Ugly is in the eye of the beholder with Nikki Payne

Adam Sockel: You’re listening to Passions & Prologues, a literary podcast. For 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, thanks so much for joining. If you’ve been here since the beginning, glad to have you back. Today’s interview is a wonderful discussion I had with debut author Nikki Payne, and this is one of those discussions where it doesn’t happen too often, although it has happened frequently on this podcast, it feels like. I meet someone and instantly feels like we have been close friends, or I told Nikki, relatives for a long, long time. We hit it off instantly. We had a rapport that I just was obsessed with and Nikki and I discussed something really interesting. She’s a cultural anthropologist and something that she gets paid to do is ask big questions and then find the answers to them. And the question that we talked about that she’s been obsessed with for most of her life, is this concept of ugliness in society and what makes a person or a place or a thing ugly, and why does that change from society to society, from culture to culture? A really interesting, super fascinating discussion. I think you’ll get a lot out of this chat. We had a really great time discussing it. And Nikki’s new book, Pride And Protest is a Jane Austen retelling, re-imagining, a story of Pride And Prejudice, if you will. We get into that very heavily in this discussion as well. I want to give you a book recommendation, but last week was the week that I gave you a re-imagining or retelling of sorts. And so, I don’t want to do that again just because I do want to give you the ability to get a little bit of a different recommendation from me. So, this recommendation is actually from past guest Claire North. What I want to recommend is The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August. You may remember Claire North as the author of Ithaca. Claire and I discussed synesthesia, her fun, wonderful job where she lights live music and all sorts of stuff. But I got a chance to read The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August this week. And it’s really, really interesting. It’s basically a person who relives their life over and over and over. I wouldn’t call them immortal, but basically they get reborn as the same person every single time they pass away. They are born in the same place, at the same time. More or less, the large scale aspects of the world don’t change, but they can change small things here and there. And what ends up happening is they befriend another person who has the same experiences as them. And that friend ends up having ulterior motives. And so, Harry August spent life after life trying to find a way to stop this person from ending the world. Really interesting, funny in a way that I wasn’t expecting. But yeah, it was very, very unique. It really reminded me only almost the writing of Andy Weir and Hail Mary, Project Hail Mary, rather. So yeah, I think you’ll really, really like that. I was a big fan of The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August by past guest, Claire North. So check that out. And before I get to my wonderful discussion with Nikki Payne, just want to remind everyone any time you’d like to reach out, you can find me at passionsandprologuesgmail.com. I’ll be happy to answer any of your questions. I’ll send questions along to past guests if you have any of them. And anytime you leave me a rating or a review, I will give you some book recommendations. All you have to do is screenshot that and send it to me as part of your email and I’ll be happy to give you some customized book recommendations. I also want to let people know, as a reminder, if you send me any of your passions, just send me an email with whatever the thing is that you’re passionate about, once a month I’ll be giving away a bookshop.org gift card to one lucky winner. And last thing, there’s a really interesting conversation that came up on one of my Instagram posts last week about a specific book that I had talked about reading, and it sparked this idea of creating some Zoom, sort of like book club, book discussion spaces. I got an overwhelming response on Instagram where people do seem very interested in taking part and I would love to hear from you as well. So again, shoot me an email [email protected] or you can find me on Instagram and TikTok at Passions And Prologues. Let me know if you’d be interested. I’m thinking of setting up a Zoom discussion about a specific book at first and then maybe some additional recommendations for anyone who wants to join in early December, sometime. So again, let me know what your thoughts are. I would really, really love to hear back from you. That would really great. Okay, that’s enough housekeeping. That’s all the things, really excited. If you are listening to this when it comes out and you celebrate the Thanksgiving weekend, I hope you enjoy it. Get some food, connect with family and friends, all that good stuff. But for now, I am extremely excited to say I hope you enjoy this discussion with Nikki Payne on Passions & Prologues. All right everybody, I’m back. I’m super, super excited. Right before we started recording, Nikki and I were bonding over other work things that we do and even more excited than usual to ask this question. Nikki, what is something that you’re super passionate about that we’re going to be discussing today?

