Ep 768 - Retro, by Jessica M. Goldstein

Overdue

In this episode of Overlam, hosts Craig and Andrew discuss the novel 'Retro' by Jessica M. Goldstein. The conversation explores the life of

Key takeaways

• The novel 'Retro' is written by journalist Jessica M. Goldstein, known for her work in McSweeney's and Vulture.
• The protagonist, Ash, is an actress turned office drone struggling with millennial malaise and student debt.

Main topics

• Time travel literature
• Millennial nostalgia

Notable quotes

If I'm asking you to believe in time travel, everything else better be bulletproof.

Conclusion

The episode offers a thoughtful critique of how modern fiction uses th

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Andrew, summer is over now, but you can still carry the spirit of summer, the spirit of those carefree months with no homework or school, and the freedom to get away from a big wireless company that's gonna lock you in and overcharge you. That's right. Thanks to Mint Mobile's summer sale, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So free yourself from big wireless and their gimmicks and their gotchas and switch to Mint for high-speed data and coverage on the T-Mobile 5G network. Andrew, would you please talk about your personal experience using Mint Mobile? Is it easy? How high is the quality of service? Are you saving? Speaker 4 (0:36) I think even when the ad copy is ambiguous, it's fine because Mint is a phone. plan provider for all seasons. In every one of the four seasons, Mint Mobile has given me good, reliable, and inexpensive cell phone service that I have had nothing bad to say about. Speaker 3 (0:54) I love to hear it. I love to hear that all the plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. To get your new wireless plan for just $15 a month, go to mintmobile.com slash overdue. That's mintmobile.com. Speaker 3 (1:34) See MintMobile.com. Speaker 1 (1:40) This is a HeadGum Podcast. While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well-told tale, they will not shy away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary. Plus, these are books you should have read by now. Speaker 3 (2:20) Hey everybody, welcome to Overdue. It's a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig. Speaker 4 (2:24) My name is Andrew. Speaking Speaker 3 (2:26) to you from the year 2026. The Speaker 4 (2:29) future. I Speaker 3 (2:31) almost forgot what year it was when I started talking. This year hasn't felt real. I Speaker 4 (2:37) really like that period of... the like 80s and 90s where stuff happened in like the year 2000 20 xx yeah it was the distant futures like guy gang that is an extremely like easy amount of time to wrap your head around Speaker 3 (2:53) no it sounded is Speaker 4 (2:55) not that far it sounded fake a whole other century Speaker 3 (2:58) and millennia no here Speaker 4 (3:00) we are the year 2000 everything that's happened so far in this decade has been pretty good i think it's great Speaker 3 (3:06) Yeah, it's been like 26 years of nothing but good stuff. Speaker 4 (3:11) Nothing but the hits, you know? Recorded this on September 18th. Speaker 3 (3:15) I can't Speaker 4 (3:16) think of anything that happened within like a week of today that sucked. Like everything was great. I Speaker 3 (3:22) look back on the whole week and I think, why can't I live these days forever? Why Speaker 4 (3:26) can't I live them forever? But if you do feel, you know, if you feel oppressed by the buzz of modern life. Yeah. If getting back to something older and purer is appealing to you, then perhaps time travel. Speaker 3 (3:45) Why not? Perhaps. Why not? On this week of our show, where each week one of us reads a book and tells the other person about it, Andrew has read another time travel book. He's stuck in a bit of a loop here. Speaker 4 (4:00) Is Katnip... For me, Catnip Everdeen Retro by Jessica M. Goldstein. Craig, I will have you know that this is a novel. Speaker 3 (4:10) It says so on the cover, doesn't it? It says Speaker 4 (4:12) so on the cover. Speaker 3 (4:12) Can't go back in time and change that. It's permanent. Speaker 4 (4:14) I Speaker 3 (4:15) think Speaker 4 (4:15) if we manage to upgrade our website so it's searchable and sortable, I think we have to have a tag that's just a novel, and it's every book that says that it's a novel on the cover. That's pretty funny. You might need to crowdsource that a Speaker 3 (4:29) little bit, I suppose. That's funny. I like that. I wonder which classic books, which publisher is out there. Putting their own version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein out there and going, Frankenstein, a modern Prometheus, a novel. Speaker 4 (4:45) This one's a novel. Moby Dick, Speaker 3 (4:47) a novel. A novel. In, like, the fuzzy font, in the fuzzy 21st century, like, color-blocked Speaker 4 (4:55) cover. I would like to see, I mean, probably someone's done this. I hope someone's done this. But yeah, give me all the cool like public domain classic literature. But with like 2024 front of the independent bookshop, I grabbing pastel color. Now, now a Speaker 3 (5:15) series produced by Reese Witherspoon covers. Yes. But anyway, Andrew, this is a book that you're going to tell me about that you read for the show Speaker 4 (5:23) to Moby Dick. And it's like, oh, now an inescapable metaphor. Speaker 3 (5:31) That's funny. We're covering an author who has published stuff in McSweeney's, and I think that would actually make a good