Keridwyn Dovey

Does that resonate with you at all?

Yes, absolutely.

And I think, you know, I started out as a social anthropologist, so there's an element also of that thing of doing participant observation or field work, sort of just hanging around someone and getting to know them, you know, their lives from the inside out.

So actually in my own fiction, I usually like to bring in some aspect of work.

Again, until you asked that question, I hadn't really thought about it, but in my first novel...

I was writing about a portraitist and a barber and a chef in my most recent novel about an archaeologist in an audio book I've done recently about many different professions, a jeweler and another chef.

So, yeah, and I am drawn to the same thing.

I was thinking about Ian McEwan's novels.

I think he writes really well about the intricacies of work in his novel Saturday, I think it is, where he writes about a heart surgeon.

And in Ian McEwan's novel, The Children Act, the way that he gets into both the legal and the medical worlds and through these characters who are experts in what they do.

So it is, I, like you, I find it very satisfying to read about people at work, whether it's in non-fiction or in fiction.

Yeah, I agree.

And I think the danger always of trying to transpose that body of knowledge into fiction is that it can collapse under the weight of the research and the weight of the details that you can't let go of because they're so great and so wonderful.

And of course, in fiction, that doesn't always work.

And it's something I struggle with a lot because I always do a lot of research for the fiction, but I often find I'm getting the balance wrong or that they, then the details end up weighing down the book.

So it's a really delicate thing to get right.

And so I admire someone who can do that in fiction even more.

I find nonfiction has been really lovely to have that outlet to be able to follow those details right to where they need to go without then having to think about story or narrative or, you know, believability and all of those things.

It can just be the story of a person's life and career sort of on their own terms.

And in that, I don't know if you've ever read the Studs Terkel book.