Second Chances and New Beginnings: A Deep Dive into 'Last Bets' with Mary Carroll Moore

In this episode I talk with novelist Mary Carroll Moore about her latest novel, 'Last Bets’. Mary shares how a life-changing breast cancer diagnosis at the age of fifty motivated her to leave a successful career as a food journalist to writing novels. We explore the theme of second chances, the complexities of female relationships, and the juxtaposition of high stakes gambling with the serene yet risky world of scuba diving. Set on a tropical island, the story follows two women, Ellie and Rosie, as they navigate personal challenges, budding friendships, and moral dilemmas against the backdrop of an impending hurricane. Mary delves into her character development process, the significance of intergenerational dynamics, and how personal experiences shape her writing. This episode offers a deep dive into Mary’s creative mind and the intricate layers of her new novel.

00:00 Introduction to Art Heals All Wounds

01:14 Meet Mary Carroll Moore: A Journey of Second Chances

03:09 Mary's Transition from Food Writer to Novelist

07:26 Exploring the Themes of Last Bets

10:52 Character Dynamics and Development

21:06 The Ticking Clock: Hurricane and Tension

23:26 Nuanced Characters and Villains

28:13 The Role of Scuba Diving and High-Stakes Gambling

34:39 Conclusion and Where to Find Mary Carroll Moore

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Pam Uzzell: Do 

[00:00:12] you believe art can change the world? So do I! On this show, we meet artists whose work is doing just that. Welcome to Art Heals All Wounds. I'm your host, Pam Uzzell.

[00:00:38] Have you ever had the chance to change your life? How many chances like that come along for us? One, two, three, none? I hope that for all of us, the answer isn't none. I'd like to think that we all get, at the very least, a second chance. What would you change in your life if you got a second chance?

[00:01:14] My guest today, Mary Carroll Moore, definitely knows all about second chances. After her diagnosis with breast cancer at 50, she decided that after a very successful career as a food writer, she would try her hand at writing fiction. At age 70, she's published three novels. Her most recent one, Last Bets, captures this theme of second chances in a beautiful tropical setting with attractive and interesting characters.

[00:01:50] If you're thinking that this is going to be the story of a lovely island romance, you'll be delighted to find that it's nothing as uncomplicated as that. Two women who desperately need second chances race against the clock to find solutions to their unsolved problems they left behind them.

[00:02:11] Can they get past jealousies, distrust, and old harmful patterns to be able to lean on each other? Mary loves the dynamics between women, especially those of different generations, and that's a very significant part of Last Bets. Her two main characters come to realize that they need each other in order to get their second chances.

[00:02:44] You want to know how you can really help me keep this show going? Follow me on your favorite listening app. So easy, right? And if you really want to give the show a boost, leave me a five star rating or review. Hi Mary, I'm so happy to have you on Art Heals All Wounds. Can you start by introducing yourself, telling us who you are and what you do?

[00:03:07] Mary Carroll Moore: Thank you for inviting me on your show. I'm a food journalist, professional food journalist turned novelist after a big kind of right turn in the middle of my life in my fifties when I had breast cancer and had to look carefully at what I had done so far in my life and what was missing. I'm also a painter, a fine artist, and that came back as well.

[00:03:30] So I've had quite the right turn. And I'm now 70 and I have three novels published and I'm, I live in New Hampshire with my family and it's been a great, great 20 years of taking these new directions. I've enjoyed it. And I'm looking forward to talking about it with you all. 

[00:03:48] Pam Uzzell: That's so interesting. I knew that you, just from reading about you, that you had had breast cancer and that you used a lot of painting for that, but I didn't realize that that's when you decided that your writing as well had to change or that you were going to, you were going to go in a different direction.

[00:04:10] The first question that pops into my mind is, had you always wanted to try your hand with novels and just felt like it wasn't a safe thing 

[00:04:20] to do? 

[00:04:22] Mary Carroll Moore: I started out as an artist. That was the thing I was so passionate about when I was a kid. And in my twenties after college, I started to teach cooking. Cause I'd lived in France.

