Authors Mary Kay Andrews, Kristy Woodson Harvey, Kristin Harmel and Patti Callahan Henry dish on their hugely popular podcast, the effect it has on authors and booksellers and how they maintain a deep friendship amid writing and real life.
The Friends & Fiction podcast celebrated its five-year anniversary this past April. During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when book tours were canceled, bestselling authors and friends Kristy Woodson Harvey, Mary Kay Andrews, Kristin Harmel and Patti Callahan Henry turned to online collaboration in the form of a weekly web show and podcast—thus, “Friends and Fiction” (F&F) was born.
Now, the podcast has produced over 266 episodes including guests such as Jodi Picoult, Tommy Orange, Kristin Hannah, TJ Klune, Colleen Oakley and Taylor Jenkins Reid. F&F has garnered quite the following through the years, amassing over one million readers across the authors’ social media pages and mailing lists. Hosts Harvey, Andrews, Harmel and Henry chatted with Deep South‘s Haley Roberts about friendship, the “Friends & Fiction effect” and the balance between podcasting and writing.
Haley Roberts: How has the podcast made you more fearless as writers? What have you learned from one another and from your guests about the craft?
Patti Callahan Henry: I think I can speak for all of us that the podcast has definitely made us braver, whether it’s approaching a subject or, as Mary Kay often says, ‘If it doesn’t scare you, why do it?’ I think that every single author we interview gives us something to carry away and something we can hold in our hands and take with us. Different authors have inspired us for different reasons over five years and in over 400 interviews. There have been so many places and times that have been “aha” moments in our own work.
Kristy Woodson Harvey: When we started the show, I was getting ready to write the book The Wedding Veil, which was my only book containing a historical storyline with real-life characters. I had the idea for it, and then the world shut down. I thought there was no way I could do it or research this book out in public. These ladies said ‘yes you can’ and ‘stop trying to get out of doing the hard thing,’ because they knew that deep down I was just nervous about doing something different and new. They really encouraged me and helped me have the confidence to be able to step into that.
Mary Kay Andrews: I think overall being a part of this writing community and the greater reading community has helped deepen my fiction. I write kind of light usually, and I’ve learned that it’s OK to go to the dark, because if you don’t have any darkness, you can’t define light. Every author that we have on the show we ask for writing tips. I’ve taken so much away from that. I remember that we had Jean Hanff Korelitz on the show, who’d written The Plot, and that book is dark. There are no characters in there that you root for, or at least I didn’t! The book was so memorable, and I asked her about that. She said, ‘It’s not my job to create characters that you like. It’s my job to tell a story and to keep the plot moving.’ That was an eye-opener for me.
Kristin Harmel: Adding on to what the others said, I think having the community of Friends & Fiction, specifically the support of these other three women here with me, has helped me to really spread my wings. I know that I have their support and encouragement. Like Kristy said, sometimes you just need them to push you a little bit past your comfort zone. I think we’ve all done that for each other at one point or another, which is important. As Mary Kay was saying, I think that we’ve learned so much from the authors we have on the show. Every week, we talk to them about how they wrote their books or what their advice might be, and every person says something just a little bit different. There’s no one way to do this. The way I write is fine and is what gets me to the finish line. I don’t have to try to write like somebody else or use someone else’s process—that has freed me to be a little bit more myself as a writer. It’s an important step in finding and clarifying your own voice.
HR: Booksellers say that book events have been better attended since F&F came on the scene. Can you speak to this “Friends & Fiction effect?”
PCH: It is astounding to see the community that has been created. I won’t even say we created it, rather we started it, and the readers are the ones who have become the community that shows up for us and for each other. Some of our guests tell us, ‘Your Friends and Fiction crew showed up!’ They do. I just wrote up a newsletter called ‘showing up.’ That’s what this community does. They show up for us, for our readers, for each other and for the authors that we’ve had on the show.
KWH: We started during the pandemic, so none of these people who were chit-chatting with each other online had actually met in person. Very specifically, we have a F&F book club that two of our members run together, and it was sort of their brainchild. They had been doing all this work together and had become really good friends that had never met in real life. I was doing one of my events, and they met in person for the first time. They were so emotional, and of course I was, too. People have made real, true friendships just on the internet through this group. That was very cool.
MKA: I love that members of the community have found books outside of their previous comfort zone. I don’t want to say that we’re tastemakers—we’re not—but I will say time and again that we’ve seen on the F&F Facebook page people chiming in saying they enjoyed books that they didn’t think they’d like for the voice or the genre. I hope that’s one of the great F&F effects and that we’re widening the community. Diversity and inclusion is important. When we started, we looked at each other and said, ‘Look, we’re five white ladies. We’ve got to open the doors and have other voices in the room with us.’ I like that a lot, and I think our community does too.
