January 23, 2025 • 32 mins
If you haven’t always had the easiest time getting along with your mom, this episode is for you. As teenagers, it can be hard to “put the shoe on the other foot” and understand where our parents are coming from. That’s what author Maurene Goo wished she could’ve done better when she was younger. Her latest novel, “Throwback” — the Reese’s Book Club Winter Young Adult pick — is a fresh take on a timeless time travel story, which explores mother-daughter relationships and what it would be like to know the 17-year-old version of your parent. She shares how “Back to the Future” inspired her, and what it was like to experience the ’90s through a Gen Z lens.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hello Sunshine, Hey besties. Today, on the bright Side, it's
time for an all new shelf life with author Maureen Goo.
Her book Throwback is the Reese's Book Club Winter Ya Selection,
and it's a time cross romance filled with laughs, lots
of heart, and the big questions you can't help but
ask when you're the daughter of immigrants.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
It was like, what am I writing about? Like, I
don't want this to be some rosy look at the
American dream. I'm like, what is the American dream? How
does it change?
Speaker 1 (00:30):
It's Thursday, January twenty third.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
I'm Simone Boyce, I'm Danielle Robe and this is the
bright Side from Hello Sunshine. Our guest today is the
best selling author Maureen Goo. She's an expert when it
comes to writing young adult fiction, and she's best known
for writing the book Somewhere Only We Know and I
Believe In a Thing Called Love. I love that title,
(00:54):
and that one is currently being developed into a Netflix movie. Okay, Simone,
here's a fun connection. The screenwriter for I Believe In
a Thing Called Love is Reese's book Club author Juleen Kwang,
who we spoke with last year about her novel How
To End a love story. Both Maureen and Euleen are
incredibly talented storytellers, so I cannot wait to see this
(01:15):
movie come to life.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
That's so cool. I love Youuleene and I love Maureen.
This is a dynamic duo, absolutely all right. But now
it's time to get into Maureen's latest book. It's called Throwback,
and it was inspired by a movie we all love,
Back to the Future. This one is also a time
travel story, but here in Throwback, Maureen explores the challenges
(01:36):
of mother daughter dynamics through a multi generational lens. Maureen
wanted to robe her own relationship with her mother, and
she says writing this book offered her a fresh perspective
that's really been instrumental in her own healing. We can't
wait to hear more. So let's jump in, Maureen. Welcome
to the bright Side.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Hi, I'm so happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Congratulations on your book, Throwback being the wind. Why a
pick for Reese's Book Club. It's major. Yeah, it is
really a major. It feels like almost like the book
just came out in a way. Where were you when
you got the call or the email?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
I was It's really funny that you use both words
because I was on vacation with my husband and my
son and we had like not been able to take
a vacation in forever, so so excited, and I didn't
I was like, I am not checking my emails. I'm
not even going to look at my phone. So I
was like outside on this little porch of this hotel
we were staying at and reading, and then my phone
(02:34):
was buzzing and I'm like, gosh, shouldn't look at my phone,
but okay, I'll check. And then it was my publicist
and she had texted me like I just wanted to
reiterate how excited we are about the Reese news. And
I was like what, and so I, you know, my
heart is thumping, and I like opened up the email,
my email, and I saw it and I was like,
oh my god. And my son was napping, so I
(02:57):
was trying to be quiet, and my husband came out
and he's like, what what happened? And I was like,
I just got picked for this book club.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
You don't know, you don't get it, but it's really
book club. And I started crying because this book has
been a journey, you know. I started writing in twenty nineteen,
I became a mom when I was writing it. Then
the pandemic happened, and then it came out, and it's
just had like a long, kind of a long journey.
(03:26):
So it was really nice. It was unexpected, a huge surprise.
I'm so happy to hear that. I love the crux
of the story.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
It's really all about how hard it is to get
along with your parents as teenagers and how we're not
always on the same page. And Throwback explores that it
explores your own relationship with your mother, and you've shared
that it feels like an apology to her for not
really understanding her when you were young. I relate to
that so deeply. I've been thinking about that a lot lately,
(03:55):
and I think so many listeners will too, particularly women,
because no matter how wonderful our mothers are, we all
I think sort of have these fraught relationships with them.
They're so complicated. And I look back and I think
I was really hard on my mom. Do you feel
the same way. Oh, my gosh, I was terrible to
my mom. But you know, while I feel like sorry
(04:19):
for my behavior in a way, and while I have
a lot more understanding, I also have learned to stop
feeling bad about that and like be gentle to like
my teenage self too, because I have a lot of
empathy for both of them, even though I'm talking in
the third person, like that was me teenage maris Yeah,
(04:39):
because you know, I just know what it means to
be a parent now and how much work that involves
and how stressful that is.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
But I also see how your kids are so tuned
into you all the time, and how that's a huge
responsibility too, right, So the sensitivity of being a teenage
girl with your mom is also very real and something
that I want to be empathetic about. So it is
mostly to say, hey, Mom, I understand you now. That
(05:08):
took me a long time, but it's also kind of
like it's understandable why it was hard on me as well.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I think people can read more of the nuance in
the book, but I am curious if you're comfortable sharing
one or two things that come up for you in
what you misunderstood in hindsight.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
You know, I think I knew to a point the
cultural gap right between my mom and I because my
mom grew up in Korea. She immigrated to the US
when she was like in her late twenties and then
she had me immediately after, you know, just a couple
of years being in the US and my yeah, and
then my sister was born two and a half years
(05:49):
after me, so she had these two girls back to
back in a way, and then she's in this new country.
And my dad is a great dad, and he became
a bet or dad, but he was my dad was
the oldest son of a lot of kids, and so
he was very the head of the household, of head
of the family and his family, so that was a
(06:11):
lot of responsibility and so he I think, even though
it is not my dad's nature, he took on a
very patriarchal role. So he did not do anything to
help with the kids, me and my sister when we
were younger, because that was the role of the mom.
But my mom worked full time and my dad worked
full time, So my mom did everything. You know, in retrospect,
(06:33):
I look back, and even as a kid, I knew
my mom was doing everything, and so we were hardest
on her. We were closest to her, we were the
most raw with her. And my mom just didn't have
the tools to deal with working full time, being in
charge of two kids and so I just feel like
(06:55):
we I did not appreciate that she was so stretched
thin all the time, and that then I'm giving her
attitude because I can't go to the mall. She and
I both have short fuses, big tempers and are bossy.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Maureen, I don't believe anything you're telling me right now,
not the woman who's sitting across from me.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Oh my gosh. I mean, I have learned to calm down,
but like you know, if you cross me, and then
when we were teenagers, it was just like a clash
of hormones, me being hormonal and like angry, typical teenage stuff.
I think I was a typical teenager, to be honest.
