Episode 598 || Into the Backlist: Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object

Episode 598 || Into the Backlist: Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object
From the Front Porch

This week on From the Front Porch, it’s a new episode of Into the Backlist! Today, Annie changes her focus from new releases to dive into the backlist: the books that came out years ago, the books that didn’t get enough attention, the books you may stumble upon while browsing in an indie bookstore like The Bookshelf.

To purchase the books mentioned in this episode, stop by The Bookshelf in Thomasville, visit our website (search episode 598) or download and shop on The Bookshelf’s official app:

Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object by Laurie Colwin

Other titles mentioned in the episode:

From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in South Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf’s daily happenings on Instagram, Tiktok, and Facebook, and all the books from today’s episode can be purchased online through our store website, www.bookshelfthomasville.com. 

A full transcript of today’s episode can be found below.

Special thanks to Dylan and his team at Studio D Podcast Production for sound and editing and for our theme music, which sets the perfect warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations. 

This week, Annie is reading The Dog Stars by Peter Heller.

If you liked what you heard in today’s episode, tell us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also support us on Patreon, where you can access bonus content, monthly live Porch Visits with Annie, our monthly live Patreon Book Club with Bookshelf staffers, Conquer a Classic episodes with Hunter, and more. Just go to patreon.com/fromthefrontporch.

We’re so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week.

Our Executive Producers are...Beth, Cammy Tidwell, Jammie Treadwell, Joseph Shorter IV, Kimberly, Linda Lee Drozt, Martha, Nicole Marsee, Stephanie Dean, Gene Queens and Wendi Jenkins.

Transcript:

Annie Jones: [squeaky porch swing] Welcome to From the Front Porch, a conversational podcast about books, small business, and life in the South. [music plays out]

"In her unswerving correctness and by her unflappable elegance, she made me aware of a curious side product of tragedy, embarrassment. Grief and mourning single you out. You are the one afflicted while the rest of the world goes off scot-free, even if you know that death catches up with everyone. If you are recovering from the death of someone near you, you are its victim. It happened to you and not to anyone else." 

-Lori Colwin, Shine on Bright and Dangerous Object.

[as music fades out]

I'm Annie B. Jones, owner of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in beautiful downtown Thomasville, Georgia, and this week we are back with an installment of our podcast series, Into the Backlist. But first, have you ever wondered what The Bookshelf actually looks like? Consider following us on Instagram bookshelftville. We post behind-the-scenes pictures and give important updates on store hours, events, and special promotions. We'd love to see you over there. Now, back to the show. Because From the Front Porch is a podcast very much wrapped up in the comings and goings of our indie bookstore, many of the books we feature are new, or many times they're not even yet released books, which means backlist titles, books published more than a year ago, can get lost or overlooked. We launched the podcast series, Into the Backlist, back in 2024 after I got to thinking about the magic of indie bookstores and how we try to replicate that in-store magic for you, our long-distance customer and podcast listener. One of the most magical things to me about shopping in an indie bookstore is the serendipitous nature of it, how you might stumble upon a book you've never seen before and be inspired to read it or to buy it because of an in-store recommendation, or simply because the book begs to be read from the shelf.

[00:02:20] Now, don't get me wrong, I get that serendipitous feeling from new titles all the time, but it seems to especially come from an unsung book, a book that's been out for a while, or a book that only a particular bookstore seems to know about. So on the podcast now, every so often, I dig through the imaginary Bookshelf vault and highlight the backlist titles I think are books we keep on our shelves even though they were published years ago, books we secretly hope a customer stumbles upon, asks us about, and eventually takes home for themselves. For past Into the Backlist episodes, I have discussed Frances and Bernard, The Ensemble, The Mothers, Defending Jacob, History of Wolves, and The Sea Will Tell, Walking with Sam, and The Great Believers. All of those episode numbers can be found in the show notes in case you want to go back and listen to those episodes. Today, I'm discussing a book by a backlist author I uncovered at another indie bookstore, and now I feel it's my duty to share with you Lori Colwin's Shine on Bright and Dangerous Object. I discovered Laurie Colwin at a New York bookstore. I think it was The Strand, and actually, since I typed up these notes, I confirmed this. I went back and found my copies, and sure enough because my copies still had the stickers on them and the bookmarks from the store-- I like to do that, little time capsules-- it was The Strand. I thought it could've been Book Culture. I didn't think it was McNally Jackson. Sure enough, went back, looked, it was 2021 at The Strand. I had heard of Laurie Colwin before, but only, and I'm not quite sure how to say this, only in the air. Her name felt whispered among authors I knew and respected or friends who were really good readers, authors I wanted to write like, I felt like they were talking about Laurie Colwin, but quietly, like she was a secret they didn't want to share.

