Show notes
What if you could take a vacation on your marriage and for six months, pursue a lifetime dream your husband doesn’t share? And he could do the same. That’s the premise for Lian Dolan’s latest book, The Marriage Sabbatical.
Hi, I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler and today Lian, the author of the popular The Sweeney Sisters and Lost And Found In Paris is quick to make clear that the central premise of the marriage sabbatical does not come from personal experience. She jokes her life is ‘just not that interesting.’
But on today’s Binge Reading show, she talks about how she came to write a fascinating tale of marriage veterans of 23 years who take holidays apart for the first time in their lives because of their wildly clashing personal interests, and discover new things about themselves and their love for each other.
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Links to things discussed in the show
Ali Macgraw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_MacGraw
Love Story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Story_(1970_film)
ALS: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/amyotrophic-lateral-sclerosis/symptoms-causes/syc-20354022
Dervla McTiernan: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16918766.Dervla_McTiernan
Maeve Binchy: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3532.Maeve_Binchy
Kate Elizabeth Russell (My Dark Vanessa) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44890081-my-dark-vanessa
Donna Tartt The Secret History: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29044.The_Secret_History
The Satellite Sisters: https://satellitesisters.com/podcast/
The Sweeney Sisters, Lian Dolan: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49978226-the-sweeney-sisters
Helen of Pasadena by Lian Dolan: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8882001-helen-of-pasadena
Where to find Lian Dolan online
Website: liandolan.com
Facebook: @liandolan
Satellite Sisters podcast: https://satellitesisters.com/podcast/
Introducing author Lian Dolan
Lian Dolan – women’s fiction with humor and heart
But now here is Lian. Hello there, Lian, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Lian Dolan: Thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here and do this conversation with you. I’ve loved listening to a lot of your podcasts and I’m pleased to see so many of my friends on your shows. That was fun to discover them.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. The Marriage Sabbatical, which is your latest book is what we are discussing today. It’s quite newly published, isn’t it?
Lian Dolan: Yes, just out. I’m excited to have it out. The writing process is a long one and the development process was long and then it’s a year in production, I’m excited to be out and about with it, because I feel like I’ve been talking about it for years, but really it’s just out.
Jenny Wheeler: And as the title indicates it’s about a couple who spend some time apart, happily married in a marriage that’s very much settled into a routine. You like to make it really clear in the acknowledgements for the book that it’s not a personal story. Tell us about that.
Lian Dolan: I think one of the big myths of writing is when people who are non-writers say, ‘oh, write about what you know.’
A Gen X couple on a different journey
And honestly, I’m out material by book six. This is my sixth book. My life is not that interesting. I need to make stuff up. The book is the story of a couple that’s a Gen X couple.
They’re approaching 50 or just over 50. They’ve been married for 23 years. They’ve just been through the Pandemic. They have a couple of college aged kids that are going off to their study abroad program and he, the husband, has the opportunity to take a sabbatical. His work is giving him a year off, and they decide to do this adventure trip through Patagonia.
And then the wife decides ‘that is your dream. But it is not my dream.’ And so long story short, they come up with a compromise position. And that’s okay. we’re going to go our separate ways for eight months.
You can do anything you want with anyone, no questions asked So it’s a breaking of their marriage vows and it’s a different journey that they didn’t expect to be on.
That of course is very different than my own marriage. We’ve been married 31 years, no sabbaticals, no agreements. It’s hard to write about what is ostensibly a pretty good marriage? It’s not that fascinating a topic. So ooh, we ran errands on Saturday and then we had chicken for dinner.
I had to fish around for something to happen, to kinda shake ’em both up and that was it.
Learning the art of compromise
Jenny Wheeler: At the beginning, Nicole is really reluctant to admit to her husband that she doesn’t want to go because they’ve got a long way up the track with him just assuming she was going to love everything he loved
That scene where she finds the courage to tell him she doesn’t want to come and then sticks to her guns, that’s one a lot of women can identify with, I’m sure.
Lian Dolan: Yes I think we get dragged into our partner’s interests whether we want to or not. And sometimes it’s benign.
