it's the roaring 20s a trailblazing young woman is desperate to make her mark in a man's world on Wall Street add in the immigrant experience sibling rivalry and a looming catastrophic stock market crash it's The Tradeoff by Samantha Green Woodruff [Music] samantha Green Woodruff is the author of the bestseller The Lombotist Wife she spent two decades in television on the business side of media the tradeoff is her second work of historical fiction this one taking place in Manhattan in the 1920s samantha welcome thank you i'm so happy to be here thank you for having me for Okay honest i love historical fiction and the trade-off has it all it has family it has ambition it has greed and it has a female heroine be a brahmitz first off was there a person who was an inspiration for be i wish I could say there was a woman on Wall Street who was an inspiration for be but there was not um be came about came to be when I realized that there were people who were short sellers of the crash of 29 and that they made a fortune and one of them was a man named Jesse Livermore who turns out to be pretty much of a scoundrel so when I set out to write the book I thought maybe it would be somehow based on Livermore's life and I had written the labotamist's wife so I thought maybe I would give Livermore a wife who was somehow involved but the more I researched him the more I did not want to write a story about him he does appear in the book um so I took that idea and I love to write about strong women and women making their way in worlds that don't really want them and that's how we came up with Bee well describe Bee so who is she bee is a go-getter she is incredibly bright but she has her challenges she is a twin it to a daughter of immigrants Russian immigrants who fled early prams and lost everything when they came to America as was common and she has to sort of hold up her family and fill the role that her mother doesn't ever really step in to fill so she is both the homemaker and the caretaker and this really bright woman who wants to be a stock broker in the 1920s let's talk about the twin aspect for a minute her brother is Jack there is this interesting brother dynamic and they're they're not really treated equally in the family especially by the mother yes so um when I initially thought about writing this book one of my ideas was that I would do like a Tootsie thing reverse Tootszie where a woman would try and work on Wall Street realize she couldn't and have a twin brother who could would you know sino tootsie something like that and so I made them twins for that reason um but I was also fascinated by the idea that twins have this unbelievable connection and I really wanted to explore the depths of family relationships um Bee's background is based on my own family what I know of it so in that way I did have family history rattling around in my mind um my grandmother Pauline was one of five and she was the only female and her mother had immigrated lost everything and treated Pauline like basically her servant girl um and that led for to her having this preoccupation with wealth and with money the mother and then Pauline that was a totally different way of thinking about why someone would be so preoccupied with money be is not just smart she has almost this superpower with numbers and with market trends and her stock picking skills are phenomenal if she actually were allowed to pick stocks um and and we'll we'll get into a little of that the story begins three years before the crash and I would love it if you would read a little set this up and read just a little bit of this so we can learn what Bee is thinking at that at that moment absolutely so this is the prologue so this is actually while the crash is happening she saw her panic and horror mimicked in the faces of everyone around her felt her cheeks soaked with tears only then did she hear the percussive sound of more thuds only then did she take in the bodies that were coming from the highest windows of every building on Wall Street only then did be truly understand the magnitude of this day until now she had believed that any loss in the market would be purely financial now she saw it was so much more things had grown so bad that bankers were jumping from windows rather than face a financially decimated future she had to get out of here to get home she was worried about Jake maybe she could reach him on the phone given the sense of importance he derived from his recently earned wealth she couldn't help but fear that he might be among the bodies on the street she had to remind him that money wasn't everything she had to tell him her secret to assure him they still had a tiny thread of hope and that exactly now that that's where we are okay 1920s Wall Street it is it's a man's world no question about that a secretarial job is pretty much the closest that a woman is going to get to the trading floor yes so that's one of her challenges but she has other challenges she has her background she has anti-semitism give us what it looks like from her perspective so be understands that it's going to be tough to be a woman on Wall Street that it's still a man's world and she understands to some degree because she's gone to Hunter and not a seven sisters school that would never consider someone like me in the 1920s that there is both a degree of hierarchy around social status based on your origins and also religion and wealth um but she doesn't realize how much that's the case and it is the 1920s which was in many ways this bubble of liberation for women they just gotten the vote you have these flappers who are having sex with whoever they want not caring about what you know society says they should be wearing to show off their bodies um smoking cigarettes going to speak easys and so be is caught up in that so she walks into Wall Street thinking she's going to make a difference she's going to be different because she's so good at what she does but it turns out that it doesn't matter what your skills are in on Wall Street at this time the only women who got jobs on Wall Street that were facing clients at all were rich already well-connected typically multigenerational us like from the May like Mayflower and had gone to seven sisters schools because they were they created these new women's departments to serve women like themselves speaking of women's departments there was the ladies department at the House of Morgan and so of course I had to look that up and that is pre JP Morgan correct correct correct and then there's another it was JP Morgan it was that bank but they called it the House of Morgan that was kind of House of Morgan and that's where the these upscale women Yes were that that was their their department there was there was a successful banker in that era uh Mary Veil Andress yes and you make reference to her in the book as well yes so part of the reason that bee believes she's going to have success is because she knows there are women carving their own path on Wall Street what I learned in my research and it it's fascinating is that really those women were already connected in some way so Maryville Andress who wrote a pamphlet that I got my hands on called banking as a career for women she basically says in the pamphlet that you have to have a really thick skin you have to it's still not a place for women it and this is a something called banking as a career for women and she outlines a lot of sort of behind the scenes back office jobs for women she herself got her job at a bank by accident she ha you know she she was a wealthy woman who had been abroad with her husband during World War I was very involved in the Red Cross and in fundraising for the war effort and as a client of the bank caught their eye um and it wasn't it wasn't JP Morgan um and I'm blanking on what bank it was but it was one of the big New York banks and they asked her to start their ladies department so bees outside looking in says "Oh there are women like Mary Veil Andress who are leading ladies departments that are executives at the bank."