[00:04:13] She felt a little bit like Nora Ephron, a specific kind of New Yorker vibe, New York era that I really personally had no business knowing anything about because, as we all know, that's not my personal story. She also felt a little bit unsung. I think that's what I mean by whisper. She felt like the best-kept secret, and maybe that's not true if you live in New York or if you live in New England, but here it felt like we're all talking always about Nora Ephron, or at least in my circles we are, but who is talking about Laurie Colwin? And it felt like writers I really respected, readers I really respected were talking about her. However, it also felt like she was too good to talk about out loud. Folks felt a little gatekeeper-y about her. Over the course of her career, Laurie Colwin wrote five novels, three short story collections, and two volumes of essays that really read more like memoirs. She also contributed regularly to food columns for Gourmet Magazine, which I think is why, in my mind, I've always thought of her as Nora Ephron meets Ruth Reichl. Her volume of work is actually astounding considering the limited time in which she had to do it. She died unexpectedly at the age of 48, but her books live on. I found two of them on a shelf at The Strand in 2021 and promptly brought them home. A Big Storm Knocked It Over, which I believe was actually published posthumously, and Another Marvelous Thing. Of course, those books actually then just sat on my bookshelf for years. I bought them from The Strand with every intention of reading them right then, right that very minute, but instead they just sat on my shelf.

[00:05:53] I don't know why I'm like this, except aren't you? I assume you are. I assume that's why you like this podcast. Where it's not that you hoard books, but if I'm at a bookstore and I see a book I've never seen before or I see a book that I just have to have, I buy it, and I know I might not read it that minute, but I really do believe, and I know I've said this on the show before, I really do believe that books find you when they're meant to. It's probably some of the only woo-woo magic I believe in. And so I think books find you at the right time. And while I bought that book in 2021, in 2024, a couple of months after losing a pregnancy, I picked up A Big Storm Knocked It Over for the very first time, only to discover that book was about Jane Louise, a Manhattan woman approaching 40, I think she's 39 in the book, who gets married, then pregnant with her first baby alongside her best friend. That is the premise, but it functions more as an overarching theme than a real plot point. That particular novel progresses more or less alongside Jane Louise's pregnancy. But even the birth of her child is just treated as this passing occurrence. You would think the book would be building to that moment, but instead, as I recall, it's a simple, brief sentence in the book, in the narrative.

[00:07:07] And so at first even a character-driven fiction evangelist was a little bit flummoxed by how nothing was happening in this book, but by the end I went back, and this is the beauty. Guys, this is the beauty of tearing up your pages. By the time I was done, I finished and kind of thought, "Did I like that?" And then I looked and my book was totally marked up. Line after line. And so that's when I knew, "Okay, I'll probably be reading more of Laurie Colwin." And you would think to yourself, "Oh, Annie, didn't you just immediately then pick up the second book you had bought by her at The Strand?" No, I did not. I picked up Another Marvelous Thing earlier this year on a whim. It's sometimes like shopping your own shelves, and I firmly believe we should read the books we own. I do. I don't want to be wasteful. I use our little free library. I donate things I know I'm not going to read. But also every so often I hold onto something, and then when it's time to go on a trip, or in this case I was going on a solo vacation to the beach, and Another Marvelous Thing has this very wintery cover, and it was February, and I thought this looks perfect. And so that is when I picked up that book. So if you're counting, I bought the books in 2021, read one in 2024, one in 2025, and I still haven't read the books for which Laurie Colwin is most famous, including her memoir, or her collection of essays and recipes, called Home Cooking, which is beloved by readers. I feel like if you Google Laurie Colwin, that's the book that's going to come up.

[00:08:33] So when a friend of mine here in Thomasville said that her local book club was reading Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, I decided to too, even if I couldn't make the book club in person. I'm so glad I did. Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object was Colwin's first novel, originally published in 1975. My limited experience with her work tells me she writes best about ordinary people, small moments, quiet lives, and Shine On is definitely written in that same vein. The book is about Ollie Bax, who at the ripe age of 27 becomes a widow after the death of her vibrant husband, Sam. My mom has always described her marriage to my dad as a heartbeat, where my dad supplies the steady rhythm and my mom provides the fun blips and kind of spikes of excitement. Colwin writes Sam and Ollie's marriage and dynamic in the same way, with Sam, adventurous and outgoing, our now what we would call maybe a golden retriever energy. He's the blip, and Ollie is the steady but quiet, and perhaps in her view, boring presence. When Sam dies, Ollie doesn't just lose him. She loses a bit of the personality she's cultivated for herself, and she finds it difficult to navigate her relationships with their friends and family. The book chronicles Ollie's grief and her new quest to start over and reassemble her life. Like A Big Storm Knocked It Over, it's not a bombastic novel where much happens. So in A Big Storm Knocked It Over, yes, you have this pregnancy, but you think it's building to the birth of the child, and it's really not. The book is really more about friendship and marriage.