Like when I married my husband, all of a sudden I had to watch Formula One races at four in the morning, because he was a lifelong fan. And he had to learn how to ski. He had not grown up as a skier. We had those are fairly low stakes entries.
But I think when you start to talk about like adventure travel or let’s sell everything we have and drive around in an RV, then you’re ask yourself do I really want to do that? And for Nicole… She is really banking on the fact that as the book takes place, at the very edge of the pandemic, people are just starting to travel again.
For us here in the United States, we had so many opportunities where we thought the pandemic was over and then it was back and it was over and it was back. I think she’s hoping the whole time it’s going to get canceled.
Learning to see things from the other side
Like that was how I envisioned Nicole. Oh, this is never gonna happen. There’s gonna be another surge. I won’t have to go to Patagonia and ride around on a motorcycle in a windy, country. So two countries. So that’s what she’s banking on and it does not work out. She actually looks like she has to go.
Jenny Wheeler: Now in terms of the research, because as you say, you haven’t had a sabbatical yourself, in the acknowledgements again you credited a pal with sending you gobs of reading material that helped you to get some of the research. And I wondered what was the hardest part about thinking yourself into this book?
Lian Dolan: It was definitely a point of discomfort for me as a person. I don’t really think having a relationship with someone outside your marriage is a great idea. I’ll just say it. It’s not something I really go for. As you write more and more books and the older you get, and I would look around at other people’s marriages and I’d think something’s happening over there.
Like they have some sort of an agreement. And I think I had to peel back my personal judgment. That was the hardest part of writing a book about something that, you know, morally. It was a gray area, but it was not a gray area for me. It was black and white.
So my friend that you referred to, Daniela is a marriage and family counselor. And I wanted to be able to have a background and ask about women who make this choice, or how do couples, survive this? What do open relationships look like and do those actually work or do those all implode?
Important we like the main characters
She sent me tons of books on that. But it was important to me that you buy into this couple, Jason and Nicole, that you like them and that you’re like onboard with this choice, even if it’s a choice you wouldn’t make.
And so I really worked hard. With any book you do a bunch of research, but then you have to put it aside and you have to focus in on the character journey.
I really worked hard on the first a hundred pages before they separate and go on their separate sabbaticals to make the characters likable. I want readers to be invested in both of them. You’re rooting for both of them. There’s not a bad guy or a good guy. There’s just a couple that’s struggling to find themselves again after 25 years of marriage.
Jenny Wheeler: Jason does go off to Patagonia and follows his adventure dream, which is partly actually related to a very good friend of his, Charlie, who’s died. It’s not necessarily even Jason’s personal dream. It’s more of a kind of pact that he had with a friend who’s now dead. So that’s an added complication.
But Nicole, she decides that she would love to just go to somewhere like Santa Fe and do an art course and work in jewelry or something like that, something totally different.
And you take her to Santa Fe and she meets a whole cast of interesting new friends, including Cleo Jones. Now tell us a bit about the inspiration for the Cleo character in this story.
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Ali McGraw and Santa Fe magic
Lian Dolan: I did a research trip to Santa Fe. I had been there decades ago when I was in college and hadn’t been since. It’s a spectacular spot in America. It’s in New Mexico. It’s 7,500 feet, so it’s very high. Thin air, exquisite architecture. It’s the second biggest art market in the United States, outside of New York, in terms of fine art.
They’ve got fantastic food. It’s just a great mix of cultures. It’s almost like it’s its own separate place and it has this real spiritual vibe and that comes from the natural beauty. And in the middle of that lives Ali MacGraw. Okay. Perfect. Ali MacGraw, Love Story Ali MacGraw.
We were there, my husband and I, and we were waiting to go into the Georgia O’Keefe Museum and we just ducked into a coffee shop. I looked up and there is Ali MacGraw coming through the door. And can I tell you, she is still magnificent. She was full Ali. Oh my gosh. She had the long braids and the big silver statement jewelry and a white linen shirt and jeans.
And she had Birkenstocks on, like white Birkenstocks and her toenails were painted blue. And big silver cuffs. I couldn’t speak. And there’s my husband just making chitchat with a pretty old lady, like about the coffee and when she left. I was like. Do you know who that was?
