Politically nuanced with Marie Benedict

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Adam Sockel:

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

Today's guest is Marie Benedict, and ugh, what a great conversation. I have known Marie for many, many years and gotten to interview her many, many times for her, many, many bestselling books. This conversation was just a little bit different.

So, Marie has a new co-written, instant New York Times bestselling book, The First Ladies, which she co-wrote with Victoria Christopher Murray. They wrote The Personal Librarian together as well, which was also, a New York Times bestselling book.

This was a fun conversation because Victoria couldn't join us today, but Marie wanted to talk about Victoria's passion and how it helped inspire this particular novel. It was so much fun. They have such a unique working relationship and just friendship at this point.

So, we got to break down all of what makes them tick as co-authors, and especially being two authors who have such in-depth experience as solo authors and just how that process worked for them.

And what it's like writing with another person after so many years writing separately and how they're going to continue doing it, on and on. Just a delightful conversation. I loved catching up with Marie. It was so much fun. And you're really, really going to love this conversation.

And The First Ladies is out now. Like I said, it was an instant New York Times bestseller, so you can go get that right now if you'd like.

And before we move on, I want to give you a book recommendation and all those various fun housekeeping things. I'm not going to stray too far from the discussion today. I'm just going to say my book recommendation for you is The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, one of Marie Benedict's many, many solo books.

It's all about these few days and weeks in the life of Agatha Christie, where she was basically off the grid, off the map, couldn't be found, and then she just reemerged.

And it's a fascinating story, and Marie does such wonderful work where she does these in-depth deep dives into the things that really happened, and then builds out these historical fiction novels based on true events and then puts in her color and her stories where the blanks need to be filled in.

And then that's a lot of what happens in The First Ladies as well, and we get all into that. So, I won't dive into the specifics about that book, because we talk about it throughout this conversation today.

As always, if you want to get ahold of me, you can find me at [email protected], or you can find me on TikTok and Instagram @PassionsandPrologues, where I'm always sharing book reviews, book recommendations, and all that good stuff.

Okay. I'm not going to keep you any longer here in this intro because I'm so excited for you to hear this conversation with Marie Benedict on Passions & Prologues.

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Okay. So, originally, this conversation was going to be with two wonderful bestselling authors, but I just have one with me, which is Marie Benedict, who I have gotten to talk to a bunch in the past. I'm very, very excited to catch up, but we're going to do something just slightly different.

As I said, she has a co-author of Victoria, who is not with us right now. And Victoria Christopher Murray is your co-author of The First Ladies.

And you said right before we recorded, instead of getting into what you are passionate about first, you know what she would've said. Well, we're going to dive into that.

So, I think this might be my favorite way that I've ever got to ask this. Marie, what is Victoria super passionate about that we're going to discuss today?

Marie Benedict:

So, what's interesting, and normally I don't like to speak for Victoria. Marginalized people have had other people speak for them for so long, and I'm so cognizant of that.

But there are definitely certain things that I know Victoria would be completely fine with me saying, because we've talked about them ad nauseam and because she's given me license to talk about certain things.

So, in terms of what Victoria is passionate about, I am very comfortable saying that she is a political junkie. And she has, at any given time, multiple media streams going on politics. She studies it broadly and deeply.

She has her opinions about things, certainly very strong opinions. But what's beautiful about Victoria is that she's determined to look at something from all sides.

Even though she believes in one particular viewpoint, she's formulated a particular viewpoint, she wants to make sure that she's not giving short shrift to anything and see from full 360.

So, she will watch news channels, which espouse things that are really different from what she believes or follow a Twitter thread from somebody whose views are completely opposite to her own.

She'll engage with people not in a like combat way at all, in a, “I just want to understand how and why you've come to believe that.”

And I'm not fascinated with politics. I mean, I keep abreast of politics, but I don't need to know every senator and the latest thing that's happening on the Hill, she knows it all. And her like celebrity superstars are politicians.

So, just a funny aside, my like second or third cousin is or was a congressional representative from Pennsylvania, Conor Lamb. And he was very involved in politics generally, and he still is. He lost his most recent election.

She lives in Washington, DC which is like perfect for her passion. And she saw him at like a coffee shop or something, and she was like, “Oh my God,” she took pictures.