Nikki Payne: Oh man. I am super passionate about ugliness, about what it means for something to be ugly in society, what it means for something to be beautiful. And just being ugly has always obsessed me. Yeah, ugliness.

Adam Sockel: Oh my gosh, I love this. Okay, this is amazing. One of my favorite things about this podcast is not knowing what a person’s going to say before I ask this question and my head is percolating right now. So, when did you first discover that this was something you were super passionate about?

Nikki Payne: I think it would start with watching The Color Purple as a child. And I was watching Celie, who had these plaits in her head and the main driving force of that story was that she was an ugly woman and that she was undesirable for all these reasons. And even the main character, her husband, Mister, when she’s leaving, he says, “What are you going to do? Black, you’re ugly, you’re a woman.” And so, being ugly was just part of her character and she just still deserved the world. She still deserved all this love that she ended up having for herself and choosing it for herself. But I loved that movie so much and I just connected so much with this ugly protagonist and that it made me just question the ugliness for a very long time. I was very young when I watched The Color Purple but even as I grew and started being interested in anthropology and human society and culture, even then, my doctoral research was about aesthetics and power, and how people connect and attach beauty and goodness to things that associate with power and it’s always obsessed me. I taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called The Politics Of Ugly. I was very into it.

Adam Sockel: Okay, hold on before I ask my other questions, what’s the synopsis of that course? That is super interesting. I might just be lying, I feel like every time you say something, I have nine questions that come already. So, what was the hypothesis or synopsis of that class that you wanted people to walk away with?

Nikki Payne: Oh man. I can tell you that we started from the … we started with reviewing propaganda posters, starting with Nazi propaganda posters and those classic movies. And we talked about why it was so important for the Jewish characters in these posters to look a certain way. What does that mean if they had these dark and what does it mean for them to have this kind of nose? What types of things are you saying about this population? We did deep analysis of the Rwandan genocide and some of those early posts came out on the radio, about the Hutus versus Tutsis, that people had begun to distinguish themselves physically first and the narrative about who they were and building distinction from the other person physically. Like, “They have this long nose. Look at their sloping foreheads. They can’t be trusted.” And so, the way that something becomes packaged as ugly, it can tell you so much about a society, what it’s up to and where it’s going.

Adam Sockel: So, I don’t even know if this is an answerable question in a book podcast, but I’ve thought a lot about this. My dad’s side of our family is Jewish and we have always joked our side of the family, you can tell when someone else is Jewish, you can just tell. We’re of the same tribe, as people like to joke and say. But I think you’re talking about aesthetics and how depending on where you are in the world, a different aesthetic, or a time of history, depending on where you are, quote unquote attractive means something wholly different. And how do you go about even researching how the things that we consider attractive in United States, versus Uganda, versus China, how do you even go about unpacking all of that? That’s a huge question. I’m sorry.

Nikki Payne: No, no, that’s fine. I love huge questions. First of all, great question. One of the things that I started studying, and this was really interesting, were these rituals of beautification in Mauritania. I think the word is called [foreign language 00:10:56] or [foreign 00:10:58], that process that when the French are fattening a goose to make fois gras. So, what they do to girls from maybe nine to 16, is they start essentially force feeding them meal and cereals and millet and all kinds of things and limit physical interaction and physical running around. And they’re essentially force feeding these girls 24/7, until they’re able to get a considerable amount of girth on their bodies ,to the point where it’s a bragging to show your stretch marks. So oftentimes, they’re forced to sit, forced not to move, and being fed not in a comfortable, “Hand me my grapes garcon,” type of way, very much being forced fed to the point of throwing up. And this is seen as a beautification ritual to prepare them for marriage because the weight and girth, and the association of having extra weight, is associated with being of a different class, to be of a leisure class and to afford the extra food. And so, the way that people associate a young woman with being beautiful, oftentimes can map very neatly to what is considered valuable and good in that society.