And he says no.
I say that’s Ali MacGraw. And there was a blank look of course. And I was like, Steve McQueen. She was with Steve McQueen and all of a sudden it came back to him.
Cleo Jones – an Ali inspired character
But I just thought she represented so much about the city that’s fascinating. But also, I just love writing older female characters who have a past that is pretty hot.
Ali had a hot past. She was the actress, she was with interesting men. She did the first yoga tape that revolutionized it.
And she’s been in Santa Fe for 30 years where she is beloved. She’s a great patron of the arts and many other causes there. And she just was so inspiring to me that I said Nicole has to meet someone like Ali.
So I created the character of Cleo Jones and they become friends and eventually business partners. But it was all because of that coffee shop.
She’s still Ali. She’s unbelievable. What a role model.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s gorgeous. And the Patagonia part of it? Now, you weren’t going to go and research that on a motorcycle, so how did you get the inside story on Jason’s part of the adventure?
Lian Dolan: I have two older sisters, Liz and Julie, that enjoy many things I don’t. One of which is adventure travel, the other’s hiking, and the other is wind. Windy countries. And they went on a hiking trip in Patagonia four years ago and they came back and they told me all about it, and I’m like, that sounds like my worst nightmare.
Not made for motorbikes in Patagonia
In a million years, I would never want to go on a trip like that. I’m sure it was gorgeous. I love looking at their photos and hearing their stories. But no thanks. And that stuck in my head. And then I had another friend whose husband did a very similar motorcycle trip when he turned 60.
He drove from America all the way down, had his motorcycle, did his thing, was gone for months. I had to think of what’s the least likely trip that Nicole would want to do? And I had to make the story work, I had to get Jason out of Europe, because that’s too easy to reach. He needed to be out of cell phone distance.
That was part of the thing, that they weren’t going to call each other a lot. There was a cutoff of communication. And so Patagonia worked on all those levels. So that’s why I thought this is a trip I would never want to do. So yes, Nicole is me on that one.
Jenny Wheeler: Now you mentioned the sisters and sisters have played a huge role in your life. Not only is one of the more recent books, I think the one before this was one called The Sweeney Sisters, but you’ve had a long running podcast with two of your other sisters. Tell us a little bit about that podcast.
23 years? You must have been a baby when you started it!
Pioneering the Satellite Sisters show
Lian Dolan: I am the baby of the family, which I often remind them. That makes me the youngest. We started Satellite Sisters as a radio show, actually pre podcast in 2000. And it was all five Dolan girls at the time. Five real sisters who lived all over the world, did a show about the things going on in our lives and the things going on in the news and what we were reading and talking about.
And at one point the show was on live here in America six days a week for three hours a day. We just talked and talked. We talk about anything. Anything, Jenny, anything. And in 2008 we turned the show into a podcast and we’re one of the first podcasts out there. We won a Podcast Pioneer Award a couple of years ago.
Our show was really focused on the lives of women and the things that are important to women. The things that don’t necessarily make the front news. American radio is filled with people just yelling and screaming about politics or sports, and you have to have an immediate opinion on every small, tiny detail that takes place in the political sphere or the sports sphere or blue versus red.
And we just thought women, they don’t live their lives like that. They live their lives talking to each other. They can have differences, be different party affiliations and still hav, funny conversations that are meaningful and informative. And so that was always our goal and we’ve loved doing the show.
It’s been an extraordinary experience. Social media has meant that our reach has extended beyond the United States, and we’re able to communicate with people and create a real global sisterhood that we just did not anticipate in 1999 when we pitched the show idea.
A sisterhood novel – The Sweeney Sisters
Jenny Wheeler: We will have a link in the show notes, this episode of them, so people can pick up on those podcast episodes going right back. If they want to, they’re still live aren’t they?
Lian Dolan: Oh yeah, we have thousands. Literally. We ended production of new stuff essentially in December of 23 after 23 years. But we’re even still reposting and re-editing and doing all kinds of things. But our whole back catalog is up on most podcast platforms.
