“We Are Not Like Them” With Christine Pride
Originally published on “Terrible, Thanks for Asking” on April 21st, 2022
For the past few years, the U.S. has been in the midst of a racial reckoning, and though today’s book is a piece of fiction it is, like all fiction, a reflection of the real world that we live in.
In We Are Not Like Them, a white woman (Jen) and a Black woman (Riley) are lifelong friends, nearly as close as sisters … until Jen’s policeman husband is involved in the shooting of a Black man, and journalist Riley begins covering the story.
In this episode, Nora talks with one of the book’s authors, Christine Pride, about writing a book about interracial friendship.
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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
Christine Pride: I think when you're gathered with your friends or your book club, you're not necessarily going to say, "Hey, guys, do you want to talk about race tonight?
Hello Terribles, it’s Nora McInerny. This is another episode of the Terrible Reading Club, which I think of as good books for terrible times. And times are … pretty consistently terrible lately. Every day there is a fresh new horror waiting for us in our news apps, our social media feeds, our personal social interactions.
For the past few years, the U.S. has been in the midst of a racial reckoning, and though today’s book is a piece of fiction, it is, like all fiction, a reflection of the real world that we live in.
The book is We Are Not Like Them … the story of a white woman — Jen — and a Black woman — Riley — who have been lifelong friends, nearly as close as sisters. The prologue begins with the killing of a Black teenager by a white police officer, and the fallout is documented from Jen and Riley’s alternating perspectives.
Jen is the wife of a cop involved in the shooting, and Riley is a journalist covering the story. So the book is the story of a friendship and a conversation about race … written by two friends. Jo Piazza, a white author and podcaster (you know her from “Committed” and “Under the Influence,” we love her) and Christine Pride, a book editor-and-author who joins us here today.
Here we go …
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Nora McInerny: First of all, I want to ask how writing and releasing a book amidst a pandemic, how that is feeling for your, your stress levels right now.
Christine Pride: You know, I've been helping other people publish their books, write their books for 20 years. And to be on the other side of things, I really underestimated how hard writing a book is both just, you know, mentally, logistically hard, work wise, discipline wise, but also emotionally. It really is much more challenging than I thought it was going to be, particularly since I have some experience in this area, so it shouldn't have caught me so off guard. But now I want to go back to apologize to all the authors I published over the last 20 years and say, "I didn't know. Now I know."
Nora McInerny: What are some of those moments where you can look back and see like, "Oh, this is the thing I said to an author, and this is how it probably landed unintentionally."
Christine Pride: I'm notoriously sort of a hands-on editor, and I would write these really long editorial letters with a thousand comments embedded in the manuscript and just sort of blithely hand it over and be like, "All right, you know, see your revision in three months." And knowing now,the mental process that's sort of happening on the other side of that, it's just fascinating to me. In fact, one of my authors, Tembi Locke, who wrote this wonderful memoir called "From Scratch," it did really well and is a bestseller, she's now filming the Netflix series.
Nora McInerny: Oh, I know I cannot wait to watch that one.
Christine Pride: I know, it's so good. But she, she and I obviously had a great editorial relationship that blossomed into this friendship, but I wrote her a really long editorial letter. And it wasn't until I read her blog. She wrote a blog when she published the book that reminisced about the day that she got my editorial letter and she just saw it and burst into tears. And I had no idea any of that was happening, which now I can understand on the other side, you're just so obviously emotional about your work, particularly when it's a memoir and it's so close to you and it's daunting to think about, "Oh, I'm done," and then I'm sort of, "Oh, now I have to go back in." And so now I understand it. But we had an hour-long talk, and she was so chipper and positive. And then she had a little emotional moment, which is probably unavoidable. But it was just funny to hear about it.
Nora McInerny: I think it is, it’s absolutely unavoidable. And it's not even a leap. It feels like, especially reading you, like a very natural next step to go from one side of the process to the other. But tell us about making that step with this book, with "We Are Not Like Them."