She was just flying … we've been all over the place on this like multiple week book tour. And she was in Cleveland coming somewhere, I think on Monday. And she ran into some politician that she adores, and she took pictures.

So, it's fun to watch, but I've also, learned so much, and that's one of the many beautiful things for me about having Victoria as my co-writer, is that I get to witness and share in and learn from her passions too.

Adam Sockel:

Well, first off, I am so in awe of people who are able to do exactly what you just said, because I will freely admit, like I am very open about my political beliefs.

And I've talked about them here with authors, which the nice thing about authors is, at least many of the authors that I talk with, share my political beliefs.

Marie Benedict:

Oh, that's probably almost across the board. Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. And I will say with the last, like honestly since like 2015, all of the political cycles, especially mentioning Cleveland, being in Ohio within any like 18 months leading up to a major election is just exhausting around here because we're one of those like — much less so now our state is very, very red.

But even still, we get inundated with ads on both sides and messaging, and it's exhausting. And I will freely admit, like I have gotten to the point where I say all the time, like I don't even want to engage with people … and I know that this is not a good thing.

I don't even want to engage with people who fervently disagree with me because it's exhausting. And I mean, title of the podcast is Passions & Prologues, I get very passionate. And I struggle to keep my calm.

And I am so impressed, I've seen so many people who are able to go out and like go to rallies and political events of the opposite side of the aisle as it would be like, actually have conversations.

And that is so impressive to me that people can do that and be able to, like you said, not get snarky or … because I have to imagine like 99% percent of the time when Victoria has a conversation with someone, she's probably more well informed than that person.

Marie Benedict:

99.99. I mean, she knows every issue from every side. She's just trying to understand the how and the why of people's beliefs.

And it's interesting, even my last solo book, The Mitford Affair, which does explore, it takes a look at these six infamous aristocratic British sisters from the 1930s, some of whom literally became part of Hitler's inner circle.

It is a deep exploration, not just to the role that they played in World War II, but into how people form their belief systems. Because like you, sometimes I tune out, but I also struggle to understand.

And I wrote that book, not from a place of judgment, but from a place of trying to understand how and why people form their political beliefs.

And certainly, my relationship with Victoria drove that topic. That's her favorite solo book of mine, because it goes right to the heart of one of her curiosities.

So, it's amazing the way in which, if you're very, very close with someone, as I'm sure everybody has this experience, your friend, partner, family members' interests can open up a door for you.

Adam Sockel:

And I love that so much, and I want to get into exactly what you said, like the two of yours relationship and how this, her like political interest and deep knowledge obviously affects your writing. Like The First Ladies, it’s very like you don't have to squint at all. It's very clear.

But I'm going to say like we were talking about our exhaustion. We're recording this you and I on July 28th, and it'll come out sooner thereafter. But this week was the week that all of the like UFO news has happened.

And in addition to it being just like a wild and crazy story that I was interested in it, I realized one of the things that interested me the most is while I was watching some of those congressional hearings, is like for one of the first times in a long time, people on both sides of the aisle were asking questions, and they like were calm, and they were just seeking information.

And I was like, “Oh, I bet this is how politics used to be.” But it's like, yeah.

Marie Benedict:

It should be, maybe.

Adam Sockel:

It should be. Exactly. Yeah. So, but I was …

Marie Benedict:

I love that. It's like we needed UFOs to have people calm down and ask the questions that people should be asking all along.

Unfortunately, today, politicians go into meetings, hearings, whatever, with a preformed view. That's not necessarily on-site gathering but based on agenda building. And that's that kind of you lose all this stuff I think that probably used to happen more regularly in political settings.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. And so, something you and I have talked about a lot is every time you write a book, I'm always fascinated by the avenue you take to determine what stories you want to tell next.

So, like for people who somehow … everyone listening in here, I'm sure is aware of your work. But you pick these women in history who kind of haven't gotten their proper due or have stories about them that people don't know, like the Christie one.

Like then you unfold them, and you unpack them, and you dive into such rich detail, everything. And I’m also fascinated by that.

But I'm curious with The First Ladies, did Victoria's interests in politics help shape your decision to write this together?

I guess that kind of take me through how the two of you decided we're going to get the gang back together, and we're going to [crosstalk 00:12:42]. So, how did that come about?