Jenny Wheeler: The book, The Sweeney Sisters is three sisters who have of unexpected revelations when. Dad who’s a – I think he’s a Nobel Prize winning author, isn’t he? In the book? He’s certainly a very high status literary author – and he dies. Tell us about that. And it really comes through, I think, that you have sisters yourself in that book.
There’s a real feeling for sisterhood there. Tell us about it.
Lian Dolan: You know what? You nailed it. That’s what I was going for. That was my fourth novel, and I hadn’t really written about sisters in the first three, because you know what? I’m sick of my sisters sometimes. I thought up till then, I’m going to write a book. It’s not going to be about them. I say that with love. They can write their own books.
But I did feel like after the first three, I was ready to write a book with a trio of female leads. There’s actually a fourth one that shows up. And what I was trying to go for was the idea that not all sister relationships (are the way they are portrayed.)
In a lot of media pop culture books, they’re either super saccharin, like huggy kissy all the time, super supportive, or they’re just warring, they have nothing in common and they’re bitter enemies.
The disruption done by DNA tests
And I think about 90% of sister relationships live in the middle of that. Sometimes you’re supportive, sometimes you’re warring, but if you have a common sense of humor, I think that can really get you through a lot of that. So that was my idea, was to write a book about sisterhood.
The sisters in the book are younger than my sisters, they don’t line up, they’re not my actual sisters. Again, that’s not how books work. But I did try to capture that feeling of sisterhood that we’ve had. Even if you don’t talk to your sister for six months, you’re still there for her.
And when things get bad, they’re there for you and you can have very different lives, but there’s this common connection. And so that’s what I was trying to capture with The Sweeney Sisters. It’s also said in my hometown in Connecticut. So that was fun too. I had never done that before.
Jenny Wheeler: It taps into the zeitgeist, as you say, in one of the blurbs, of 23 and me and ancestry.com, and as people can probably guess, one of the unexpected surprises is revealed by a DNA test.
You raise the question of what makes a family, and it did occur to me. Have you had a DNA test yourself? Do you have any personal experience of DNA in your family?
Lian Dolan: I think I’m the only one that actually has had a DNA test. But I have had plenty of friends have this experience and when I cooked up the idea for the book, it was right when they were starting to market those Ancestry and 23 and Me tests like fun family holiday gifts,
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A fun gift that ‘blew families apart’
Then they like blew families apart. Really. Wasn’t that fun? And I remember reading a couple of stories and one of which was on our Satellite Sisters Facebook group. It was a photo of a woman in her fifties with two men in their fifties. And the headline was ‘I met my brother today.’
I’m not going into details, but here we all are. And we have a really nice group over at Satellite Sisters. It’s the nicest corner of the internet, so everyone was like, oh, thumbs up. Oh, that sounds great. Oh, congratulations. And I’m thinking. That sounds terrible. The last thing in the world I want is another sibling.
I have seven. I have four sisters and three brothers. I also never, ever want to think about my parents’ sex life. We have not had any surprises, but for that book tour, there was not a single event I did where at least one person didn’t come up to me and say, oh, this has recently happened to me.
Something very similar. So I think it’s very common, thanks to that fun over the counter DNA test. But I took mine recently and I think the biggest surprise for me was that my father’s family is all Irish. Dolan, Lee and Dolan. But my mom’s family, we thought was German.
They weren’t German. They were Irish too. I dunno, she said for years, oh no, we’re not Irish. That’s the Irish syndrome. We don’t have that. Whatever that was. (I discovered) I have not one tiny speck of German in me., I’m 88% Irish and 3% Viking I think. And, a little bit of English. So why would she lie about that? We don’t know.
For some, identities turned inside out
Jenny Wheeler: When I was reading The Sweeney Sisters and I saw some comments online from people saying, I would never take a DNA test. It’s just so terrible and all that sort of thing.
I must admit I had one done years ago, and for a similar reason to you actually, we had an oral history in our family going back on my mother’s side, that we were descended from three artists in Renaissance Italy.
