Elena Meets the Author

Five is not like any other novel I’ve read. It’s a fast-paced, urgent, entertaining psychological thriller with fascinating flawed characters. Funny at times, sad at others, thoughtful and surprising throughout.
Here’s the premise: Five strangers are waiting on a suburban London train platform. In five minutes, one of them will be hit by an oncoming train and die. They don’t know this. But you do.
Ilona Bannister has broken down the fourth wall, so we the reader know a lot about these characters’ thoughts that they wouldn’t necessarily want us to know. At first, we see them superficially, the way you might clock a stranger on your commute. A mother trying to control her energetic six-year-old. A handsome, smug businessman. An unfriendly older woman. A young man in a burgundy pinstripe suit with a red wine and orange knit scarf that somehow works. We make snap judgements, as one does. And then the author takes us directly into the lives of each of them. We see disability, abuse, addiction, narcissism, and trauma. Then we return to the platform, minutes ticking into seconds. Who will it be?
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, I speak to Ilona about how a lightning bolt idea combining people-watching on a London bus with a local cycling death inspired her novel Five, a national bestseller. We talk about her no-outline writing process, how she developed the novel’s snarky omniscient narrator, the research she did into train platforms and forensic pathology, and the moral dilemmas she wanted the reader to sit with long after the last page.
If you enjoy the show, the best thing you can do is leave a rating and review on whichever listening platform you use and consider subscribing to Behind the Stories on Substack. It’s a newsletter where subscribers get insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. You can find it at elenabowes.substack.com.
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

00:00 Elena meets Ilona
00:00 Welcome to the Podcast
00:15 Meet the Novel Five
00:42 Platform Countdown Premise
01:41 Moral Dilemmas and No Spoilers
02:00 Author Joins the Show
04:25 Shift to Thriller Writing
06:21 Building the Five Strangers
08:44 Reading the Opening Scene
11:55 Writing Without an Outline
15:21 Creating the Omniscient Narrator
23:11 Research Process and Accuracy
24:33 Obsessive Train Research
25:24 Reading Mrs Worth
26:41 Emma and Motherhood Judgment
29:50 Luna Defends Neurodiverse Kids
33:31 Lawyer Mindset in Fiction
34:54 Next Book and Character Voices


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Mary Kay Ash built a $2 billion cosmetics empire out of a 500 square foot Dallas storefront. She was the first woman ever to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange and the only woman included in Forbes’ Greatest Business Stories of All Time, a pantheon otherwise reserved for Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie. And when CBS This Morning introduced Mary Kay to America, they declared there was no more potent role for the self-made woman than Mary Kay Ash.
Her story is scrappier and stranger than the pink Cadillacs and bouffant wigs you might remember.
Born dirt poor in Hot Wells, Texas, she was running a household and nursing an invalid father by the age of 10. She was a mother at 17 and a grandmother at 34. By the time she founded Mary Kay Cosmetics in 1963 at 45, she had already outlasted three divorces and two husbands’ deaths. The later death, of husband George Hallenbeck, the man who was supposed to be her business partner, came via a heart attack while jogging, just one month before the doors to Mary Kay were set to open.
Her 20-year-old son Richard, a budding finance whiz, stepped into the breach. A legend was born.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, I’m speaking to Mary Lisa Gavenas about her new biography, Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay, fifteen years in the making. We get into the restrictive 1960s norms that shaped what was possible for women, how Mary Kay adapted the direct-selling and party-plan models to build something genuinely new, the thinking behind her famous non-cash incentives like the pink Cadillacs, and the culture of encouragement and competition she created around her. We also talk about the criticisms levelled at direct selling, what made Mary Kay’s approach different, and what drew Gavenas to spend so many years researching and writing this particular story.
If you enjoy the show, the best thing you can do is leave a rating and review on whichever listening platform you use, and consider subscribing to Behind the Stories on Substack. It’s the paid tier that keeps Elena Meets the Author going, and subscribers get insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. You can find it at elenabowes.substack.com.



