What happens to a marriage when things get complicated, when the hopes and dreams of one partner are not echoed by the other?

Add in the complexities of living in a small town and the horrible suffering of infertility.

This is the story of "The Half Moon."

Welcome to "Between the Covers."

I'm Ann Bocock.

Mary Beth Keane is the "New York Times" bestselling author of "Ask Again, Yes," and she has done it again with a new novel about family dynamics.

It's written with insight and such thoughtfulness that make you care about the characters and make you empathize with the struggles they're going through.

The book is "The Half Moon."

Mary Beth Keane, welcome to "Between the Covers."

Thank you for having me, it's an honor to be here.

I'm gonna start with the background of the story.

Malcolm and Jess Gephart, she's an attorney, he is the owner of the local pub.

I'd like to go back just a little bit to how they met, who they are as an individual, before they became this couple, and we won't spoil any of the read.

So if you would take it from there.

Well, I'm a notorious plot spoiler, but basically they grew up in a small town and Jess is a little bit younger than Malcolm, and so they didn't encounter each other in high school.

She's sort of onto bigger and brighter things, and he's kind of a local guy, a local star, handsome, gregarious, everybody loves him, and he works in the local bar that everyone loves.

Jess falls in love with him because she's back visiting, and her life becomes sort of more entwined with her whole small town than she ever expected.

But the book is about marriage and what happens when the first bloom of love sort of wears off, you know, what happens when each of you has to sacrifice something, and who sacrifices what.

The setting is very important.

We're in Gillum, and we are back in Gillum actually, it's the same fictional town as your previous book.

It's a small town, and as anyone who has lived in a small town, and I have, small towns operate differently from living in a city.

So this is kind of a two part question.

One would be, why did you choose to continue with Gillum and can you elaborate on what it is for these people living in a small town?

Well, this is a unique small town in that it's so close to New York City.

But these people sort of look North, upstate instead of South.

There are a lot of people, it's based in the town where I grew up, which is Pearl River, New York, even though I sort of fictionalize it, but it's a lot of people who work for say, NYPD, FDNY, commute into the city and come out again.

And so there's a certain sort of working class feeling to it that's unusual, I think, outside of the city when you have Bergen County and Westchester and these other places.

The book, I think of, is in some ways, as a cousin to "Ask Again, Yes."

I felt like there was something about the town and the types of people who live there that I didn't explore fully in "Ask Again, Yes," and that story was so, the main character was so internal and so closed off.

I think I really craved writing someone who was the opposite of that.

And where Peter was so shy and so reserved, Malcolm is so outgoing and so gregarious, and I think, sort of as a challenge to myself, A, I wanted to set a book over the course of a week.

This is my fourth book, and they've all taken place over like 45 years.

And I wanted to write a different sort of person, you know, who's not necessarily self-reflective, who's not what people might call deep, you know, but you still have those feelings and he has ambitions and desires just like everyone else.

And part of it was Covid.

I wrote this book during Covid and I wanted to put a person like that alone in his house and see how he does when he actually can't go anywhere.

The book is bookended by two snowstorms that sort of lock the town in place.

And for me, those snowstorms sort of served as a Covid equivalent.

If that makes any sense.

Actually, it made perfect sense.

And I love that you call it a cousin to the book that preceded it.

At the heart of the book is the local bar, and it's The Half Moon, which is also the name of the book.

Malcolm has worked there his whole life.

Now he is owning the bar and it's not just a bar.

You read this book, the bar is community for this place.

It's a crucial element to the story.

You know the bar business, your family was in the bar business, correct?

Yes.

Yeah, my dad is one of 11 siblings and all but I think two of them, or three of them, were in the bar business when they came.

They immigrated from Ireland to the Bronx to New York and worked in bars first, then opened them, and so it was something I've been sort of tuned into my whole life.

You know, will a bar succeed or fail?

So much of it has to do with things you can't control at all.

You know, what makes one place popular and one place sort of dead?

The minute an owner sort of focuses on trying to make a place cooler or more desirable, it's like you're dead in the water.

People feel that desperation.

And so it, you know, it's a really unique business, sort of like writing novels.

And I just wanted to sort of delve in deeper and use what I know.

Being a bartender is like being a rock star, you know, in some ways.

You have to be charming and charismatic and always on, and that's exhausting.

So does anyone in your family think they see themselves in this book?

Oh, yes, everybody.

You know, it's very funny.

You know, I interviewed a couple of my cousins and I've asked a lot of questions, and then there's two in particular who think this is about them.

So I said, you know, his main characteristics are that he's handsome and he is charming.

Are you handsome and charming?

And they're both like, "Well, yes of course I am."