Christine Pride: You know, Jo and I met — my writing partner, Jo Piazza and I met — when I published her last novel, "Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win" at Simon and Schuster. And I'd heard her name before kind of in publishing circles, and we have a mutual friend, but we'd actually never met. But when we did, we just really hit it off, and we had a great editorial experience, like I did with Tembi, and a friendship grew. And then we worked on another project together that was a tie-in to the television show "Younger," which is set in the world of publishing, and they were doing a book they were publishing on the show. They needed to be done really quickly, and I knew just the person to do it, Jo Piazza, because she's so good and fast, we had to turn that around in like five weeks. And so we really worked together fast and furious on that. Really, from there, just because we liked each other so much, because we work together so well, we started thinking about other things that we could collaborate on. And I had this idea to do a book about a friendship affected by a police shooting — an interracial friendship, notably — and working with Jo on it, as we talked about, it made a lot of sense, because we could both bring our different perspectives to the table. And as an editor, you're always looking for a new way to tell a story, a unique way and something that people haven't seen before. And in this case, both of us telling the story and working together to tell it as a white woman, Black woman would result in a better book, a richer book than if either of us had tackled this premise individually. Right? And so it just seemed like it would make sense to work together on this, and we could do something really different. It was actually a pretty seamless transition in that I was still working full time, she was still working on her various projects. And then we did this mostly on the side, evenings and weekends sort of thing. We started this book in March of 2018. And so this book has actually a really long journey. [No way. Oh my god. Wow.] We sold it in October 2018. Yeah, this has been a long time in the making, and the pandemic, mainly what we thought, "Oh, October, fall will be such a great publication date, because the pandemic will be over and everything will be back in person. And we can do all these in-person events," which ... famous last words of the pandemic. But that was, there were lots of different twists and turns and reasons why the book was a little bit delayed or has taken a long time, a longer time than we might have liked to finally get here.
Nora McInerny: I think sometimes our sense of time or speed is skewed just by, you know, a culture where we move very fast, and we want things very quickly. But I also think it's perfectly reasonable for a book that is meaningful and takes a lot out of you personally, which I honestly think almost every book does, I'm sure there are some exceptions, for it to take a while, for it to take a couple of years. And I guess my shock at it beginning in 2018 is not that there were no police shootings then. There have been quite a great many since the dawn of American policing, but that truly, most white Americans were sort of blasted into consciousness around that only in May of 2020, with the killing of George Floyd.
Christine Pride: Absolutely. I mean, we, you know, we sadly and sort of pessimistically knew this would be a timeless book, potentially, in that way, right? When we started the book, we were very motivated by the headlines at the time. It feels like sometimes these things go in waves, where there's rashes of police shootings and violence, and then we have a lull in rashes and we were in a particularly bad period. But as you said, there was just a seismic change in the culture and in people's awareness in 2020. Our book is still set in 2019. We very much wanted to keep it that way, but I do think all things happen for a reason in the larger sense. The universe works itself out in a lot of different ways. In a way, it's good that this book is coming out now, because I think people are more hungry and open and vulnerable and aware to kind of have the conversations that the book prompts us to have. They would have been very different conversations, potentially, in 2019 or 2018. So in a way, I feel like this all worked out to where the book — and I have this kind of theory as an editor, right? — like the right book at the right time. And sometimes that can't be orchestrated, and sometimes it's just a twist of fate. But I do think we have the right book at the right time for these kind of conversations. And they're hard to have. And I think when you're gathered with your friends or your book club, you're not necessarily going to say, "Hey, guys, do you want to talk about race tonight? What are you guys thinking about this or that?" You need a little more of a way into these subjects. And this book really offers a way in by way of our characters who can be proxy, right, for the types of conversations that we need to have, and that, again, I think people do want to have now, or see the importance of now, even in a way that they did a year ago.
Nora McInerny: Yeah, we go to fiction and art of all kinds to see truth, even when it's, you know, technically a made-up story. There's truth in fiction, and I think that's the power of it. So what are the truths that were important to you in writing your side of the book?
