00:00:00.000hey everyone and welcome to vulgar history of feminist women's history comedy podcast and
00:00:15.340this is a special bonus episode you know we're all we're all going through it we're all living
00:00:21.040through march of 2025 and so here's a nice thing for us all to enjoy together which is an audio
00:00:26.320recording of an event that I just did last week. So as I was aggressively promoting on the podcast
00:00:33.920for the last couple of weeks, I went to Minneapolis to host an event for Alison Epstein, friend of the
00:00:40.220podcast's latest book, Fake and the Thief. And I brought along a little recorder device with me
00:00:44.240that I had been advised by Kate and Renata from Worst Best Sellers Podcast, also friend's podcast,
00:00:49.540friend of the podcast, who have recorded live events before. And they advised me this. This
00:00:53.500is how they did it. And so I brought this recorder with me and I didn't know if it would work.
00:00:57.040And I'm so excited that it worked. So this is an audio recording of the event that Allison and I
00:01:03.060did at Majors and Quinn Bookstore in Minneapolis, which is like, heads up, such a nice bookstore.
00:01:09.180It's huge. It's just an expansive bookstore. Actually, the day after the event, I went back
00:01:14.100just to browse around the store because it's such a nice place. Anyway, so I thought that you would
00:01:19.000all enjoy this discussion. Me and Alison, at the end, you hear some questions from the audience.
00:01:24.240I don't know how well you'll be able to hear them, but maybe pretty well. And you can for
00:01:27.040sure hear our answers to the questions. And there were about 20 people there, which was really
00:01:31.920exciting. And I think at least half of them were like tits out brigade type people. And so it was
00:01:37.020really nice to meet everyone who I met, who Alison and I both met. Lana was one of the people in the
00:01:41.400audience as well, friend of the podcast, Lana Wood Johnson. It was just so nice for the three
00:01:45.360of us to first of all, meet each other because Lana and Alison and I had never met each other
00:01:49.680in person before. And then secondly, to meet a bunch of listeners at the event. It was so sweet.
00:01:55.280And then the next day I had the meetup where we met at a bowling alley. We had so much fun. I did
00:02:00.380terribly. You know what? I started off strong and then I got worse, but it was a nice, that was a
00:02:05.940nice hangout as well. I just had such, could not have had a better time in Minneapolis meeting up
00:02:10.700with, with friends new and old. And so this is a recording of this fantastic event that Alison
00:02:16.160and I held talking about Alison's new book, which everyone should read. I mean, everyone should read
00:02:22.020it, request it from your library. And if for some reason you don't have time to read it, or you don't
00:02:27.000feel like reading it, then like flip, go to your local bookstore, take it off the shelf, flip to
00:02:30.440the back, look at the acknowledgements. And there'll be, if you're a member of the Titswood
00:02:33.860Brigade, there'll be a really sweet surprise for you there and the acknowledgements towards the
00:02:38.280back to the book anyway so here's here's a bonus episode and enjoy this audio recording of a live
00:02:44.740event my first ever live event that i've done and i couldn't have been happier than to do it in
00:02:50.420service of allison epstein and their third book with the show tonight you will hear from our
00:02:59.360authors then there will be a time at the end of the program's audience questions with ann foster
00:03:05.720After Q&A, please allow Allison to move to the side encounter, which is a glass display case you pass on your way into the store.
00:03:12.860You may line up there to say hello, get a side copy of the book, and proceed to check out.
00:03:17.340If you do buy a book with us this evening, you're not only supporting the author, but also a locally owned independent bookstore, and we cannot thank you enough.
00:05:18.060And so the scene I'm going to read from, he's 10 or 11 years old, and he's just encountered a very talented pickpocket on the streets of London.
00:05:28.580And he's decided, that is what I want to do with my life.
00:05:31.420I want you to teach me how you do that.
00:05:33.580And so the short scene I'm going to read is Fagin's first attempt at picking the pot.
00:05:38.820Lesson number one, Lefwich says, as he walks and Jacob jogs, is to avoid habit at all costs.
00:05:45.600You can double back to somewhere with rich picking is all you want, he says over his shoulder,
00:09:57.080Your book, Fagin the Thief, is a retelling of or reimagining of a character from the book Oliver Twist of Charles Dickens.
00:10:05.000Do you remember when you first encountered the character?
