Hello, and welcome to the bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Babette Fraser Hale, author of This Familiar Heart an Improbable Love Story.

Thank you so much.

Welcome back.

I should say thank you so much for being here again.

My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

Well, last time you were here, we talked about your, work of short fiction, which I hope if you haven't seen that episode, people will go back and watch it because it's a delightful book that later won a wonderful award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Right.

So please look at that, please.

Yeah, please read that.

Well deserved, in my opinion, because I thought it was lovely.

Lovely stories.

But this is a very different book.

This is nonfiction.

This is a more personal story.

Can you, introduce the book and tell us why you decided to kind of veer into the nonfiction realm?

Well, it I go into this a little bit in the introduction.

Well, a lot an introduction.

When, my husband, Leon Hale, died.

One of the things he had said to me a few days before was, please write about me, which is really strange, in a way, because he'd already written everything.

I mean, he'd been mining his life, his for he'd written several memoirs.

He always wrote in the column about his growing up period.

And, so I said, of course I will.

Of course I will.

We were going through sort of a traumatic period when he, right near when he went into hospice, because it was the middle of the pandemic and we had not been able to get palliative care for what turned out to be cancer.

So I wasn't sure at first whether he was talking about, right about this experience we are having or whether he meant me.

And I decided later that he was giving me permission to write anything I needed to write because he knew I would.

He knew I would need to write it, as a way of maybe, adjusting to the loss.

And so I did, I thought about it and I thought, well, the only thing he hasn't written about was himself and me, because I would pop up in the column occasionally.

The partner is what he called me.

And his.

His what?

He'd been married twice before.

So his very his to us would pop up a little in the column from time to time.

He worked at home, so he spent a lot of time at home.

He was either at home working or he was on the road.

He stopped doing that so much after we got together.

But the first two, marriages, there was a lot of that.

So I thought that was what I should start examining.

And it did.

The second thing it did for me was, it kept him alive.

In my mind, I could.

It's wonder this is one of the great reads.

This is one of the things that writers generally don't tell you.

It's the fun that they have, and it isn't always fun, but the fact that they can see what they're writing about.

So if you're writing about someone you love who's died, you can have they're alive in what you're writing.

And it's a way.

It, for me, was a way not to feel quite as upset, bereft.

That is really it.

And I kept doing it, it in, I just I'm going to just keep babbling here because I it it segways into the way I told the beginning of the story, which was third person, tried to do it in first person because memoirs are usually first person.

I don't know if you're ever going to get into that.

Yes, I was going to ask because it's such a unique choice.

So I think it does two things.

I'd probably talk about what it means as a writer, but as a reader it's immersive in a different way.

I know I have to keep reminding myself as I'm reading, this is this is not this is a real story because it especially as a love story, we read so many, you know, there's romance novels, there's there's all these love stories, great love stories, you know, going back to Austin, hundreds and hundreds of years of love stories.

But and they're written this way.

So in that tradition, it makes sense.

I think literary wise.

But then it also, as the reader, it kind of helps me fall into it.

I'm used to reading things like that.

But I would love to know more about your choice to write it as a, as a story, as as being told a story, basically.

Well, it's lovely to hear the readers perspective.

For me, I started off trying to write it as memoir, and I hated it so much.

The vertical pronoun.

It's very interesting.

When I first started writing, which was really 55 or 60 years ago, more probably, I had a great impetus to write in first person fiction.

I lost that somewhere along the line.

And I, started writing a lot of things in third person prison, and I couldn't really make the story move until I got rid of the first person.

And this, this, this love story, and made it the two of us.

And I had to use our names, of course.

It it I think it must have given me enough distance that I could be really honest, I don't.

I really think that fiction can.

You can be more honest in fiction sometimes it the the jump the jump in, in, in, first person work, it's a limiter.

And even if you're an expert with first person and there are people out there that are just brilliant with it and they change their points of view and it's a different first person.

And and oh, I love to read that, but to write about myself in such a personal way as I did to talk about things as personal romantic things that we did.

And I mean, it's very graphic in a lot of areas.

And, it worked much better for me in third person.

And I thought maybe it would interest the reader more.

You already know the ending.

You know, when you start this story, because, you know, he died.

It's in the introduction.

It, so you have how do you have a reader be interested in something where they know the ending?

It kind of a up, up and down convoluted courtship.

Which if you didn't know the outcome, would be interesting on its own.