Christine Pride: We really wanted to have this book rooted in authentic experiences and perspectives for whatever we sort of created around it, right? So part of that was we did a lot of interviews with people — with cops, with cops' wives. We interviewed a police therapist who does couples therapy for officers and their spouses. We just ended up talking to a lot of people to make sure that everything we wrote was rooted in real experiences and perspectives. And then from our own too. You know, everything in this book stems from a personal experience of ours in one way or another. Right? So for me, I grew up in a middle class Black family similar to Riley. This is my debut novel, right? And it's, with every debut, it's kind of write what you know. I'm not Riley, but a lot of it is informed by things that happened to Riley on the page, a lot of them have happened to me. And I think that's really important, too, because when you have something that's based on real experiences and dynamics, it feels like authenticity comes through right, and fiction, even though it's created, we're really looking for that authenticity to come through. The same with Jo, you know, a lot of what she brought to the table are conversations she's overheard or experienced growing up in all-white spaces that I would never be privy to. People say things that they would never say in front of me. And so part of this book was to bring those perspectives to the table and to see how those parallel conversations happened, right? There's the things that we say to each other, and then there are the things we say only to ourselves. And there's things we say behind closed doors to other people where we feel like it's a safe space. And we wanted this book as much as possible to capture all of those perspectives.
Nora McInerny: I think you did that so beautifully in a way where none of the characters are perfect people. That's what makes stories interesting, right? Perfect people are boring.
Christine Pride: I'm nodding along feverishly as you're talking, because that's exactly right. And we knew that we could easily fall into the pitfall of making this story overly simplified, making it sort of a morality tale, right? With very clear villains and very clear victims. And that would have been easy and maybe satisfying, but that doesn't make for a good, compelling read. And it doesn't capture, as you said, the complexity of what we deal with in the human experience and with all these characters and the people that we come across in real life. And so we had to be really conscious of making sure that we were not being preachy or didactic or that we didn't want our characters to do sometimes just what we wanted them to do as people, but that the characters would do things that were true to themselves as characters. And sometimes that's hard to do as a writer because you control all the puppet strings. So why not make everybody great or make the right decisions or say the right thing at the right time? But that's just not how life works, right?
We’ll be right back.
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Nora McInerny: I also think it's so interesting you had to say, "I'm not Riley," because ...
Christine Pride: People will assume.
Nora McInerny: Because of course, you have to say that. People will assume that. There was another female novelist — oh, Sally Rooney, right? Who had said, like, "You know, I'm not every character that I write. Everybody just assumes that I am." And if it wasn't Sally Rooney who said that, sorry for the slander. But you know, people assume that women can only write versions of themselves.
Christine Pride: Absolutely. And it's interesting, because one of the questions that Jo and I get a lot is, "Oh, I'm assuming you wrote the Black character, Jo wrote the white character," kind of thing, which is not how we worked and not how we operated. Both characters are very much ... I mean, obviously, we brought unique perspectives, but both characters are really written, their voices, what happens to them, by both of us. But I think the interesting thing about the Riley character, because there is a balance of: you bring something of yourself and your experiences to the table. But for Riley, the way that we differ so clearly, which is really hard for me to write her this way, is that she- I'm a very emotive person. I tell everybody everything. I have no secrets. I cycle through about a thousand feelings in about five minutes. And Riley is not that way. She's a very contained, compartmentalized person who swallows a lot of her feelings, particularly the bad ones. And so when it comes to writing a book about race, it is that we would deal with things differently, right? In terms of reaction or the emotional, the emotional fallout of different things. And so I think that was what was fun to the degree that was a challenge but meaningful to write Riley in that way, in that she has very different reactions to things and she's so buttoned up. And I think that has been part of the challenge with her relationship with Jen and any friendship, right? The vulnerability of talking and being intimate and confessing everything is such a bonding point in female friendships. And so that she sometimes feels like there's all these things, not just race, that she has trouble talking about, is a real obstacle in their friendship that they have to address. And I think that's relatable here. It's race, right? But we all have the things that are hard to talk about with various people in our lives. And so we hope again taps into something universal there.
Nora McInerny: Yeah, and friendship is complicated by so many factors, and their friendship is complicated by race, but in a way that is only apparent to Riley. [Mmmhmm.] Which is, it is interesting. And also, nearly every friendship has some sort of issue that is only immediately obvious to one person.