And this sounded so fascinating that I wanted to prove there were some Italian there. And actually what happened is that at the beginning, absolutely not. I think the closest thing was 2% Iberian.
Then the database updated and improved. I’m now 8% Tuscan, so I’m fully satisfied!
Lian Dolan: Oh my gosh. You are Michelangelo’s great-great-great-great granddaughter. Amazing.
I am descended from – what I loved with the US census – we are descended from uneducated laborers. There is nobody fancy in our family tree. Nobody, they came, they could not read, at least they could speak English.
That was it. Yeah, it’s pretty fascinating, but it’s also really devastating. People told me really heartfelt stories, like really stunning talk about turning your identity inside out. I think that’s why for me, writing The Sweeney Sisters, the three sisters were super easy to write.
It was the fourth sister, the new one. That I really had to dig deep for because A, she was an only child, which is an experience I don’t understand. And then B, her identity was really turned completely inside out. I had to really get inside the head of people that had that experience.
I did a bunch of interviews and did a lot of reading about that to understand exactly what that’s like.
Helen of Pasadena – a remarkable debut
Jenny Wheeler: Your first book was called Helen of Pasadena, and at the beginning I thought it might have been historical because that sounds like a slightly historical topic title, but it was very definitely contemporary and it went to the top of the LA Times best seller book list, a debut novel, top of the LA Best Seller list. How did you do that?
Lian Dolan: Yeah. It was just a charmed publishing story. From the beginning, it is a great story. It was my first novel, Helen of Pasadena. It’s contemporary, but it does have a Helen of Troy motif. So there is a hot archaeologist in it and references to Troy, FYI.
And I had a fancy agent in New York at that time and she rejected me. She rejected the book. She didn’t want to rep it. It was the Global Financial Crisis. 2009. Things look grim.
So I turned to my neighbor, who ran a small press in Los Angeles doing travel and food books. And I said, can you just read this because I have to go find a new agent and I don’t even know if it’s worth publishing.
And she read it. She was going through breast cancer treatment at the time, so she said I’ll be home all weekend after chemo. She read it and called me Monday and said, I want to publish this. She had never published fiction. It was not my alternative. I wasn’t trying to trick her or anything.
So long story short, we knew almost nothing about publishing fiction, but we just stormed ahead and she was very connected in the Los Angeles world. And most book publishers are in New York in America and they just don’t understand the West Coast, but she really did. And the book came out and it was an immediate instant sensation.
All the good stuff happens in transition
It was a social satire. I spoke at every single book club, every single women’s organization for a year. I did over a hundred appearances. It just caught fire because I think particularly Angelinos, they liked to read about themselves and it was fun and sexy and uplifting and it was an extraordinary experience, because that so rarely happens.
Small press. Top of the list. I couldn’t believe it. Every week, when it just kept showing up. But it was all those book clubs, it was word of mouth and women loved it. And that book, someone talks to me about it every single week. It was published 13 years ago and still, someone mentions it to me every week.
So it’s nice. It’s a very charmed first book story.
Jenny Wheeler: There’s a theme with your books as I’ve looked at them. They’re about successful American women, people who look as if they’re successful. They might have a husband who’s got a good job, they’ve got a nice house, but there’s always a little bit of a worm in the apple somewhere.
And that seems to be an underlying theme of maybe your own life, what you observe around you.
Tell us a bit about that. What fascinates you about that worm in the apple feeling?
Lian Dolan: I think all the good stuff, the learning, is in the transitions. I don’t know. Do you really want to read about perfect people? Not really.
The less than perfect life
It’s not that much fun to write about perfect people. I don’t really want to read about it. I think it’s years of doing the radio show. We talked to hundreds and hundreds of women about the transitions in their lives, and that’s what I mean.
There’s the news headlines on page one, but it’s the first year of widowhood, the first year of new motherhood, the year after my husband left me, dealing with the grief of losing a child.
That’s where the meat is and the heart is, and that’s where women’s lives become interesting. And they go through a moment where they can’t go back again to their old life.
And that is very interesting to me. So even though the people might have a Pasha dress they’re going through a divorce or there’s some loss in their history.