And my mom is not used to this American team
(07:40):
because in Korea, like you work, you study all day long,
you know, and you don't have a life. What is
that like you have a life when you go to college.
But in that way, my mom felt like you are
so you have such a bad attitude, you know. That
was always that you have such a bad attitude. And
I did have a bad attitude, but it was also
like you're my mom.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Well it sort of feels like a love letter to
her in some ways. It is Yeah, why was it
important for you to bring that to life in the novel?
Speaker 2 (08:11):
I think that me being a YA author comes with
a lot of I picked YA for a reason. One
it's really fun to write. Two, I feel very much
in touch with my emotions as a teen still, so
it's really easy for me to access those kind of
stories and those characters. And three, I want to write
(08:33):
this stuff I didn't see growing up, and so I'm
writing about a Korean American family and all of my books.
And that's the obvious one. But I also feel like
a lot of teen books didn't really talk about family
dynamics in a way that you know, my life was
dictated by my family in every way. I saw my cousins,
(08:55):
my huge extended family on both sides, lived in La
I grew up here, and so I saw them all
the time, more than I see my friends. And I
was so aware of my parents and their expectations and
their values, and so it seemed like, you know, if
I write YA, I'm going to write about all the
(09:15):
family stuff too. So I had two books about dads
that were like both single dads, because that's easy for
me to write. That's like such pure fantasy, right, Like
dads are so dad and daughters it's like a sweet
cute relationship. I'm generalizing here, but you know, like those
are the stories that you see in Y, like oh,
the single dads that are like COOKI and can't handle
(09:38):
a teenage daughter.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
La la la.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Mom's stuff is so hard. Mom is Ladybird, Mom is
joy Ltte Club, Mom is everything everywhere all at once.
It's way more fraud And so I was really kind
of avoiding that because I'm like, oh man, I'm gonna
have to like access those teen years when my mom
and I really went at it. But I knew that
it was actually important for me to eventu excavate that.
(10:01):
And I think I was like, because it was so
hard on me, and because it's so heavy, it's going
to make for a good book. You know, it's going
to be a challenge, and I think things that are
really challenging are always ultimately the most rewarding.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
I agree.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
So I knew. I was like, Okay, I'm going to
write that book, but it's going to be a daisy
for me emotionally. Hoptually doesn't feel like work when you're
reading it.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Well, I read that you did a lot of your
excavation work in therapy. Did you go to therapy with
your mom or did you do it?
Speaker 3 (10:31):
My god?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
No, can you imagine, I mean, getting your mom to
go to therapy. To my mom's credit, I've never given
her the chance, and I've not really talked about my
therapy with her, and I don't think she would be
hard about it. But part of my issue with my
mom and my family in general, and I think a
lot of immigrant kids can relate to this, is there's
(10:53):
a bit of a wall or like a dynamic that
is set early on that is very hard to break
out of. And we don't talk about stuff like that,
you know, Like it's not like emotions weren't allowed. I
was allowed to be emotional, but talking about real stuff
is very uncomfortable. So when my mom and I used
to get into fights, I would write her apology letters
the next day, because if I try to apologize in person,
(11:14):
it was like pulling teeth or I would start screaming,
and you know what I mean, like and therapy. Bringing
up therapy just feels like so just too raw. I
would think it's a generational thing too. Yeah, it's a
bigger hurdle mental hurdle to convince women of that generation
to go to therapy, and still stigma for sure within
(11:36):
the generation, within Korean culture, still stigmatized a little bit,
although it is definitely getting better. I think over there too,
and I think my parents have an understanding of yeah,
mental health is real, but we don't really like to
talk about it. It's kind of like, you know, it's
a little bit of a awkward that's a that's like private,
(11:58):
you know, that's what there's like family stuff that's private. So, yeah,
therapy helps me have a lot of kindness towards my
mother and myself with all this stuff, and just to recognize, like, okay,
this is our dynamic. What are the things I want
to and can change, what are the things that are
probably not going to change? And that's okay.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Well, it sounds like the book was almost a form
of therapy in and of itself. Your characters, Priscilla and
Harmony are Sam's mother and grandmother, and we meet their
younger versions whenever Sam goes back in time, and their
mother daughter dynamic is actually the relationship that reflects your
own relationship with your mom.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Right, all three of them kind of experience the same
thing with their mothers. Obviously, Haimani's mom is not alive
in this book, but the idea of understanding your parent
right and the choices they make, and so Sam and
Priscilla's relationship is changed by Sam witnessing Priscilla and Himene's
(13:03):
relationship and saying, oh, okay, that's where her mom issues
come from. And then that has trickled down to me
in this way, which created a whole other set of
mom issues. I felt like, Priscilla is my generation. She's
I have to know. She is older than me. I
was like, I am not going to be the same
(13:23):
age as a mom of my own book. So Priscilla
is older than me, but we grew up similarly as
the children of immigrants. So Sam is born to a
mom who was born here, and that is pretty far
removed from being the kid of an immigrant. And I
thought about that, having a kid who is half Korean
(13:45):
and then you know, born to me who is Korean American,
fully Americanized compared to my mom, then you think about
what's his relationship with Korea going to be? Because mine
is pretty I feel like it's pretty strong, but it's
also pretty thin. So I was thinking about like, Sam
is so easy to criticize her mother and her mom's
(14:07):
dreams and the way she wants to live her life
because she did not have to go through any of
the immigrant kids struggle, Like she did not have to
explain Santa Claus to her mom. She did not have
to explain prom to her mom, or why she wanted
to dress this way, all of which was a battle
for Priscilla. And so that's why Priscilla kind of puts
(14:28):
that on her kid, because she's like, oh my god,
you are so lucky. I take you to them all,
I go shopping with you. I'm going to buy you
a homecoming dress. I'm going to help you with your
homecoming campaign. Priscilla feels like I am setting you up
for this American experience and you do not appreciate it.
And Sam, in her defense, that's her privilege. You know,
(14:49):
that is a privilege to be so far removed from
the struggle that you can then be critical of the
country and that you live in and the the expectations.
You know, that's a privilege. And I think she understands
that after this journey, and I do feel like that
was all in my head as I was looking at
(15:11):
my son rewriting this book during Black Lives Matter, it
was like, what am I writing about? Like, I don't
want this to be some rosy look at the American Dream.
I'm like, what is the American Dream? How does it change?
And so I hope that the book got more complex
from all of my experiences.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Thank you for taking us into that thought process. It's
really cool to hear how you challenge yourself, you know,
throughout the writing, to ask yourself, what am I really
writing this book about.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
We have to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back to shelf Life with author Maureene Goo. And
we're back with Marienne Goo. So I'm obsessed with time
travel novel and there is a major time travel element
(16:02):
to your novel. Part of your book takes place in
the present and then the other part takes place in
nineteen ninety five. And we mentioned that you were inspired
by Back to the Future. What about that movie made
you want to write this novel?