I've been told that it's still interesting, even though, you know, eventually they all get together, which pleases me greatly, I think.

Well, I, to me it's a little bit more interesting because every bump, I think, well, they must get through this.

But how?

You know, I, I want to know the answer.

How do you overcome this problem or this outside?

You know that that makes me wanting to know.

The spoiler makes it more interesting almost in a way.

Well that's great.

That's that's just what I was hoping.

Good.

Very good.

Okay.

I also want to talk about you talked about your decision on what to write.

The question of how, I'm going to quote you to yourself.

I'm sorry that I know that.

Strange, but, you say in the book, the act of writing is both a disclosure and a construct.

The writer may have every intention of telling the absolute truth, so far as that may be possible.

And yet so much gets left out.

I felt from the very beginning that the person in the columns he wrote, the one who wrote them, was the living man whom I loved for almost 40 years.

And yet there was a necessary reticence to a complex private core to the public person.

And so I think that's not something we can all relate to a little bit.

You know, I like to think that I am myself all right.

Now, but I know I must be a little bit different to my mother and to my friends and to my sister and to my coworker.

You know, we are all different people, to different people, and which is the true version of me.

So, yeah.

Can you talk about how you decided to put him in the, in the, in the book and also knowing that it's going to be read by the readers of the column who maybe think they already know him, how do you how do you that was the hardest.

That was the hardest decision, involved in it, because he may not be in some of the things that took place.

Quite the person they thought, because he censored things about himself.

He was very careful in his work not to, not to do things that up.

He never wanted to hurt anybody.

He really, seriously did.

Not even his humor, which occasionally had a, had a, had a, a little edge to it.

I mean, he was wit but it wasn't ever hurtful.

It was never saccharin, but it was never hurtful.

He didn't want to hurt people.

His so.

He would, Well, let me talk about it from this angle.

When a person you love dies the moment they die, the very second that they are no longer alive, your perspective about them is completely changes.

I.

And it's it's radical.

The change.

I've been told by some of the readers that.

I mean, it wasn't just.

I wasn't the only person this happened to you.

Suddenly, everything that you inadvertently censored in your life or didn't do or didn't pursue any question you might have had, well, you'll never be able to ask it.

You'll never find an answer.

And all of a sudden, everything the landscape is different, and you find out that you should have asked some questions.

Maybe you'll discover letters.

Maybe you'll discover, maybe you'll find old calendars and and things will just.

Mutate slightly.

The trick is to not have that derail you.

I felt that writing about a person who was a public person who was so well known was was almost, an affront to me, in a way.

And that's why it required that I be as honest, brutally honest about my feelings as I wanted to be about is there's not anything in the book that he and I didn't discuss.

That was one of the things that let me invent dialog for him.

I remember him saying everything in there.

I couldn't have been in some of the situations.

And I refer to that as, you know, I can't I'm not a little person in the corner of his life looking at his life.

Normally, I'm not doing a good job of talking about this at the moment.

Because people have criticized that.

I put that words in his mouth.

But when you're that, when we talk to you, let's say, how am I going to talk about this?

No, I think that's a I think where you're going, if I can interject a minute, I think that once you get through it, you know, a large chunk of the book is the beginning.

How you met, how you caught it, how it evolved.

But I think most relationships that I know, once you get past that, you go back and you talk about it.

What did you think when I you saw me here?

What did you think when we first met?

So maybe you can't quote him exactly what he was thinking and feeling, but you got to respect him.

That's something that I feel like most couples do discuss.

Yeah.

What what happened in that moment?

What was it from your perspective here?

Was it from mine so that you both have an understanding how you were meeting, how you were feeling?

And we also talked about it as writers.

You know, I'm the I was the junior writer for sure, and I'd been doing it a long time, but he was so much older and had done it so much more.

I mean, so much wider context.

And his world, his knowledge of Texas was just vast, and the people in it and mine was not.

I was particularly interested in how men think.

I was very curious about how men think, how they look at women, how they look.

So any time I because I well, I think when you write fiction or when you write nonfiction, you have to at least try to bring to life the other half of, of the world.

If you're a male writer, you should be doing this with female writer, female people.

And in the end, all right.

And there's some male writers who do women.

Well, there's some male writers who really don't even try.

I wanted to know what Hale thought, and he told me, after he died, I decided that he certainly was telling me what he thought and about himself.