McSweeney's article. That would be like a funny McSweeney's post. Speaker 4 (5:42) Yeah, just like cool stickers and stuff that they put on the... Yeah, that's Speaker 2 (5:46) a Speaker 3 (5:46) pretty good... I don't think I've seen that before. Andrew, good goof. Thanks. Thank you. But Jessica M. Goldstein. She studied journalism here at the University of Pennsylvania here in Philadelphia. And one of the first things that she sends to Seventeen Magazine as she's studying journalism is a review of the movie Seventeen Again. Speaker 2 (6:08) Kind of clever, I Speaker 4 (6:10) think. Speaker 3 (6:10) She Speaker 4 (6:11) gets the job. Every time I got that, I would get that magazine in my mailbox. I mean, I never got it at any point. But I'd be like, oh, Seventeen Again? Speaker 3 (6:21) So she gets assigned to the Entertainment and Culture Desk, and kind of the rest is history. She has gone on to, the article was published in McSweeney's and Vulture and New York Times and Marie Claire, the WAPO style section, among others, generally being a... Pop culture journalist of sorts. And she also now has a newsletter called The Retro Report that provides, quote, vintage mood-based, unquote, pop culture recommendations. Speaker 4 (6:57) Okay. Speaker 3 (6:58) I was trolling through there. It's like some interesting books to read. Yeah, I was going to ask if you had any Speaker 4 (7:03) more information on what that means. Stuff Speaker 3 (7:06) that's older than 30 years ago. Like, you know, stuff from the... 80s 90s and before yeah uh the reverse of your favorite radio station that's Speaker 2 (7:16) playing the best of 80s 90s Speaker 3 (7:17) and Speaker 2 (7:17) now Speaker 3 (7:17) uh and she'd been kind of noodling on this novel idea i think going back to around 2020 21 um and she's everybody Speaker 4 (7:32) was noodling with Everyone was noodling with the novel. In that phase for no reason. Speaker 3 (7:36) She spoke to Writer's Digest saying that the novel took two and a half years to write, another year in edits. Her inspiration for this novel was that she had this idea for a time travel agency. She loved the wordplay of that phrase. And she also wanted to write about workplaces, places with corporate cruelty and office norms and work... work relationships that could all turn into a particularly interesting story. She did say she started writing. This was an interview with the Nerd Daily where she started writing in the pandemic and struck by how, quote, people across the political spectrum were enamored with the past and its superiority over the present. Now, I do think personally. There's a difference between trying to impose hierarchies from the past on the present and perhaps being afraid of a future where tech overlords run amok, which are the two examples that she kind of gives. But I get her point. Speaker 4 (8:40) Yeah, I mean, there's some stuff in this book that is lightly, like... And I'm not always 100 % clear whether it's being satirized or just kind of represented accurately and honestly, but like a sort of surface level liberalism that never does anything and never shows up anywhere. Okay. Like just sort of a loose commitment to goodness. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Speaker 3 (9:11) She also was kind of, you know, she is. generally of our generation, I think, Andrew. Yeah, she's Speaker 2 (9:19) a Speaker 3 (9:19) hashtag Speaker 4 (9:20) millennial. Speaker 3 (9:21) She knows about Speaker 4 (9:22) Millennial Pink. She knows about Broad City. Like, what are the other millennials? I bring that up Speaker 3 (9:29) to say that she is of a generation. Harlem Speaker 4 (9:32) Shake. We Speaker 3 (9:33) have a particular version of pop culture nostalgia that I think is best epitomized with, like, the vh1 best of the 90s turning into the best week ever where it was like what if we just had nostalgia for last week like what yes we all loved pet rocks but also what if we just loved knowing what the news was about yeah before we got too old for it sort of thing which she also talks about as inspiration for this book i did like what she said in a lit hub interview about time travel stories where she does talk about many of them. I don't think all of them, but many of them have this notion of kind of a collective despair about what's ahead. A lot of time travel books are about going into the past. You got it, Marty. You got to go and like, you know, it's back to the future, but like you got to go to the back. You Speaker 4 (10:31) got to go to the past to fix the present or you go to the future and it's bad. Then you have to go back to the present to fix the future. Speaker 3 (10:38) I can't. I am struggling to think of a time travel story where they go to the future and it's cool as heck. I feel Speaker 4 (10:45) like thinking of the future as like a cool space age like thing where everything was going to be great is like a. relic of like World's Fair era like the original like Futurama exhibit the like I know that like there's a lot of stuff in the Venture Brothers that is like spoofing like how amazing the oh sure like all this space age stuff was supposed to be and how disappointing it ended up being or how it like just kind of got to a certain point and stopped going anywhere like Speaker 3 (11:18) we were never going to be the Jetsons and we were fools to think so yeah yeah yeah But she does say that there is an innate optimism to time travel stories that she liked because we, whether or not it is always