KH: For each of our book launches each year, we do one launch together. We launched Patti’s most recent book together in Atlanta. We had a launch for Kristy’s book at the end of May in Charleston, and one for my book in June in New Jersey. Mary Kay doesn’t have a new hardback this year, so I don’t want to leave her out. That’s part of the deal we’ve made—that we do that for each other. That tends to bring out a large number of people from the F&F community. I think every time we do an event like that, or even when it’s just one or two of us, there’s a real sense of community at those events. It’s not just people there for us. It’s people there to see each other and to deepen the friendships that have begun online. I think we often say that book people are the best people, and readers tend to be really good, empathetic people. This is a real case of finding one’s people and getting the chance to be with them in person. It’s a beautiful thing.
HR: What does community mean to authors in their writing careers?
PCH: It means everything! When I first started writing, I didn’t know a single writer. In fact, Mary Kay was the first ‘real’ writer I had ever met other than going to book signings. I cornered her at a Christmas party and said, ‘Will you have lunch with me?’ From that moment on, I do believe that the writing community and indie booksellers are the mainstay and the blood-life of what I do. I think our community uplifts us and encourages us. It also holds us accountable when we’re not doing the things we should be doing. It informs our work. The community of both readers and of other authors and the authors we have on the show have created something that’s a really big boat that we’re all on some choppy seas in.
KWH: To be very plain about it, we write the book, and that’s amazing. But the readers are the ones that make all this happen. They’re the ones that come to the events and get us on bestseller lists and allow us to keep writing. They’re buying the books and let us keep writing. The same goes for the independent booksellers. They’re the ones out there saying, ‘I think you’d really like this book.’ None of us would be able to continue to be writers or to do this for our career if it wasn’t for the amazing community that supports us.
MKA: I came to understand how much the community meant to me after my daughter died of Covid side effects three years ago. This community right here showed up. They came to my house for my daughter’s going away. Funnily enough, they all showed up in black at my house, and my crazy decorator friend thought they were the catering crew and put them to work.
KWH: We loved being your catering crew.
KH: Didn’t we break something?
KWH: It was me. I broke a crystal candy dish. I owe you one.
MKA: I’ve never forgotten about it. Kristin also had breast cancer a few years ago. We went through that with her, and the community went through that with us. People kept saying, ‘What can I do?’ I got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cards—prayer cards, donations in my daughter’s name. To this day, people still do that, and that reminds you that it ain’t just about the books.
KH: I will add to that in saying I had the same experience when I went through breast cancer. I had to go through a lumpectomy and chemotherapy and radiation. It was a very difficult chapter in my life, and I found a great deal of support in the broader community of F&F, who sent me hundreds of cards and gifts and words of encouragement. It was a similar experience to what Mary Kay had. To have the support of these three women and our Managing Director Meg when I went through a dark period like that was everything. We built this community almost by accident. This wasn’t something we necessarily intended to do, but it turned out to be the community that I think has sustained us all through various challenges in our lives and our writing careers.
HR: Did you ever envision yourself as having a side hustle as a podcaster? What have you learned about podcasting?
PCH: When we first started this, it was Mary Kay who said, ‘I think we should put our discussion on Facebook.’ I was a naysayer. I thought, who’s going to listen to us talk about publishing and writing and being stuck at home? I had already produced two behind-the-scenes podcast series for two of my books Becoming Mrs. Lewis and Surviving Savannah. I’d already been doing podcasts as the interviewer and not just the interviewee, so I loved doing that enough that I wanted to do another after doing the first one. I was ready to do it again, but I just didn’t realize how doing this on Facebook and YouTube Live would gather such a community. We tried to do it by ourself for a few shows. It didn’t go well at all. Within the first six shows, we hired Audivita to be our audiovisual techs and hired Meg to harness this circus.
KWH: I don’t think I had listened to that many podcasts before. I didn’t know anything about it. I do remember Audivita being a happy coincidence. I was filming someone else’s podcast, and they were using Audivita. When we needed someone, our original idea was to get someone to get us online. Then, it evolved to thinking that if we’re going to have someone there recording, we might as well have the podcast. It was an evolution. Of course, people can access us the way that works best for them. I’ve definitely learned a lot through the process and am glad I don’t have to do the tech end with editing and uploading.
MKA: I think we became accidental entrepreneurs. We did not at any point anticipate anything that subsequently happened with us. All along the way, we’re running and trying to catch up with the runaway train. I think we’ve learned some skills we didn’t know we needed. Luckily, we learned that each of us had some skills—what’s that line from ‘Taken?’ ‘I have a particular set of skills, and I will use them.’ I don’t think I have a skillset except for maybe comic relief.
PCH: You also have such creative ideas. None of this would’ve happened if you hadn’t said, ‘Let’s put this on Facebook and let people listen in on our conversations.’ We met a couple times without airing anything as almost a support group. Mary Kay was the one who wanted to put it on Facebook and see if anyone wanted to join the conversation.