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A grieving young widow receives a phone call on her birthday. Her husband, Joe, died five months earlier. But before he did, he arranged something extraordinary: a year’s worth of books, one for every month, chosen to help her move on with her life.
That’s the premise of Libby Page’s latest novel, This Book Made Me Think of You, a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick and USA Today bestseller, and the book I’m talking about in this episode of Elena Meets the Author.
Before you think it sounds too sad, it isn’t. There’s a handsome bookseller named Alfie, who Tilly has to visit every month to collect her next book. There’s travel: Bali, Paris, Manhattan, Tuscany. And there’s London, drawn with the kind of warmth that makes you want to head to your nearest international airport. Libby has written something that holds grief and joy in the same hand, which is much harder than it sounds.
In our conversation, Libby talks about the inspirations behind the novel, including You’ve Got Mail and It’s a Wonderful Life, and how she balanced an emotional subject with a genuinely uplifting story. She describes the meticulous planning that went into the book’s 12-month structure, the pinboards, the 80 book references woven throughout, and the themed reading lists that give the novel so much of its warmth. We also talk about what the final gift Joe leaves Tilly actually means, her views on accessible versus literary fiction, her writing habits, the rejections she had before she was published, and how she overcomes writer’s block.
There will be some spoilers, so if you haven’t read This Book Made Me Think of You yet, Libby’s enchanting novel is well worth reading first.
If you enjoy the show, the best things you can do is leave a rating and review on whichever platform you use, and consider subscribing to Behind the Stories on Substack. It’s the paid tier that keeps Elena Meets the Author going. Subscribers get writing craft insights, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. You can find it at elenabowes.substack.com.



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Today I’m speaking with Grant Ginder about his latest novel, So Old, So Young. I feel like I really get millennials and their anxiety-driven yet somehow still hopeful character.
The book follows six college friends across five parties and twenty years. A New Year’s Eve, a wedding, a birthday, a kids’ Halloween, and a funeral. From a night where everything felt possible to a morning where they had to reckon with what actually happened in between. It’s about people who met at Penn in the early oughts and spent two decades showing up for each other, making tiny decisions they didn’t notice until those decisions became their lives.
If you love character-driven fiction — which I do — this one is for you. Think Normal People. Or, if you’re a boomer like me, the 1983 film The Big Chill.
Grant grew up in Laguna Beach, worked as a speechwriter in DC, earned his MFA at NYU, and now teaches writing there while living in Brooklyn with his husband Mac and their apparently disastrous dog, Frankie. He’s the bestselling author of six novels. Grant, not Frankie.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, we talk about where the book came from- Grant’s own midlife anxiety, waking up in the middle of the night in a deep sweat, like that Talking Heads song, Once in a Lifetime with the phrase this is not my life- but oh yes, it is. - We discuss how the party structure gave Grant a way to write into that feeling. We talk about what long friendships actually give us, the particular tension between millennial hope and the reality of middle age arriving faster than expected, and how New York’s changing landscape can mark time in ways the characters themselves can barely track.
We also get into the craft of it. Grant talks about cutting backstory across eleven drafts with his editor, the link between his speechwriting background and how he thinks about narrative arcs, and his advice on writing dialogue: listen to real speech, avoid exposition, and pay attention to when a character over-explains. In real life when someone over-explains, like one of Grant’s NYU students telling him why a paper is late, that’s usually a sign they’re lying.
The episode is out now!
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What do Taylor Swift, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna and a teenage girl from Pittsburgh in 1900 all have in common? More than you’d think.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, I’m talking to New York Times bestselling author Allison Pataki about her eleventh book, It Girl, a gripping, fast-paced historical novel inspired by the true story of Evelyn Nesbit, America’s very first influencer. But this conversation is about a lot more than one book. It’s about what happens to young women when the world decides they’re too beautiful, too talented, and too powerful for their own good. And why that story keeps repeating itself.
Evelyn Nesbit’s life reads like something invented. From a Pittsburgh boarding house, where she lived with her widowed mother and younger brother, she became an artist’s model in Philadelphia at just 13, and by 16 she was taking Broadway by storm. Dubbed America’s Eve, her beauty and talent drew the attention of two very powerful men: Manhattan architect Stanford White and Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Thaw. What followed became known as the murder of the century.
But Allison’s real obsession isn’t the crime. It’s the woman at the centre of it, and the way history chose to tell her story. Eve, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Salome. She made him do it. She drove him mad. She’s the cause of it all. Evelyn was just the latest in a very long line.
We also get into Allison’s own story, from her two storytelling grandmothers to writing live TV news at ABC, to becoming a full-time novelist. She talks about how she finds her heroines, why she’s drawn to women that exist only in the footnotes of history, and as a mother of three girls, what it felt like to write the darker parts of Evelyn’s life.
She also reads from the prologue. It’s worth it.

00:00 Welcome and Premise
00:15 Meet Allison Pataki
02:08 Origins and Influences
03:26 Finding Her Heroines
05:26 Discovering Evelyn Nesbit
09:16 High Society vs Showgirls
12:11 Prologue Reading Crime Century
16:42 Agency and Swim Metaphor
21:01 Modern Echoes Taylor Swift
23:56 Writing the Dark Parts
26:26 Fun Research Mythic Tropes
31:25 Mom Life and Book Tours
33:06 Recommendations and Wrap


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