[00:10:14] And in this book you think, "Oh my gosh, her husband has died. It's going to be this real kind of gut-wrenching book," almost like When Breath Becomes Air or something like that, but it's really not that at all. In fact, it's really about Ollie, and it's a little bit about Sam's brother, Patrick, too. It's about New England and New York and the right ways to do things, or the right ways some people think there are to do things. It's about resilience and recovery. And it's Ollie's book. It's she who steals the show, who Colwin paints with compassion, but also without as much tenderness as you'd expect from what could be described as a grief novel. Honestly, if I were building an endcap of grief books, I'm not sure I would even think of this one. And you know what? I was doing research for this episode, and I was googling books about young widows, and the funny thing was this book doesn't show up on any of those lists. None of them, not even the human-made ones. Forget the AI ones, which are a absolute disaster. But the human-made lists, like on blogs and stuff, this book doesn't find its way to any of those, and I think that's because it's not really a grief novel, it's a coming-of-age novel. And I don't know if the lack of tenderness-- and I don't mean that in a bad way-- has to do with kind of the New England of it all. The characters Colwin has created aren't overly sentimental or weepy. Ollie instead is stalwart. That's the word I kept coming back to. Maybe even no-nonsense. Or if she's no-nonsense, she's trying to have a little bit of nonsense because her husband was full of nonsense.

[00:11:46] Anyway, I loved her because she felt so realistic, truly grieved, truly sad, truly lost-- at least at first. But you're not drowning in grief with her, and she's not really drowning in it either. She felt like someone I'd want to get to know, but maybe I'd keep her at arm's length at first, or she would keep me. I think that's really what it is. She would keep me at arm's length at first. And I have to say, although the book is Ollie's, she is the main protagonist, she is the main character, I'm shocked by-- all these months later because I read this back in May or June. I'm shocked by how well I remember Sam. Sam dies on page one. And it's not a spoiler that he dies. He dies almost immediately upon the book's opening. And you know immediately, as Laurie Colwin kind of describes him, why Ollie loved him. And you fall in love with him, too. And certainly he pops up throughout the book, so it's not like Laurie Colwin describes him and then dumps him. But the book's not about him. But all these months later, I am still thinking about him. And so I wish I had been able to attend the in-person book club discussion about this book, but now it feels like a little treasure that my friend maybe doesn't even realize she gave me. I probably should actually text her. I probably should text her as I finish this episode because it feels like this quiet little gift of a book that nobody else knows about. But now I'm passing it on to you. Now, as usual with these episodes, I'm going to give you some stats. So this book was originally published April 1st, 1975. It's available still in print, in paperback. It's about 180 pages.

[00:13:21] I'm going to read you the description on the back of the book. "When Sam Bax, that charming daredevil of a Boston lawyer, sails his boat into a storm off the coast of Maine, Elizabeth 'Ollie' Bax, his wife and ardent sidekick, becomes a widow at the age of 27. With no pretense of courage, Ollie grieves, coping with the warmth and awkwardness of family ties and trying to rethink her own life. Realizing that her risks are as daring as any of Sam's, while he chants life and limb, Ollie risks her heart. She finds that love can take some surprising turns. Laurie Colwin depicts Ollie's recovery with humor, compassion, and a decided lack of sentimentality, creating a real heroine who remains true to her heart and still manages to keep her head." I just reread this for the first time, and I couldn't agree more. That's what I was trying to say, a lack of sentimentality. Whoever wrote this blurb, great job. That's 100% accurate, which isn't always true of the back-of-the-book description, but it is in this case. As far as critic's consensus, this was fascinating to me. So this book was not even reviewed by The New York Times when it released. At the time of its publication, Laurie Colwin had only written a short story collection, so this is her debut novel, and The New York Times did not cover its release, which I think is fascinating. She's a New Yorker. She lives in New York. The newspaper didn't even cover it.

