Slow content boil with Tim Murphy

[Music Playing]

Adam Sockel:

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

I'm your host, Adam Sockel, and today's guest is Tim Murphy, author of the new novel Speech Team. I really, really loved this conversation.

The book itself is very much like a modern-day breakfast club. It is the story of this group of now, older students. They all went to high school together. They're now in their, I believe, late 20s when this happens.

And it's the story of why they come back together to deal with a series of traumatic experiences that they didn't really know were traumatic while they were in high school.

And that's something that I think a lot of people experience while they're in high school. They get these moments that they don't realize are going to have lasting effects on them, whether it's with friends, or teachers, or significant others, whatever it is, you have these moments where you don't really realize how much they're going to affect your life moving on.

So, that's a lot about what Speech Team is all about. It's a really, really great novel. It's a perfect back to school novel, which is going to kind of color the conversation.

I didn't mean this to be a back to school special, but we are releasing this right around back to school time for anyone going to high school and all that. So, this is a good novel to read for those who are nostalgic for those high school years.

And yeah, just really, really love the conversation we have. We talk about a series of different TV shows and just media in general that Tim and I are both drawn to and we kind of show our age and our grumpy old person aspects of our personalities where we talk about a few very, very popular modern pieces of content that neither of us care very much about.

But it was a really great conversation. I loved getting into the different types of stories that we are both drawn to.

And with that in mind, I have a book recommendation I bring up during this conversation. And I've brought this author up a number of times in the podcast, but I don't know that I've ever recommended any of his works.

Wendell Berry is one of my favorite authors that has ever written. Wendell has written quite literally dozens and dozens and dozens of books, both fiction and nonfiction.

He is based in Kentucky. He has lived all of his, I believe, 90 plus years in Kentucky on a farm that his family has owned for generations. And he writes lots of these stories that are very, very small town, very like family and community centric.

And this time of year, I find myself reading Wendell Berry books as a mid-Westerner who loves fall and pre-fall.

It's that time of year where if you're driving around Ohio where I live, you'll see all of these overflowing farmers markets and gardens and everything. It's just a pretty cool time to be around here, especially if you like vegetables, which I do.

So, this is all to say, I'm going to recommend one of his Port William books. Port William is a small town that Wendell Berry “created” quote unquote, but it is absolutely based on a small town in Kentucky that he is from.

But he created this community of Port William and he wrote a bunch of different stories that are interconnected. You can really read them in any order, but there's these different characters you'll see coming and going from each story.

And so, I'm going to recommend A Place on Earth, which is one of these stories where you return to Port William. It's during World War II, but there's all these different characters again, that you'll notice if you read additional Wendell Berry books.

There's Jayber Crow, who's a barber. There's Uncle Stanley who's a grave digger. There's sharecroppers, there's a preacher.

But it basically just tells the story of all of these different lives that are intertwined during World War II, the things that they have to do to adjust their lives, to find a way to find peace with all of the things that are going on.

But I just really, really enjoy how Wendell Berry is able to write about nature and these lives that sometimes take place fully on a single farm, and they still are rich, and fulfilling, and beautiful.

And there really aren't any other writers like Wendell Berry out there, I don't think, that do it quite as well as he does.

So, if you're a fan of nature, agriculture, agrarian lifestyle, things like that, and even if you're not, I recommend giving a Wendell Berry book a try. He also, writes tons of poetry, but A Place on Earth is the one I'm going to recommend today.

And as always, if you want to get additional book recommendations from me, you can email me at [email protected], or you can follow me on TikTok and Instagram @PassionsandPrologues.

And also, be sure to check out my YouTube page. You can find that just by searching passions and prologues on YouTube. We've been posting clips of each episode there as well as some book recommendations. So, if you want to take a look at some of the conversations I'm having, you can find me on YouTube as well.

So, I would appreciate if you want to follow me in any and all of those places. Got to be out there producing content at all times.

Okay. That is all of the housekeeping. I cannot wait for you guys to hear this conversation with Tim Murphy, author of Speech Team on Passions and Prologues.

[Music Playing]

Okay, Tim, what is something you are super passionate about that we're going to be discussing today?

Tim Murphy:

Well, Adam, as it happens, I just finished watching this limited series called Love & Death on … oh God, I forget now, if it was on Netflix or Max.

But anyway, it's a limited series, and it's based on a true story of something that happened in sort of like a comfortable Dallas suburb in the very late ‘70s where it was about a group of couples. They were all part of the same church.