[00:04:33] I came back to Arizona where I lived and somebody asked me, well, why don't you teach cooking classes? And then that led to, uh, writing a recipe column for the local magazine. And that led to a syndicated column with the LA times that went on for 12 years. So it's like, I fell into this career of food journalism.

[00:04:52] My passion for food, of course, informed it, but I always thought of myself as a painter, and so painting really doesn't [00:05:00] make a living very easily. So I found myself embracing this new idea of being a food journalist because it paid the bills. I was able to write books and work for different food companies, and I was a chef for a while, and it was really a great launch into my life as a young person.

[00:05:17] And so then when I hit it at that turning point at age 50, the things that I had set aside, like you say, came back full force. Cause if anybody in your audience has ever experienced the trauma of cancer or life threatening illness, you know that you have the opportunity to kind of pause and reflect about what you've done so far and what's missing.

[00:05:39] And so I've always loved reading. I'm just like crazy about books and reading novels and you know, so then I thought oh, that's kind of where my heart is What why am I doing food writing now, you know, so it was a big change though to let go It was a very very profitable career and I was at the top of it at that point I'd won awards and all kinds of things. So I really had to take this huge risk to look at my life and say hmm What's missing here?

[00:06:09] And then I went back to school for my MFA at age 50. And my first novel was published about five years later. So I wouldn't recommend it for everybody. But it was like the thing I had to do. I really had to do it. 

[00:06:23] Pam Uzzell: I love what you're saying here. Part of the message is nobody has to be one thing. You can be a painter, you can be a cook, and you can decide I am going to go for that other thing

[00:06:36] as well. And I love that. And it also really sheds a lot of light. I think, on your book we're going to be talking about Last Bets in terms of the characters, some of the things they're facing and what they do as a profession, what heals them, maybe what their obstacles are. That's really interesting. And I, don't want to imply that you are writing the type of fiction where everything is sort of about you, but just with different characters.

[00:07:14] But I think your experiences really do inform these characters and the plot. So your book,

[00:07:21]  Last Bets, 

[00:07:22] can you tell us about that a little bit? 

[00:07:26] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, it's a complicated story because I like to research the complications of the human experience, especially in women. And my my theme in this book and in most of my books is how women become heroes.

[00:07:41] They start out maybe as badass women or very unhero like, you know, have bad things happen in their past and I like to put them in tricky situations where they have to face something in themselves and then do something heroic. I try not to make that predictable. So in Last Bets, Ellie and Rosie, who are the two main characters, both come from this crazy past, um, and I wanted them to both have to face themselves.

[00:08:09] You know, they're both on an island. They come to this island. Ellie is a portrait artist and she comes to finish a commission. Rosie comes because her dad snatches her away from home. She set fire to her boyfriend's van because he two timed her. And so she's almost in jail and her dad talks them out of putting her in jail because she's 16.

[00:08:30] Takes her to this island for a month of scuba diving. So they meet on this island, and the island idea, the myth of an island, is that you can get away from your life, right? It can become anything. But, uh, not true. You're there with yourself. And so what I had, this hope, this idea that both of the characters would face something in themselves, thinking that they were going to escape it, but not.

[00:08:55] And so, they both face themselves, they both face their past, and then through their friendship, their reluctant at first friendship, they become heroes to each other. They both give up something that they were going to do for selfish reasons, and they end up saving each other. So it's kind of an intergenerational mix there, you know, cause Rosie's 16 and Ellie's in her thirties.

[00:09:16] And I love that combination of women too. So it's a, it's a quite, it's quite the complicated story, but I loved writing it and it's a fascinating exploration to me and to, morals and ambition in the female gender, and also how women can become heroes unexpectedly, even if they don't think they are. 

[00:09:40] Pam Uzzell: And what I liked about 

[00:09:41] this is that you kind of trick us in the beginning by setting it up as if it's going to be Ellie's story of an island romance.

