Insights From Imbolo Mbue and Patrick Ryan

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing

This episode features two in-depth interviews with acclaimed authors Imbolo Mbue and Patrick Ryan, who discuss their distinct journeys to publication and the craft behind their latest

Key takeaways

• Imbolo Mbue faced approximately three million rejections over several years before agent Suzanne Gollum's assistant championed her manuscript.
• Mbue's novel Every Story Is a Love Story was directly inspired by her own unresolved guilt from a teenage incident where she accidentally injured someone.

Main topics

• Navigating literary agent rejections and breakthroughs
• Translating personal guilt into fictional narratives

Notable quotes

"I had to write draft after draft after draft."

Conclusion

The episode provides aspiring writers with grounded advice on embracin

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:06) Hi there and welcome to our show, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. I'm best-selling author Bianca Murray and I'm joined by Cece Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates and Carly Waters of PS Literary. Hi everyone, I am super excited about today's interview. I've been trying for a very long time to get this guest on the podcast and I was finally given a yes. So here we go. Today's guest is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the Penn Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, about a fictional African villagers fight against an American oil company. was named by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. A native of Limbe, Cameroon, she now lives in New York. It's my pleasure to welcome Mbolo Mbwe. Mbolo, welcome to the show. Thank you, Bianca. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this. I'm super excited. Before we dive in, I'm just going to read the flap copy. For those of you who are not watching on YouTube, I'm holding up the cover of the book we're discussing today. Every story is a love story. Really gorgeous cover. All right. And so let me dive into the flap copy and then we're going to take it from there. Three years ago, Warlow's pregnant wife was killed in a tragic car accident. In an instant, the great love of his life was gone, and so was their beautiful future. The twins they were expecting, the PhD she was on the cusp of finishing, and the house they'd just bought in New Jersey. In the face of a loss that seemed insurmountable, Warlow has slowly rebuilt a semblance of a life. He goes to work, hangs out with a small circle of friends, and fends off the matchmaking efforts of the older woman in his family. The grief that dogged him has, with time, become a little gentler, until a letter arrives one day, unbidden, threatening to upend his life once again. It is from Victoria, the woman who was behind the wheel that terrible day. Walua's mother's pastor tells him the letter is the work of the devil. His mother expressly forbids him from making further mention of it. His father's second wife calls from Cameroon to tell him to destroy it. But Waller ponders it for days and ultimately agrees to meet with the woman who killed his wife. When he does, the compassion and deep remorse of the woman affects him in ways he had never imagined and he begins to wonder if the long road to healing can be shared. What do we owe to those who have hurt us? Are we defined by our worst moments and our deepest regrets? And more than anything, can forgiveness ease our suffering? Moving and full of life, Every Story is a Love Story charts the uneven path from heartbreak to healing. Yeah, I mean, guys, as I'm reading the flap copy, I get goosebumps and you are going to get goosebumps as you read the book. Now, before we dive into this, Mbolo, I know that our listeners are very interested in journeys to publication. So can you take us through yours from before your debut published? How did all of that work out for you? I did not Speaker 2 (3:12) do an MFA. I actually didn't even take a writing class in college. I began writing because I'd read Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and I loved it. This was, I don't know, 20 something years ago. I was 20, I was 21, I believe. And I loved it so much and I started writing and it was meant to be a hobby. This was going to be something I did for fun to myself. My dream was to, well, first was to be a lawyer. That didn't work out. Then it was to be a college professor. That didn't work out. And then... At some point, I lost my job and I decided to take my writing seriously. And I got inspired by the fact that I'd lost my job and I was in Midtown Manhattan and I saw Show First. And that is how I ended up writing my first novel, Behold the Dreamers. And again, I mean, at that point, I thought, you know what? I'm in New York City, you know, let me send it out to agents and see what happens. And long story short, after about three million rejections, I got an offer from... person who was my dream agent, Suzanne Golomb, because I loved Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. And I said, I would love to have this agent. And shout out to Franzen because this month is going to be 25 years since The Corrections was published. So I sent it to Suzanne Golomb and she rejected it. And then she changed her mind after I worked on it. And she became my agent and that book came out. And then my second novel came out five