Marie Benedict:

Well, it's a great question, of course, Adam. As always, you're asking questions and nobody else asks. Which I love so much.

Yes and no. I guess the for people who haven't read the book that are listening, The First Ladies is about the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt, who we all know, and a woman that most people in the white community don't know, but she's very well known in the black community. And that's Mary McLeod Bethune.

She was the 15th born and her family first born free. She became very well educated, started a college that is now, one of the biggest and best HBCUs, Bethune-Cookman in Florida. And she became well-known advocate for equality.

But our story is really about their friendship. Like they were like secret BFFs, at a time of segregation when black and white people were not supposed to shake hands, let alone sleep over each other's houses. I mean, that would've just like been unheard of.

And all the work that they did together, kind of behind the scenes to advance equality.

And so, Victoria and I started out … we had such an extraordinary experience writing The Personal Librarian, we knew we had many, many more books in us, and we did have many books in us. But something happened when we were starting to promote.

At the very beginning, The Personal Librarian, we knew people would be fascinated with Belle da Costa Greene, who, if people read that book, was the personal librarian of JP Morgan. She ran his personal private library, which was like the world's best collection of manuscripts. Not your average library.

But she was only able to do that because she hid her identity. She's a black woman passing as white.

So, we knew people would be fascinated when we were out, finally able to talk about Belle. But what we didn't bargain for was the depth of people's fascinations about us and about our friendship.

On the road, I mean, at least at the beginning, it was maybe a quarter, then it became like a third and then like a half. People's questions were about our friendship, about our writing process, about our conversations. It was crazy. And the one-on-one comments we would get.

And so, we realized that people had this hunger. And if Victoria were here, you would see it in person, we have a very unique, very close friendship.

I mean, it's sisterhood and it really is because of what we've gone through in writing and in terms of the depth and uncomfortableness of the conversations we've had, we literally will talk about any topic together.

It's very unique, and people see that and feel it, and quite honestly, they want it. They’re hungry for that.

And so, when we set out to write The First Ladies, we wanted to honor that hunger that we saw, and we very intentionally wanted to set out to select a topic that would allow us to explore some of those things.

So, it's explore something that we both feel very strongly about, which is that we need to have difficult, uncomfortable conversations together with somebody different than ourselves in order to develop empathy and bridges between races.

And that isn't happening. Instead, we're more siloed than ever. And it's becoming more and more the case.

And so, Victoria has been enamored with Mary McLeod Bethune since her childhood. Like I said, she's really well known in the black community, not very well known in the white community.

And I was doing some digging around and I learned about the friendship between Mary and Eleanor. It wasn't easy to find because there's really not very much about it out there.

There were a couple of news articles, a couple snippets, but you could get like an 800-page book on Roosevelt and not see one mention of Mary McLeod Bethune. And yet she was honestly one of Eleanor's best friends.

And that very fact was even fascinating to me, the way in which their friendship was buried, because that would mean these women were trying to hide it. In fact, they were trying to do the opposite. They were trying to normalize equality by appearing together very publicly.

And once we kind of got dug into it, we were like, “My gosh, their story's amazing.” And it is in some ways, an exploration of the same sorts of conversations, growth, openness, empathy that Victoria and I have experienced in our own work.

And now, you asked me whether or not … this is a really long-winded answer.

Adam Sockel:

Honestly, I love interviewing you because I can ask like three questions, and I know you're just going to giving me this.

Marie Benedict:

I'm gone, I’m gone. You asked me to go full circle back to how Victoria's passion for politics, that was like the deal sealer.

At first, she already knew that what Mary had done, and she knew that during this time period … I mean, she didn't know, none of us really knew about the way in which Eleanor and Mary worked together.

But she already knew that Mary had had one of the most senior positions in the New Deal administration. Definitely the most senior position as the black person, let alone black woman.

But she also, knew something that I didn't, but now of course I know very well is what was happening in politics at this time. And during this time period, prior to this juncture, black people generally supported the Republican Party because Abraham Lincoln was not Republican, and he had freed the slaves.

But the political party identity is in great flux at this time. And Mary McLeod Bethune is hugely important in that shift, in that identity.

And for Victoria, who knew all about that, loves politics and the way it shows, that was like, “Oh my gosh, we can get into that. And we could get into the way in which things actually happen in politics.”

