Laura Moriarty on Writing Amid Her Cancer Diagnosis

Totally Booked with Zibby

Zibby Owens interviews author Laura Moriarty about her new novel, Sunlight Finds You, which has been selected as a Read with Jenna pick. The

Key takeaways

The novel Sunlight Finds You follows Nora, a teenager in 1947 Florida, through a transformative and difficult love story.
Moriarty highlights the racial segregation of the era, specifically the practice of 'giving whites the wall' in St. Petersburg.

Main topics

Sunlight Finds You plot overview
Jim Crow era racial dynamics

Notable quotes

Because when you talk about books, you're really talking about life.

Conclusion

The episode provides a moving look at how personal resilience and hist

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to Totally Booked. I'm Zibby Owens. I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show and learned endless amounts about storytelling, reinvention, and life itself. Because when you talk about books, you're really talking about life. So get ready to hear from today's best authors, the best-selling, and the not-yet-discovered. Come find your next great read and the story behind it. Enjoy. Speaker 2 (0:26) I was so excited when Laura Moriarty's book, Sunlight Finds You, was chosen as the Read with Jenna pick. So exciting. I had just interviewed her, I don't know, a couple weeks before the announcement and was so excited. I emailed her right away. Couldn't have happened to a nicer person. Here's a little more about Laura. Laura Moriarty is the author of the national bestseller, The Chaperone. as well as The Center of Everything, The Rest of Her Life, and While I'm Falling, in addition to her new book, Sunlight Finds You, The Read with Jenna Pick. She received her master's degree from the University of Kansas and was awarded the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Felix Exeter Academy. Speaker 1 (1:05) Moyarty lives in Lawrence, Kansas. Speaker 2 (1:08) Welcome, Laura. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about Sunlight Finds You, a novel. Congratulations. Speaker 1 (1:14) Thank you. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here. Speaker 2 (1:17) Can you please tell listeners what your book is about? Speaker 1 (1:20) Well, I wanted to write a love story and not exactly a romance, but a story about how a deeply felt love can change a person and alter the course of her life. Nora is a teenager in 1947 when her family moves to St. Petersburg, Florida. On the first day of high school, she meets Leonard Lifton and he's... A few years ahead of her, and he's from a wealthier family, but they form a connection that is intellectual as well as physical, and the feelings are so powerful between them. Within a few years, they're engaged, but plans change, and she ends up not just heartbroken and alone, but pregnant. In this era, of course, being unmarried and pregnant is an especially isolating and humiliating circumstance. She has to make hard decisions quickly, and even decades later, she's still thinking about the decisions she made. She's still thinking about Leonard, who he really was, and why she can't forget him. Speaker 2 (2:29) Well, I have to say, some parts of the ending I was hoping for, and... others that I was hoping for didn't happen. And I guess that's just like life, right? Speaker 1 (2:40) Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. You get some partial victories. Yes. Yes. It's bittersweet. Speaker 2 (2:47) Yeah. Speaker 1 (2:48) Bittersweet. That's a good Speaker 2 (2:49) way to say it. I feel like you totally captured this world, the time. First of all, even in the beginning, you referred to sort of the racial dynamics of St. Pete back then. And there was an expression I've literally never heard before. about walking on the street. What was that called? Speaker 1 (3:06) Giving whites the wall. Speaker 2 (3:07) Yeah, I've never heard that before. Speaker 1 (3:09) Yeah, I hadn't either. I found it in my research. Oh my gosh, so terrible. It's so terrible from the Jim Crow era. So white people would get to walk close to the wall. Yeah, and it was just so rigidly enforced, you know, even in a... A town like St. Pete, which is coastal and had a lot of tourists from the north. It was still in the south. Yeah. Speaker 2 (3:33) Oh, okay. Well, anyway, from the beginning, you set the scene up for us and you show the huge influence of Leonard's parents, which is a huge piece of the book, of her parents, of her losing her mother young and what that does and her stepmom, May, who becomes such a great character in her life. And what it... feels like when you just want to throw everything to the wind and be with the one that you are so into, honestly. And then life and war and everything comes in the way. And how do you handle that, right? I actually understand the way, the decisions that they made at that time, because like, what do you do in the face of the unknown like that? Speaker 1 (4:16) Yeah, so much of it is about dealing with uncertainty, right? Having to live with uncertainty and not knowing what's going to happen and not knowing where someone you love is. So much of it is about that. She really has to grow as a person. I mean, that is something I think we all have to wrestle with all the time is uncertainty and not knowing how things will turn out, not knowing what things will be okay, especially when the feeling, the caring is so strong. Speaker 2 (4:45) Yes. And deception and longing. There's so much here. The shame of coming back to a town after, you know, can I say that? I don't want to give too much away, but just how she had to come back to the town and was like, just so, it was like the scarlet letter, right? There was so much shame in having a child of that age and going back to school and then how she ends up in like another situation that is not the best. Oh my gosh. I just, I feel like I've just been on such a journey. I Speaker 1 (5:20) mean, it's just amazing. Speaker 2 (5:22) Nora is a true warrior and has to deal with so much and yet comes out through with her head up at the end. I feel like. Speaker 1 (5:31) I think she does too. I think she does too. You know, she, she is full of regret, right? Yes, of course. Well, not full of it, right?