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Back After This: A Novel - Hardcover

Holmes, Linda

 
9780593599259: Back After This: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059359925X ISBN 13: 9780593599259
Verlag: Ballantine Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A podcast producer agrees to host a new series about modern dating—but will the show jeopardize her chance at finding real love? From the New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over and Flying Solo.

Longtime podcast producer Cecily Foster has always operated behind the scenes. For years, she’s worked toward hosting her own show, putting everything, including her love life, on the backburner. So when her boss finally offers her the chance, she’s over the moon.

But there’s a catch. Actually, two catches:

1) The show will be about Cecily’s dating life 
2) Cecily will be mentored by renowned dating coach/life coach/influencer Eliza Cassidy

Cecily would rather do anything else than put her singledom on display, especially since the last time she mixed work with romance the outcome was catastrophic. But when Cecily’s boss tells her that doing the show is the only way to protect her mentee's job, she realizes she has no other choice.

To make matters even more complicated, Cecily finds herself unable to stop thinking about Will, a photographer she serendipitously met while chasing a runaway dog down a busy street. Even though there are sparks between the two, Eliza forbids Cecily from dating Will, whom she believes is no better than Cecily's disappointing exes.

As Cecily struggles to balance her real romantic life and the one Eliza wants to create for her, she finds herself at a crossroads. Will she fall back into old patterns, or is this her chance to finally find love that lasts?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Linda Holmes is the New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over and Flying Solo, a pop culture correspondent for NPR, and one of the hosts of the popular podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which has held sold-out live shows in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and elsewhere. She appears regularly on NPR's radio shows including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. Before NPR, she wrote for New York magazine online and for TV Guide, as well as for the groundbreaking site Television Without Pity. In her free time, she watches far too many romantic comedies, bakes bread, plays with her wonderful dog, and tries to keep various plants thriving.

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Chapter One

The Pitch

In Studio D, I was trying to record a short intro that should have taken less than fifteen minutes. The board in front of me was lit up, the mic lights were green, my headphones were on, and the host was in the chair on the other side of the glass. I pressed my talk button. “Tell me what you had for breakfast.”

“Well,” Miles began, leaning intimately toward the microphone, as if I were really asking. “I had an omelet. Four eggs, goat cheese, and arugula. Oh—­and a diced tomato.” He knew that one purpose of this exercise was to make sure his P’s didn’t pop unpleasantly at the poor public, but he managed never to eat anything for breakfast with P’s in it. No potatoes, no pepper, no prosciutto or pancakes.

“I’ve never known anybody who eats as many eggs as he does,” Julie muttered from the chair next to me in the booth, firing up her laptop. “I’m never sure whether he actually smells like eggs, or whether I just think he smells like eggs because I look at him and I can’t stop thinking about eggs.”

I pressed my button again. “I need to hear some P’s, Miles.”

“Oh!” he said, always freshly surprised, months into production. “Peter Piper.” I heard Julie moan in the corner.

“A few more than that, please,” I told him, “and back off the mic about an inch, you don’t need to swallow it. As we’ve talked about before.” I looked over at Julie. “Too much?” I asked.

She nudged her glasses up on her nose. She must have gotten a late start with her daughter and not had time for her contacts. “Nah. I think it’s charming how every day is like the first day. He’s like a newborn baby.”

“Pizza!” he said. “Pickles, popcorn. Sergeant Pepper. Yellow Submarine.”

How had he gotten lost over the course of seven words? “Right,” I muttered. I fiddled with the sliders and talked to him again. “Okay. Go ahead on the intro, please.”

Miles had come to audio from one of the biggest newspapers in the country, where he’d won the biggest awards in journalism for reporting on the biggest corruption scandal in the history of his state. My boss, Toby, had been perched atop a mountain of investor money, jonesing for respect after getting Palmetto on the map with a pulpy true-­crime podcast and an addictive series of marital-­infidelity confessionals. He was trying to keep the place on track after Rob, his co-founder, who had recruited me, cashed out. Toby had snapped Miles up like a blue-­ribbon hog at the state fair, bidding and bidding until the competition threw up its hands. The paper could, after all, hire three young reporters (or twelve interns) for what it would cost them to keep Miles, which was easy math for people who now worked for venture capitalists. So Miles Banfield became a podcast host, interviewing newsmakers, presenting some of his own reporting, and delivering commentaries that Julie and I would cut down from seven or eight minutes to a tight two and a half.

