for me.

And because though it's a really thick book, which I think can be intimidating to a lot of people, the chapters can be read episodically, you don't have to read everything like from beginning to end.

And it's just, what it is, is it's dissecting stories, fairy tales you've always heard and saying what those mean and what they do for us psychologically. And I think that's really powerful because you can lead through the pages and you can say like, “What is the story that as a kid always meant the most to me. What is the fairytale that I couldn't get out of my head?”

And then seeing, okay, well how do we psychoanalyze that fairytale. And you can understand maybe the needs that you had as a kid or the needs that you have as an adult that you didn't necessarily know that you were aware of.

This is hilarious, but my sister-in-law, who is 10 years younger than I am, came to stay with us last week and we were talking about children's books. And you know that children's book about the meatballs where it's like raining meatballs?

Adam Sockel:

Yes. I know, Claudia with a Chance of Meatballs.

Jennifer Herrera:

Yes, yes. She said this story would make her cry every time she read it.

Adam Sockel:

Really?

Jennifer Herrera:

She is like not an emotional person, but this story would have her sobbing. That story and another story about a carousel horse, where the horse runs off and can't find the rest of the carousel.

Adam Sockel:

Oh, my God.

Jennifer Herrera:

And so, we were talking about these books and she's like, “I'm not an emotional person. I have no idea.” And like finding the patterns of like, okay, what do these stories have in common? And how does that reflect on like how you felt as a kid and what was going on and who you became as a person.

At the end she was like, “Oh, my God, wow. I had no idea.” And she had this sense of like having insight into her own world because of like just understanding what she connected to and psychoanalyzing those even as a child.

And that I thought, especially as I was reading The Woman Who Run with the Wolves, that was such a powerful experience to have, to take something so simple and to build it out so that it's like by loving it you're actually, even as a child being able to express something that you felt very deeply but didn't have the words for because you're a kid.

Adam Sockel:

I love that so much. Your book is fantastic. I'm so excited that there's going to be more of them. This was just such a wonderful conversation. Jennifer, thank you for joining me today.

Jennifer Herrera:

Thank you. I had such a great time.

[Music Playing]

Adam Sockel:

Passions and Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen Podcasts and was created by Adam Sockel. It was produced by Adam Sockel and Sean Rule-Hoffman. And if you are interested in this podcast and any other Evergreen Podcasts, you can go to evergreenpodcasts.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.