Adam Sockel: So, as someone who has so much knowledge about this, because I feel like I find out things all the time now, usually on TikTok, which is weirdly how I’ve become [inaudible 00:12:37]-

Nikki Payne: That’s real. TikTok University is real.

Adam Sockel: One of the things I recently learned, so one of my TikTok algorithm things is farming and local farming things, it’s just very soothing to me. I learned the fact that the reason that people have grass front yards is that used to be a social symbol, is it basically showed people don’t need to use that space to grow their own food because they can afford to buy food. So, they put grass in their front yard as a social symbol and status symbol. And that’s one of those things where I’m like, “Oh okay, logically I understand how we got to now what people think of as beautiful yards,” but are there instances in that … because you’re right, I remember reading things about how long, long time ago, weight and girth was a sign of social class, whereas if you would see someone who … nowadays you’d see someone like six pack abs and they’d be … You would think, “Oh, that’s a farmer, that’s lower class.” So, how do you think that shifted? Because now I feel, honestly, I feel like in the United States it shifts every five years what people think is attractive.

Nikki Payne: Yeah, yeah, I think it’s shifted a lot because leisure now is associated with having the time to take care of one’s body. If you can think about those major shifts in the industrialization of food, one of the things … This is to America’s credit, one of the things that we just freaking nailed in the 1930s and ’40s, was food science. So, we had this big depression on our hands, people were starving and food scientists were like, “Hey, we have to make things cheap and nutritious and the birth of American processed food really starts from this place of making cheap food quickly.” So, we did it. Yay, success. But what happens is that the availability of overly processed food for individuals who are indigent, has in fact … and without the residual spare time to be sitting on a treadmill for two hours or have a personal trainer, what that has actually resulted in is a deep increase in weight problems, diabetes, heart disease, particularly for Americans in the United States. I’m saying all this to say that that has so slowly shifted because now, excess weight and those types of issues associated with weight, are now a marker of poverty instead of a leisure time. Time is this major currency, right?

Adam Sockel: Yeah. So, I’m really interested in how you decided to want to spend so much time, like you said, you taught a course on this and clearly it’s something you think a lot about. I think about back when I was, I want to say eight or nine, if my mom was listening to this, she’ll laugh. We went and bought clothes for school that year and I was a little bit of a bigger kid. Not really, I was active, I played lots of sports, but I remember to this day, I remember my pants, I remember what size it was, but it was like 28 husky. It used husky [inaudible 00:15:56]-

Nikki Payne: Husky, it ruined so many kids.

Adam Sockel: Nikki, I am 36 whole years old. I still think about that. I still have body dysmorphia. I run marathons. I go to the gym all the time. I still see the word husky in my brain all the time. And so, I know that has been, both for positive and negative, a driver in my health journey. Clearly, The Color Purple deeply impacted your psyche and the way that you see the world and saw the world then. How did you go from that to deciding, I want to study this and teach it to other people? What was that process like for you? That was a long walk to get to that question.

Nikki Payne: First of all, I love long walks. I’m an anthropologist, I love to be told a story, that’s literally … If you’re a cultural anthropologist, you just sit around the fire and let people tell you about their life. It’s my entire jam. But yeah, so I got there because there’s so many ways that people write off certain types of things. Especially desire and sexuality and beauty, as their preference. It’s one of the things that it’s so easy for us to write off and say, “I think this is beautiful because this is me, personally. These are my feelings and society has nothing to do with it. This is just what I love.” And one of the things that I feel like really passionate about, is just to question people. To just have them question themselves, about where certain types of desire comes from. And if you took the time to unravel some things, then would all that look the same? And it’s fine if it does, like what you like, but also be able to step outside of those things that you take as a given and try to truly examine why something is the way it is. That’s honestly, the major goal of most cultural anthropologists is to have people step a little bit outside of their lived in situation and say, “Huh, why is that this way?”