for the better, we believe that we can change things. Yeah. And I think I recently watched the TV adaptation of Stephen King's 11-22-63, which is that time travel book about trying to stop the JFK assassination. which has loomed large in my brain as a time travel story. But that is like, you can't change it. What are you doing? What are you trying to do here? But there is a drive to a lot of time travel fiction, for better or for worse. Like, well, what if I could go into the past? And what if I could fix things? What if I could do something? She did say in an interview with her campus... that she talked about her journalism background serving her in the writing process, particularly the gathering of period facts. She was committed to a certain level of resimilitude, quote, if I'm asking you to believe in time travel, everything else better be bulletproof. So I'm interested to hear about the periods in the past that get covered in the book. And she also talks in that interview a bit about how she'd been working on the novel for a little bit. you know coming out of lockdown and stuff like that but ironic i guess not ironically in 2022 and 23 23 maybe is when that uh big strike in the writers guild and sag happened which impacted a lot of her culture writing because there just wasn't stuff there was just wasn't stuff happening there weren't actors to interview there weren't new projects taking off um a lot of what she had been doing as a freelance writer was just drying up so she buckled down and worked on this novel which is interesting just like i'd not heard that as an origin story for a novel before labor labor unions take action and pop culture writer decides to finish their novel which is an interesting uh way for this to come about yeah Speaker 4 (13:30) i've got some stuff from the authors know just about about her about her thought process and the stuff she was, yeah. She says, the watershed horror of COVID made all the pre-pandemic days look in retrospect like a glorious before as the gap between the rich and the rest kept widening. The American dream, start from anywhere, go to school, get a job, buy a house, lead a dignified life was starting to feel like the stuff of science fiction. All of a sudden, everything cost a million dollars and was made of polyester and particle board and was designed to be obsolete the minute the warranty ran out. The accelerating devastation of climate change and the colossal failure of our government to act in time to prevent the worst possible outcomes only intensified the sense that the best days were behind us. Yep. And then but then she watches. She's talking. You know, that thing where like Gen Z folks like the young people today, the kids and the teens who listen to our podcast. They're like, you know what's awesome is like a Canon PowerShot, a horrible Canon PowerShot camera from like 2003. You know what's cool is that. Yeah. And she says of that. of that fad of that like movement uh but it was surreal to watch people romanticize a recent past through which i had actually lived and that i remembered well and yeah you do you do think like you see people i'm i'm sort of a sucker for some aspects of this like if you if you think about the um like Like the way the Game Boys looked in 2002. Oh, yeah. Like the clear plastic iMac thing. That was, I think that aesthetic is neat. I do have nostalgia for it, but it's not like 2002 was like amazing. It's not like 2002 was Speaker 3 (15:16) an amazing time of Speaker 4 (15:17) your life. Speaker 3 (15:17) What do you do with those feelings? You're like, that was interesting and kind of cool. Do I want to go back there exactly? I don't know. Speaker 4 (15:26) Even at the time, she says, I remember thinking all of this was kind of ugly. Still, I dutifully marched through the mall and purchased the popular items waiting for the culture to improve. Speaker 3 (15:34) Yeah, that's fair. What I do Speaker 4 (15:37) not remember thinking is that those years were the halcyon days for which we'd all forever yearn. That was not the national mood. Speaker 3 (15:46) Yeah, I'm reminded of one. In addition to a couple of interviews she gave around this book, she also penned some articles. Like, here's why I kind of wrote this book, which I think is an interesting thing that somebody who is used to pitching for freelance writing can do, which is kind of neat. And one, she talks about like... Speaker 3 (16:13) if she could have a technology back like maybe she would want dial-up internet back and she's like as a kid i hated it why would i want that but there's a certain level of Speaker 4 (16:22) remove and like friction that Speaker 3 (16:25) there should be Speaker 4 (16:26) a speed limit at which the internet can come into your house yeah and the benefit of there being a speed limit it's not just like i can't consume as much internet but it also dictates how much crap can somebody send into a web Speaker 3 (16:41) page yeah yeah and Speaker 4 (16:42) like that and that has downstream effects like the reason why there's a bit like there's a big computer memory shortage right now uh-huh reason why as a user of computers that sucks is because like every browser tab takes up like a gigabyte of memory all by itself and i'm just trying to learn about Speaker 3 (16:59) gandalf in all his permutations and this wiki page is straining come Speaker 4 (17:04) on Speaker 4 (17:05) Why is my fandom wiki like mining Bitcoin on my computer? Like this stuff should not, the pipe