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My guest today is Caroline Woods, author of The Lunar Housewife, listed in the Visual Arts category on Art In Fiction.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/0nJmxXJcrQQ

• How Caroline discovered the CIA's secret program to fund and shape American literary culture during the Cold War, including its involvement in the founding of the Paris Review, and why she saw a novel in it.
• The real-life women who inspired Louise: the aspiring writers and girlfriends surrounding the men at the center of the 1950s New York literary scene, and the female journalist who eventually broke the story decades later.
• The novel within a novel structure: why Louise's book had to be science fiction, how its chapters shift as Louise's disillusionment deepens, and the freedom of writing a melodramatic '50s romance as an "implied author" who isn't Caroline.
• The Hemingway interview at the heart of the book, based on Lillian Ross's real New Yorker profile, and how Hemingway, who is portrayed here as a kind of fairy godmother to Louise, inadvertently became Caroline's writing coach for the whole novel.
• Class tension in the 1950s literary world: why Louise's working-class origins matter in a scene dominated by Harvard and Yale men, and what that gave her as a character and as someone for readers to root for.
• How the title came about -- originally The Long Leash, the CIA's own term for the program -- and why her agent's suggestion of The Lunar Housewife did so much more work for the book.
• Writing The Lunar Housewife in spring 2020, during COVID lockdown, with a four-year-old and a one-year-old, writing after bedtime every night, and why that particular moment gave the lunar colony chapters their flavor.
• Why the 1950s is having a moment in historical fiction: the scrim of conformity and domestic bliss concealing postwar darkness, the seeds of the counterculture, and women who had tasted wartime freedom and had it yanked back.
• The common thread across Caroline's novels -- The Mesmerist, For All the Moons, and The Lunar Housewife -- women who question the status quo and push against systems, often in the face of government interference in private life.
• Caroline's advice to writers: write every single day (not just on Saturdays), and write what genuinely entertains you because if you're having fun, the reader will feel it.
• Reading from the opening pages of The Lunar Housewife: the launch party for Downtown magazine's second issue.

Read more about Caroline Woods on her website: https://www.carolinewoodsauthor.com/

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Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany, A Woman of Note, The Muse of Fire, and The Choir. Find out more on her website.