And this was a huge step forward except when you go behind the curtain these are women who were primed and set up to do this didn't need to be working but just took these jobs almost because there was a cache involved in them they did not have the strikes against them that that they didn't have poor Jewish and female this is above all things an immigrant story yes and this family left Russia they left a very comfortable life in Russia now they are living in an Lower East Side tenement it comes down to money in this story having it losing it and that is true really to the immigrant story yes so I as I said the immigrant story came second in some ways when I was conceiving of the book um I was inspired to write the book by a very contemporary event in the stock market which was um and I'm sure you remember the GameStop short squeeze and you used that actually in I remember in the notes in the back of the book you you referred to talk about that because it was my my spark it was my origin point because what happened in GameStop was that a very prominent hedge funer was short the stock his fund was short the stock of GameStop and a group of everyman investors b banded together to drive up the stock price and it caused chaos in the market um but what also happened was that the prominent investor received death threats was reviled on social media i mean there were memes of like rockets shooting him out to space and people and he happens to be someone who was a personal friend of my husband's more than me but he was in our wedding and I never had any interest in the stock market even though I have an MBA and that's where I met my husband but I watched this and I said wealth and making money in the stock market is more complicated than if you make money and you're rich you're bad and if you don't and you're poor you're good and I wanted to explore that and somehow to me that took me once I found out that you that there were people who profited from the crash like Jesse Livermore to my own family's immigrant experience and how losing wealth and gaining wealth had been such a part of the narrative of our lives what was the challenge or was there a challenge writing historical fiction when it has to do with finance what wasn't a challenge about it no so I'm very fortunate i do have an MBA and I met my husband in business school but I always was interested in the strategy and the people behind and the marketing and I worked in business development and strategy for years my husband is an investor so he was really my sounding board and my research partner for the financial excuse me financial research for the book so he he was he did a first pass read of all the major toms about the crash that were economic and financial and said read this one don't you're not going to want to read this one i would start something and say do I need to know about this and he'd say no it's not it's so good that you that that you know that that's perfect yes that's perfect for research you talked about Jesse Livermore what was a surprise to me was shortselling was a thing in the 20s so that was the moment when I said I can write about GameStop because I write historical fiction there's I think novels always start with a what if question right so what if in this case what if the short seller wasn't a bad guy what what would that look like but there was no way for me to write that because I didn't want to write a contemporary story about it and it felt like an apology for something which is not my idea either like there's no question that in the hedge fund industry the compensation scale is totally out of whack right like I don't say it's not but that doesn't make the people who are making that money necessarily bad people and so I wanted to get into that and then my husband said "Well there was this guy Jesse Livermore who shorts sold the the crash of 29."