And the wife of one couple, who is played so brilliantly by Elizabeth Olsson in just an amazing performance that I hope she gets an Emmy for.

And the husband and another couple that's played by … I feel terrible. I think it's Kirsten Dunst's … that's a hard one to say with the possessive attached to it. Kirsten Dunst’s husband in real life, I'm forgetting his name.

But they decide to have this very secret affair. And it's about everything that unspools from there. And it is called Love & Death. So yes, it does end in death. And it's based, I think, quite scrupulously on a true story.

So, as a novelist, I love how it plays out because it plays out in a really slow, nuanced, very detailed way that is, I don't know, just like a slow car wreck in a way, that happens in slow-mo. And it's just so good.

I mean, the period ness of it. It goes from ‘78 to ’80, and at that time I was like 8, 9, and 10. And it's like the period ness of it is so spot on. I mean, I swear to God, I can spot like blouses and sweaters that like my mother wore, or the interiors of their houses are so to the period, like that sort of Ethan Allen like brown furniture, everything's kind of brown and tan.

The cars, the music is incredible. It's so much like she's always in the car with like AM radio on, so you're always hearing like Juice Newton or …

But she's just so good. I've never really seen her in anything before and she's incredible. I mean, even just like her face when she's like alone in the car is like riveting to watch.

And it's so good because it's sort of a story about when basically good people through a series of choices, end up in a nightmare. It's really, really, really good.

And it's also, kind of like a romantic noir suspense that becomes a courtroom drama at a certain point. Like it sort of changes genres halfway through. It's really good.

So, I guess that's probably because my husband and I just finished watching it a few nights ago, like we've been saying to each other, like, “We can't stop thinking about it.” It's really has a really haunting quality.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. So, my first question about this is like I have like whatever the version of TV analysis paralysis is, like I'll see so many options and I'm like, “Jesus, I don't know what to watch.” And I'll just like defer to watching like the Great British baking show again for the 100th time.

So, what drew you initially? You mentioned not really having seen Elizabeth Olsson in much else. Like what drew you guys to wanting to watch the series when you first kind of like saw the trailer or saw the …

Tim Murphy:

Well, just like you said, I think we always go into this slight despair when we finish something amazing. We're like, “Oh no. Like where's the next hit? A really good pure drug that's going to be our hit for like the next week or something like that.”

I don't know. I mean, I think it was kind of just the … I think we were on … oh yeah, it's on Max because of course, like the good middle-aged gays we've been watching and Just Like That, the Sex and the City reboot.

So, it was presented to us when we finished that. And he loves Elizabeth Olsson because he knows her from like some Marvel Comic movie or something. That he showed me a clip from.

I lack the sci-fi Marvel superhero gene. Like that kind of stuff just has never, even since I was a kid, really interested me. I always want to watch like the domestic naturalistic family drama. I mean, I've been like that since I was 10.

Like I would've taken Little House on the Prairie over Star Wars any day because I wanted to like go to the general store with Laura and like buy my own calico and make my own dresses.

Adam Sockel:

Listen, one of my favorite authors of all time is Wendell Berry, who writes just like American pastoral books. I think he's like 97 now. He lives in Kentucky. He lived on this farm that his like family has owned for five generations.

He writes naturalistic poetry. All of his fiction is literally about a small town that he's made up, which is basically just the small town that he's from. And so, I get it. I'm all for that.

Like I'm the same, like I never cared about — I'm like one of the few people, it sounds like you may be the same, or like when it comes to Star Wars, like I feel like you have to either love or hate it, and I just don't care. I'm so indifferent. Like it doesn't matter to me at all.

Tim Murphy:

Yeah, no, I know. I can't connect with something that … I mean, I can watch it a little bit and marvel at the technological visual brilliance of it.

And I can certainly watch like the first one and be charmed by the technology of film at that time that made it look as sophisticated as it did at the time, even though now it looks really charmingly …

But I guess I have a hard time connecting to stories that I know are that are fantasy or sci-fi and then involve these … and certainly as a writer, like I think I've always felt that real life is sort of like kind of like extraordinary, and horrifying, and beautiful, and shocking enough.

I've never needed like leaps into like wild, imaginative territory, like time travel and stuff like that, or other galaxies.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. I mean, I will do some like magical realism type stuff, or like speculative fiction, but I always say like the line I always use to describe the books I like, I like small stories with big emotions, which is honestly one of the reasons I loved your book so much, which we’ll get to in just a bit.

But like-

Tim Murphy:

Oh, thanks.

