Elena Meets the Author

Priya Parmar’s The Original covers eighteen years of Katharine Hepburn’s life, from the age of 13, the year her brother Tom died, to the age of 32. Not the icon in the polo neck, but the young woman before all that. The failures, the self-invention, the loss she never really recovered from. It’s been praised by The New York Times, The Independent, BBC Radio, People and Oprah.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, Priya explains why she chose a period defined by self-discovery and failure rather than the years everyone already knows. We talk about Hepburn’s unusually progressive family in Hartford and Fenwick, Connecticut, how the Hollywood studios manufactured star personas before the Production Code came in, and the decade of research behind the novel. Priya also talks about the omniscient Greek chorus structure she built the book around.
Priya Parmar is also the author of Vanessa and Her Sister, a New York Times Notable Book about Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, and Exit the Actress. She co-wrote the musical Sylvia, staged at the Old Vic and nominated for an Olivier Award.
Books mentioned in this episode
The Original by Priya ParmarUK | US
Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya ParmarUS
Exit the Actress by Priya ParmarUS
Links support independent bookshops. As a Bookshop.org affiliate, the show earns a small commission on any sale.
00:20 Podcast Intro and Guest
01:37 Why These Years
03:07 Hepburn Family Roots
04:47 Epigraph and Persona
06:54 Hollywood Image Machine
09:12 Cary Grant Parallels
10:37 Defining Hepburn Boldness
13:34 Opening Pages Reading
15:46 Ten Years Research
19:22 Hidden Discoveries and Letters
23:09 Finding the Narrative Voice
26:41 Los Angeles as Character
27:35 Hepburn Home Base
28:18 Los Angeles Greek Chorus
28:53 Box Office Poison Escape
29:17 Dick Cavett Tape Gold
30:20 Crafting the Hepburn Persona
33:48 Favorite Films Shift
35:24 Wardrobe and Chanel Clash
38:38 Howard Hughes and Deafness
40:13 Cut Scenes and Europe
43:26 Next Book and Homesick
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Alan Anderson is a visionary ad man. That is, up until the morning he isn’t.
He blows the biggest account of his career, comes apart, and moves out to live off the land, the land being his backyard in suburban Greenwich, Connecticut. He sets up in the children’s playhouse. He goes barefoot. He uses the woods as a bathroom.
His timing couldn’t be worse. His wife Vivian is in the middle of a campaign to join the Queen Anne’s, Greenwich’s most selective women’s social group. Their two daughters are similarly going off the rails. One prefers drama to sports, which is not done in Greenwich. The other has started talking to animals. And Alan is emerging unshowered from the playhouse just as Vivian’s trying to make the best possible impression.
Alan Opts Out is a comedy about what it costs to keep up, and what’s left of a man and a family when they stop trying. It’s a New York Times best book of the summer, blurbed by Elizabeth Gilbert and Carl Hiaasen, and currently in development as an HBO series.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, Courtney talks about the luxury playhouse that sparked the whole idea, her frustration with overconsumption and the Stanley cup trend, and what it was like growing up around extreme wealth in Greenwich. We get into her past life as a brand strategist, how she developed compassion for Vivian over eleven drafts, and the unexpected joy of Alan’s lobster sidekick Lenny. She also talks about the Werner Herzog epigraph, taken from his 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, and what she wanted it to signal about the book’s tone. And she mentions Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer as a book she returned to just before publication, and why Christopher McCandless was on her mind throughout the writing.
Courtney’s previous novel Touch also comes up in conversation. She describes it as the book she would have written next, except it’s already written, and thinks it will resonate just as much now as Alan Opts Out. She’s also the author of the publishing guidebook Before and After the Book Deal and runs writing classes and resources at courtneymaum.com.
Behind the Stories on Substack is where the conversation goes deeper. Subscribers get writing insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. Find it at elenabowes.substack.com.