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I love that movie. You know, like when you are
exposed to something when you're young at a certain age,
it's just like imprints for imperence. Yeah, so Back to
the Future was one of them. I probably watched it
when I was like an elementary school or younger, and
I also became really obsessed with Time Trouble because of
this movie, and I read time travel books and I
(16:37):
just love that like goosebumpye, like ooh, something's not quite
right moment, and you know, Back to the Future to
me was so okay. Now, you know, when I write
screenplays and I write books, I'm like a perfect movie, right,
I can like appreciate on a craft level. I'm like,
oh my god, like there's no fat on this movie.
It's just like perfect. But as a kid, I think
(17:00):
it was just like the idea and the reason why
I think this movie is popular going to high school
with your parents as teens, Like who wouldn't want to
witness that?
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Right?
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah, like how did my parents fall in love? Were
all their stories that they told us true? Like they
can't just be accurate depictions. That was a big part
of Back Future, right, because his mom is always like
saying like she was so prim and proper, and then
you're like, whoa, she's kind of wild. I mean that
movie though, the whole like Marty and his mom, I'm like, okay,
(17:31):
let's just ignore that that was like eighties weirdness.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
But uh, that's the one part I have to skip
through whenever I show it to my kids.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yeah, you're like this, I know. And so that was
It's just such a movie that has made such an
impression on me. And I like to write about bigger
things but in a package that is still really like entertaining.
And so when I was brainstorming with I was brainstorming
(18:00):
with my husband actually, who's also a writer, and I said, Okay,
I do want to tell a mom's story. I want
to do you think it should just be back to
the future, Like should we just write a Korean back
to the future? And we sat there and we like,
h we worked it out. We like broke the whole
story together. It was our anniversary dinner eating sushi, and
I'm like, oh my god, yeah, I'm going to write this.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
So, like we mentioned, your novel takes us back to
the nineties, which, of course, as millennials, we are so
here for this. And I hear that you actually created
a nineties playlist to give you some inspiration. Tell us
everything about this playlist.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Oh my gosh, it's in the back of the book,
which I have right in front of me. The paperback
has the playlist, so I made one for Priscilla and
I made one for Sam. Priscilla's playlist is okay. So
this book takes place in the past in nineteen ninety five,
so I had to pick nineteen ninety five or Before
Dreams by the Cranberries. It's so hard to say goodbye
(18:56):
Day Yesterday by Boys to men because who didn't dance
slow dance to that song. And also it's kind of
about time more than words by extreme because that is
a very Korean American. Christians loved that song the teens,
like every if you went to church, some dude on
a guitar would be playing that. So that was a
very nineties like Karan American memory.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
For me of course.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yep, and Forever Young by Alphaville, which is also not
really nineties, but it captures the feeling of this kind
of epic high school moment.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
I mean, you can't get any more poetic than Forever Young.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
I know, story bumps every time I ye have a
song and listen, I can't say anything, but let's say
there's a movie made about this, that would be the
song that would play at the at the end of school.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Dance. I love the way your protagonist Sam struggles with
being so far removed from modern day technology when she's
back in the nineties. I don't want to spoil it,
but I will explain a little bit. Her phone battery
life was such an intricate detail in your story.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
What did you.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Enjoy most about exploring the digital divide?
Speaker 2 (20:05):
I was thinking, you know, then, back to the future,
eighties versus fifties. Visually, it's so clear, right, the difference,
the cars, the fashion, very distinct from the eighties.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
That's a great point.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
The nineties. I don't know. Maybe it does feel different
for the youth, but for me, I look at a
Honda Civic from nineteen ninety five and a Honda Civic now,
and it's not like, oh my god, look at that
vintage car. It just looks kind of old and same
with fashion, right, Like a teen from the nineties walking
down the street right now would not look weird. It
would not be like poodle skirt curl curls from your hair, right.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
I'm so glad poodle skirts are gone.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
So I thought, okay, how can I make this like
what would be the thing that Sam would immediately notice
and that would be like I can't reach for my phone,
Like I just can't reach for my phone. So I
had to be constantly aware of her when she was
in the past, like remember how she would feel like
she would be constantly reaching for her phone and realizing,
oh my god, to problem solve, like I have to
(21:07):
like look at a map, I have to take a bus. Then,
like the idea of there being no Wikipedia or Google,
like that's a big deal. Like her having to go
to the library and use microfiche, which was like I
knew im like, I have to include microfiche. It was
like the bane of my existence in the nineties.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yes, it's the definition of I walked to school three
miles uphill in the snow.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Yeah, you know, like I had to like go to
the library and ask a librarian for help and pull
out many volumes of like encyclopedias.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Gosh, you're so right. The kids these days have it
so easy. I forget these things. But I love your
attention to detail because that's what makes the story feel
so lived, in the fact that you're remembering like the
instinct to reach for your phone.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah. I had to really remind myself of that though,
and really have to excavate my memories of all the
little things about the nineties, and you know, part of
me was like, am I going too deep? Like who's
going to find this interesting? But other nineties kids, Oh yeah,
there's a huge.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Demo of us. Oh yeah, I know.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Well, okay, it's historical fiction now, Oh my god, it
is actually considered that. FYI, you're kidding.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Really, yes, let's not use that.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yes, hysterical stuff in the nineties is historical now.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Oh god.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
If you listen to the oldies station, what are they playing? Nirvana?
Speaker 1 (22:30):
It's time for another short break. But don't go anywhere.
We'll be right back with more from moreen Goo, And
we're back to shelf Life with author moreen Goo. We
want our listeners to hear some of your story for themselves,
in your own words, in your own voice. So will
(22:51):
you read a passage for us? This is we're thinking
of one of our favorite passages from page sixty one,
And would you just tell us a little bit about
what's happening in this scene.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, Samantha has just been dropped off at school, or
so she thinks by her weird ride share. She took
this weird ride share after getting into a huge fight
with her mom. She had to call right because her
mom's like, I'm not taking you to school anymore. And
the ride share is weird and wonky, and she tells
her mom problems to the driver and then she gets
(23:22):
dropped off at school and things are not quite right
at school. The lockers are a different color. She does
recognize everyone, and everyone's dressed like a little weird and
her locker combo is not working, and this other guy
is claiming, Hey, this is my locker, and she's like,
I don't even know you. So that is the setup
(23:42):
for this scene. The bell rang and Neil stepped in
front of me, grabbing the lock and opening my locker.
Seconds later, he gave me a meaningful look all seed, dumbass.