With The Sweeney Sisters, The father was imperfect and the mother dies young. And that sounds all very grim, but I try to infuse it with humor, but I think that’s where the good stuff is, and I like that people read the books and have the experience like, oh gosh, I read that book after my divorce and it really helped me.
Helen Of Pasadena, she’s a widow and she has to completely reinvent her life. And that, I heard from a lot of widows all over the place, that was a big deal.
I like that. It’s so juicy, the material in those transitions.
A dark and deep personal experience
Jenny Wheeler: You were great at turning the humor view on things but you have had your own rather deep and dark experiences, which you’ve written about in one of your humor columns. I’m referring to the test that showed that you were in danger of colon cancer. Tell us a little bit about that. That must have been a bit of a watershed moment for you.
Lian Dolan: Yeah, it was. I was in fact diagnosed with colon cancer, so I went to get my first colonoscopy, and that’s traumatic for a lot of people. And I had put it off, not because I was thinking, oh, the prep, I was thinking, oh, I don’t want to go under anaesthesia. I had a weird fear of anaesthesia.
And I have a good friend, a Satellite Sister, college friend, who texted me like, once a month for a year. Have you made your appointment yet? Have you made your appointment yet? And I was like, fine, I’ll make the appointment. And even at the end, I almost canceled because I was nervous and I was like, Ugh, if I have to face Kara and tell her I didn’t make my appointment, she’s gonna kill me.
So I went and lo and behold, there was a polyp, but they said nothing to worry about.
And then a week later, the doctor called and said, oh, in fact it’s cancer. You have colon cancer. And it was such a shock to me. I was so shocked. I thought, oh, there’s a whole host of other horrible diseases I’m gonna get, my dad died of Alzheimer’s and we have Parkinson’s and ALS, we have terrible things in our family, but we don’t actually have a lot of cancer.
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A day that changed Lian Dolan’s life
And so I was just so stunned by it. I was lucky that they caught it early. It was a surgical solution. I’m four and a half years out. I’ve had clean scans ever since, but it really does (change things). There’s a day before you have cancer and then there’s the next day. You can’t go back again.
It’s almost like fiction. I think back on that Friday before I got the call from the doctor, I was feeling great and then the next Monday I had cancer. And I think back on that last weekend? Boy, that was the last weekend of my previous life and now I have this other life.
But trying to find a way to talk, to write about colon cancer in a humorous way was hard. That’s where I took time to process. I relied on years of writing columns. I’ve been an essayist for years. And still I really had to work hard to find the funny in that, but also make people aware go get those colonoscopies. They literally saved my life
Jenny Wheeler: You do mention in that column that if you’d left it six months later, you might not have had such a good outcome.
Lian Dolan: Yes, that’s true. And that’s the only time I cried when the doctor told me that. I’m not a huge crier. I didn’t lose it a lot after the diagnosis, but when he told me that, because a hundred percent I could have left it six months, a hundred percent. I could have talked myself out of that test.
I’m just eternally grateful for my friend, for bugging me and for having good medical care and a great team of doctors and nurses.
Long term goals – and has Lian reached them yet?
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. Let’s take a look at your wider career. What was your goal when you first started writing fiction, and have you realized it yet?
Lian Dolan: Oh, that’s a good question. There’s no joy like writing your first novel because you just don’t think anyone’s ever going to read it. You just have the idea that you’re going to find an agent and find a publisher.
That your neighbors might read it. I felt like I had a book in me and it had been there for a while and I finally had to get it out, so I really thought. Oh, I’ll write this book.
I had no long-term plans. I certainly didn’t anticipate (what happened). I just turned in my seventh book. I didn’t anticipate this. I had been a working writer before, working in different media. Fiction seems so hard and so challenging to me. I was just happy to have that first book out and have that fantastic experience.
One of the reasons I had to scale back on the podcast and not do Satellite Sisters anymore was I was like, you know what? I’d really like to focus just on writing. Now I’ve been doing this crazy dual career with talking Monday and Tuesday and writing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and Sunday if I need to.