00:10:08.300I do. I was seven or eight years old myself and I was listening to the cassette tape that my grandmother had of Oliver the Musical, the 1994 Broadway cast.
00:10:21.640And I fell in love with the character of Fagin.
00:10:53.860Let me pick up the Dickens novel and see if it's any good.
00:10:56.140And the experience of encountering Thagian the way Dickens wrote him is a very different experience than the way that the show portrays him.
00:11:04.580And I kind of felt a little bit betrayed by experiencing it in the novel that way.
00:11:11.360I mean, it's such a nothing of a character the way that Dickens writes it.
00:11:15.720It's just a villain there to be an anti-Semitic caricature of an evil person who kind of comes out of the shadows and has no real personality other than to be a problem for everyone around him.
00:11:28.340But I don't know if it was because I had already fallen in love with the stage musical or I think there's something in Diggins' character at the same time that I still kind of loved that he's been a problematic fan for me even so ever since.
00:11:42.200And so I was just like, I wish someone would give him a chance to stand up.
00:12:00.360Because I was sure someone was going to beat me to it.
00:12:03.160I started it, it's 2021 maybe, so I've been kicking it around for a while.
00:12:08.600And as the draft was coming together, literally every morning, I was like, OK, who sold the book about Fagin?
00:12:13.100Because someone's going to do it. But fortunately, I finished it first before anybody did.
00:12:18.060Yeah. Well, and I think it fits so beautifully in with kind of this genre that's been around for a while,
00:12:24.340but sort of emerging recently, like James or Percival Everett, like taking a character who's like problematic from a classic quote unquote novel
00:12:31.240and just kind of giving them more depth and more meaning and looking at what was life like for these kind of people living on the margins of society.
00:12:38.600these eras and how does the whole story change when you kind of reorient it around that person
00:12:43.260so it wasn't like when you you're like okay i'm gonna write this book hopefully no one else does
00:12:48.800like how do you dive into that world of we'll talk about the dickens a bit in a second but like
00:12:55.040living as like a jewish person in london in this era like what kind of research is there for you
00:12:59.280to even do about that from chicago but from chicago not not taking myself in a time machine
00:13:04.540and also to London yeah um there's quite a bit of research about sort of the European Jewish
00:13:11.500experience in the 19th century and so I I started just kind of like the way I always do research is
00:13:17.900I pick up the biggest broadest book that I can find and this one was like the Jews of Europe
00:13:22.020that's a starting place and so I would kind of get like a leg of the land of where I've had it but
00:13:29.620But being able to focus it in on England was a really interesting research project to me because most of what I knew about kind of the European Jewish experience was like Eastern Europe, Soviet, Russia, Poland, like that kind of era.
00:13:45.060That's a very different kind of experience. That was a very like the the ruling party of those countries was actively passing laws and enacting violence against Jewish communities.
00:13:56.380And England wasn't necessarily like that in the 19th century.
00:14:00.300Was England like a place where people fled to from those places?
00:14:03.240Yeah, there was, I mean, London was sort of an immigration community.
00:14:07.620And so in Fagin the Thief, his family are immigrants who come to London from more of an Eastern European place.