My mouth dropped open. Maybe it was at the wrong
locker after all, did Marge somehow get me Hi? Everyone
was rushing to class, so I decided to do the
(24:03):
same locker be damned. I would deal with it later
and just haul my books to homeroom. When I walked
through the quad, I looked for val but couldn't find them.
We didn't see each other every morning, so it wasn't
that odd, but I still felt the strangeness of the
car ride creeping through my body. Seeing Val would reset
whatever weirdness was going on, and curran our testing text
(24:25):
exchange was still bugging me. I was about to text
Val when the late bell rang.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Shit.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
I ran to his homeroom, slipping through the door as
the bell was clanging. Mister Finn was leaning over his desk,
so he didn't notice that I was late. I jogged
over to the back row where I usually sat, except
the seats weren't arranged in rows, they are arranged in
a circle, and the desks were different. The chairs were different,
(24:51):
and the students sitting in them were different. I stopped
in my tracks and stared at everyone. They stared back
at me, all unfamiliar faces. Was I in the wrong
class somehow? I turned to look at the teacher. Yeah,
it was mister Finn, same slouche, same disheveled hair. I
blinked way more hair with none of the gray at
(25:13):
the temples. My pulse picked up, and then he glanced
up at me from his desk. Miss what in the
holy hell? It was mister Finn all right, but younger
and not wearing his tortoise shell glasses, His skin was
all buoyant. Even his voice sounded different, higher and clearer,
and dear God, it had to be said, mister Finn
(25:34):
was hot. This was impossible. I felt the room spin
slightly before I could react hot. Mister Finn looked past
me and said, Priscilla, do we have a new student? Priscilla?
And I felt it then, the low electric buzz in
my body, the kind you felt when a TV was
turned on in a house. Subtle but the tiniest of
(25:56):
signals that alerted me every time my mom was near.
I turned around. I stared into the face of a
pretty Asian girl with flawless skin, thin arched eyebrows, and
a pink glossed mouth. Her high ponytail switched and her
eyebrow cocked while she assessed me. No, we don't have
a new student. Who are you? Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
It's so good and I love how you read it.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
It was so fun to hear that.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Can I ask a quick question about the passage? I mean,
that's a pretty big moment where this young woman is
meeting the younger version of her mother. What would you
want to ask your mother if you had the opportunity
to meet the seventeen year old version of her.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
My gosh, I think I would ask her, what's what
is the dream life that you envision for yourself, because
it'd just be interesting to see, like, Hey, did your
life go according to plan?
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Are you happy? I mean, I think I kind of
know the answer. My mom once told me she was
very real. She was like, oh, yeah, if I didn't
have kids, I would have had the best life.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Well, she sacrificed a lot, she did.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
And my mom is such a She's a person with
like me, a lot of interests, a lot of energy
and zest for trying new things, and she's very social,
she loves travel. She's just kind of like an extroverted,
enthusiastic person. So I think she would have liked to
have And I feel this, I'm sure like a lot
of people too. There are so many different lives that
(27:36):
we could have lived that we would have probably liked.
It doesn't mean you regret the life you have, but
just the idea of like, oh, there's so many different
kinds of lives, you know, like sliding doors.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Yeah, and it's human to imagine those.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah, So I would like to know, like how different
her life ended up being from what she dreamed of,
you know, and I am very certain my mom and
I would have been us as changed because we are
very similar.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
This is actually one of my favorite parts of the show.
We have listener questions. So we have a listener who's
a huge fan of Throwback, and she relates to your
story on a very personal level, and she wants to
ask how you created such nuanced representation in your book.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
Hey, Maureen, it's Hannah. I picked up Throwback because I
wanted to read about Korean American mother daughter tension. It
reminded me a little bit of movies like Clueless and Ladybird.
But what I thought was really interesting was how you
added this layer of representation to the story. I love
that Priscilla, as this teen in the nineties is really
(28:40):
the share Horowitz of her story. She's not some Asian nerd.
She is cool and pretty and popular. That felt true
to my high school experiences. But Sam's experience also felt
really healing in contrast, because I, like Priscilla, didn't really
feel like I could be super proud of who I
was as a Korean American growing up in the late
(29:02):
nineties early two thousands, But Sam, as a gen Z
teen feel so proud of being Korean and thinks nothing
of loving Korean food and culture. And I wanted to
ask you about what made you want to show this
difference in terms of how Sam and Priscilla relate to
Korean culture across their generations, and what was your approach
(29:23):
as you were writing them as characters.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Such a great question, and I thank you. I really
I'm like, Hannah, you're sitting here, but Hannah, if you're listening,
thank you. I thought real hard about this because in
all my books, I try to avoid falling into stereotypes.
Obviously that is my instinct, just to make it more
(29:49):
layered and like she said, nuanced. But I always am
I just want to write the story like, hey, if
these characters were white, what would be the things that
I would not feel caged in by? So I treat
my characters that way. They could be anything, but of
course in this book they have to be a certain
thing because they have to be different and they have
(30:10):
to reflect the times, and that is a big part
of the story. So I want there to be a contrast.
So what kind of mom would she butt up against?
So this would be very realistic to have a mom
that grew up wanting the whole John Hughes experience, and
so it was really fun for me to be able
to write. And I was like, I'm not going to
have her be unpopular, and that's why she wants to
(30:32):
be popular. She was popular, but it took so much
for her to be popular, you know, it was such
it was such a job, and I wanted to show like, what,
you know, what a price she had to pay to
get that to that level in society or the high
school hierarchy anyway. And so I had a lot of fun.
(30:55):
And yeah, Clueless, I talk about Clueless in the book
because I'm like, Clules is such a fantasy, you know.
I don't think any nineties Beverly Hills or anything. Nobody
had high school like that. But I love the idea
of like a little bit of that fantasy in this
book too, So I think we all do. Yeah, And
so like if you're a nineties if you're like a teen, now,
what's the fun of reading about nineties? You got to
(31:16):
talk about the fashion, you got to talk about like
the clickiness, you have to have some of that. It's
like kind of the fun of that media and those
stories when we were growing up, so I wanted it
to feel a little bit like I'll give you a
little nine O two and oh, I'll give you a
little clueless, but you know, the more realistic versions.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Yeah, Maureen, thank you so much for sharing your time
with us.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
I'm really excited about this book.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Oh thanks.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Maureen Goo is the author of Throwback and The Winter,
ya pick of Reese's book Club.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, we're popping off and
dishing on this week's juice is pop Culture Stories with
our very own showrunner, Tim Halizola. You don't want to
miss it.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Join the conversation using hashtag the bright Side and connect
with us on social media at Hello Sunshine on Instagram
and at the bright Side Pod on TikTok oh, and
feel free to tag us at Simone Boyce and at
Danielle Robe.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
Listen and follow The bright Side on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
See you tomorrow, folks. Keep looking on the bright side.