years ago. And this is my third novel. Speaker 3 (4:41) Wow. So like of the 3 million rejections, I mean, that seems Speaker 2 (4:45) insane to me. I was rejected by everybody and their second cousin. I don't think there's any agent. I didn't query in New York City or in America. I queried everybody. Speaker 3 (4:57) And did anybody give you like a revise and resubmit? Was anybody coming back and saying, okay, this is what I like. This is what I didn't like. Is that how you landed the agent? Speaker 2 (5:06) Yes. So, I mean, I don't think anybody is so much as reverse and resubmit, but I would say that Susan Gollum only became my agent because she had a wonderful assistant who believed in me. So what happened is that I sent that draft to her assistant and she read it. And she said, oh, my God, Mbolo, this is great. Susan is going to love it. And she's going to offer to represent you. And I was like, I can't believe it. Finally, after three million rejections, I'm going to get an agent. And I'll never forget. It was March 31st, 2014. I come back. I'd gone to California with my family. Came back, opened my computer, and there's an email from... Susan Golomb's assistant. And she said, I'm so sorry, Mbolo, Susan does not feel the way I do about this manuscript, so she's going to pass. And I thought the world had ended. I came so close, so close to getting this dream agent. And she said, no. There was a lot that was wrong with it. Obviously, it's a difference being Susan Golomb and her agent, who is... incredibly intelligent. She had a different taste. And I think that people at Suzanne's level have a different taste also. And she told me what was wrong. And she said, the thing about the novel is that it is about two different families in New York City during the financial crisis of 2008, 2009. And one family is a Cameroonian immigrant family. And I'm from Cameroon. And the other family is a wealthy, you know, American family, white family living in the Upper East Side. And not only Susan, but other agents felt like the book was not balanced. So, you know, I was writing about these Cameroonians who are struggling. And you could tell that I had a lot of empathy for them because everybody loved their chapters. And then they come to the other side and the other chapters, these people were way more familiar to American readers. And they felt like... they did not feel for the same richness there. So that was what was holding down the book. So I had to basically, you know, get rid of half of the book for that for it to work out in the sense that I had to tell the whole novel from the perspective only of the Africans, but tell the American family stories through the African's eyes. And that changed everything. So Suzanne's... assistant did say to me, she said that like, you know, this is a problem that Susan sees and she just thinks that like, you know, you need to keep on working. And other people have said that to me, you know, you're onto something, you need to keep on working. And it hurts. You know, I tell people, young people right now, I say, it hurts to hear that, but people are onto something because, you know, they know that there's something here. So I went and I got people to, I paid people to read it for me. Like I had an editor and she read it and she said, yes, you know, this is a problem. So I had to sort of, you know, Dig in and find out why I would have so much empathy for people who are like me and have such little empathy for people not like me. So that had to do with my own judgments, right? My own biases against these people, these rich white people, because I don't know what are their problems. They don't have as many problems as the poor Africans, but that is not exactly the case, right? It's not a matter of compare and contrast. Everybody has their own struggles. So I had to work. my own self to find out why that was happening. And then it was just a matter of, you know, rethinking the story, like telling it, but telling it with a lot more honesty. So anyway, after Suzanne's assistant said that, I went back to work and I hired an editor and she said the same thing and it took me many drafts. And then I finally sent it back to her. And again, I'll never forget the date, July 24th, 2014. She said. Can we talk? And I said, oh my God, this is happening. Speaker 3 (8:51) I love that. And shout out to the assistants, to the passionate assistants out there, because without the Speaker 2 (8:57) passionate assistants, it wouldn't have gotten to this point. That's right. I think, I believe her name is Krista Ingebrigtsen. I hope that is her name because I'll never forget, like every time I got an email from her, I was like, oh my God. And I don't know if she's still in publishing, but it... definitely like that assistant is played a huge role in me getting my agent and again it took me three years and three million rejections to get an agent but once Susan submitted my novel to publishers it sold in four days so everybody has their own struggle I had a hard time getting an agent and then my book sold easily there are some people you know get an agent easily and it takes a while for their books to sell so it's just different for everybody Speaker 3 (9:36) Yeah. I mean, so was there like a bidding war for the first book Speaker 2 (9:40) once it went out? Random House did, I believe it's called it preempt where they read it and they took it off the market immediately. So