You know, so it's been fun, but I think in some places that I, you know, without knowing it, I might have hit closer to the bone than I even realized, you know, which is one of those creepy things that writers do sometimes, but it's not based on anyone, it's just a setting.

I like to write about work, a lot, and what people do for a living.

So... You also have an out, because you can just say it's fiction.

Mary Beth, you are so good at character development.

You are a master of that.

And for instance, when you're talking about Malcolm, I know who Malcolm is, we all know who this guy is.

He's the guy that's great with strangers.

He entertains the bar crowd.

At home, not so much, he can't have those deep conversations.

What kind of characters most interest you in developing?

I think I'm always drawn to characters who are not terribly articulate about their own feelings.

They haven't been to therapy.

They were maybe raised in a certain way to sort of tamp things down and not say aloud, you know, "This hurt me or that hurt me," but those hurts come out in different ways.

And Malcolm is just another example of that.

When it comes to character development, if I might say, I had a professor once who said that you don't need to have a character accomplish things or do dramatic things, you just need to have them want something, and it doesn't matter what the thing is.

If you describe them wanting something, then people will identify with that want, you know, and see themselves in it, no matter what the specifics of that story is.

And I thought it was such a good piece of advice.

Was there a particular impetus to this storyline?

What made you want to write this story?

And it's a deep story.

A couple of things.

I'm not so sure people will understand the connection, but first I wanted, like I said, to write a book that takes place over the course of a week.

That was the challenge to myself, after writing these unwieldy, multigenerational novels.

But also, I'm a mother in a community, I'm on the sidelines of baseball fields and soccer fields, and I'm hearing people all the time, you know, gossip about other people and how interested they are in their lives and their little, and you know, I'm not above a piece of gossip myself, I'm human, but it fascinated me and still does, how much people imagine they know about other people's lives, that people are so willing to draw conclusions based on so little information.

And it says more about them, of course, than it does about the people they're talking about.

And I think the story began as me wondering what the gossip would be like in this town.

You know, Jess cheated on her husband.

that's not a plot spoiler, we learn that on like page two that they've separated.

But I think when we have more information, you'd be surprised where your sympathies might change and shift, and that was sort of the point.

You think you know everything about these two, but you don't, you don't know what it's like for them at home.

And that's true for everyone we're talking about.

Mary Beth, this is a story about a marriage falling apart and I'm not giving it away, as you said on page two, we're into that.

Human nature is to judge.

And my takeaway from the read is that the story is more of an exploration of the depth of this relationship, not one where you're picking teams, not one of blame.

Am I close?

Right, that was the whole point, you know?

I didn't want there to be any victims or villains, you know, I wanted there to be two people who came at this union honestly, with hope and all good things, and then what happens, you know, life gets in the way and you know, some couples decide to work through it, some don't, and you know, you'd have to read to decide what they figure out.

But life, you know, when you begin a relationship, everything is ahead of you, it's all forward momentum.

You know, what happens when things don't turn out exactly the way you plan?

You know, specifically what happens, especially if you're a couple like Jess and Malcolm who quite literally only have enough money for one dream.

Is it gonna be his dream or is it gonna be her dream, and why?

You know, questions like that.

I think that they are, you know, there are things that every marriage struggles with and can become toxic, you know, if you don't deal with them.

And they're just people who are dealing with these questions as best they can, in ways that are as flawed as they possibly can be.

That brings me to this.

Infertility is such a significant part of this story.

And for anyone who has either suffered with this or known someone who has gone through this, the struggle is on both parties.

It is such an emotional cost.

It is a huge financial cost.

There is no particular book that tells you, "Okay, this is where you stop."

Talk about this, if you would.

Well, there is no stopping.

I mean, I didn't experience anything like Jess does in the book, but I have friends, I have sisters, I have so many cousins, and, you know, women talk, and I think, I had my kids pretty young.

I don't think I realized how much other women were going through.

You know, you glimpse something, you think you know, and then you find out what other people are going through and it's a multiple of 20 compared to what you went through.

And I have wondered, you know, where would I, it's another one of those things where you think you know how you would react, but you don't know until you're in the situation.

Where would you draw the line?

If every doctor you see has another plan, another solution.

No one will ever say, "This is not gonna work out for you."

As far as I can tell, given everyone I've talked to, there's always a clinic in Croatia, a treatment in Newfoundland, a you know, get on a flight, pay another $100,000 and maybe your dream will come true.

We're used to going into stores, and we're on Instagram, and say, "Follow your dreams, never give up."

In some cases, it seems to me it would be merciful to give up, you know, to have a different dream, for someone to say, "This is not gonna work out for you."

And it's sort of a thing that we don't, it reminded me a little bit when my father was dying, I don't know if anyone will get this connection.