I'm not altogether sure that it extended as widely as I might at the earlier thought it did, but the feelings that that he had about almost everything I tried.

I was interested in this man in a really thorough way.

He was he was very charming.

But, I mean, anything he was interested in, I was interested in a, a feminist.

I'm I never I never felt that with anyone else to that degree at all.

And I still, I am I'm still interested in.

I'm still fooling around with characters related to his life.

People that I maybe have met or heard him talk about.

I'm still thinking about them as people, in a way that I don't know that I would have expected.

And again, I'm not sure I, I dealt with all that I want to ask.

Grows out of that a little bit.

For a nonfiction book, I always like to ask the authors what kind of research did you do?

Which sounds silly in this case, but also not because you did.

You had his papers.

You had letters.

You did interviews with people he knew.

Can you talk about the research process for this book?

Sure.

Okay.

Well, the University of Houston has his papers, and, so I went down there and I sat there several days going through what he had, and they were there were, he all his calendars that he kept over the years.

He had these very large calendars.

He would stick up on the wall.

And then he would put on them what the subject of the column that day was and where he had traveled, so that you can see each week, day by day, what he was doing.

And, it was fascinating to see the lag time and to, to learn just I had, when I was with him, early on, not knowing where he was because, you know, we were seeing each other sporadically.

He was seeing other people.

Of course, he didn't pretend he wasn't.

You would feel that he was right where he said he was writing from each time.

But it might have been two days earlier than he was actually there.

Some days it was the same, and it took a day to get in the paper.

So it was really interesting to see how that worked in the calendar form.

And so the calendars are missing from the time that, he and I, from the time he committed to me, to about a year before we got married, always.

Calendars are missing.

We're the only ones missing.

And it was, So where did they go?

Why did he throw them out?

Or did they just get lost and move?

Because it would have sometimes perhaps shown that he was doing more than he shared.

And I think that a person like Hale, who was who had great need for privacy somewhere because he was so public about things in his column about that ground, about family and about where he was, he he couldn't be completely honest in it or he would upset, frankly, the women in his life whom he had a very jealous first wife.

I think he had a very jealous second wife.

I, would have been a really jealous third wife if he'd been gone all the time.

I'm sure there was something about him that made you want to hang on.

Grab and hold.

And he couldn't with him.

If you grabbed and held, he would need to move away, and I somehow, I don't even know how I understood that, but I did.

I understood it, and I think that's why we endured.

And then he he had gotten to the point where he had gotten tired of roaming Texas and interviewing people.

So it fit that way as well.

That I, I may have I lost the train of your question.

No, it's okay I because I want to add another part of it to the question too, which is, you know, the end of the book, as you've mentioned, deals with grief and deals with the loss.

And you talked about how when a person dies, everything changes.

Something that I found to be true is when I've lost someone I love very, very deeply.

I get very greedy for the ephemera of their lives.

I get very greedy for photos of them, for stories about them that I hadn't heard.

And I can only imagine that being able to go through his papers to have these calendars, that must have been.

It was wonderful to just to hold on to whatever piece.

You know, I, I find myself wishing for scraps of of anything, of my, of my late brother.

So I can only imagine that that that feeling of, you know, the original question was about going about things and all the other things besides what, which is valuable to write a book, but also it must be so valuable as, as as him being your partner to have all these things.

It's so important when you lose someone for people to tell you stories about them.

Yes.

And they often don't.

Yes.

And I found a real thing in there.

Some of the people who know him best just didn't want to talk about it.

And I don't know if they feel that they're going to betray a confidence or if their memory, you know, in this case, everybody was old.

Who knew him?

Well, older than I, you know, in this case, I'm 80 now, and I was in my late 70s when he died four years ago.

Basically, most of the people who knew him were either in their 80s or pushing it or in their 90s and the, the, the memory issues come up, which is just tragic because then you can't be having these lovely scraps shared.

Sometimes people would send a letter.

I found letters in his personal file, and I'm his literary executor and his executor and his heir because we got because we were really bad about planning.

So I have it all.

And I went through it.

When he died.

I found photographs of people I didn't know.

Some of them.

I figured out, some of them I didn't.

I love seeing any of them.

Him as a younger man.

I mean, he looks like at times he had expressions most of the time, and then I didn't recognize he had changed.

And I don't know why he changed.

And it would have been lovely for his friends to really tell me how and why.

Because it just would have been an illumination.