Hello Sunshine, Hey besties. Today, on the bright Side, it's
time for an all new shelf life with author Maureen Goo.
Her book Throwback is the Reese's Book Club Winter Ya Selection,
and it's a time cross romance filled with laughs, lots
of heart, and the big questions you can't help but
ask when you're the daughter of immigrants.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
It was like, what am I writing about? Like, I
don't want this to be some rosy look at the
American dream. I'm like, what is the American dream? How
does it change?
Speaker 1 (00:30):
It's Thursday, January twenty third.
Speaker 3 (00:32):
I'm Simone Boyce, I'm Danielle Robe and this is the
bright Side from Hello Sunshine. Our guest today is the
best selling author Maureen Goo. She's an expert when it
comes to writing young adult fiction, and she's best known
for writing the book Somewhere Only We Know and I
Believe In a Thing Called Love. I love that title,
(00:54):
and that one is currently being developed into a Netflix movie. Okay, Simone,
here's a fun connection. The screenwriter for I Believe In
a Thing Called Love is Reese's book Club author Juleen Kwang,
who we spoke with last year about her novel How
To End a love story. Both Maureen and Euleen are
incredibly talented storytellers, so I cannot wait to see this
(01:15):
movie come to life.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
That's so cool. I love Youuleene and I love Maureen.
This is a dynamic duo, absolutely all right. But now
it's time to get into Maureen's latest book. It's called Throwback,
and it was inspired by a movie we all love,
Back to the Future. This one is also a time
travel story, but here in Throwback, Maureen explores the challenges
(01:36):
of mother daughter dynamics through a multi generational lens. Maureen
wanted to robe her own relationship with her mother, and
she says writing this book offered her a fresh perspective
that's really been instrumental in her own healing. We can't
wait to hear more. So let's jump in, Maureen. Welcome
to the bright Side.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
Hi, I'm so happy to be here.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Congratulations on your book, Throwback being the wind. Why a
pick for Reese's Book Club. It's major. Yeah, it is
really a major. It feels like almost like the book
just came out in a way. Where were you when
you got the call or the email?
Speaker 2 (02:10):
I was It's really funny that you use both words
because I was on vacation with my husband and my
son and we had like not been able to take
a vacation in forever, so so excited, and I didn't
I was like, I am not checking my emails. I'm
not even going to look at my phone. So I
was like outside on this little porch of this hotel
we were staying at and reading, and then my phone
(02:34):
was buzzing and I'm like, gosh, shouldn't look at my phone,
but okay, I'll check. And then it was my publicist
and she had texted me like I just wanted to
reiterate how excited we are about the Reese news. And
I was like what, and so I, you know, my
heart is thumping, and I like opened up the email,
my email, and I saw it and I was like,
oh my god. And my son was napping, so I
(02:57):
was trying to be quiet, and my husband came out
and he's like, what what happened? And I was like,
I just got picked for this book club.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
You don't know, you don't get it, but it's really
book club. And I started crying because this book has
been a journey, you know. I started writing in twenty nineteen,
I became a mom when I was writing it. Then
the pandemic happened, and then it came out, and it's
just had like a long, kind of a long journey.
(03:26):
So it was really nice. It was unexpected, a huge surprise.
I'm so happy to hear that. I love the crux
of the story.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
It's really all about how hard it is to get
along with your parents as teenagers and how we're not
always on the same page. And Throwback explores that it
explores your own relationship with your mother, and you've shared
that it feels like an apology to her for not
really understanding her when you were young. I relate to
that so deeply. I've been thinking about that a lot lately,
(03:55):
and I think so many listeners will too, particularly women,
because no matter how wonderful our mothers are, we all
I think sort of have these fraught relationships with them.
They're so complicated. And I look back and I think
I was really hard on my mom. Do you feel
the same way. Oh, my gosh, I was terrible to
my mom. But you know, while I feel like sorry
(04:19):
for my behavior in a way, and while I have
a lot more understanding, I also have learned to stop
feeling bad about that and like be gentle to like
my teenage self too, because I have a lot of
empathy for both of them, even though I'm talking in
the third person, like that was me teenage maris Yeah,
(04:39):
because you know, I just know what it means to
be a parent now and how much work that involves
and how stressful that is.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
But I also see how your kids are so tuned
into you all the time, and how that's a huge
responsibility too, right, So the sensitivity of being a teenage
girl with your mom is also very real and something
that I want to be empathetic about. So it is
mostly to say, hey, Mom, I understand you now. That
(05:08):
took me a long time, but it's also kind of
like it's understandable why it was hard on me as well.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I think people can read more of the nuance in
the book, but I am curious if you're comfortable sharing
one or two things that come up for you in
what you misunderstood in hindsight.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
You know, I think I knew to a point the
cultural gap right between my mom and I because my
mom grew up in Korea. She immigrated to the US
when she was like in her late twenties and then
she had me immediately after, you know, just a couple
of years being in the US and my yeah, and
then my sister was born two and a half years
(05:49):
after me, so she had these two girls back to
back in a way, and then she's in this new country.
And my dad is a great dad, and he became
a bet or dad, but he was my dad was
the oldest son of a lot of kids, and so
he was very the head of the household, of head
of the family and his family, so that was a
(06:11):
lot of responsibility and so he I think, even though
it is not my dad's nature, he took on a
very patriarchal role. So he did not do anything to
help with the kids, me and my sister when we
were younger, because that was the role of the mom.
But my mom worked full time and my dad worked
full time, So my mom did everything. You know, in retrospect,
(06:33):
I look back, and even as a kid, I knew
my mom was doing everything, and so we were hardest
on her. We were closest to her, we were the
most raw with her. And my mom just didn't have
the tools to deal with working full time, being in
charge of two kids and so I just feel like
(06:55):
we I did not appreciate that she was so stretched
thin all the time, and that then I'm giving her
attitude because I can't go to the mall. She and
I both have short fuses, big tempers and are bossy.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Maureen, I don't believe anything you're telling me right now,
not the woman who's sitting across from me.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Oh my gosh. I mean, I have learned to calm down,
but like you know, if you cross me, and then
when we were teenagers, it was just like a clash
of hormones, me being hormonal and like angry, typical teenage stuff.
I think I was a typical teenager, to be honest.
And my mom is not used to this American team
(07:40):
because in Korea, like you work, you study all day long,
you know, and you don't have a life. What is
that like you have a life when you go to college.
But in that way, my mom felt like you are
so you have such a bad attitude, you know. That
was always that you have such a bad attitude. And
I did have a bad attitude, but it was also
like you're my mom.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Well it sort of feels like a love letter to
her in some ways. It is Yeah, why was it
important for you to bring that to life in the novel?