Which is not always evident. It's the wheeling and dealing behind the scenes. It's the conversations that no one sees. It's pulling the string to get the string over here to move.

And because that's the way these women had to work, they were not part of the formal political system because very few women were. They had to use what power they had at their disposal to move the needle.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. You saying that, like there's a very well-known show that is now done, unfortunately called Veep with Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Marie Benedict:

Oh, I loved that show.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. I adored it. And I thought it was like the smartest written show ever. And then I come to realize, I've since read many, many people who are in politics say, like in addition to being very funny and outlandish, it's the most accurate depiction of like those kind of back-channel dealings and all these different things.

And that's been every time I rewatched, that's very eye-opening to me.

Marie Benedict:

That’s really happening. Yeah. We know that.

Adam Sockel:

So, you mentioned you could read a 800-page book about the Roosevelts and not really see much about Mary.

If you were to find, and I'm sure they exist, like if you were to look at biographies of Mary McLeod Bethune was there more information from like those resources to formulate how their friendship and relationship, like their working relationship came together?

I guess like something we've talked about a lot is how when you write your novels, sometimes there's rich veins of information you can work from. And sometimes it's very much, you kind of have to make assumptions and go with your gut.

So, for that, because like you said, it be so hard to find information about them from the Roosevelt side of things, I guess, where did you both find the information that was going to enable you to write this story the way that you did?

Marie Benedict:

Again, such a good question. Always. Okay.

So, I would say, gosh, definitely not a lot about Mary from the Eleanor Roosevelt side outside. And quite honestly, not enough about Mary McLeod Bethune in general out there. I mean, the dearth, the balance is like 10 million books on Eleanor and like very few on Mary.

What I will say is two things. There was very little mention of their friendship in mainstream media channels.

But at this time, there were some very rich and wonderful black media channels, including (well, this is just one example, but it's dear to my heart because it's where I live) the Pittsburgh Courier was probably the most prominent black newspaper at the time. And that's where we found lots of public mentions of the two women.

You could find descriptions of the speech that Eleanor gave at a convention, the way they shook hands. You would almost never find something like that reported in mainstream media because the mainstream media didn't want people to see that. So, that was a rich vein.

I will say, in terms of, and I definitely went deep and wide into all the Roosevelt archives to find references to Mary.

And I did uncover like a treasure trove of stuff deep in a couple archives that I had to like paw through on a dusty microfiche machine that hadn't been used in my local library for like 20 years, honestly.

Like they literally had to dust this thing off. They're like, “Nobody's used this thing.” It was like in the grungiest corner of the library.

So, we did find these wonderful letters, but in terms of like the more up close and personal aspects of their friendship, the richest vein was Victoria went … she's very friendly with the president of Bethune-Cookman, just by coincidentally, Bethune-Cookman College in Florida.

She went down on his invitation. She got to poke around in all sorts of corners that are usually off limits. But she also was given access to an autobiography written by Mary's grandson who had just passed away.

She talked about everything that was in it with his granddaughter, I think, who would be Mary's great-great granddaughter. And that is where got to find a lot of the touchy-feely type of details that you hoped you could find.

The way in which the grandson who lived with Mary would be frustrated and unable to get sleep when Eleanor would stay over because the two old women would be up all night giggling. You know what I mean? Like girlfriend stuff.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah.

Marie Benedict:

And all those beautiful little details helped us more stitched in with the more formal things that we could find.

The more formal things allowed us to get a sense of how they worked, what they were doing to make these things happen. What kinds of things they were involved in, the breadth scope of that. And all the stuff that we were digging out of archives and in newspaper articles and that sort of stuff.

But it was that personal touch, which really wasn't anywhere else, that we were able to layer in a lot of that personal aspect of the relationship.

Adam Sockel:

So, I'm really interested in the process of creating the story. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but I have two very dear friends. Kimberly Latrice Jones and Gilly Segal, who also have-

Marie Benedict:

Oh, I love them. I love them. Love.

Adam Sockel:

So, speaking of Cleveland, they were just here a few weeks ago, and they did an event. I got like to hang out. I feel like I've known them about as long as I've known you. And it's like family.

Marie Benedict:

I love those women. I was fortunate right before COVID, we did an event together and I got to know them.