And if I could just write, whoa what would that look like? So that’s what I’m doing this year. But I do think it’s amazing that I’ve churn out so many novels that there are so many stories inside of me. I didn’t know there would be that many.
Fascinated by the story of Helen of Troy
Jenny Wheeler: What made you decide you wanted to do that very first book?
Lian Dolan: Like a lot of writers. I was a huge reader growing up and then remained a reader and loved stories and loved storytelling.
The work that I was doing, the talking and the magazine writing, that was nonfiction, but I just thought… It’s that little bit of ego where you read a couple books, and think I could write this thing.
Like you have to have that or you have to think I feel like I could write this. And I had been stashing away stories about Helen of Troy for years. I was a classics major in college, so loved Greek history and archaeology and I just thought, now’s the time.
I was in my mid-forties, I was not, I was not just out of college, I was in my mid- forties and had 20 years of professional experience behind me before I started.
And I think that helped. I had the professional discipline. I knew what it was like to work every single day and sit down and work on something for long stretches of time.
Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Lian as reader, because we always like to ask our guests about their reading taste. This is The Joys Of Binge Reading and a lot of our listeners are whale readers and looking for their next great discovery and particularly in terms of multiple published authors so they can read their whole oeuvre if they want to.
Tell us a bit about your reading tastes and if you’ve got things you’d like to recommend right now.
What is Lian Dolan reading now?
Lian Dolan: Oh, okay. You know what? This is one of those things. People ask me this question. I forget every book I ever read. I should keep a list!
I love audio books. That’s one way I can pile through a lot of books. And I particularly like mysteries and thrillers in audio books. I would never pick up a mystery or thriller and read it like a normal book. That’s was not my genre. So definitely during the Pandemic and beyond, I would binge listen to Dervla McTiernan.
The Irish have turned out a lot of good mystery writers and thrillers. And I like listening to audio with good accents, like you have. So that’s why I am drawn to the English and the Irish and the Australian writers. So Dervla McTiernan is one that I would recommend. I really enjoy her things.
I just did a whole re-listen to four Maeve Binchy books. She’s the best, a wonderful Irish storyteller, weaving people’s lives together. It’s just amazing the complexity of the stories that she tells and how she could pull all the strings together at the end and wonderful narration.
The last couple of months I was working on another manuscript, and so I was listening to those to take my mind off it, which they’re just delightful. Delightful. If your listeners haven’t ever read Maeve been she’s the best. She’s gone now, but she’s great.
I’m reading a very dark book now called My Dark Vanessa (by Kate Elizabeth Russell,) which is very dark.
But another genre I like is terrible things that happen on college campuses. I like professors and academics and the cutthroat world there and the weird sexual tension and stuff. So that’s one is good. It’s very dark. But it’s well written.
I’m just finishing now.
The What ifs’ and the path never taken
Jenny Wheeler: I don’t know if I’ve got it wrong, but the campus thing makes me think of Donna Tartt.
Lian Dolan: Yes. And that was one of my favorite books. I was a classics major, so imagine. I had just graduated from college when the book came out. And I was like a book about classics majors murdering people called The Secret History? I’m on it. So that probably started me off on my exclusive college campus situation.
Jenny Wheeler: Looking back down the tunnel of time. If there was one thing you’d change about your creative career, what would it be?
Lian Dolan: I had an opportunity when I first moved to Los Angeles. Prior to that I was a writer and producer in the sports business in my twenties, if you can believe that. And I moved to Los Angeles, A to get married and B to get into film or tv. And I wrote a couple of spec sitcoms and I was meeting with agents and producers.
And then my sister Liz, suggested this radio show and my career went off in that direction. But I think a lot about a TV writer, what that would’ve been like. I’ve had the opportunity since to develop a couple of TV shows and they’ve sold, but none of them have been made into actual shows.
But I enjoy that process a lot, writing with other writers, the collaborative process. I love writing dialogue. I think about that a lot. If I had said no to Satellite Sisters and yes to more TV work, what would’ve happened. So that’s one turning point, but I don’t have any regrets.
Satellite Sisters has been an extraordinary experience, like completely extraordinary.