Adam Sockel: How do you think thinking this way and having this type of a brain affects your day-to-day life? I don’t remember which author it was, but it was a very prolific writer. I remember asking them, “When you walk outside, do you just see 900 stories a day?” So, I want to ask you, when you step outside and you see, whether it’s a billboard, or you go to the grocery store and you see a specific type of food market in a certain way, how does having this knowledge affect either the way that you purchase things, or the way that you approach consumerism? How does that affect you?

Nikki Payne: That’s an excellent question because one of my favorite things to do when I’m traveling outside the United States is go to stores, to grocery stores. And you can tell a lot about a country with the way that it presents food. So, United States is, I mean, top tier, top tier in food presentations, you know what I mean? It is all about the bass. It has those little spray things out. Tomatoes are fresh and you look like you’re farming. You’re just taking these things right out of the ground and it just feels so freaking natural. And oftentimes, when you go to grocery stores in other countries, the mindset is not necessarily about a presentation of bounty in the way that in the United States, you have these apples piled up in this perfect triangle with the leaves still on and a little moist. And it’s telling you that we are a nation of plenty. The aesthetics of that makes you feel calm, it makes you feel like everything is going to be okay. We’re not starving, things are fine. And the presentation of food, the aesthetics of food matters, particularly. And you’ll see that most expressly in the grocery stores. And so, as soon as you go to another country and you see that the way that other countries, the relationship with the way that food is shared and shared out, it’s very interesting. You go to a shop in Spain, you’re just going to see pieces of meat hung on the hooks on top of the … and it’s not necessarily about plenty. It’s like, “Let me show you. This is our technique. Our food has a way to eat it, a way to prepare it.” And it’s showing off the methodology. And so it’s just a very different way that people approach that aesthetic, particularly with grocery stores. I’m just interesting that you said that because I do that a lot. Go to grocery stores in other countries.

Adam Sockel: Yeah, I feel like grocery stores, I think it was an Anthony Bourdain thing. I think he also said exactly similar to you. Like he said, “If you want to understand the culture of a place that you’re visiting, go to the local … ”

Nikki Payne: Oh my God.

Adam Sockel: Go to a local grocery store, you’ll actually see … and I feel like I think about that even when I’m at my own local grocery stores all the time, even just around my neighborhood, there’s a difference between going to a big Kroger or giant Eagle, for anyone who’s listening in Meyer, or going to the local Asian market and actually interacting with people. Yeah, I was super curious. How would you say this passion of yours and this supreme interest in the way that things are conveyed, both in ugliness and beauty, and how everything is conveyed in the world, how would you say that affects your writing process, if it does it all? We’ll be back with more Passions & Prologues after this break. And now back to Passions & Prologues.

Nikki Payne: I would say for Pride And Protest, it was honestly the origin. Okay, so here’s the Pride And Protest origin story, interestingly enough. So, I was reading just massive amounts of data on dating apps and about how who was responded to and at what rate, et cetera. And what I found was that Black women and Asian men were the least responded to in these dating apps. And the idea was that in these digital spaces, these particular groups had less sexual capital. And because of our own notions of masculinity and power and our own notions of femininity and softness and beauty, that Black women and Asian men were left outside of this arena of online dating. And because I was already living Jane Austen’s world and tinkering with Jane Austen and rethinking her, I wonder what would it look like to cast this number one, most romantic, this iconic, romantic hero, Mr. Darcy as an Asian man, and what would it look like to cast this delightful, desirable woman as a Black woman? And it started from there, from that very discussion of who gets to be desired and who gets to be a desirable person in society. And then it just grew from there.

Adam Sockel: So, I want to get more deeply into Pride And Protest in a second, but I actually also want to ask, where did your love of Jane Austen come from and when did that unfold as well?