there was no, it was right away. It was like, okay, we love this. We're buying it. You know, it was over. It was over so fast. I was like, what? My book has been submitted. And then I knew I was going to Random House. It was, it was unbelievable. Speaker 3 (10:00) That's amazing. And people will talk about overnight success, right? But amazing how long overnight success takes. I Speaker 2 (10:07) mean, I was writing for 14 years before my novel, before I got my first book deal. But again, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't, you know, publishing short stories. I was pretty much an unknown, you know, I was at that point, I was unemployed, sitting at home writing, nobody ever heard of me. And I just started. you know, send out my manuscript. So when Suzanne, you know, sent it to Random House, we were all like, what else has she published? And I have no record. I've never published anything. Actually, no, I just had a short story. No, actually, I had sold the short story to Three Penny Review and that came out after I got a book deal. But when my book was sold, I was completely unpublished. I wouldn't recommend that. I think you should try to get published. But I just, you know, I don't think I have a short story talent very much. So I just focus on the novel. Speaker 3 (10:51) Yeah, I mean, there's so many journeys to publication and, you know, the long form is so different to the short form. Yeah. You know, something you said there and it really struck me is that, you know, with the first book, there was this wealthy sort of white family and it was trying to get into their struggles, trying to understand them. And you did that so well with this book, with Victoria, you know, so may I ask, like, where did the inspiration for this particular story come from? Speaker 2 (11:20) So this is funny because people will read this book and think, oh, Mbolo is the character who dies. Victoria accidentally kills the character. She's from Cameroon. She's from my town. She's an aspiring writer. She went to Rutgers. I went to Rutgers in New Jersey. So the point is, oh, could that be Mbolo? She is not me. This story came from me. thinking more about Victoria's experience because when I was a teenager growing up in my hometown, I'm from a town called Limbe in Cameroon, I was involved in a fight in which somebody got injured. And, you know, the details are all like not really that important. The important part is that I was there and I, you know, it was not just me alone, but with some other person and, you know, somebody ended up with a serious injury. Speaker 2 (12:12) It was defensive. It wasn't meant to be aggressive. It was defensive. In any event, somebody was injured. And again, as a teenager, you think, oh, well, they were being aggressive. They got injured. Moving on. I didn't think about that. I left it, moved on. Many, many years later, probably, I don't know, 20-something years later, the pandemic happened. And I found myself thinking about an incident which I had forgotten, completely forgotten. I found myself thinking about that young man. He was a young man. I found myself thinking about him and that injury. Like, wow, is he still angry about it? He has this scar now. When people ask him, he has to tell them this story. My name might feature. He didn't know my name, but I might feature in this story about somebody's pain. And I felt really guilty. You know, I was full of regret. And again, I don't know why. Maybe it's a pandemic. You know, in a pandemic, everything comes out. You're thinking about everything. And I found myself being very regretful and feeling guilty about what it was like for him and his family after he got this injury, which again was an accident. It wasn't meant to happen like that. So I didn't think about writing a novel about that. I didn't. I was working on something very different, completely different from what I have now. I was working on that novel for about three years and then it didn't work. It just, the novel did not come together and it was hard for me to accept that. But, you know, I have a wonderful team around me and they said, Mbola, what are you doing? You know, this is not happening. And so I let that novel go. And in the process of like trying to figure out where to go next, I thought about my guilt and I realized that. If there's one thing I want to write about right now, it's about that guilt, I thought. And that is how the character of Victoria came to me. Because I had been involved in this fight that somebody got injured and got wounded, and I'm feeling guilty about it. Then imagine what it's like if you killed somebody accidentally. Like, you know, like... Imagine the pain and the shame and the guilt and the regret of having killed somebody accidentally. So that is how I started writing the novel. And the first chapter is Victoria's letter asking for forgiveness from the husband. The husband is Wolo. He's asking Wolo for forgiveness because it's like, this is a lot of pain to live with. This is a huge burden. And can you please forgive me so I can... find some measure of peace about everything. And so he sends this letter to Woloh and then everything starts happening from there. But it's also the story goes back and forth between Woloh's journey with Victoria as they negotiate what forgiveness is and how to forgive. And he also looks at Woloh's relationship with his wife and also Woloh's involvement in