Speaker 2 (08:11):
I think that me being a YA author comes with
a lot of I picked YA for a reason. One
it's really fun to write. Two, I feel very much
in touch with my emotions as a teen still, so
it's really easy for me to access those kind of
stories and those characters. And three, I want to write
(08:33):
this stuff I didn't see growing up, and so I'm
writing about a Korean American family and all of my books.
And that's the obvious one. But I also feel like
a lot of teen books didn't really talk about family
dynamics in a way that you know, my life was
dictated by my family in every way. I saw my cousins,
(08:55):
my huge extended family on both sides, lived in La
I grew up here, and so I saw them all
the time, more than I see my friends. And I
was so aware of my parents and their expectations and
their values, and so it seemed like, you know, if
I write YA, I'm going to write about all the
(09:15):
family stuff too. So I had two books about dads
that were like both single dads, because that's easy for
me to write. That's like such pure fantasy, right, Like
dads are so dad and daughters it's like a sweet
cute relationship. I'm generalizing here, but you know, like those
are the stories that you see in Y, like oh,
the single dads that are like COOKI and can't handle
(09:38):
a teenage daughter.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
La la la.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Mom's stuff is so hard. Mom is Ladybird, Mom is
joy Ltte Club, Mom is everything everywhere all at once.
It's way more fraud And so I was really kind
of avoiding that because I'm like, oh man, I'm gonna
have to like access those teen years when my mom
and I really went at it. But I knew that
it was actually important for me to eventu excavate that.
(10:01):
And I think I was like, because it was so
hard on me, and because it's so heavy, it's going
to make for a good book. You know, it's going
to be a challenge, and I think things that are
really challenging are always ultimately the most rewarding.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
I agree.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
So I knew. I was like, Okay, I'm going to
write that book, but it's going to be a daisy
for me emotionally. Hoptually doesn't feel like work when you're
reading it.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Well, I read that you did a lot of your
excavation work in therapy. Did you go to therapy with
your mom or did you do it?
Speaker 3 (10:31):
My god?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
No, can you imagine, I mean, getting your mom to
go to therapy. To my mom's credit, I've never given
her the chance, and I've not really talked about my
therapy with her, and I don't think she would be
hard about it. But part of my issue with my
mom and my family in general, and I think a
lot of immigrant kids can relate to this, is there's
(10:53):
a bit of a wall or like a dynamic that
is set early on that is very hard to break
out of. And we don't talk about stuff like that,
you know, Like it's not like emotions weren't allowed. I
was allowed to be emotional, but talking about real stuff
is very uncomfortable. So when my mom and I used
to get into fights, I would write her apology letters
the next day, because if I try to apologize in person,
(11:14):
it was like pulling teeth or I would start screaming,
and you know what I mean, like and therapy. Bringing
up therapy just feels like so just too raw. I
would think it's a generational thing too. Yeah, it's a
bigger hurdle mental hurdle to convince women of that generation
to go to therapy, and still stigma for sure within
(11:36):
the generation, within Korean culture, still stigmatized a little bit,
although it is definitely getting better. I think over there too,
and I think my parents have an understanding of yeah,
mental health is real, but we don't really like to
talk about it. It's kind of like, you know, it's
a little bit of a awkward that's a that's like private,
(11:58):
you know, that's what there's like family stuff that's private. So, yeah,
therapy helps me have a lot of kindness towards my
mother and myself with all this stuff, and just to recognize, like, okay,
this is our dynamic. What are the things I want
to and can change, what are the things that are
probably not going to change? And that's okay.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Well, it sounds like the book was almost a form
of therapy in and of itself. Your characters, Priscilla and
Harmony are Sam's mother and grandmother, and we meet their
younger versions whenever Sam goes back in time, and their
mother daughter dynamic is actually the relationship that reflects your
own relationship with your mom.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Right, all three of them kind of experience the same
thing with their mothers. Obviously, Haimani's mom is not alive
in this book, but the idea of understanding your parent
right and the choices they make, and so Sam and
Priscilla's relationship is changed by Sam witnessing Priscilla and Himene's
(13:03):
relationship and saying, oh, okay, that's where her mom issues
come from. And then that has trickled down to me
in this way, which created a whole other set of
mom issues. I felt like, Priscilla is my generation. She's
I have to know. She is older than me. I
was like, I am not going to be the same
(13:23):
age as a mom of my own book. So Priscilla
is older than me, but we grew up similarly as
the children of immigrants. So Sam is born to a
mom who was born here, and that is pretty far
removed from being the kid of an immigrant. And I
thought about that, having a kid who is half Korean
(13:45):
and then you know, born to me who is Korean American,
fully Americanized compared to my mom, then you think about
what's his relationship with Korea going to be? Because mine
is pretty I feel like it's pretty strong, but it's
also pretty thin. So I was thinking about like, Sam
is so easy to criticize her mother and her mom's
(14:07):
dreams and the way she wants to live her life
because she did not have to go through any of
the immigrant kids struggle, Like she did not have to
explain Santa Claus to her mom. She did not have
to explain prom to her mom, or why she wanted
to dress this way, all of which was a battle
for Priscilla. And so that's why Priscilla kind of puts
(14:28):
that on her kid, because she's like, oh my god,
you are so lucky. I take you to them all,
I go shopping with you. I'm going to buy you
a homecoming dress. I'm going to help you with your
homecoming campaign. Priscilla feels like I am setting you up
for this American experience and you do not appreciate it.
And Sam, in her defense, that's her privilege. You know,
(14:49):
that is a privilege to be so far removed from
the struggle that you can then be critical of the
country and that you live in and the the expectations.
You know, that's a privilege. And I think she understands
that after this journey, and I do feel like that
was all in my head as I was looking at
(15:11):
my son rewriting this book during Black Lives Matter, it
was like, what am I writing about? Like, I don't
want this to be some rosy look at the American Dream.
I'm like, what is the American Dream? How does it change?
And so I hope that the book got more complex
from all of my experiences.
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Thank you for taking us into that thought process. It's
really cool to hear how you challenge yourself, you know,
throughout the writing, to ask yourself, what am I really
writing this book about.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
We have to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back to shelf Life with author Maureene Goo. And
we're back with Marienne Goo. So I'm obsessed with time
travel novel and there is a major time travel element
(16:02):
to your novel. Part of your book takes place in
the present and then the other part takes place in
nineteen ninety five. And we mentioned that you were inspired
by Back to the Future. What about that movie made
you want to write this novel?