Nikki Payne: Oh man, I was also very young and I was watching Clueless, I think I was 11 or 12. And Clueless, if you’re of a certain generation, it was just revolutionary. It was just like we said all the words as if … We said everything, we did everything we wanted to dress like Cher, everything was Clueless. It just rocked my teenage world. And I just got super into it and I found out it was an Emma adaptation and actually pretty faithful, Emma adaptation. And I said, “Emma? Oh, there’s more? There’s more like this?” And at that same year, banner year for Jane Austen, the 1995 version of Pride And Prejudice came out. And those two combined, that year, 1995, no one was escaping Jane Austen a lot, really? You know what I mean? You are ever changed. So, I would say from there on, I was just completely hooked on the magic of Jane Austen. I would say because Clueless was my gateway drug, I always was very interested in what these characters would look like today and about how they translated. Because I didn’t start off in the purest form, because I started off in an adaptation, in a modern adaptation, sometimes I even read thinking what things would look like today.

Adam Sockel: Yeah, I feel like as a anthropologist, I feel like I want to ask you to do a study about when people are in their teenage years who end up becoming literary people. Be like what classic literature they like? I’m a huge Russian lit fan. I remember when I was with 15, 16, 17 Reading Brothers Karamazov.

Nikki Payne: Wow.

Adam Sockel: And all this different stuff. Now, I feel like I can see a direct line between that and loving sad, depressing books. I feel like there should be almost a Buzzfeed thing like “If you Jane Austen, you’d probably like this now,” type of a-

Nikki Payne: That’s genius. I got into the Russians for a little bit. I didn’t come out well, but I still have a deep love of Nabokov, deep Love.

Adam Sockel: Oh, yes.

Nikki Payne: Gorgeous, gorgeous, super playful writer. One of my favorite things about him, I think this is in Lolita. I think he also does in another work as well, but he has these fake citations. When I tell you, I just love the playful, winking detail of those types of things. I really love it.

Adam Sockel: We could do a whole thing about Russian lit, but I want to get back to Pride and Protest. So, I guess first, I want to let you tell people a little bit more about it, but then I’m also a secondary question. You spend so much time with a specific book when you’re writing it, I would love to know how this specific Jane Austen book was the one that you wanted to reimagine. But first, let’s do a little intro to Pride And Protest before we do that.

Nikki Payne: Okay. So, Pride And Protest is my debut novel. It is about Lisa B., one of my favorite lines is, “The only DJ that gives jam.” She wants to take her neighborhood back from what she sees as these soulless property developers. And they’re dropping these unaffordable condos on every street corner in DC. But her planned protest, this is their meet cute, that’s really one of my favorite scenes to write in this book. Her planned protest at their corporate event takes a turn for the worse after she mistakes this extremely hot person waiting outside, with a very nice suit, for the wait staff. She mistakes him for the wait staff and it’s like an unforgivable crime to Dorsey, who is the adopted son in this family and is already struggling with his own identity. So, they go toe to toe. And so sparks fly, but Lisa’s family is all there and they’re thwarting her at every turn. But in the end, she tries to get him out of her neighborhood. But I think by the end of the book, she settled with getting out of her head, really. You know?

Adam Sockel: Yeah. So what was it about this specific and awesome book that you’re like, “Oh, I want to … ” because obviously, I feel like reimaginings are such an awesome space. I remember talking to Kalynn Bayron about this type of stuff-

Nikki Payne: [inaudible 00:28:15].

Adam Sockel: … and she gets on her … She said this, so I feel comfortable saying it, she gets on her soapbox when people when say like, “Oh, you’re basically just taking an old story. It’s so much easier to write those.” Exactly, yeah.

Nikki Payne: No, no.

Adam Sockel: Exactly. So, she gets real mad about that’s, but it’s such a fertile space. I actually just got done reading a book called Darling Girl, which is a reimagining of Peter Pan and I loved it. It was so, so good, super dark. But what was it about this specific Jane book that you were like, “Ah, this is the one I want to start with?”