Adam Sockel:

You're welcome. I totally know what you mean. Like I feel like we've hit the point now with technology where I know that if I were to watch a fantasy movie, or like one of the Marvel ones, (I watched like the early Marvel movies) but I'm just like, “Yeah, I get it. There's incredible virtual effects teams out there who can do this stuff.”

Which is why if I'm going to watch a movie like that, I'm more drawn to like Guillermo del Toro. His stuff tends to be like more like physical tricks, like actual practical effects, which that stuff, practical stuff is very impressive to me.

But it's like, at a certain point, our computers are so advanced and I'm like, “Yeah, you made a very impressive looking blue beam go into the sky, and that's how you're going to end the third act of your story.” So, I'm with you. Yeah.

Tim Murphy:

That's so funny you say that because I have a friend … I'm like 54, but one of my best friends is like 30. And we're both like film nuts. Like we get together twice a week, and like we watch a film, usually an old film.

And so, recently we've been on, because a lot of these films, we've been watching what we call like ‘80s prestige films, like all the films that won like Oscars in the ‘80s. Like a lot of which I had saw a long time ago, but he's never seen.

So, we were watching Out of Africa with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, which came out in 1985. And like it's so sumptuous. It is so sumptuous. I mean, the issues of race and Africa and representation is one thing.

I mean, it's actually kind of weirdly good for the period in which it was made. Like they acknowledged colonialism and that it's not really their country, it's not really their continent, it's not really their land. But it's so gorgeous.

Like there are these aerial shots and these wide shots. And we were just like, “This is all real. Like none of this is CGI. Of course, it would be CGI today.”

But we were just sort of marveling at how gorgeous it was, and that it was all real. Obviously, they shot it on location and like every shot had to be like meticulously worked out no matter how expansive or like epic the shot was.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. I think honestly, exactly what you're saying is why I love … I kind of am talking on both sides of my mouth because always like I say like I don't really care about the computer generated graphics because I'm like, “Okay, at a certain point our computers are just incredible.”

But I will be blown away by watching like the new natural, like nature documentaries that have been coming out, or whether it's on like Disney or wherever, Netflix.

And they will use these cameras that are like just absurd. Like 8,000K or whatever it is, 8K, it's like these insane cameras to show like a frog jumping from one leaf to the next. And I absolutely will be like, “Did you guys see that frog? Is anyone else?” Like I will be blown away by that stuff.

And like exactly what you're saying about like Out of Africa, that stuff does impress me, where I'm like, “Okay, it's all real. These are things that are actually happening in the world.” That stuff really does fascinate me. I know what you mean by that.

Tim Murphy:

Yeah.

Adam Sockel:

So, about Love & Death, like what was it that captivated you? You mentioned kind of like how these unbalanced good people can have situations turn into a nightmare, but like what kept you so like enthralled with it once the story had ended?

Tim Murphy:

Oh, that's so interesting. I mean, I think the part that like really left me feeling haunted was, well, I guess I don't want to overly spoil it for anyone who might watch it.

But let me put it this way. There's a long segment in the story that between when someone does something heinous, when someone commits a murder and when justice catches up to them. And in this interval, they go on with their regular life.

And watching the actor play that, going on with their regular domestic life and their daily domestic duties with the knowledge that they've done this thing was like fascinating and haunting. And watching the actor sort of embody the split that takes place in their personality was really cool.

And I think also, what I loved about it again, was like it's a really slow … I mean, this is the truth, once I'm in a really good like TV series, I'm so in it.

But like I'm not saying this to sound fall, fall, fall, but like most nights I read rather than like watch TV because I'm a writer and I just love at any time, I'm sure just like you, I have a stack of 12 books that I'm like really excited to get to.

And recently, what I've been doing is I have a wonderful secondhand bookstore cafe, like around the corner for me. So, what I've been doing is like in bits and pieces, whenever I go in there, I buy a book that I've wanted to read for a really long time and I just sort of add it … but it never has.

Ann Beattie for example, like I've never really read Ann Beattie's short stories even though I've heard amazing — or Alice Munro. So many authors that I have heard about for decades but have really yet to get to. So, on most nights, I'd rather do that.

But I think with this show, and you can see when you start watching a new TV series, you see how it's engineered to like hook you as fast as possible. Like they're so scared that you're going to be like, “Meh.” And hit your thing and go over to another.

Pilots feel like turbocharged in this, to me, really obnoxious way. And as you probably could tell from Speech Team, like, I like a slow boil. I really do. Like I like a relaxed rollout that accrues meaning and tension slowly.