He had been ill for a very, very long time, and at the end, we took him home, but still people wanted us to bring him back to the hospital for more treat, for more, and it's like, where do you end?

You know, where do you say, "This is the life I have."

This is a gift in and of itself.

The chances of us being here are so infinitesimal that I'm missing it unless I start enjoying it for what it is.

And that was a large driver of the book, is seeing people sort of wait for their lives to happen, you know, by reaching these dreams that they probably weren't gonna reach.

And in the meantime, they were missing, you know, their own lives.

And that struck me as really, really tragic.

And you also have in there that there is a society that the community's perception becomes a factor where it should just be these two people in this situation, but it's not.

No, yeah, no, it's true.

I mean, that's probably the small town aspect that you referenced earlier, but everyone has an opinion about these two, why they don't have children, what is going on between them, what exactly happened, you know?

And that presses in, you know, especially part of the community is your mother and his mother and your old teachers, and people that you really, really know.

I mean, that's the nature of a small town, people piping up with their opinions on all of your local errands.

It's annoying.

That is a small town.

You quote at the very beginning of the book, and it says, "Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin."

Boy, if that doesn't just talk about what you've written.

I love that quote, thank you for that.

Yeah, well, "Love Medicine," it's one of my favorite books of all time.

It's one of those books I've reread several times.

I don't know if it came to me while I was reading or if I actually was rereading it, but it seemed to sum up, you know, especially Jess' side of things, the female character's side of things in this book.

And so I love an epigraph, so I stuck it in there, and I think it sets a mood for the book, and in this case, it was the right one.

It definitely was.

Forgiveness is central to this book, and forgiveness is complicated.

I want to kind of get into your thoughts on developing this theme of forgiveness, and then if we could piggyback that with your personal thoughts about forgiveness.

I don't know that a lot of these things are conscious in a book.

People said "Ask Again, Yes" was about forgiveness.

My book before that, the epigraph was, "Jesus Mercy," because that was on a gravestone of Mary Mallon, who was known as Typhoid Mary, and so on.

I think it was in my first book too.

You know, I don't know why I am fixated on this.

I think maybe because I'm Irish and I have a gigantic family, and sometimes in those gigantic families, there's estrangements and bitternesses that you don't even know where they came from.

And so I don't know what I can speak to.

I do think in my personal life, it's important for me to forgive, if not necessarily forget.

You know, I guess the expression is right, forgive and forget.

I think you forgive, but I think I personally hold a little memory of what happened, whatever the thing is that I'm having to forgive.

But, you know, whether that's good or bad, I don't know.

I'm just being honest.

But I don't know, I think a lot of the themes in books, sometimes book clubs ask me about these things, and the truest answer is that I don't know.

I think there's something in me that, you know, wanted to write this particular story, and address forgiveness, but I can't say that any of those things are like head on or conscious, you know, they come out in the writing.

And the more specific I get about characters, the more clearly I can see them, the more vivid those themes are.

And I honestly don't really know why.

I'm sure another articulate writer would be able to tell you, but I don't know.

You know, I think it's a really hard concept to define, because I think we use it all the time, forgiveness and not forgetting, but I'm not sure it's something that we can easily put into practice.

You just talked about honesty, and that is one thing in particular, you are so honest in your writing.

This will sound crazy, does it ever become a challenge, burdensome?

Well, no, because I'm not, right, I mean, truly I'm not writing about myself, and the whole point of, I mean, there are aspects of myself, of course, in every character.

Sometimes I think I'm drawn to writing male characters, in particular, is because no one will mistake them for me.

And so there's freedom in that.

Any female character I write, readers try to match up, like one-to-one, which is such a disorienting experience because I just don't write that way.

But, you know, I think the whole point of fiction is, you know, strangely and ironically, to get at something really true and really honest.

And I don't see the point of sitting down and dedicating several years of my life to a story without, you know, that being the sort of driving engine that I'm, you know, that I'm heading for.

I think, you know, otherwise it's all pointless.

Thank you for noticing that.

I try to make it as honest as possible.

If my math is correct, you wrote it during Covid.

There's no Covid reference in the story, but there is this snowstorm that paralyzes the town.

And when I'm reading, to me, there's this parallel between the town and the snowstorm, even though it's only a week, to our experience in Covid.

Am I stretching this?

No, that was intentional.

I think I was trying, I mean, part of it was intentional.

There was a snowstorm, I saw them at home, and then I added another snowstorm.

The moment you think that you can get out and about again, you know, you get hit again, which happens here.

I live in the Northeast and sometimes the kids have been home for a week at a time.

And it's fun for a day, kinda like Covid in the beginning, it was very scary, but it was novel, and we were baking cookies and teaching the kids how to play poker.