00:14:14.680There had been a Jewish community in England for a while until, I want to say, the 1200s,0.61
00:14:19.820when some one of the Edwards was like expelled all of the Jews from England because every country
00:14:25.300in Europe has expelled all of the Jews at some point but yeah the the particular context of that
00:14:33.00019th century English Jewish experience was odd because there were highly placed successful
00:14:41.260Jewish people in London at that time there were Jewish members of parliament at that time but
00:14:45.460there was still sort of a undercurrent of we've expelled this community from our country before0.95
00:14:51.900and we could do it again this you're still not really part of the fabric of this country0.97
00:14:57.300and so when you're researching so you've got the jewish history that you're looking at um
00:15:03.200and then another part of that would just be london and like the slums that you're writing about so
00:15:07.120how did you go about because if for people who haven't read the book yet like you're getting
00:15:40.580how what the average income of the people who lived there was and so you could kind of really
00:15:46.020cross-reference these are the parts of the city that are dangerous and that are really strapped
00:15:51.560to resources and then you go you know six blocks this way and this is where the extremely wealthy
00:15:57.480people would live and it was just really brought the city to life to me in a way but there were
00:16:02.740all kinds of resources like that the victorians wrote about everything and they documented
00:16:08.180everything so if i had a question about you know what did this particular building look like someone
00:16:13.580had written an article about it at some point so that's what i love about english history yes so
00:16:18.080many people whatever you want to research someone's written a book about it someone has i love research
00:16:22.480they love writing about their own history they do they love and dickens himself loved looking at
00:16:29.080things okay so dickens so just to sort of like put this all together you've got jewish history
00:16:35.520you've got like the poverty map the london history and then you have to look at presumably
00:16:40.380oliver twist like line by line to like look at what are the events because how much of those
00:16:45.740were like cornerstones for your book of things that that had to happen and you had to work around
00:16:50.260yeah um i must have read oliver twist a dozen times which god bless you i was at least one
00:16:57.160of the shorter dickens which is nice but yeah i really quickly getting into that had to decide
00:17:03.880okay if this is no longer the story of a child named Oliver Twist this is the story of Fagin
00:17:09.700he is in maybe half of the book so the other half of the book already I can kind of decide this is
00:17:15.700not relevant to me but of what I have what are the kind of the tent bull scenes that I want to
00:17:20.540make sure I'm writing to what do I want to make sure I'm keeping from the original and what if
00:17:25.400anything is not going to fit in the way that I'm telling it and I kind of challenged myself from
00:17:31.520the beginning to change the least amount as possible just kind of as partly as a challenge
00:17:37.580to myself but because it like dickens gives you so much in the original of the world that these
00:17:44.300characters live in but he doesn't build them out really he's not interested in creating sort of a
00:17:51.100fully rounded person he's writing in this is a good character and this is a bad character and
00:17:57.080And so the challenge that I set myself kind of was, can I work with what he gave me in that box and see what would happen if we weren't working with stock figures anymore?
00:18:06.940What would a real person do in this frame?
00:18:09.080So it's sort of like taking that scene and just turning the camera lens, like if it's a movie.
00:18:13.440And once the other people leave the room, Fagin is still in the room.
00:18:27.080Was there anything that Fagin did? Like you're talking about he's the anti-Semitic stereotype. Was there anything that he did in the book that you were just like, I can't have this in my book. This is too gross.
00:18:35.940yeah there were two things and one of them i just said i'm not doing that and that was the one of
00:18:43.840the scenes when oliver first meets fagin he like it's his first night in fagin's house and he is
00:18:50.200sleeping badly and sees fagin get up and kind of creep through the moonlight to like pull up a
00:18:55.020floorboard and he takes out a giant box full of diamonds and counts them i'm like we're not doing
00:19:00.520that that's ridiculous so i threw that out but the part that i was interested in playing with
00:19:07.940is the way that dickens shows fagin is he's kind of a collector of children like he goes out and
00:19:15.160finds these vulnerable orphans and teaches them to steal and uses them for his own purposes and
00:19:20.640you can't you can't write the story of fagin without figuring out what's his relationship
00:19:24.620with these kids like and I didn't want it to be purely like predatory for profit right that didn't
00:19:31.460feel honest to me and it didn't feel interesting either that's what that's what a villain you draw
00:19:37.580in Sharpie in three seconds would do so I wanted to think okay this is a person who's bringing in
00:19:43.120these children and teaching them to break the law okay not ideal but why would somebody do that why
00:19:48.380is that happening and I had to kind of play around with his motives without super changing what
00:19:54.100actually happens yeah it just seems like such a challenge to take the book and then build up like
00:20:00.760we were talking about like just kind of like what was he thinking about so part of that involves
00:20:03.660giving him a first name yeah i was giving him a family background um how did you kind of develop
00:20:09.660this family yeah that was what frustrated me the most about oliver twist is there's he taken just
00:20:18.020appears he has no first name no background no nothing he has no community he is the jew singular
00:20:25.160standing by himself and there's a there's a throwaway line in the in the novel but
00:20:29.220i think bill sykes says you know did you have any parents at all or did you just come straight from
00:20:34.960the devil and like clearly what dickens is implying is no he just came straight from the
00:20:39.040devil this is a creature this is not a person yeah so i knew by the time we meet fagin and
00:20:46.740Oliver Twist. He's alone. But I didn't think he would start out that way. So I wanted to kind of
00:20:53.540turn the clock back and think what would a community for him have looked like and what
00:20:58.800would have happened for him to lose that. And so his relationship with his mother kind of came out
00:21:05.200for me as a kind of a cornerstone for where he started. That was the kind of the one relationship
00:21:11.540that he had as a child to hold on to the other relationship that was interesting to me was him
00:21:17.700and his father and in the way that i've written it um his father was hanged as a thief before
00:21:23.900jacob was born so they never met but there's this presence of kind of his father's path through life
00:21:30.120that goes through the whole book this is a person he didn't know but it's sort of a state that's
00:21:35.320chasing him and that sort of you brought it up so i don't want to be like spoilers but like
00:21:41.900there are ghostly presences in this book you know i love a ghost
00:21:45.160is there any of that in oliver twist or that was that's like you like this is really
00:21:51.300your book because i don't want to always just be comparing it to oliver twist but like this
00:21:54.860is the story that was the like basis inspiration but then you made it a book and part of your book
00:24:11.560He's so boring and he just, he lets every Christian character in that book call him the worst names you've ever heard.