Nikki Payne: I love this book, not only because I just know it like the back of my hand. It was a story that once … You know what? Not to compare myself to Duke Ellington, but the thing that they say about jazz or being able to do a ton of improvisational jazz, is that it starts from knowing the beats by heart, right?

Adam Sockel: Right.

Nikki Payne: It starts from a deep, ingrained knowledge of the actual structure of music and you’re able to actually improvise and create something new as a result of having ingrained knowledge of those beats. I think that having read it so often and having come to it for comfort so often, you get this ingrained knowledge of the beats, where to go to feel a certain thing. And then your mind just does this interesting jazz with it to say, “What if this happened? What if you skip this? What happens then?” And it becomes this thought experiment. And so, the books that I’ve read over and over become really ripe for retelling because you can really just create these interesting jazz reps off of these very well-known notes. And that was one of the things I was very interested in doing.

Adam Sockel: I love that. That’s such an interesting way to think about it because you’re absolutely right. Duke Ellington couldn’t have created In A Sentimental Mood, without knowing how to do every single, structured, specific part about being a classically trained musician, without doing that. And to your point, while you were saying that, I was just thinking, again, I just read this Darling Girl and I love Peter Pan as well, but when you reimagine or retell a story, there’s reader expectations. There are certain beats that, even if it’s not verbatim, people want to have that when they’re reading it or they’re listening to the audiobook, whatever it is, they want to be like, “Oh, oh, I get it.” And if you miss those people will be like, “Wait a minute, this is not … ” I feel like there’s almost more pressure to adapt something that people absolutely love.

Nikki Payne: You’re exactly right. It’s like that Leonardo DiCaprio meme, where he’s pointing at the screen. People want to feel that and this interesting sense of unfamiliarity too. It’s like you love your house and you know your house, but you turn off the lights in your own house and everything’s black and you’re walking around, you go, “Oh, that’s the couch.” And there’s this touch of relief. So, there’s this sense of everyone’s in their favorite house, but all the lights are off and you still have to rediscover it in an interesting way, that’s fun for people.

Adam Sockel: Yeah, I know that this is your debut novel, but did you feel pressure taking on a story that so many people do love so dearly?

Nikki Payne: Oh, absolutely. I’m very much part of the Jane Austen community and I am here. I hear the absolute turmoil when it’s adapted. When Persuasion was adapted, all of Jane Austen community was just like, we were flipping tables. We were just like, “What? You can’t use those words.” So, you can just imagine. I felt incredible pressure because people feel so … They feel like they grew up with these characters. They don’t want to see them besmirched, they don’t want to see anything bad happen to them. But I wrote this character Lydea who is like … or Lydia, and in my book, her name is Lydea, and she is twerking to orchestral music. You know what I mean? So, that’s the level that I wanted to bring to those characters and I’m sure that someone will read that and say, “Jane Austen characters should not twerk.”

Adam Sockel: How dare, yeah.

Nikki Payne: How dare. People are going to clutch their pearls. There’s also a lot of spice on the page, it’s open door. So, some people would also say Jane Austen wouldn’t approach.

Adam Sockel: But that’s a lot of, because of the time it was written, I would clap back at anyone who says, “It wouldn’t be spicy?” It was spicy for the time.

Nikki Payne: Yeah, it really was.

Adam Sockel: That’s the point. Is this something you want to continue doing with books, reimagining stuff like this? Or are you thinking through something a little bit different for a second book? It’s entirely possible you can’t tell me as well, which I’m-

Nikki Payne: Oh no, no. I can tell. You for my second book, I love reimaginings. In fact, I just finished The Weight In Blood. It’s like a Black retelling of Carrie. Oh, it was dark. It was dark.

Adam Sockel: Yeah, I bet.

Nikki Payne: But it was phenomenal. I love retellings. Oftentimes, that’s a way to get me to auto buy something. So, oh, it’s a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but set in Compton. I’m like, “Sis, say less.” It is bought. But yeah, so my next book is a retelling of Sense And Sensibility, about these two sisters who have very different temperaments and are forced to revamp and end in Maine. And it’s called Sex, Lies And Sensibility because the Eleanor character is running away from a viral event, you can only guess the content, of in D.C.