Christine Pride: It's so true, and it's so interesting that way because I mean, like you said, it's race in this case. But I do think that that happens. And the real tension then in the friendship is: It's bound to come up at some point. One person can't harbor this feeling, whatever it is, or this perspective or feelings of slight or what have you without at some point, particularly as the relationship goes on, having to acknowledge it. And we hope that the inspiration here is that by acknowledging this, the elephant in the room, or the thing that you've been chewing on or annoyed at or sad about, or confused or whatever it may be, which the other person might be completely oblivious to, is to get it out and supposedly talk about it. And then you can move on. Or worst case scenario, if you don't move on, at least you've addressed it. Like, there's some catharsis in that.
Nora McInerny: Yeah, you either move on as friends or you move on separately. And both are viable options. I love stories about complicated friendships, because friendships are as complicated as romantic relationships. And I think it's also good to see books that are dedicated to the glorious complication of a friendship. A lot of our friendships do last longer than our romantic relationships.
Christine Pride: That's certainly been the case in my own life, by like tenfold.
Nora McInerny: I'm on my second husband. Both my husbands added up don't even come close to my longest held friendship.
Christine Pride: Same here. And that was important to Jo and I, because we both really love our friends. I mean, for me personally, just friendship has been truly the guiding force of my life. I mean, from when I was young, I just, you know, making friends is something that was always really important to me, particularly female friends. And I've never been married. I've had relationships of any length. But my friends have been the sustaining force in my life, and I've had a lot of long-term friendships. I feel really fortunate that way. And I think that's what's really special about Riley and Jen's relationship, too. Because when you meet as children and you grow up with a person and you're 50 different selves between the age of 5 and the age of 35, right, then you really, it's just a different kind of friendship than if you meet at 30 and you're friends, even, for a long time, right? There is something about coming of age together and having this shared history from when you were discovering who you are and forging yourself and having the other person both be a part of that and a witness to that. It brings up all these complexities about how much you're allowed to change, right? And you just see a lot of different versions of that person over time, which can be so exciting, and when you have a friendship of that length. I mean, I feel that way about my friend, Julie. We met when we were in first grade. It's just a different kind of relationship altogether, and it's something because of the trajectory of life that you cannot duplicate, right? You can't create that again later in life. You were lucky enough to have it or you don't, and then you have to appreciate it in a way that sometimes means riding the waves of lots of ups and downs the same way you would a marriage.
Nora McInerny: When you have a relationship that lasts that long, through so many hugely varying versions of yourself, hugely, from, you know, childhood, like Riley and Jen's relationship, like your relationship, like some of my relationships, you store within each other these different versions of each other. And so you can call those up at any point in time. Basically, you have no control over which version of yourself a person is choosing to see you as.
Christine Pride: For better or worse, right? Sometimes it's like, "I'm not that person anymore, stop seeing me that way." And sometimes it's, "I know who you are. I remember who's inside you." You know? I mean it can be a double-edged sword that way, but both in a sense can be valuable. Just to have that witness to your life, because that's what friendships do. They mirror ourselves back to ourselves. So we can kind of have a framework to understand who we are and why we're making the decisions that we make. And I think that to the point that you just made about … you’re so many different selves: When your identity changes over time, sometimes you need that steadying force, right? Like to become a mother or to become a wife or to become an office worker, even, to become a grown up in that way, like when you, when you take all these different adult identities. You might shift in a way, that you have that person, that it can be grounding to have somebody be by your side to say, "I knew you when." Right?
Nora McInerny: My mom is in her 70s, and she was just spending a weekend with "the girls." The girls, right? The girls, they're in their 70s, that she's known since high school. And she said, "When we're together, we are still freshmen girls eating old Chinese food, sitting in the lobby, waiting for our dads to pick us up from school." [Oh my God. I love that.] Right? And I'm like, that's what friendships like this become, is like, a little bit of a museum to each other where you can revisit things that were simpler or were better, and sometimes things that were harder that you never addressed or that you didn't say. And it's just the luck of the draw which one gets brought up. It really is. But I do think there is a comfort and a discomfort in that level of familiarity.