00:24:18.100And he just takes it all and never stands up for himself.
00:24:21.460And so while I think Dickens did see maybe what I did the first time was not great and he tried to learn, I still like Fagin better personally.
00:24:33.600I think he's more interesting and had more potential for a story that I wanted to read than this kind of idealized nothing of a character.
00:24:46.140Yeah. Well, I think that is part of what's really interesting about your book.
00:24:49.440And I've seen you describe it this way as well.
00:25:01.340Like, so what was it like to write a book?
00:25:03.180I don't want me to write a book and then also to present it to your agent, your editor, be like, hey, here's this book full of terrible people.
00:27:46.440I tell people, like, I have, I've told a lot of people I'm writing an Oliver Twist retelling and they're all like, oh, God, do I have to go out and read Oliver Twist?
00:27:53.540And I, you know, you don't. I wanted this book to be able to stand whether you have background in that novel, whether you've read Dickens and love Dickens.
00:28:02.160I want it to have something to offer to those readers.
00:28:04.200But I also want it to be accessible and interesting for people who saw the musical one time in elementary school or saw Oliver and Company, the Disney movie about the dogs and the village old music.
00:28:15.540That's also fine. Yeah. It's just like it is a story that stands on its own.
00:28:19.960And I think the characters that Dickens created are interesting enough that they can stand on their own without needing to soak through all of the Dickens of it all.
00:28:31.300I'm just glad I recognize the song lyrics.
00:29:40.100I came into this project knowing, OK, Fagin was done dirty by the original.
00:29:44.780And I want to figure out what that actual person would be like.
00:29:47.540Nancy was the other one that I wanted to figure out.
00:29:49.960Um, and again, Dickens actually also got pushback for the way that he portrayed Nancy in his original novel. And for, for those who haven't experienced the novel recently, Nancy has one character trait and it's, I love Bill and I will put up with absolutely anything that he does to me because I love him.
00:30:08.220She is a suffering, battered woman who doesn't really have any agency outside of that relationship.
00:30:16.500And when Dickens was questioned on that, he really did double down on it and say, sometimes this is how it is.
00:30:22.960This is what, you know, sometimes women in abusive relationships are like this.
00:30:27.440And that frustrated me in that response because it felt, I've always felt that his treatment of Nancy is not, not patronizing exactly, but he's not, I didn't feel like he was asking the right questions of her.
00:30:42.780So Dickens was asking the question, you know, how much will she put up with and how how strong is she and how how much can she suffer?
00:30:50.600And I wanted to ask the question, why is she there? Why? Why is she with Bill and why does she stay with him?
00:31:00.800And the more time I spent with her, it felt like there had to be something there at the beginning of their relationship that was worth staying for even after it got bad.
00:31:11.600bad and it does get bad but it it seemed wrong to me to start it there and say you know she's
00:31:18.620she's choosing to suffer because she doesn't think she deserves to be happy that didn't feel right
00:31:22.560i want to just clarify for everybody too that like in your book we meet nancy before nancy
00:31:26.120meets built so we see who she is as a person before she comes in this relationship so you
00:31:31.600and i assume like on purpose yeah to kind of show who she is so she's not only defined by
00:31:37.580that relationship she exists outside of it but it is important to her life and so i wanted to show
00:31:43.740you know what does a relationship like that look like for a person like her in a more nuanced way
00:31:50.040than just oh she'll she'll yeah yeah and now for a quick advertising break the war is over and both
00:32:00.960sides lost. Kingdoms were reduced to cinders and armies scattered like bones in the dust.