And it's very much like that, like the atmosphere. Their lives are so perfect in a way that the atmosphere is so charged with like oh damn, you know something's going to happen.

Adam Sockel:

I honestly, this was a good time to transition into Speech Team because you mentioned being fascinated in love and death by this character who does something pretty bad and then kind of lives their life as if nothing has happened.

So, I mean, that's not giving anything away in Speech Team, but I think it's a good kind of transition. And it's interesting to hear you say that that's what fascinated you, because there's definitely some aspects of that in Speech Team.

So, before we like kind of dive into breaking down random parts about the book, do you want to kind of tell my listeners sort of an introduction to Speech Team and then that'll help kind of color the rest of our discussion about it?

Tim Murphy:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's about four friends who, when they were in high school in the mid late ‘80s in the Massachusetts public school, they were all on speech team together. And 25 years have passed, and now, they're all in their early ‘40s and in the kind of the early Facebook era.

So, they're slowly brought back together by the news that a fifth member of the team who was always sort of like the oddball, the one who didn't seem to really be able to connect with people, has killed himself.

And he leaves a goodbye note on Facebook saying to the teacher who was the coach of the speech team, “And Mr. Gold, I never forgot what you said to me when you called me like a like a fucking robotic drone robot.”

And so, this slowly kind of reunites the four of them. And in bits and starts, they reunite, and they share notes. And they realized that they were all told like really abusive, upsetting things by this speech coach.

So, the leap, I think, into novel land as opposed to real life land is that they take a trip to Florida where he's in retirement and they determine that they will seek him out and that they will confront him.

And people have said to me like, “Ooh, did they kidnap him, or did they kill him?” I mean, no, it's not that kind of book. They really just want to ask him this to say, “These are the things you said to us, and do you even remember? And why did you say them?”

And especially for Tip, the narrator, it's not just about that one thing. It's about how the things that that teacher said kind of crystallized the experience that they all had when they were in high school as different kinds of outsiders. So, it's kind of like a reckoning with.

I say the book it's about small T trauma. It's not about devastating trauma. It's about this subtle trauma that like so many of us, the messages, what we are told when we're children or teenagers that we never fully exercise from our consciousness.

And it kind of becomes woven into our concept of who we are and how that can shapes us, often misshapes us as we become adults.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say, I was laughing, you said like small T trauma, which having read the book, like I get what you mean. But at the same time, I always think of like high school in your teenage years.

I have a bunch of nieces and nephews, and the oldest one is 16, so she's going into her junior year of high school, which is wild to think about.

But I think so much about back when I was that age, like having my first girlfriend or like experiencing my first, what I thought was like heartbreak, or like these interactions I had with people that were either friends or acquaintances or teachers and like things that I wouldn't have thought twice about back then.

Saying like I still remember now, at 37. Like they're stuck in my brain. Like, “Holy shit, I can't believe you said that.” Or like, “Wow, what were you thinking?”

And so, while I was saying it's like small traumas, I think because at that age we're all experiencing these huge emotions for the first time and trying to figure out how to process them.

I mean, if it makes sense that the experiences we had in high school would, if not shape who we turn out to as adults, like at least like you said, kind of be like buried.

And I feel like it's not a surprise that in therapy, I talk a lot about like things in high school and when I was younger first, as opposed to like adult situations. Because you don't really know how to handle them, and you might think that they're just okay.

And it's not until you become like a fully-fledged capital A adult that you're like, “Holy shit, this was all pretty messed up.”

Like I get why you would want to write about those things. I guess like where did this idea initially come from? Did you have not great experiences, were you on a speech team? Like where did this all sort of start baking?

Tim Murphy:

Well, yeah, I mean, it's like I've said, I mean basically, to be quite honest, my name is Tim Murphy and the storyteller’s name is Tip Murray. It's blatantly auto fiction.

I should say the part that's set in the ‘80s is, I mean, that's basically like memoir. And what the coach says to Tip is verbatim what a teacher said to me which was, “Why are you such a screaming homosexual? Like you need to pull yourself together and like tone it down.”

Which I remember to this day. And I was not one at a loss for words. You can ask anyone who's known me my whole life. I was a very mouthy kid, but I just remember being stunned into silence because it wasn't … other kids would call me a faggot all the time, but they were kids, I expected it from them.

And this was the early and mid ‘80s, there were no anti-bullying programs, or words hurt programs, or we're all special. But to be taken aside … I mean, he pulled me aside privately to say this to me.