Speaker 2 (16:16):
I love that movie. You know, like when you are
exposed to something when you're young at a certain age,
it's just like imprints for imperence. Yeah, so Back to
the Future was one of them. I probably watched it
when I was like an elementary school or younger, and
I also became really obsessed with Time Trouble because of
this movie, and I read time travel books and I
(16:37):
just love that like goosebumpye, like ooh, something's not quite
right moment, and you know, Back to the Future to
me was so okay. Now, you know, when I write
screenplays and I write books, I'm like a perfect movie, right,
I can like appreciate on a craft level. I'm like,
oh my god, like there's no fat on this movie.
It's just like perfect. But as a kid, I think
(17:00):
it was just like the idea and the reason why
I think this movie is popular going to high school
with your parents as teens, Like who wouldn't want to
witness that?
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Right?
Speaker 3 (17:10):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Yeah, like how did my parents fall in love? Were
all their stories that they told us true? Like they
can't just be accurate depictions. That was a big part
of Back Future, right, because his mom is always like
saying like she was so prim and proper, and then
you're like, whoa, she's kind of wild. I mean that
movie though, the whole like Marty and his mom, I'm like, okay,
(17:31):
let's just ignore that that was like eighties weirdness.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
But uh, that's the one part I have to skip
through whenever I show it to my kids.
Speaker 2 (17:38):
Yeah, you're like this, I know. And so that was
It's just such a movie that has made such an
impression on me. And I like to write about bigger
things but in a package that is still really like entertaining.
And so when I was brainstorming with I was brainstorming
(18:00):
with my husband actually, who's also a writer, and I said, Okay,
I do want to tell a mom's story. I want
to do you think it should just be back to
the future, Like should we just write a Korean back
to the future? And we sat there and we like,
h we worked it out. We like broke the whole
story together. It was our anniversary dinner eating sushi, and
I'm like, oh my god, yeah, I'm going to write this.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
So, like we mentioned, your novel takes us back to
the nineties, which, of course, as millennials, we are so
here for this. And I hear that you actually created
a nineties playlist to give you some inspiration. Tell us
everything about this playlist.
Speaker 2 (18:36):
Oh my gosh, it's in the back of the book,
which I have right in front of me. The paperback
has the playlist, so I made one for Priscilla and
I made one for Sam. Priscilla's playlist is okay. So
this book takes place in the past in nineteen ninety five,
so I had to pick nineteen ninety five or Before
Dreams by the Cranberries. It's so hard to say goodbye
(18:56):
Day Yesterday by Boys to men because who didn't dance
slow dance to that song. And also it's kind of
about time more than words by extreme because that is
a very Korean American. Christians loved that song the teens,
like every if you went to church, some dude on
a guitar would be playing that. So that was a
very nineties like Karan American memory.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
For me of course.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Yep, and Forever Young by Alphaville, which is also not
really nineties, but it captures the feeling of this kind
of epic high school moment.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
I mean, you can't get any more poetic than Forever Young.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
I know, story bumps every time I ye have a
song and listen, I can't say anything, but let's say
there's a movie made about this, that would be the
song that would play at the at the end of school.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Dance. I love the way your protagonist Sam struggles with
being so far removed from modern day technology when she's
back in the nineties. I don't want to spoil it,
but I will explain a little bit. Her phone battery
life was such an intricate detail in your story.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
What did you.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Enjoy most about exploring the digital divide?
Speaker 2 (20:05):
I was thinking, you know, then, back to the future,
eighties versus fifties. Visually, it's so clear, right, the difference,
the cars, the fashion, very distinct from the eighties.
Speaker 1 (20:17):
That's a great point.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
The nineties. I don't know. Maybe it does feel different
for the youth, but for me, I look at a
Honda Civic from nineteen ninety five and a Honda Civic now,
and it's not like, oh my god, look at that
vintage car. It just looks kind of old and same
with fashion, right, Like a teen from the nineties walking
down the street right now would not look weird. It
would not be like poodle skirt curl curls from your hair, right.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
I'm so glad poodle skirts are gone.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
So I thought, okay, how can I make this like
what would be the thing that Sam would immediately notice
and that would be like I can't reach for my phone,
Like I just can't reach for my phone. So I
had to be constantly aware of her when she was
in the past, like remember how she would feel like
she would be constantly reaching for her phone and realizing,
oh my god, to problem solve, like I have to
(21:07):
like look at a map, I have to take a bus. Then,
like the idea of there being no Wikipedia or Google,
like that's a big deal. Like her having to go
to the library and use microfiche, which was like I
knew im like, I have to include microfiche. It was
like the bane of my existence in the nineties.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yes, it's the definition of I walked to school three
miles uphill in the snow.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Yeah, you know, like I had to like go to
the library and ask a librarian for help and pull
out many volumes of like encyclopedias.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Gosh, you're so right. The kids these days have it
so easy. I forget these things. But I love your
attention to detail because that's what makes the story feel
so lived, in the fact that you're remembering like the
instinct to reach for your phone.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah. I had to really remind myself of that though,
and really have to excavate my memories of all the
little things about the nineties, and you know, part of
me was like, am I going too deep? Like who's
going to find this interesting? But other nineties kids, Oh yeah,
there's a huge.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Demo of us. Oh yeah, I know.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Well, okay, it's historical fiction now, Oh my god, it
is actually considered that. FYI, you're kidding.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Really, yes, let's not use that.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yes, hysterical stuff in the nineties is historical now.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Oh god.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
If you listen to the oldies station, what are they playing? Nirvana?
Speaker 1 (22:30):
It's time for another short break. But don't go anywhere.
We'll be right back with more from moreen Goo, And
we're back to shelf Life with author moreen Goo. We
want our listeners to hear some of your story for themselves,
in your own words, in your own voice. So will
(22:51):
you read a passage for us? This is we're thinking
of one of our favorite passages from page sixty one,
And would you just tell us a little bit about
what's happening in this scene.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, Samantha has just been dropped off at school, or
so she thinks by her weird ride share. She took
this weird ride share after getting into a huge fight
with her mom. She had to call right because her
mom's like, I'm not taking you to school anymore. And
the ride share is weird and wonky, and she tells
her mom problems to the driver and then she gets
(23:22):
dropped off at school and things are not quite right
at school. The lockers are a different color. She does
recognize everyone, and everyone's dressed like a little weird and
her locker combo is not working, and this other guy
is claiming, Hey, this is my locker, and she's like,
I don't even know you. So that is the setup
(23:42):
for this scene. The bell rang and Neil stepped in
front of me, grabbing the lock and opening my locker.
Seconds later, he gave me a meaningful look all seed, dumbass.
My mouth dropped open. Maybe it was at the wrong
locker after all, did Marge somehow get me Hi? Everyone
was rushing to class, so I decided to do the
(24:03):
same locker be damned. I would deal with it later
and just haul my books to homeroom. When I walked
through the quad, I looked for val but couldn't find them.