And there seemed something, you know, really, like we knew we would remember this our whole lives.

But then as time bore on, it became something else.

And I think that the snow here and locking everybody in place is sort of a micro version of that.

I also think people reacted in very surprising ways.

Speaking of being honest, you know, I'm mostly a good girl.

I did everything I was supposed to do, mask-wise, exposure-wise, but I did not find it easy.

You know, I found myself after a couple of months, especially when the weather got nice, I would drive around my town with a camp chair in the back and see if my friends were outside, you know?

And if I had, you know, maybe a little tumbler of High Noon or something, or a little cocktail, I'd make a personal amount and I'd say, "Oh, you're outside raking leaves.

I'll set up my camp chair here.

You set up down there, it's safe."

But I really, really missed that kind of social interaction.

My mom hates when I say this, 'cause she says, everyone will think I'm a bar fly, which I'm not, but I really missed going to a local, you know, like popping in and seeing your old friend, your eighth grade boyfriend, your cousin, and you know, I live in this sort of town where that's kind of the central place.

And to see all of those places shuttered and everybody at home wondering what everybody else is doing, I found that much harder than I think I would have if someone had told me it was gonna happen.

You know, 'cause I think I'm a writer, I'm alone all the time, it's no big deal, but this was strange.

This was another added layer to being home alone all the time.

Your previous book, "Ask Again, Yes," quickly became a "New York Times" bestseller, and deservedly so.

It's a wonderful book.

So knowing that, what's the outside pressure like when you know you have the next book coming out, and is there also pressure that you put on yourself?

Yes, there's both.

I mean, I'm lucky enough that I've been with the same publisher now for three books.

And I know them, they know me.

But yeah, this one was different because I knew that no one was ever waiting for one of my books.

You know, I could write them or not write them.

no one cared, you know, including "Ask Again, Yes."

I don't think anyone realized that it would be the book that it was, least of all me.

I never would've given it such a difficult title if I had the faintest notion that it would take off like it did.

But then all of a sudden people were waiting for it.

It was a different experience, I'll say that.

My next book, I think I'd like to be completely done with it before anyone reads it, an editor, an agent, no one.

I think I'd like to go back to the way I did things for the first three books.

But it was also, you know, I was very grateful for the opportunity to write "The Half Moon" and have it be sort of a sure thing.

You know, that was a huge relief that I knew it would come out.

I didn't have to worry about writing a book and spending all of those years and then potentially not selling it.

You know, that's the first time that I didn't have that worry sort of hanging over my head.

So while I had other new worries, I also got rid of some old worries, and so I guess this is just growing up.

Mary Beth, let's switch it up a little bit.

When was the first time you knew you wanted to be a writer?

Oh, young.

I was probably six or seven.

I remember asking my mom to write for me because I couldn't write fast enough.

I also had imaginary friends that would do really dramatic things.

Like one, I think committed suicide.

I mean, that's a very weird thing for a small child to imagine.

So I knew I wanted to make up stories and sort of make worlds and people in them from when I was very young.

But I didn't know that I'd be able to make a career out of it until I was much, much older.

I almost hate to ask after you were talking about being six years old and having a character that committed suicide.

What are the books that you gravitated to as a child?

One of the best things about my upbringing was, my parents, to be honest, they weren't readers.

I've never seen either of my parents read a book, which is why sometimes I laugh.

People approach me how I'm trying to model this behavior, you're trying to make your kid a reader.

I think kids are gonna be what they're gonna be.

But my mom would drop us off at the library and let us sort of have free reign, 'cause she knew it was safe, you know, she knew that's a place where no bad things would happen to us.

And no one was telling me what to read.

I didn't know about the canon.

I didn't know about, you know, what I should like and shouldn't like, so I just sort of picked at random.

I never paid that much attention to the titles or the author name, which is sort of funny now.

There were certain books, of course, that stood out.

I read all the Nancy Drew's, Babysitters Clubs, "Sweet Valley Twins," "Sweet Valley High," but then "Ann of Green Gables" was like a big, big moment for me.

I must've read that book a hundred times.

And Evan Lee, you know, all the other ones.

There was a book called "Caddy Woodlawn."

I probably read that 50 times.

It's a little more problematic now when I look back, but I loved it, you know, an independent girl sort of living out in a free way.

I thought, this is the best story I've ever read.

So my reading life was pretty varied and pretty random.

And when I got to college, there were people who sort of assumed everyone else in the room had read the same stuff, and I had never read the same stuff.

And it ended up being a blessing in some ways 'cause I could kind of form my own opinion about things without knowing what I should think.

The new book is "The Half Moon."

Mary Beth Keane, I wanna thank you so much.

Thanks.

I'm Anne Bocock.

Please join me on the next, "Between the Covers."