Adam Sockel: Man, I love that so much. Speaking of sort of reimaginings, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Alexis Henderson, but she writes horror and spooky books and she’s written two. One, The Year Of The Witching, which is just best. That was her debut novel. I think it won Goodreads Choice Award. It was the best horror book I’ve read in so long. And then she just had a second book that came out called House Of Hunger and it’s like a reimagining, loosely based on the Countess Bathory, the person who is kind of, allegedly a vampire and bathed in blood and all these different stuff. Yeah, it’s called House Of Hunger. And again, her first one is The Year Of The Witching. She was on the podcast earlier the year.

Nikki Payne: Oh my gosh.

Adam Sockel: Yeah, I think you would love them. I only mention, they are dark, but you mentioned having just read a dark book.

Nikki Payne: Oh yeah, come on. And I also just recently, I’ve been reading a lot of Native American Horror and have you read Only Good Indians?

Adam Sockel: Oh my gosh. Honestly, if you didn’t say Only Good Indians, I was going to say you need to Only Good Indians.

Nikki Payne: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. I was shooketh, okay?

Adam Sockel: [inaudible 00:35:15].

Nikki Payne: Talk about retailings of folklore. That is precisely what I mean, how something can be fresh and be a story told over and over and over again at the same time.

Adam Sockel: And also, from a logistical standpoint, again, being in the literary world, I’m querying a novel right now. Having worked with some of the authors over the years, a big part of being able to market and promote your book is having that quick hook. So, that’s another thing. There’s another horror novelist, Dawn Kurtagich, who was also recently on the show. Her most recent book is called Teeth In The Mist.

Nikki Payne: Teeth In The Mist.

Adam Sockel: It’s this Faustian horror novel. Yeah, the face you just made, people won’t see it. Gave me the eyes open, jaw dropped. That was a big part of … Yes, she wanted to write that story, but she was also, she told me, she’s like, “Well yeah, but also it needs to be marketed properly.” So for Pride And Protest, it would be an incredible book if it had nothing to do with Jane Austen, because you’re a phenomenal writer. But also the fact that you can tell people like, “Hey, it’s Pride And Prejudice, it’s a remake.” That sparks people’s interest instantly. Because there are all those people who have read those books when they were 13, 14, 17 years old and they’re always looking for a book like that.

Nikki Payne: Yeah, absolutely right. Also, just writing down these horror recs [inaudible 00:36:40]. Gorgeous.

Adam Sockel: Yeah, when we stop recording, I can give you some more, because there that is something I spend on probably too much time reading, is dark books. But speaking of recommending stuff, I always end this show with having the author who is visiting give a recommendation. It can be a book, you could talk about a report you think people should check out. It could be a movie, it could be a recipe that you think more people should enjoy. One of my first guests talked about a protein powder. Anything you want to recommend that people should know more about, the floor is yours.

Nikki Payne: Oh my gosh. Anything that I want to recommend? Gosh, there’s so many things. I want to recommend this app called 10% Happier, and it is a meditation … It started off as this meditation app, but it’s so much more than that. It’s just this guy who is talking to you about, “Hey, you think you can’t meditate, you think you can’t find peace?” He wrote a book called Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics, I think. And so, this app is really … It takes the mystery out of meditation. There’s this meditation and it’s just called Five Small Breaths. And it just brings you along this journey, to make it feel imminently possible to find those moments of mindfulness and yeah, 10% happier. And it’s just perfect and it under-promises and really over-delivers, you know what I mean? On the thing. It’s just like, “Hey, this is just a small thing.” And that’s what his focuses on, these just tiny moments.

Adam Sockel: Nikki, Pride And Protest is so wonderful. I’m recording this on book release week and I was so excited to get to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Nikki Payne: Thank you for having me.

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.