Christine Pride: It's really hard to hide from somebody who knows you so well, that has known you for so long. And sometimes our instinct as humans is to want to hide, and then you can't, and then, you know, that can bring up some tension.
Nora McInerny: I always feel, like, weird talking about fiction. Like, I never want to give anything away. I don't know if this makes me a bad interviewer, probably. But there are these moments in the book where Jen is, like, aching for Riley, right? And does not understand why there should be a boundary or why it would apply. And you can feel in her, her wanting to sort of just revert to, like, old saved drafts of themselves. You captured that ache and that resistance really, really well.
Christine Pride: Thank you. And I love that. I'm going to steal that "old saved drafts" of themselves.
Nora McInerny: I'm wondering too about, I'm sure everyone's going to ask you about this, but, when you're writing a book with a friend, what that does to or for that friendship.
Christine Pride: It's really hard. It's almost like when you, you meet a romantic partner and you have the spark and the heaviness and the giddiness. And we sort of dove into this together, and it was all adrenaline and excitement and momentum. And then there came a point of, "Oh. Oh my god," you know, "There are going to be some things we have to figure out here, in terms of communication and work style and all the things." And that would be one thing if we were just colleagues, but we were also friends, right? We had to figure out how to be colleagues while also maintaining our friendship. And it's sort of like, you know, when you have a husband and wife team or a husband and husband team, or wife and wife team, and they suddenly decide to open a business together, work together, right? They have to kind of navigate the same dynamics. And then on top of all that, we were having really hard conversations about race. I mean, in a way, we mirrored Riley and Jen in that they met when they were so young. These conversations weren't coming up for them on a regular basis, right? I mean, not when you're 5, 10, what have you? And so they never really had a reason. And then they were long-distance friends for a while. So they never really had a reason, necessarily, to really hit these subjects head on. But Jo and I had to. And so we were in a similar situation. And that's hard. It's really hard to have these conversations. And so we had a lot to work through and work out and talk through on all of those counts. I mean, just me converting to Google Docs was a whole conversation, because I was currently a Word girl, so there were lots of sacrifices that had to be made.
Nora McInerny: Every editor is a Word girl. It's so funny to me. They're like, "Nope, nope. Nope, nope, nope. Send a Word doc." I'm like uhhhh. I open Word. Yes, offense to Microsoft. Yes, offense. I open Word and I'm just like, "Oh God, ohhhh, what's happening?" Just so ... I feel claustrophobic. I don't know.
Christine Pride: It's really polarizing ...
Nora McInerny: It really is. I don't know if my friendships could survive this.
Christine Pride: Yeah, exactly. That was one of our early, real sticking points there. Who knew that Google Docs would bring us to the brink? But all to say, you know, we worked through and on a lot of stuff in the way that Riley and Jen have to, and I think that that comes out on the page as well, right? I think that we are sincere in our belief that two friends can confront very hard things and go through a very hard time and have miscommunications and iciness and distance and tears and all the things and still come out on the other side. And we believe that, because we did it, and all friendships have to do that, right? And I'm not an expert psychologist, but based on my own experience, I just don't think that you can have a true, true level of intimacy with someone if you never have conflict in that relationship, right? If there's never anything to talk about or overcome. That just tells me that there's something that either party is holding back on and is not willing to say or deal with. And again, we just want people to say and deal with the things and have faith that you can come out on the other side. And we not only came out on the other side of some of these really hard conversations with a friendship intact, but I think we came out on the other side with a creative project that we built together that we're really proud of, and I think we're strengthened by some of the things that we had to go through, right? It probably would have been a different book if it was completely smooth sailing all the way through. But that is just not life or art.
Nora McInerny: I think you're absolutely right. I also have no psychology degree and, you know, barely Google things when I think about them, but I do think that a key to intimacy and relationships —not like, you know, constant conflict is what you're aiming for — but if you've never had to challenge one another in any way, if you've never had to even face something together, right? Not even as adversaries, but face something together, there's really only so deep a relationship like that can go. And I think, at least for me, most of my most rewarding relationships have survived something, and sometimes that thing is me. Sometimes they have just survived me.