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Twenty-two rib eye steaks go missing from Aunt Orsa’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in a fictional Midwestern college town. They vanish on the same day that celebrity author John Grisham is due to dine there. Someone on the staff took them. But who?
That’s the whodunit. What Rebecca Kauffman’s sixth novel actually is, is something deeper and more complex than that. A who are they? The table of contents is renamed Menu, and each chapter, each course, dips into the life of one of the suspects. No one at Aunt Orsa’s is above suspicion. And as it turns out, no one’s life is boring.
Kauffman has a real talent for believable dialogue and for telling us just enough about a person that we feel like we know them and want to know more. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, Emma Straub named it one of the standout books of 2026, and it’s been described as a pitch-perfect mash-up of Clue and The Bear.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, Rebecca talks about drawing on years of working in restaurants, how John Grisham ended up in the book, the menu-style chapter structure, and her approach to revision by subtraction. We also talk about leaving some mysteries unresolved, how motherhood changed her writing, and why noticing is at the core of everything she does.
Behind the Stories on Substack is where the conversation goes deeper. Subscribers get writing insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. Find it at elenabowes.substack.com.
https://pods.to/4zv3l7o.ODL



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John Lanchester, Booker Prize-nominated author and regular contributor to The New Yorker, is my latest guest on Elena Meets the Author, the literary podcast that goes behind the book and into the mind of the author.
His latest novel Look What You Made Me Do is full of twists and turns, so pay attention.
Two women, both Londoners from different generations. Kate, 57, recently widowed, quietly devastated. Phoebe, a millennial TV writer whose Netflix megahit Cheating has become the show everyone’s talking about. When Kate starts watching, she realises something that stops her cold. The show contains secrets, inside jokes, a private language from her marriage to architect husband Jack that only she and Jack should know.
Look What You Made Me Do is a novel about love, loss, calculating minds, family dysfunction, and revenge. It takes on popular culture’s intrusion into our personal lives, the private language of a long marriage, and generational warfare between boomers and millennials along the way. As one critic put it, it’s good, mean fun. And revenge here is less a dish best served cold than a whole buffet of chilled platters.
In this episode of the Elena Meets the Author podcast, John Lanchester tells me that the entire plot of Look What You Made Me Do arrived in two minutes while he was brushing his teeth. We talk about how he built the thriller mechanics from there, the art of surprise versus suspense, how he shifts reader sympathy between Kate and Phoebe, the real-life Soho Farmhouse scene that made it into the book, and the generational resentments simmering underneath it all.
If you enjoy Elena Meets the Author, Behind the Stories on Substack is where the conversation goes deeper. Subscribers get writing insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. Find it at elenabowes.substack.com.


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Annabel Monaghan is a return guest on Elena Meets the Author, and for good reason. The internet has crowned her the queen of the summer romance, and as one fan put it, it’s not summer until Annabel Monaghan has come out with a book.
Her latest, Dolly All the Time, is a number one New York Times bestseller and a Good Morning America book club pick. It’s the story of Dolly Brick, a single mum, a champion caretaker, the person on everyone’s emergency contact list, who goes home to a fictional town next door to Newport, Rhode Island, and ends up fake dating the town’s handsome heir. It’s funny, it’s warm, the setting is dreamy, and it snuck up on me and broke my heart a little.
In this episode Annabel tells the real story behind the name Dolly, a smiling fan she met on tour who later reconnected through Good Morning America. She explains why she loves the fake-dating trope for its forced intimacy and emotional honesty, and how she draws from her own life in this charming tale. We also get into Annabel’s unplotted drafting process, how her editor helped shape the humour, and why she was determined to rewrite the rescue narrative so Dolly is never a damsel.
Annabel is one of my favourite guests. She’s smart, funny, and self-deprecating, and her characters mirror those traits. The dialogue, the sensual summer settings, the big life questions she weaves through every book. And by the way, Annabel’s first book came out when she was 50, which should give every aspiring writer a lot of hope. Dolly All the Time has spent five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer author. If you’d like to hear more from Annabel, she’s also in episodes four and 24.
Behind the Stories on Substack is where the conversation goes deeper. Subscribers get writing insights from each episode, early access to upcoming guests, and the chance to help shape the show. If you want more than the podcast, 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 Welcome and Guest Intro
02:08 The Real Dolly Story
04:20 Why Fake Dating Works
06:49 Writing From Personal Life
08:42 Research and Writing Process
12:34 Caretakers and Family Roles
17:14 Parenting and Letting Go
18:37 Building Whitfield and Newport Vibes
21:40 Romance Heroines and Age
23:05 Writing Older Heroines
24:11 Rewriting Rescue Tropes
25:42 Pretty Woman Escargot Rant
28:14 Specificity Makes Love Real
29:54 Banter and Finding Humor
33:03 Dream Casting the Movie
35:17 Queen of Summer Romance
36:28 PG Yet Evocative Intimacy
38:18 Editor Notes and Revisions
40:07 Letting Love In
41:21 Teasing the 2027 Novel
43:43 Wrap Up and Bestseller Buzz


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