He was very bad at it. He made mouth noises—­tsks and gulps and smacks of all kinds—­while other people were talking. He would overlap the first few words of the next question with the final few words of the last answer, which signaled his impatience and rattled guests. He asked the same question in different ways four times in a row. He refused to read any of the research Julie stayed up late creating for him and then told Toby we hadn’t prepared him. He would spend most of a half-­hour interview asking a prolific author about the dedication in a single mid-­career book, ignoring our efforts to interrupt, sometimes pointedly taking off his headphones. He clattered his watch on the table every time I didn’t remind him to take it off. He hummed tunelessly while I was trying to solve technical problems. I couldn’t get him to improve his active listening past an obnoxious “oh-­oh-­oh-­OHHH,” which he occasionally unleashed ten times in the same interview. A former senator emailed me once and complimented me for editing his interview with her to the point where you couldn’t hear him making “that car alarm noise.” I told no one.

And now, as he spoke, I heard his mouth clacking and sucking, like an octopus playing with a wheel of cheese. He was three sentences in when I hit the talk button again to interrupt him. “Hey, did you by any chance drink Mountain Dew before you came into the studio again?”

He paused. Looked at us through the glass. Shrugged. “So what?”

I silently turned to Julie, who chuckled and looked determinedly at her notes. “Oh, boy,” she said. “Just remember, it could be worse. It could be the true-­crime guy with the big glass of milk.”

I leaned on the desk, flattening my palms against it on either side of my script so I wouldn’t raise my voice. He had already told the boss—­his and mine—­that he did not like it when I raised my voice. So I inhaled deeply, puffed out air several times until my lungs emptied of what Toby called my tone, and spoke again. “Do you remember when I told you drinking Mountain Dew makes you sound like your mouth is sticking to itself?”

“No.”

“Well, I did. A couple of times. There’s a bottle of water right there. Take a few sips. And please don’t drink Mountain Dew when you know we’re tracking. It doesn’t help you sound your best.”

Looking away from me, down at his phone, he said, “It’s journalism, Cecily. The audience is smart. I don’t think they care what I drank with lunch. Let’s not get distracted by the small stuff.”

“Well,” I said. “Your smart audience has things to listen to that don’t sound like they were recorded inside a Saint Bernard’s mouth.” I heard Julie snort. “The microphone you are talking into cost as much as my first car. You’re in a room designed to make sure that the sounds that come out of your face are the one thing that everyone is one hundred percent guaranteed to hear. Right now, that means it’s picking up every time your lips pry themselves off your gums. So again, please stop drinking Mountain Dew before we track.”

I could hear Julie take a breath. “Oh shit,” she whispered.

Miles turned and looked at me, hard. I raised my eyebrows at him. Tilted my head. He rolled his eyes, then held up one hand in my direction. He put down his phone. “Let’s take it again,” he said. “You wrote ‘debut’ in here, and ‘introduction’ will sound better.”

I had written “introduction” originally. Over email, he had changed it to “debut.”

It took Miles thirty-­two tries to get through the seventy-­two-­second intro, interrupted by multiple water-­swishing breaks. Halfway through, I had a Slack from Toby: “Can you come by when you’re done? Have great news to share.” I promised I’d be there soon, and after I saved the tracks and shut down the board, I turned to Julie and said, “I have to go see Toby.”

She scowled. “What’s he want?”

“No idea. He says it’s good news.”

“Oh no,” she said.

“I bet he wants to tell me something about promos.” Toby had Slacked me throughout the previous day about fifteen-­second promos versus twenty, because...

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Verlag
Ballantine Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059359925X
ISBN 13 
9780593599259
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
SC
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/

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