And I said "I didn't know shortselling existed in the 1920s."

He said "Yeah it's existed as long as the market's been around."

And so that was my weigh-in the chapters start with the Dow monthly average which you know now that that we're over 40,000 it'll be to people will go wow in 1927 in January it was 156 and then I believe when Black Tuesday came around it was 230 when you were doing all this research what surprised you the most about the about the financial piece right i think that it's really it was really fascinating to look and I again my husband keeps coming up in this he has access to the Dow data he sent me the data daily weekly monthly and annually from 1925 all the way till 1930 and I studied it like a Bible i charted it all and when I was first writing everything that happened in the book had to correlate to where the market was one of the things that surprised me was there was still a lot of bounce you think that it was this rise rise rise and then a fall but markets go up and down and even through this really really prosperous time the roaring 20s leading up to this great crash there were ups and downs and the downs were real but people just didn't want to take them to heart the setting in the book is so vibrant and you just mentioned the roaring 20s there is this contrast of the world from the tenement building where the Abramitzes are to the excess of Wall Street and there are the speak easys and there are I mean it's it's just lovely i'm curious the my one of my last trips to New York I went to the Tenement Museum which to me was extremely eyeopening yes um I would recommend that to anyone on the on their next trip to to get that that history yeah and you can actually see a lot of it online as well if you don't if you can't get there like actually when I was researching this book the apartments and the building that I wanted to see was closed but they have pictures of them online so you can understand i mean I know the Lower East Side i used to go out there in my 20s all the time but it was it's a different place obviously than it was in the 1920s but the apartments themselves you can see how small and the multi-use and all that you know and you can hear about it but when you look at it when you feel it it's very different there's in the book there is a struggle with morality when it comes to wealth do you want to talk about that that was the really the heart of what I wanted to write about initially and I think as you go and your characters develop there are more themes but again I really I wanted I'm sorry to roll up my sleeves and dive into this gray area of making money and what it means to make money and what it means to be wealthy and does it necessarily have to be a poison and again the twins they diverge there in a in a way that worked for me very beautifully so I have be who's really interested in making money more because it is a measure of success for her it is a marker that shows that she has achieved her goals and then you have her brother Jake who grew up in the shadow of their mother's misery of not having what she had once had and really wants to make as much money as he can with as little effort as possible and then show it off and so he really becomes the archetype of that excess that you think of in the 20s and he gets burned a couple times i mean there's a Ponzi scheme that starts off his experience that was real i found I found this and I and I initially had contemplated writing about the Florida real estate bubble which was also in the 1920s um my editor said "No that's a different book."

But I wanted to look at this idea that you can make money and you can be driven to make money and that doesn't necessarily have to telegraph to that you are a selfish and bad person but it can samantha my takeaway from the book is all about girl power i mean this is a story about a woman with grit and determination and at the same time though what makes it so fascinating is there's this cloud of impending doom because the reader already knows where we are heading tell me about making creating that that aura so I feel like this is a writing exercise right you want to have some ticking clock in your book you want your reader to want to turn pages because there's something that's going to happen and are is it going to happen in time or isn't it i like to read books that have that kind of narrative tension and drive and so I the minute I decided to write this I said "Oh my god like what better ticking clock than this thing that everybody in the world knows is coming."