And I remember walking out like so stunned, like feeling so exposed, so seen in the worst way. And this was also, by a teacher that I didn't expect it from this teacher because this teacher was, I felt kind of literary, and intellectual, and not a jock teacher.

Like we had a lot of teachers that they basically were just teaching there to coach the sports teams.

Adam Sockel:

Same.

Tim Murphy:

Yeah. I mean, typical middle class public high school. So, I'm sorry, I kind of lost my own train of thought. What was the question?

Adam Sockel:

No, you're … where did it come from?

Tim Murphy:

Yeah. So, yeah, definitely came from personal experience, but it also, came from a few years ago, I met up with two friends from high school who I literally had not seen since graduation day. And we shared notes on what the experience was like.

And it was one of them was gay and one was Jewish and in a town that was not very Jewish. And I was surprised to hear from her, like how much verbal shit she got for being Jewish.

It made me think about, God, there were a tiny sprinkling of kids who were not white in my high school. Tiny, tiny, like less than 1% probably.

And I mean, she was white, she was Jewish. But for the first time I was like, “Oh, I mean, high school was hell for me. What was it like for them?” And the book started spinning up from there.

And also, to a point we were talking about, I left this meetup with these two friends feeling so weirdly bruised. Like it really upset me how much these memories still hurt. I thought I was supposed to be past them. I was like 50 by this point. And I sort of walked away like, “Whoa, that was years of abuse.”

And so, the novel, it kind of started spinning out from that. I started thinking a lot about what would people say like if you caught up with people years later and asked them if they remembered that they said this or did that, what would they say?

Would they not remember? Would they feign not remembering? Would they cop to it and say, “I'm so sorry. I've changed since then.” Like it just got me thinking.

And flip and vice versa too. I mean, what are the things that I've said or done to people, friends, et cetera, that I just tossed off, but that they never forgot? So, it all started like spinning out of that.

And also, quite honestly, the book was also, like a blatant attempt to just write like a smaller, more commercial accessible book than my last two books, which are like twice the size of this one.

And they're set against like, big historical backdrops. And I just wanted to try to write like quote “a book club book.”

Adam Sockel:

I mean, to write this book, was it cathartic? Was it fun? Like did it feel different than your other books? How did writing this story feel?

Tim Murphy:

You know something really funny? I don't know if I would say it was cathartic. I feel like in a weird way, it brought me closer to — it made me think about the connection between then and now, and how kind of like the abuse of that time shaped me as an adult in ways that thinking about that was not always pleasant, actually.

It was important for me that the book also, be breezy and funny to sort of offset the kind of darker notes of the book. I wanted the conversations between them to like be really funny and bing, bing, bing.

Adam Sockel:

So, I assume like you said, because it is kind of like set me autobiographical was, you were actually on like speech team? Was that something you-

Tim Murphy:

Yeah, I was.

Adam Sockel:

Okay. So, I want to ask about this because I went to a very small high school where you … one of the cool things about it, I was actually the last graduating class before they closed our school. It was very, very tiny. I think I graduated with 47 people. So, very, very small.

And because of that, I got to do everything. I got to do sports, I got to do drama and everything. But I didn't do speech until I went to college where I had to take like a speech and debate course.

And our professor was this like national champion who took it very seriously. And he had a bunch of like English and communication majors who had to take it, as just a class we had to take.

And it was such a unique experience for me. In my mind, I was like, “I'm great at talking, I'm great at conversing. I can definitely do this.” And then we like learned all the different debate, like ad hominem, all these different like things that you had to learn in speech.

So, like what was the experience like setting aside the aspects that became the book, like just the kind of like day in and day.

What was it about like debate team and speech team that you really like … I know it's speech team, not debate team, but like what was it for you that like drew you to it? What was it that you enjoy?

Tim Murphy:

Yeah, right, I know what you mean. I loved speech team. I mean, because it was an extension of literature and of journalism, there were so many categories.

I did original oratory where like you wrote your own speech and you delivered it. I did poetry, I did children's literature. We would do group dramatic presentation where we would like present a scene from a play.

So, it was really like an extension of all these things that I loved already, like whether it's fiction or nonfiction, like journalism rhetoric or whatever, politics and issues of the day, poetry, theater.

I mean, I think I say in the book, it was kind of like being a theater nerd without even the grudging adulation you get from your fellow students when you actually put on a play. Because all the speech stuff that we did was offsite, these competitions were at other schools.