And my co-written books hadn't come out yet and I wasn't really able to discuss them in detail. But since then, we've connected over this very unique experience we have about writing with the other.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of what I wanted to ask about because I guess much like it sounds like you and Victoria have, Kim and Gilly have, quite literally seeing them in person, like exactly what you're describing. Like they are sisters. It is not like, “Oh, we're even close friends.” Like they are family, you can tell.

And it's their story to tell, so I won't get into the details, but like they talk about how when they're writing challenging scenes and things like how they basically create a safe space to say like, “Okay, I'm going to say stuff that may sound ignorant or it may be uncomfortable, I promise I have goodness in my heart when I'm talking about these things.”

But more specifically, like they, much like you and Victoria, like they are established writers on their own, but they come together and write.

And you and Victoria, I mean, she's written like 30 books. You have multiple bestsellers as well. You both have a full career on your own. And writing can be such a personal, private experience until the book comes out in the world.

So, I'm just curious about process, like back with starting with The Personal Librarian. Obviously, like you said, now you guys have many, many more books in your mind that you're planning on doing together. How does the process feel different from when you're writing by yourself?

Like I guess like you said, she's in DC, you're in Pittsburgh. I guess in general, what is the collaboration like for you two?

Marie Benedict:

Gosh, well, being on the other … I don't even want to say that, I'm not going to win. The other side of COVID has certainly helped.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah.

Marie Benedict:

But I'll say, COVID gave us the all, the gift of Zoom.

Adam Sockel:

It's true. Yeah.

Marie Benedict:

Prior to that we had certainly met, we had worked together, but we weren't using this platform to the fullness of its ability. And that has become an instrumental part.

I never feel like I'm really away from Victoria because we text each other about 10,000 times a day and talk on the phone and stuff.

But this always allows me to feel like we're together. But of course, now, I mean, I literally spent like pretty every minute — I can't even tell you how many meals I've had with her, how many cities we've been through together, how many play rides, car rides. I mean, we've had an abundance of one-on-one time.

And we use that to work, we use that to prepare. We use that to flesh out new ideas, but we also use it just to do what Mary and Eleanor did, which is shoot the crap. Like to talk about …

And that is something that we wove into the book. Was like, “Well, what do we talk about?” We talk about trying to be healthier. We talk about what we actually wish we were eating, which most of the time is tortilla chips. Like all that came into the book and brought them alive.

But what she described about Gilly and Kimberly is this is pretty much like what we do. Which is that there are many, many topics which would probably make a lot of people uncomfortable, which we don't even think twice about discussing.

Like I don't even need to say, “I'm going to show my ignorance here, or let's take a minute this by …” Because we've had 10 million conversations like that.

But sometimes it will come to a peak. It'll really come to that. Like there are some stuff, as you know, in The First Ladies, which is about lynching and really white people don't really know what lynching is. Really.

I mean, white people mostly think lynching is a hanging. That is just like one tiny part of lynching. It's a whole thing. A whole process, it involves a whole community. It is far more gruesome in barbaric than just a hanging.

I hate to even say just a hanging. The way it's approached to the community, I mean, it is the most awful thing I can think of.

And we had to have a lot of conversations about that. And my ignorance was on full display. And there are things where we push each other on the other, and Victoria's always the first one to say that not only am I learning, she's learning too.

And what we're really learning is about the other. Not just their my experiences, her experiences, but how we don't know what we don't know.

Previously, she couldn't understand how white people couldn't see all that she was dealing with every single day. And that's because we don't know what we don't know.

And so, some of it is learning all of that and knowing that we can 100% trust the other person to know that our intentions are pure and good. And that we're coming from a place of best intentions. And that's rare in the world.

So, when you have all that and you're writing with all that energy, sometimes it can be hard to shift to solo projects, to answer enough of your questions. You feel like, “Oh my gosh, it's just me here. I’m just doing this by myself.”

But I always know that Victoria is there to talk through anything with me. And she knows that as well. She's doing her own first historical solo book. It'll come out in January of 2025. And I talked through a lot of that with her.

Like we brainstormed on titles, and my title I think is going to win, I don't know. So, I'm never really alone.

And like I said, with The Mitford Affair, I heard her voice in my head. Like gosh, I mean, there are some really uncomfortable scenes in there. Like, ooh, really uncomfortable. Like how somebody could actually adore Adolf Hitler.