And it was really fun to play with and I don't think it gives too much away that it becomes a bit of a Chick-en little story where Bee sees the writing on the wall and can't get anybody to believe her um well you know it's interesting because we already know what's what's happening so that I think that that's what made the crafting of it so so fascinating what do you enjoy most about writing historical fiction the research you're a research girl i love the research i take that back i love the research but I also love I was talking to a thriller writer Andrea Barts Andy Barts and she said "I don't know how you write historical fiction."

Um I need everything to be in my own world and for me I think what's wonderful about writing historical fiction and the research leads you there you have this factual spine and these markers that you can kind of bounce off of and then invent within and I like that idea i like representing the facts and the truth and giving the reader a picture of a period of time and that comes from lots of research and then being able to make stuff up in the middle at the same time there is this balancing act between telling a good story and having the authenticity of of the period is there not yes absolutely absolutely so what's the best part of writing for you editing i don't know that anyone has ever said that before i am one of the one of those writers who I love write i love writing the first draft and I hate writing the first draft it's hard but once all everything's sort of barfed out on the page I love the ability to take it like a puzzle take it apart and put it back together in a way that makes more sense the moments when I look at a scene and I say "Oh this is why this isn't working because I didn't do this or I didn't do that or that's unnecessary."

Those to me are like the most wonderful kismmet kind of moments like so how do you start do you outline do you have a plan i outline have you ever had a manuscript that has never seen the light of day i my first novel which I wrote in a continuing ed novel writing class before I wrote the labotamus wife was it's not I never finished it but I probably have about 250 pages and it was a contemporary story basically about me but not me it was about a woman who m who lives in the suburbs and is seemingly happy and has everything but she's not happy which was where I was when my kids were little and I stopped working and then she goes off and does outlandish things that I never did but um that one never saw the light of day it sounds cathartic anyway um to write historical fiction obviously you need to research and you said you love researching is there a particular period in history that you haven't written about yet that might be next so I I have a third I have two third books in the works one of them is contemporary the other one is another total left turn i think I'm interested in arcane angles to things um I studied Eastern European history in college i spent a semester in Budapest in 1994 so very soon after the Berlin Wall fell and all the other communist countries fell um so that one is a dual timeline it's almost it's historical now because it was almost 30 years ago but it takes place in communist Romania under the Chaoescos and then there's a second timeline that is contemporary Manhattan and contemporary Romania [Music] your previous book which was a bestseller The Labotamist Wife a really particularly shocking part of medical history which is an excellent read for people that may not know about that book do you want to talk about what went into that so as I said I was writing a contemporary my first try ever at writing a novel was this contemporary story about a woman in a life that should make her happy that doesn't and I like to because I was a history major and I do like love to learn and I spend a lot of time in the car because I have two children who don't yet drive um I listen to a lot of non-fiction in the car and I was listening to a non-fiction book called Get Welloon by a young woman named Jennifer Wright it's fantastic and she wrote it before the COVID pandemic but it's history's greatest or worst plagues and the heroes who fought them and one of the chapters is about labbotomy and it it while I knew that it was a 20th century development it didn't really strike me until that moment when I was listening to it that Labbotoy's heyday was in the late 40s and early 50s and I had this epiphany where I said "Oh my god if my unhappy protagonist had been in live in the early 1950s maybe she would have been lobbomized."

And that was the seed of the story and I ended up writing a novel that is it has two female protagonists one who is the wife of the fictionalized labbotomist who is based very closely on Walder Freeman II who is the man who pioneered labbotomy in the US and invented the icepic labbotomy which was the quickie 10minute one which I think people would be very surprised to know that as in the 50s depression among women yes labbotomy was correct one of by the by the 50s depression and postpartum which didn't have a diagnosis at the time and that's my secondary um character is has postpartum depression migraine headaches unruly children there were all these things that they thought labbotomy was a great answer for in this tiny moment in history and so I I kind of went down that rabbit hole and wrote a whole novel about it great novel and a chilling part of history yes The Tradeoff has everything that historical fiction readers want captivating heroine and a look at one of the most dramatic moments in American history samantha Green Woodruff this has been such a pleasure thank you i'm Anne Bok please join me on the next Between the Covers [Music] [Applause]