But I just loved it. I mean, particularly, I remember I loved doing poetry because like you'd have to do such a deep dive into like the poetry you were reading and like really analyze it line by line and think about what the emotional arc of the poem was and what sort of an emotion you wanted to convey with the poem through your words and your inflections.

And I wove a lot of this into the book. If you really had never left your little town, which I basically hadn't, it was a peak into the rest of the world. Even if the rest of that world was just other towns like in your state, you saw different kinds of kids.

I mean, like honest to God, the first time I saw richer kids, or poorer kids, or black kids, or Jewish kids, or private school kids, like it was all through speech team. And it was sort of this realization that like, oh, there's a bigger world out there and there's a lot of smart, nerdy, weird kids out there.

And I think a lot of high school kids have that experience when they do theater or anything that involves like traveling to other schools and some statewide thing, you get a glimpse of maybe like the bigger world and your options. It's very liberating.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. I mean, also, like I said, going to a small school, like we did put on some really great like performances. But it was very cool getting to be like a football player, a baseball player, but then like get to go be like the Herald and Cinderella and put on like canary yellow tights.

And like it was a very like judgment free zone, having a blast. And that was only within our own school, so I can only imagine, like I say going …

I will say, at my college course, like the final for that was to actually like enter a debate like competition that was held at our school, but they brought in other colleges. And I mean, it was great at that point. When you're in college, you do get to meet a bunch of different people from different places as is.

But then like even having other people come that actually did like speech and debate, like relatively competitively, it was like, “Oh my God, they're on a such another level to the abilities of everyone in like our class who is taking it for like an hour a week as opposed to the people who are actually in it.”

But I will say the novel, like I asked you if it was cathartic for you to write it because as I was reading it, I really found myself having like emotions and things I hadn't thought about really churned up and like in both a good and a bad way.

But like it was really enjoyable for me to think back about my own experiences. And I feel like other people are going to feel the same way when they read it if they haven't yet.

I just really love that. I think it's such a important conversation because people might not realize the things that they experience as high schoolers even when they become adults that like did end up affecting them. And I think this book will really kind of help shine a light on that.

This isn't a question, this is me, like I said before we started recording, I'm just shining, I'm just pouring praise at you now, at this point.

Tim Murphy:

Aw, thanks, Adam. I appreciate that.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. So, before I let you go, I always end with having the author give a recommendation of some kind to my listeners. It can be a book, it can be something else. I'm not going to let you use the TV show that we were just talking about, Love & Death.

But what is something you recommend people check out? Again, it could be a book, it could be something else, but something you want more people to know about.

Tim Murphy:

Oh gosh. Well, I think I mentioned to you before you started recording that I just love this new singer. His name is Omar Apollo.

He's like Mexican American. I think he grew up in like Indiana. I'm just crazy about him. Someone just introduced me to him. So, I've been listening to him a lot. I think his newest album's called Ivory. Just been listening to it constantly.

He gives me Frank Ocean vibes. Like one of my favorite albums of the past many, many years is Blonde. And to me, it has a Blonde vibe. There's a very abstract deconstructed kind of vibe to the tracks, but very emotional, using a lot of strange sounds but adding up to like a very kind of raw, emotional feel. So, I love that.

And then I think I had said that I really, in terms of what I've read recently, there's a trilogy of books by … she's a French writer named Virginie Despentes. And the trilogy, it's the Vernon Subutex trilogy. V-E-R-N-O-N S-U-B-U-T-E-X.

And I loved the first book in this trilogy so much more than anything. There's been only a handful of times in my life where I like just wept. That I just thought a book was so good, so beautiful, so touching on the secret of life or whatever.

And I really had that experience with the first book. I was finishing it, coming back on a flight, and was totally crying like the last few chapters of the book.

I have to admit, I always think that like something really good is always so hard to sustain. And the second book in the trilogy I thought was okay. It didn't quite stab me in the heart the way the first one did. And I even admit, I've petered out on the third.

But God, that first book, I mean, they've called her like the contemporary Balzac because the book is about a collection of contemporary Parisians, who it's partly a group of old friends, but it's about a lot of lives that end up crisscrossing in unusual ways. And it's just really good.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah. When you told me about it beforehand, I wrote it down, I'm absolutely going to check it out. And for everyone else, I'll put it in the show notes so you guys can go check it out as well.

Tim, I absolutely adored Speech Team. I was so excited to get to talk to you about it. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Tim Murphy:

Thank you, Adam. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And good luck with your podcast. It's really cool.

[Music Playing]

Adam Sockel:

Passions and 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.