Like I had to get there. I had to understand what I was trying to understand about our own world. Not that we have Hitler in our world, but I needed to understand how people are attracted to these extreme political movements and believe in them honestly.

But I could hear her saying, “You can do it. This is not going to feel nice, but you need to.”

So, she is with me. But definitely we both feel that like once we're either done being together a lot or writing something together and onto our own project, it feels a little bit like, “Wait a second, it's just me out here.” And I'm never alone.

Adam Sockel:

This is going to sound like a very straightforward like tactical question. And I'm only going to keep using Kim and Gilly because they're like the co-authors that I know that I'm closest with.

Marie Benedict:

There's so few of us.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. Well, and they will literally tell me, like they get together like at like for basically writing weekends as often as they can because they're both so busy.

Like they'll get together in person and they will literally say like, “One of us will sit at the computer and the other one's next to us.” And they'll just basically talk through as they're writing.

But are you two like sending like, “Hey, here's a few pages,” like back and forth? Like the actual process of writing must be super unique. I'm so fascinated by this.

Marie Benedict:

So, I mean, it's yes and no. I think it starts out just by talking. Talking through the arc of the story, talking through it chapter by chapter, talking through what our goals are, what evolution, what our character development is, what themes we want to extract from the material.

And with historical fiction's a little different in that you're still researching as you go and you're still finding things as you go. Because just like in conversations with the other, sometimes we don't know what we don't know until we don't know it. And that's sometimes your mid chapter with that.

But that we sort of start that way and then we choose chapters to do a first draft. In this book, it was a little different than the personal librarian because there's two voices. And I did Eleanor, and she did Mary.

And in The Personal Librarian, we had to divvy it up on different lines. We mostly did that based on skillset, knowledge base, interest level. It was more, not arbitrary, but it wasn't as clearly delineated. It was pretty clear who was going to do what.

But that said, as soon as someone would finish a chapter or finish as much as they felt they could without involving the other, we switch. And she reads mine and I read hers, and we talk it through.

Sometimes you'll see in a chapter that the heart of the chapter is the actual conversation we had about the book. The dialogue between us is the dialogue in the story. Because there is an autobiographical component to this book.

We write fiction and it's historical fiction, we don't have perfect records. We don't know about some of their conversations. We don't know.

But we had to assume for them to do the work that they did and be as close as they did, they had to overcome some of the same hurdles that we did, and they had to have some of the same kind of awkward conversations that we have.

And so, those found their way in the pages of the book.

I don't know if I answered your question perfectly, but does that make sense?

Adam Sockel:

Absolutely. Yeah. And something that I want people to really realize is there has to be such a removal of ego to make something of this like process work.

Like I'll give an example from my own personal life. I work for a tech company, and our marketing team is very small. I was telling you before I started recording, I think I might mention this, like I do the entirety of our content from like the littlest social posts to writing market research reports.

But I obviously always need other pairs of eyes on it. But because I'm the only like genuine writer in our company, people will be very … I continuously reinforce that I want their honest feedback, but because they're not like writers day in and day out, they'll kind of tiptoe around it and be like, “I was just thinking I'll like …”

“No, no, no. Like I have no ego about this piece. I need feedback.”

And that's just me doing a tech company writing. This is not like a New York Times two bestselling authors coming together.

And I think that is the important part is like I think you mentioned there's so few co-authors like you guys, and Kim and Gilly.

And I think the reason is like you have to have such a deep personal connection and such an open, and honest, and ego free relationship to be able to say like, “Hey, I'm going to edit the thing you just spent a week writing and I'm going to change it, but it's for the good of our story as a whole.”

Like I have to imagine that is probably why you become so close so quickly, because you have to have that like intimate trust with each other.

Marie Benedict:

I mean, you just hit a, once again, the nail on the head perfectly to what's required. That's where Victoria always says, you have to have a writing soulmate to do this type of work, and you really do.

You have to have deep, deep trust in the other person. And deep, deep ability, willingness to throw yourself out there with abandon, come what may.

I mean, I'll give you an example. Victoria usually tells this story, but we know each other's stories really well.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. At this point.

Marie Benedict:

At this point. So, when The First Ladies open, it opens with the scene that really happens. Of course, our version of it.