00:32:07.700Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else
00:32:14.340tonight. But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins. This is old school adventuring
00:32:21.320at its most cruel. Your torch ticks down in real time. And when that flame dies,
00:32:26.460something else rises to finish the job.
00:32:28.880This is a brutal rules-light nightmare
00:54:05.580Yeah. Funny enough, the name Dickens got the name Fagin from a guy he used to work with when he worked in like the blue blacking factory as a child.0.98
00:54:16.460One of the people who worked in the factory was named Bob Fagin and he just liked the last name and gave it to the character Fagin in Oliver Twist.
00:54:24.180And I have to feel like that guy was not thrilled.
00:54:29.580It is a last name. I don't know that it's a traditionally Jewish last name, but I think he just liked the sound of it.
00:56:34.020I sort of embraced that to the max here.
00:56:37.200But I think the other thing that I noticed my characters are trying to figure out a lot is they don't quite belong where they are.
00:56:45.200And there's that sense of trying to make a place for you in a world that doesn't want you the way that you are.
00:56:52.680And that's shown up sort of in all of the characters I've written and care about the most.
00:56:59.020But I don't know what that says about me.0.54
00:57:04.020yeah um it's just kind of fun to look around and see how white the demographic of this audience is
00:57:10.660so i'm curious did you have a specific demographic when you're writing your books or was this just
00:57:15.300kind of a surprise this is uh i didn't have a a demographic in mind i had a kind of person that i
00:57:22.340thought would enjoy a book like this and i've described my ideal reader as uh english majors
00:57:30.340theater nerds and people who just want to yell at you about the victorians and so
00:57:34.000no but it's it's really wonderful to find it resonating with with people who you know similar
00:57:44.620background for me different background for me i think that you know it's part of the reason why
00:57:49.620dickens has stayed around for so long is there's something in there for for everybody and it's
00:57:53.460nice to kind of tap into that other questions even if you hate him
00:57:59.400i was telling allison earlier i used to have a job working at a theater box office and sometimes
00:58:07.380people would they'd see a play and they wouldn't like it and they'd say i want my money back
00:58:11.100because i didn't like the play and what we were told to tell them which i still believe it's like
00:58:15.180well you didn't pay to enjoy the play you paid to experience the play and so i feel like charles
00:58:21.120dickens whether you think about him or his books it's like well his books are an experience yeah
00:58:25.300Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, like, lest it sound like I've been bashing on Dickens for an hour, like he's incredible. And I think he's incredibly good at what he does. And there's a reason that they're classics. And there's a reason that I wanted to write a book set in this world. I just wanted to do something slightly different in it. And he has, I've described it as like Dickens put together a great sandbox in Oliver Twist. And I'm like, do you mind if I play in here now that you're done? And, you know, there's lots to do.
00:58:52.360actually i have a question yeah who is your favorite fagin performer that you heard or seen
00:59:00.060in a movie or and there's been like miniseries like the musical obviously like who's who is
00:59:06.680your fagin of your heart who are you picturing when you're writing this book i wasn't picturing
00:59:11.640any of this is a very particular person in my head and i know what he looks like and so whenever
00:59:16.760anyone asks me what's your fan cast for fagin i'm like no it's just it's the guy that i picture
00:59:21.580That is. But the the adaptation that I liked recently of Fagin, I really liked David Thewlis's Fagin from The Artful Dodger on Disney Plus, which is like it's a real popcorn show.
01:04:05.700It wasn't the way that I understood him.
01:04:08.620I understand him as a person who's very, not frightened of intimacy.
01:04:14.500That's not exactly the right word, because I do think part of it is just he's satisfied
01:04:19.180with relationships that are not romantic relationships.
01:04:21.400That's not something that I thought this character was seeking, but there was also the sense of isolation and the sense of the need for belonging was so important for him that introducing a romantic relationship for him felt like a distraction from that.
01:04:38.480And also like it didn't feel real for that character.
01:04:42.340So I did think about it and then think that that's not right for him.