KH: Mary Kay mentioned her daughter, Katie, earlier. I remember her crawling around the floor and being our connection person in the beginning. There would be no us if it weren’t for Katie in the beginning. She really provided all of the technical help we needed.
MKA: I don’t think any of us anticipated that we’d have to be camera-ready so many Wednesday nights.
PCH: Five years of Wednesday nights with lipstick.
KH: That was a big deal during Covid when getting up and getting dressed was a huge triumph for the day.
HR: Running F&F on top of busy careers as authors must be a ton of work. What makes you continue doing it?
PCH: Each other, our dedication to the community we’ve built and a great amount of curiosity. We love interviewing other authors and hearing what they have to say. This is something we started out of a love of reading, writing and indie bookstores and libraries. That love is what keeps us going. I always say that how things start is how they go. That’s how it started.
KWH: I’m about to go on tour, and Patti just got off. That’s always a reminder to me of what F&F really is, because we still have hundreds of people that show up every Wednesday night live at 7 p.m. Sometimes you forget about that part. To then go out on tour and to get to see the people in this community that continuously show up for us is amazing. There’s someone that comes up to us at every event that we do that says, ‘Friends & Fiction saved my life.’ That is so powerful and is such a reminder of how we all need community and how important that is.
MKA: We just don’t know how to stop!
PCH: The train has left the station, and nobody knows how to turn the brakes on.
KH: I agree with all the reasons that they’ve all said—including not knowing how to stop. We have just found such a passion for this, and we did so much of the groundwork early on in figuring out both by accident and intentionally how this would work. I beg part of this was hiring Meg Walker as our managing director. She does an enormous amount of the behind-the-scenes work. If we were doing that on our own, we wouldn’t still be going. She’s a huge part of this. It takes a village, and we found and built our village early with people who could keep this going and figure out how to divide the labor among us. It has been something that has touched our hearts and souls. I cannot imagine our lives without F&F.
HR: What is the secret sauce that makes the four of you tick as a group?
PCH: Our secret sauce is friendship and honesty and vulnerability. You just heard Mary Kay and Kristin talk about hard things. We don’t fake it. We started off not realizing what it would become, so we never started pretending to be something we’re not.
KWH: That’s so true. People always come up to us at the live events and say, ‘You’re really friends! You can really tell when you’re on the stage.’ There’s no pretense. We’re 100 percent who we’re meant to be. Sometimes, I look back on that and think about what the chances are that we all had books coming out, that Mary Kay would reach out to all of us, that we’d all say yes. I think there’s something kind of written in the stars about it. I think we were supposed to come together, even if it wasn’t for the community of Friends & Fiction. We were supposed to be in each other’s lives in this really big way.
MKA: I think the secret sauce is the morning text chain. We have a connection that runs deeper than books and writing. Without that, we’re just a bunch of writers trying to sell books. Because we do have this genuine connection, I think our readers and the people who are members of our community sense that.
KH: I echo friendships as being at the core of this. We couldn’t do this if we didn’t feel the way we do about each other. Another thing that has worked really in our favor is that we all bring something a little bit different to the table. We’re all slightly different kinds of writers and people. We don’t agree on everything. We don’t always have the same vision for the way forward. But we respect each other so tremendously. We have been able to come together with the different gifts we have and make this into something special.
HR: Do you have any seasonal or genre-specific book recommendations? Any recent favorite reads?
PCH: I’ve been on the road, so I’ve been listening to audiobooks. I listened to three I really loved and am listening to a fourth now. I listened to The Tell by Amy Griffin, which has been everywhere. I also listened to Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, and I loved it so much. It’s such a Patti book. It’s mysterious and takes place on a remote island with a secret and a love story. I also listened to Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall. She’s a Simon and Schuster author like I am, and I knew it was going to be great because it’s set in the English countryside with a family secret. I loved it. Right now, I’m listening to Isola by Allegra Goodman, which is another kind of remote island-based book. All of those have a similar flavor to them.
KWH: I’ve enjoyed a bunch recently. I will say The Unraveling of Julia by Lisa Scottoline was a great book. She’s a real Friends & Fiction favorite.
MKA: I’ve got a thiller and a rom-com. It’s a Love Story by Annabel Monaghan is adorable and funny and real. It’s got depth to it, which there are some rom-coms that are just sparkle. There’s actually substance beneath the sparkle of this book. For a really gripping thriller, Julie Clark’s The Ghostwriter.
KH: We’re probably not supposed to recommend each other’s, but I feel like no conversation about F&F this year would be complete without mentioning Beach House Rules, which is Kristy’s book. At its heart is a group of women who come together to support each other. Although it is certainly not our story or the story of F&F, it’s a story about how friendship can lift up and change your life. It shows how sometimes in the dark moments the way to find the light is to find the people around you that can be the light. I think that’s what we found with F&F and what you find in the pages of Beach House Rules.
Friends & Fiction airs live every Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET on Facebook and YouTube.