But Mary and Eleanor meet when Eleanor's mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who was a difficult character to say the least, when she and Eleanor hosts a luncheon for the presidents of women's clubs.

And women's clubs at that time were really women's only source of power. So, you could have all these women who are advocating for women who are in many ways the most powerful women in America.

And Sarah says, “You know what? I met this wonderful woman, Mary McLeod Bethune at some other thing. Well, she's the president of the NCNW, which is a huge and we're all trying to do the same thing.” And Eleanor’s like, “That's great. Let's do it.”

Well, it doesn't go as they had expected. The other women won't eat with Mary, they're very unkind. And this all happened in real life from what we understand.

So, several scenes later, it's several years later, and Mary is at a like a gala event hosted by James Gamble of Procter and Gamble who's one of her benefactors and he's honoring her.

And I kept putting in there a reflection. Because we write each other's chapters, and we switch. So, this was written from Mary's point of view.

And I kept on putting a line there saying, “And Mary kept thinking about those women in the very beginning, because it's like, ‘Look at me now. All these powerful men, white men are celebrating me.’”

And Victoria took it out and we went through another round. I noticed it wasn't in there, but we'd been shifting a lot of things around. I thought it got removed inadvertently, I put it back in. This goes on like two or three more times.

And Victoria's like, “Am I losing my mind? Why is this line keep on coming back in here?” Because she just felt at her core that Mary wouldn't feel that way. But she didn't know why. She didn't understand what it was about that line that she felt so strongly about.

So, when she realized like it really wasn't me intentionally putting it back in there, she took a minute. She's like, “What is it about this?” And once she figured it out, she called me and she said, “Okay, we got to talk.” And she said that the whole scenario, and actually I had just been flying back in there.

And that's not like me, usually if there's something like that, I will discuss it. But honestly, there were so many things moving around. I think I thought it was getting cut. And I felt like, “Oh, Mary would definitely be thinking about this.”

My real name's Heather. She’s like, “Heather, Mary wouldn't feel that way because that event happened almost two years prior. And in those two years, 25,000 racist incidents had happened to Mary. She doesn't have luxury of still thinking about that one or she would never move forward in her life.”

And that moment was an epiphany moment, not just for me, but for Victoria, because she didn't realize that in her own life, how many slights had happened, how she had become inured to all of that awfulness.

And in that moment, I really realized for the first time, even though Victoria had told me about the crazy microaggressions that happened to her on the daily basis, like she cannot go into an Apple store without being shadowed by someone who thinks she's going to steal something.

For the first time, I really felt and almost saw the weight about racist incidents that happened regularly. For a moment, just a moment, I saw the world through Victoria's eyes, Mary’s lens. And I felt it.

And it's that you have to have a very trusting relationship to not only have those kind of conversations but see within yourself and then see within the other.

Adam Sockel:

I love that so much. Marie, you've been so gracious with your time for people to … like you guys just got done with a tour and this Friday morning you're doing this with me. I so, so appreciate it.

Before I let you go though, I always-

Marie Benedict:

I love you.

Adam Sockel:

I love you right back. Before I let you go, I have one more ask. I always have the authors who are on give a recommendation of any kind. It can be a book, it can be a TV show. Anything you want to recommend before you go that you think people should be checking out more than they are right now?

Marie Benedict:

Well, I hadn't really thought about this, but I am halfway through a book that doesn't need me to tell people to read it, but I am reading it. It's Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Demon Copperhead.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah.

Marie Benedict:

OMG. It is like a blow you away masterpiece. I mean, she won the award, so obviously everyone thinks so. Again, I'm always looking for like, I don't know, a fresh lens through this world.

And she really offers this unbelievably unique lens to see Appalachia, poverty, addiction in a way that you really never, ever have before. And at least I haven't before. And it's a really profound book. That's what I would recommend right now.

Adam Sockel:

I can plus, plus that. I totally agree.

Marie Benedict:

Really?

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. Marie, I was so excited to get to do this. I have missed you so, so much. Thank you. Thank you for joining me today.

Marie Benedict:

Oh, fun, and best wishes with everything with your own life and this podcast.

[Music Playing]

Adam Sockel:

Passions & Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen podcast 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 podcast, you can go to evergreenpodcasts.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.