Christine Pride: Right. No, I totally agree with you, because it's also sort of like why they say you should date somebody a long time too before you commit to a serious relationship, because you can see them in all different kinds of iterations or experiences, right? So I think all of these things add up to close relationships. When you travel with someone, when you stay over the night at their house, when you meet their family, they meet your family. I mean, the same way with what we often times just conscribe to romantic love is the same way with friendship, right? And so as you said, when either party has to go through a major trial, right? A job loss or a death or cross country move or what have you, the other person, and even being there for somebody can strengthen a relationship and our friendship and being vulnerable in front of somebody can strengthen a relationship and friendship. And so we did all of that, and our characters do all that. And I think what we want the book to do also, I mean we keep saying it's a celebration of friendship, as much conflict as might be involved, we want readers to be able to talk to their best friend and to be inspired you to want to call their best friend, because it reaffirms how precious, complicated and valuable these relationships are. And there's so much emphasis in our society on romantic relationships being all of those things, or romantic relationships being worthy of all the attention and talks and movies and books. And we feel like female friendships in particular have that same value and deserve the same attention and respect.
We’ll be right back.
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Nora McInerny: This is an outdated statistic, and I'm sure there are more, but here's what I wanted to basically say, which is, you know, your your book is about an interracial friendship between a Black woman and a white woman. And I mean, there's a Reuters poll from 2013. Most white Americans don't have any friends of another race!
Christine Pride: Headline! Yeah, I think the statistic is 75 percent of white people in America do not have a friend of another race, which is very high.
Nora McInerny: Or they say they have a friend, but it's like, it's a person that they know. I don't think you can call a person a friend unless there's two, two of three criteria: You've been to their home. You know their middle name. Or you've met their parents. You know, it's like you gotta have one of the three.
Christine Pride: Yep, I agree.
Nora McInerny: And I guess you can have long distance friends, but then also like, there just has to be something other than like, "We follow each other on Instagram," like, "We would say hello to each other in the grocery store."
Christine Pride: Or we grab lunch sometime at work. Right? Because oftentimes, the office place is the only place that because we live in such a segregated society, the office space is often the only place that you're interacting with somebody potentially of another race. And so I think that's how a lot of these are perhaps artificially inflated friendships grow right? Because the person that you grab lunch with or at the office party, you stay for an extra drink with, you might feel like you're closer to them as a white person than they potentially might feel to you.
Nora McInerny: Yeah, yeah. How does that, you know, inform the characters or writing the book or even knowing or imagining how this book will, like, go out into the world where, you know, the vast majority of white readers will be like, "Huh?"
Christine Pride: We love the head scratching, because that means there's something to gain from from reading the book. And you know, this statistic actually guided the entire writing of our book. I mean, we came across this very early on, and it's something that you can sense anecdotally, right? When you just look around America. It's not exactly super surprising. We knew our characters and their relationship would be a proxy for a lot of people who don't have these relationships. I mean, we don't think a lot of people are going to come to our book who would never want these relationships. You know, the people who would say, you know, they're on the spectrum of, "I would never want a Black friend or I have no people of color in my life and I'm A-OK with that." They're probably not our audience anyway. But for the people who who want to or, you know, live in a bubble that they are having a hard time getting out of, our characters can serve as a proxy for what those relationships are. The beauty and challenges and pitfalls and benefits, even if they haven't experienced it themselves. I think there'll be a lot of white readers who read this book and understand in the same way that we were just talking about, that the people that they thought were their Black friends or potentially could be that there would be more that would go into that relationship than just meeting another white friend. In other words, race is this crucible to cross and address. Two people can another of opposite races or different races and particularly black and white in America, can't come together with any sort of intimacy and a real friendship meeting the criteria that you just described without talking about race or addressing it. So I think that would actually be the fourth criteria, right, for this kind of relationship, where it's like you met the parents and you know, you’ve had a sleepover and you talked about race and you know, like that would be the checklist that's a little bit different even than meeting somebody of your of your same race. And I think Black people are much more aware of that, because we think and talk about race all of the time. And so we're going into a relationship or friendship, potentially with that perspective. And white people, oftentimes — I'm generalizing here — but you know, are not thinking about race to that degree and so underestimate why that would, ya know, it's sort of like, "But I don't see color!" kind of thing, you know, "We're just two people being friends." And that is, can be a naive attitude that a lot of white people come to a relationship with.