[00:14:41] And then, this is why I love doing these episodes, a pretty scathing review from Kirkus. I was sitting at my desk today cackling, finding this review. So this is literally the quote from Kirkus: "Laurie Colwin first appeared with a short story collection, Passion and Effect, 1973, and it would seem that she hasn't quite graduated to the novel, however casually she writes. Simpatico it is; sufficient it isn't, reminding you that another kind of dangerous object is a little talent." Guys, that is a burn. That is an absolute burn on Laurie Colwin, who winds up becoming a pretty respected and acclaimed novelist. Please, Google for it. The review in Kirkus is brutal. The New York Times did, and I'm going to link to it in the show notes, a really great piece on Laurie Colwin back in 2021. The whole reason I found these books in The Strand that year was because all of her books, the short story collections, the novels, the memoirs/essays, they all were republished with new covers in 2021, kind of new matching covers. And so The New York Times did cover Laurie Colwin in 2021, and it's a great article. A great piece. And it also tells you, according to that writer, I think the writer gives you a list of three Colwin books to start with. Interestingly, not a single one of the ones I've read, so I have some work to do. It's fine. My own review, I read this in June, I think. My own review was, "This was my third Laurie Colwin, and I'm eager to continue to make my way through her works. A local book club had chosen this backlist title as their pick a couple of months ago, and I was intrigued. When Sam, a boisterous JFK Jr.-esque New Englander, that is accurate, dies in a boat wreck, he leaves behind his young wife, Elizabeth, and his brother, Patrick, both of whom have to move on after his death. What could've been a maudlin book about a widow is instead funny and insightful, part romance, part coming of age. I loved it."

[00:16:36] It's 3.93 stars on Goodreads. It's got 1,200 ratings and 170-ish reviews, which also lets me know it's, like I said, an unsung book, so hopefully you're discovering a treasure today. My one-sentence hand sell is, "A young woman copes with the loss of her ebullient husband and carves out a new life for herself." What would I put this on the shelf with? I can easily envision an endcap, and it would feel like an Annie B. Jones endcap to me because these are all books I really love, kind of books about ordinary people. I'd start with Sandwich by Catherine Newman, Heartburn by Nora Ephron, Whistler by Anne Patchett, Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, Musical Chairs by Amy Poeppel, Sweet Pea by Kit deWaal. That one's new. I think it's out in the UK already, but I want to say it's out this year in the US. I just saw this one in a catalog, and I thought the description actually sounded similar, so Sweet Pea by Kit deWaal. New Girl in Little Cove, that's by Damhnait Monaghan, I think is how we pronounce her name. Lucy Carmichael by Margaret Kennedy, Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith, Heart the Lover by Lily King, and Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. I want an endcap that would encapsulate a young woman trying to discover who she is, and sometimes that might be along friends, sometimes that might be in a marriage, sometimes that might be in a dating relationship, but I think those are the books I think this one would most fittingly sit beside.

[00:18:06] Favorite quote? There are many, but I think this one would be at the top. "Pleasure requires high and loving spirits and energy, but living in the world, being battered by it, having your heart pierced, sharpens everything." Read this if you love quiet books about ordinary people where nothing happens, but of course, everything happens. Is there a TV adaptation of this book? No, but I would like to recommend to you Crossing Delancey and Mystic Pizza because as I was reading this book, I actually kept thinking to myself, "What does this remind me of?" And I don't know if it was the setting or the characters, but over and over again, I thought, "What is this book?" And finally, on Annie's Five-Star Reads, I was doing a series of Instagram stories, and I finally hit on it, and it's Crossing Delancey. So if you've never seen that kind of 1980s movie, this book was originally published in '75 and to me, it does feel that way. There certainly, of course, is a timeless element to it, but I kind of like going back and revisiting these books. It's a simpler time. It's a simpler time. It's the same reason I heard somebody say the other day they like TV shows where we pretend cell phones don't exist, and I think sometimes the same is true about books. There's something simple about going back and reading a book from 1975 or watching a movie from 1982, and those are the vibes here.

[00:19:28] Okay, so I hope I have sold you on Laurie Colwin, and if not Laurie Colwin, at least on this particular Laurie Colwin. Shine on, Bright and Dangerous Object. You can get a copy from The Bookshelf. That's bookshelfthomasville.com. This week, I'm reading Dog Stars by Peter Heller.

Annie Jones: From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in Thomasville, Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf’s daily happenings on Instagram at @bookshelftville, and all the books from today’s episode can be purchased online through our store website:

bookshelfthomasville.com

A full transcript of today’s episode can be found at: 

fromthefrontporchpodcast.com 

Special thanks to Studio D Podcast Production for production of From the Front Porch and for our theme music, which sets the perfect warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations.

Our Executive Producers of today’s episode are…

Cammy Tidwell, Linda Lee Drozt, Martha, Stephanie Dean, Ashley Ferrell, Gene Queens, Beth, Jammie Treadwell…


Executive Producers (Read Their Own Names): Nicole Marsee, Wendi Jenkins

Annie Jones: If you’d like to support From the Front Porch, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Your input helps us make the show even better and reach new listeners. All you have to do is open up the Podcast App on your phone, look for From the Front Porch, scroll down until you see ‘Write a Review’ and tell us what you think.

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We’re so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week.





Annie Jones

a weekly conversational podcast on books, small business, and life in the South