We didn't see each other every morning, so it wasn't
that odd, but I still felt the strangeness of the
car ride creeping through my body. Seeing Val would reset
whatever weirdness was going on, and curran our testing text
(24:25):
exchange was still bugging me. I was about to text
Val when the late bell rang.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Shit.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
I ran to his homeroom, slipping through the door as
the bell was clanging. Mister Finn was leaning over his desk,
so he didn't notice that I was late. I jogged
over to the back row where I usually sat, except
the seats weren't arranged in rows, they are arranged in
a circle, and the desks were different. The chairs were different,
(24:51):
and the students sitting in them were different. I stopped
in my tracks and stared at everyone. They stared back
at me, all unfamiliar faces. Was I in the wrong
class somehow? I turned to look at the teacher. Yeah,
it was mister Finn, same slouche, same disheveled hair. I
blinked way more hair with none of the gray at
(25:13):
the temples. My pulse picked up, and then he glanced
up at me from his desk. Miss what in the
holy hell? It was mister Finn all right, but younger
and not wearing his tortoise shell glasses, His skin was
all buoyant. Even his voice sounded different, higher and clearer,
and dear God, it had to be said, mister Finn
(25:34):
was hot. This was impossible. I felt the room spin
slightly before I could react hot. Mister Finn looked past
me and said, Priscilla, do we have a new student? Priscilla?
And I felt it then, the low electric buzz in
my body, the kind you felt when a TV was
turned on in a house. Subtle but the tiniest of
(25:56):
signals that alerted me every time my mom was near.
I turned around. I stared into the face of a
pretty Asian girl with flawless skin, thin arched eyebrows, and
a pink glossed mouth. Her high ponytail switched and her
eyebrow cocked while she assessed me. No, we don't have
a new student. Who are you? Oh my god.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
It's so good and I love how you read it.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
It was so fun to hear that.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Can I ask a quick question about the passage? I mean,
that's a pretty big moment where this young woman is
meeting the younger version of her mother. What would you
want to ask your mother if you had the opportunity
to meet the seventeen year old version of her.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
My gosh, I think I would ask her, what's what
is the dream life that you envision for yourself, because
it'd just be interesting to see, like, Hey, did your
life go according to plan?
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Are you happy? I mean, I think I kind of
know the answer. My mom once told me she was
very real. She was like, oh, yeah, if I didn't
have kids, I would have had the best life.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Well, she sacrificed a lot, she did.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
And my mom is such a She's a person with
like me, a lot of interests, a lot of energy
and zest for trying new things, and she's very social,
she loves travel. She's just kind of like an extroverted,
enthusiastic person. So I think she would have liked to
have And I feel this, I'm sure like a lot
of people too. There are so many different lives that
(27:36):
we could have lived that we would have probably liked.
It doesn't mean you regret the life you have, but
just the idea of like, oh, there's so many different
kinds of lives, you know, like sliding doors.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Yeah, and it's human to imagine those.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Yeah, So I would like to know, like how different
her life ended up being from what she dreamed of,
you know, and I am very certain my mom and
I would have been us as changed because we are
very similar.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
This is actually one of my favorite parts of the show.
We have listener questions. So we have a listener who's
a huge fan of Throwback, and she relates to your
story on a very personal level, and she wants to
ask how you created such nuanced representation in your book.
Speaker 4 (28:19):
Hey, Maureen, it's Hannah. I picked up Throwback because I
wanted to read about Korean American mother daughter tension. It
reminded me a little bit of movies like Clueless and Ladybird.
But what I thought was really interesting was how you
added this layer of representation to the story. I love
that Priscilla, as this teen in the nineties is really
(28:40):
the share Horowitz of her story. She's not some Asian nerd.
She is cool and pretty and popular. That felt true
to my high school experiences. But Sam's experience also felt
really healing in contrast, because I, like Priscilla, didn't really
feel like I could be super proud of who I
was as a Korean American growing up in the late
(29:02):
nineties early two thousands, But Sam, as a gen Z
teen feel so proud of being Korean and thinks nothing
of loving Korean food and culture. And I wanted to
ask you about what made you want to show this
difference in terms of how Sam and Priscilla relate to
Korean culture across their generations, and what was your approach
(29:23):
as you were writing them as characters.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Such a great question, and I thank you. I really
I'm like, Hannah, you're sitting here, but Hannah, if you're listening,
thank you. I thought real hard about this because in
all my books, I try to avoid falling into stereotypes.
Obviously that is my instinct, just to make it more
(29:49):
layered and like she said, nuanced. But I always am
I just want to write the story like, hey, if
these characters were white, what would be the things that
I would not feel caged in by? So I treat
my characters that way. They could be anything, but of
course in this book they have to be a certain
thing because they have to be different and they have
(30:10):
to reflect the times, and that is a big part
of the story. So I want there to be a contrast.
So what kind of mom would she butt up against?
So this would be very realistic to have a mom
that grew up wanting the whole John Hughes experience, and
so it was really fun for me to be able
to write. And I was like, I'm not going to
have her be unpopular, and that's why she wants to
(30:32):
be popular. She was popular, but it took so much
for her to be popular, you know, it was such
it was such a job, and I wanted to show like, what,
you know, what a price she had to pay to
get that to that level in society or the high
school hierarchy anyway. And so I had a lot of fun.
(30:55):
And yeah, Clueless, I talk about Clueless in the book
because I'm like, Clules is such a fantasy, you know.
I don't think any nineties Beverly Hills or anything. Nobody
had high school like that. But I love the idea
of like a little bit of that fantasy in this
book too, So I think we all do. Yeah, And
so like if you're a nineties if you're like a teen, now,
what's the fun of reading about nineties? You got to
(31:16):
talk about the fashion, you got to talk about like
the clickiness, you have to have some of that. It's
like kind of the fun of that media and those
stories when we were growing up, so I wanted it
to feel a little bit like I'll give you a
little nine O two and oh, I'll give you a
little clueless, but you know, the more realistic versions.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Yeah, Maureen, thank you so much for sharing your time
with us.
Speaker 2 (31:37):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
I'm really excited about this book.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Oh thanks.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Maureen Goo is the author of Throwback and The Winter,
ya pick of Reese's book Club.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, we're popping off and
dishing on this week's juice is pop Culture Stories with
our very own showrunner, Tim Halizola. You don't want to
miss it.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Join the conversation using hashtag the bright Side and connect
with us on social media at Hello Sunshine on Instagram
and at the bright Side Pod on TikTok oh, and
feel free to tag us at Simone Boyce and at
Danielle Robe.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
Listen and follow The bright Side on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
See you tomorrow, folks. Keep looking on the bright side.
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Simone Boyce
Danielle Robay
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