Nora McInerny: As you're writing this book, like, you start it in 2018. What phase of the writing process are you in when George Floyd is killed? When there are, you know, uprisings across America? And what does that do to or for the book?
Christine Pride: It's such a great question. It really actually was a crossroads. Because we had finished the book. Done done done, gone through editing, we're sort of ready to begin the next phase, which is just more kind of going into the publicity and marketing and that sort of thing, when George Floyd was murdered. And as we all know and remember, everything changed. I mean, personally, I was, I mean, it was just a very hard, emotional, intense time. And then with the world equally so, we changed one fundamental thing. We knew we had to go back into the book, and it's hard to describe without a spoiler, which I want to avoid. I will say people had a different sense of justice pre-George Floyd and post-George Floyd, or the reality of what consequences are for police officers who are involved in unarmed shootings. And we did a lot of research. There's a lot of statistics. They are grim. 90 percent of the time, this doesn't result in indictments, let alone convictions. And the George Floyd era, we hope, ushers in both a change in how policing is done, period, but also should police shootings of unarmed people and particularly Black people become more outliers, which certainly we hope that is the case through reforms and so forth, and awareness that even in those cases where tragically it would still happen, there would be swifter and more extreme consequences, right? So it's sort of on a spectrum. And our book initially at least reflected more of a 2019 reality, than a 2020 reality. And there was such a sea change in there. So we went back and really took a look at that.
Nora McInerny: You cannot set a book in 2020, ever. [No.] Because we're so sick of it. [It would be the most depressing book ever.] So many transformative things happened in 2020. And yet, setting any sort of piece of fiction in there would be drowned out by people's lived realities of how shitty this time period was.
Christine Pride: As an editor, it's so interesting because TV writers are dealing with this as well, with this question of, "Well, how much do we incorporate the pandemic? Do we just pretend it never happened? Or do we put people in masks? Or, you know, how much do you acknowledge it?" And I think writers are going to have a lot to deal with there, because that's the kind of thing that can consume a manuscript that becomes the story rather than whatever you were trying to sell about marriage or friendship or what have you. And so I do think it's going to be interesting to look back at literature. And I wonder if somebody has done this for 1918 with the Spanish Flu, which is like, look back at literature, and how it does or doesn't address, or if there's this kind of black hole in books that around this time. And I started my publishing career right after 9/11, and it was a little bit like that too, where it was not the sort of thing that you could deal with head on, especially in the immediate aftermath. It was just too much and too consuming. But at the same time, a lot of books are set in New York. A lot of writers write about being in New York, and it was such a factor not only for the whole nation, but especially in New York. And so how much to address that or not was one consideration. But then even the mood of the country changed so much. And so with our appetite for reading about was different. I mean, there was a real cultural shift, and I think we're seeing that now to real cultural shift in what people want to read about and that it tends to then go to extremes of real escapism as frivolous as possible, right? I just wanna lose myself in the most improbable, twisty, turny thriller I can imagine that has nothing to do with my real life. I think people are searching for meaning and connections. So Something that offers a real emotional touch point and touchstone on the page, right? That feels like you're spending, you know, five, six, however many hours it takes you to finish the book doing something meaningful and that matters. And that was really important to us about the book, about “We Are Not Like Them,” to have readers have that experience on the page, and also have it be meaningful and mattered, and that they can use the book to connect with other people because people really are, I think, are least just me. You know, maybe I'm speaking for myself, but really craving connection more than ever, craving meaningful connection and more than ever in a way that has felt lacking through the pandemic.
Nora McInerny: That was a perfect place to end, because I know you have 100 other interviews today. That was beautiful. Thank you, Christine.
That was Christine Pride, one of the authors of the novel “We Are Not Like Them.” It’s available as an ebook, an audiobook, or a regular ol’ book, and it’s a great pick for a book club if you have one. I’ve never been invited to a book club, so … must be nice. This is my form of book club, because no one’s ever been like, “We hould all read books and hang out Nora.”