An unrealised dream – a TV series
Jenny Wheeler: And that’s an unrealized ambition that you can still work on. Isn’t it?
Lian Dolan: It’s never too late. That’s what I mean. I wish someone would buy The Sweeney Sisters, don’t you? I’d like to make that a TV show because there’s a lot more story in that. But yeah, that’s part of my master plan. I’d like to take another swing at the screenplay.
Jenny Wheeler: Absolutely The Sweeney Sisters. When you think about it, it could be 12 episodes- or even it could be more than that. It could be a series. It definitely could, it would be fun to be able to switch back to the days when, you know their father and the woman next door first met. You could have flashbacks and things too, couldn’t you?
Lian Dolan: Yes, you could. Yes. See, I’ve thought this through, so thank you. I hope someone’s listening.
Jenny Wheeler: Tell us what’s next for Lian, the author, what have you got on your desk for the next 12 months?
Lian Dolan: The book tour for The Marriage Sabbatical is pretty extensive. I’m excited about that. I do a lot of speaking around my books. I’m able to go to some of the places Santa Fe and Portland, Oregon. I’m appearing at the South Dakota Literary Festival, so that’s fun. A place I’ve never been to.
A lot of authors don’t like speaking publicly, but I’m good with it. I like to talk. I’m looking forward to that. But I’m also working on my 2025 book. The first draft is in, and I’m waiting for my editorial notes, so I’ll be doing rewrites on that. And that is a book called The Wedding.
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A wedding story with a difference
And it’s about a wedding, no surprise. But it’s told from the point of view of the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom. So, it’s not so much about the couple as the mothers, and they’re very different people from different parts of the country with different lives and different points of view on marriage and weddings and all kinds of background and things like that.
That’s been really fun to write. It’s a little bit of a social satire. There’s a little bit of romance in it beyond the married couple. I’ll be finishing that.
Jenny Wheeler: And to finish off, we’ve run out of time. You’ve obviously already made it very clear you enjoy interacting with your readers. For those people who can’t see you in person, where can they find you online?
Lian Dolan: Sure. I’m on Instagram at Laan Dolan. or at Satellie Sisters. Either one of those places are great. I’m also on Facebook at Lian Dolan, so that’s the easiest place. And I have a website. You can always just contact me directly through liandolan.com. When you have a name like Lian, you can own all the URLs.
It’s no problem. Nobody else has the name Lian. It’s an Irish name, my parents claimed, it’s the female of Liam, but I have yet to meet like a single Irish person with this name. So, I think it’s a lot of malarkey. And there’s a whole story.
They actually named my sister Liz Lian.
Lian Dolan signing off
She was number four, and the grandmothers on the way to the baptism said, that’s a terrible name. So they’re like, okay, fine. We’ll call her Elizabeth. And then by the time I was born, the grandmothers were dead, so they named me Lian, so I didn’t even get my own name.
Jenny Wheeler: Thank you so much. You’ve been a fantastic interview subject, and it’s been great fun talking.
Lian Dolan: Oh, this was fantastic. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Good luck with everything. Yeah.
You’re a great interviewer, Jenny. Thank you.
If you enjoyed Lian Dolan you might also enjoy…
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Delightfully fresh and funny romcom from Amy Poeppel. Her latest romp, The Sweet Spot is a tale of spurned love, revenge, and the healing power of friendship.
LISTEN TO amy
Next time on Binge Reading
Next time on Binge Reading, celebrated Australian broadcaster and wordsmith Kel Richards talking about his classic C. S. Lewis Country House mysteries set in 1930s. Oxford.
Kel is passionate about the Golden Age of mystery and deeply immersed in Narnia creator and theologian C. S. Lewis’ Oxford college world, and his circle of friends, including Professor J R Tolkien.
Bring all of them together, and you have his Country House mysteries, featuring Jack Lewis and friends, solving brain teasing “closed door” mysteries in 1930s Oxford.
That’s in two weeks on Binge Reading. And remember, if you enjoy the show, leave us a review so others will find us too. That is still the best way for them to hear about us and to hear about great books they will love to read.
That’s it for today. See you next time and happy reading.