It would have been, you want you want to round out this figure.

And I'm glad to know that it happens with with other people in your family, too.

It, it certainly happened with my parents when they died.

Not so much my brother, but.

But my parents, and so but it was way more intense for me with hail.

And I think it's because of the private core.

I went on faith with him, all the way through that courtship.

I just was convinced he he would do things that if any ordinary man did it to you in a relationship.

Yeah, all the warning signs would come up and and they didn't with me.

They I felt that I understood what he was about, and and I was eventually right.

And I don't know really why I could feel that way unless it's that thing I talked about, the internal congruences.

He was far more concerned about the external.

Differences that we showed.

And his friends were filling him up with words about warning.

Yeah, I wanted to touch on that.

We of course, we can't go into the whole story, but that's where I would hope people read the book.

But some of the difficulties in the beginning of your courtship are these external.

There was an age difference.

There was a class difference, which, as much as we like to pretend, it's not nothing, it is something.

It makes a difference.

Can you talk a little bit about those external forces?

Yeah.

To the relationship.

Yeah.

Well, the way I kind of summarized it in my mind was that everything that could be different about two people that, you know, as a couple, was different for us, except race.

We everything else was complete.

A West Texas urban, a country city girl.

I thought that I was going to be.

I mean, my idea of a great place is New York and London.

It was.

It's changed.

I didn't know anything about Texas.

I'd lived in Texas my whole life, and I had never seen a wildflower spring, which all you have to do is go west just a little bit.

At the right time of year.

It never happened.

We were looking at the Azalea Trail and in River Oaks.

It was a very narrow a childhood I had felt he gave me Texas.

Man, there's a lot of it.

I mean, political issues completely aside, this is the most wonderful state to drive through the differences.

And the people and the people are wonderful.

All those, you know, all the ideas that the North has about Texas, they're wrong.

It's just a great place.

And I wouldn't have known that if it weren't for him.

Now, there was a subsection there I wanted to get back to, and I've lost it.

Your differences?

Oh, yeah.

External.

Yeah.

And the people who talked.

Who talked, to me and to him, that caused difficulties.

They focused on these differences.

They mostly focused on the the the, imagination, the image they had for someone who was born in river, who lived in River Oaks most of her life.

I was a debutante.

And images are created in the minds of many people.

But even those two words that they felt would just end up leaving him miserable.

They were very worried for him.

How can someone that much younger from that background, how can she be real?

She's just playing with you, that sort of thing.

And I think he heard it a lot.

I after he died, one of those people, came up and made herself known to me.

Very nice person.

And she said that she regretted that she'd been so, sort of sarcastic about it, even after he and I got sort of together but weren't married.

She had teased him.

She said she wished she hadn't.

I think it's.

I think it just tells you a lot about the way image, about class image and prejudice works.

You know, people say it.

People from my background try to be open minded.

They don't realize that the people that being open minded about maybe even more prejudiced against them than they ever thought of being.

Sure, I never the people Hale came from or the people that my father grew up with.

And it turns out, after Hale died, that I figured out that my father, he he I knew that my father came from a very close area of Texas to where Hale came from.

But their childhoods, which were 20 years apart, were very similar, roaming around in a my father left all that, and he I think he became a little bit snobbish about it.

But I love the way they talked and the way they acted.

And so when I met Hale's relatives, I just adored them.

They were great people.

Well, I'm so sorry to break in there, but we are running short on time.

This is such a rich story.

We I could talk for two hours honestly, about this, but in our final minute, can you just maybe give us a take away what you would hope people remember from from this book or from us talking today?

Well, I hope they're entertained by the story, and I hope they gain the feeling that this, that external differences don't matter if there's an internal agreement, on things that you share and on the way you look at the world.

It's the internal part that is the the real glue.

The external stuff can be just interesting.

It can cause some trouble.

But, I guess that's really.

And also that when you go through a grief experience, be very kind to yourself and give yourself plenty of time to assimilate that change of perspective.

Well, thank you so much.

This I really I really appreciate you coming.

I really appreciate you writing this book.

I'm I feel lucky that I got to read it.

It's a beautiful story.

I would very much.

And I'll be.

I told you before we started this feels like a word of mouth book.

And I'm going to be telling people off camera, too, that they should read this book because it's it's truly lovely.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

The book again is called this Familiar Heart.

Thank you so much for joining us, and I will see you again soon.