[00:09:51] Because there is a, I wouldn't call him a love interest for Ellie, but there is like The guy, Trevor, who is [00:10:00] also really interesting in this book because he's not classically handsome, but he has this something that sets up this dilemma where he is attractive, but he's, he's the person whose portrait Ellie has to finish, and he's really challenging to draw to capture that something that makes him attractive when he's not --

[00:10:25] you even describe him as having sort of a strange face, except when he smiles and, you know, for Ellie, there's so much riding on this portrait at first, but not what she thinks. She thinks she's going to get a lot of money for finishing this portrait. And it really becomes the doorway for her to connect with Rosie, the sixteen year old.

[00:10:52] Mary Carroll Moore: You catch more than a lot of people. I really wanted Ellie to have this incredibly ugly person to paint, that she has to somehow find a beauty in. And his face is so disharmonious to her. The features don't work. And yet when he smiles, like you say, in real life, he's, he's very attractive and very charming.

[00:11:14] So she's puffing it out with this portrait. She can't quite get it, you know, and then Rosie comes along and Rosie says, well, I'm going to, she's, she sees Ellie as a rival cause she's also crushing on Trevor. She says, I'm going to sneak into Ellie's little bungalow here on the Island and I'm going to change things.

[00:11:31] I'm, I'm an artist too. And I'll just sneak in. She'll never know. And I'll redo the portrait. And it turns out that they end up collaborating invisibly to each other, and they finish the portrait together. But it's like the necessity of having that partnership comes up with Ellie in every aspect of her stay there.

[00:11:52] Rosie reminds her of her lost sister, Lily. Lily was, uh, subjected to a predator teacher at high school and ended up killing herself. Well, she was in an accident, but the implication is that it shocked her, her life got ruined because of this. So Ellie was never able to save her sister. And here's Rosie, the same age.

[00:12:16] With the same situation because if you think about it, Trevor is the older man and could cross lines that he's not supposed to. So Ellie's like in this dilemma, uh, what do I do with the portrait? How do I handle this girl who's sneaking into my apartment? I know it and she's changing my painting. What do I do with her crush on this guy that's so inappropriate?

[00:12:38] How do I handle him? You know, there's just so many things going wrong for Ellie, and I love the complication of that. That's, I feel like I'm a real mean writer. I put these people in such bad situations, but my goal is to have them pressed to the wall so that they can recognize their heroic qualities, and Ellie does in the end.

[00:12:57] And so does Rosie. 

[00:12:58] Pam Uzzell: Yeah, Ellie has one major, she has both a gift and a weakness that is around gambling. There's some fierce backgammon gambling happening, which sounds like part of the culture of this island. And, She has a gift for being successful at that. She also can get sucked into that world too far.

[00:13:24] So she's got that dark side, but she also has a lot of wisdom., I think. In that she does early on realize that Rosie is sneaking into her room and is changing her portrait. And she also realizes that Rosie is in many ways fixing the portrait, like. Adding these qualities that she couldn't get down on paper and Rosie is an aspiring artist and that complicates her feelings towards Ellie because Ellie is a successful artist.

[00:14:04] The thing that I liked about this dynamic between them is that so often in these sort of romantic rivalries, which again, Ellie's interest in Trevor does not seem to be romantic, whereas Rosie's very much is the women can so often turn on each other and there's something in Rosie that even though that's maybe an initial impulse,

[00:14:28] she just can't go there because she likes Ellie and she admires Ellie. And, whether she thinks or not she needs Ellie. So I'm wondering about your development of this dynamic. 

[00:14:39] Mary Carroll Moore: I love that! You caught so 

[00:14:41] Pam, that's so great! I'm fascinated with the idea that women again can rescue each other and I think most of my books have intergenerational relationships because I think young people in their teens or early 20s can actually save the older generations [00:15:00] if the older generations let them.

[00:15:02] So the idea is that Ellie not only is aware that she can't, she doesn't have the ability in her life right now to finish this portrait. So she sets up Rosie to finish it, but she also deliberately makes mistakes that she knows Rosie is going to catch and feel completely superior in correcting. So in a way her teacher side comes out, you know, she's an, uh, an art teacher and she, she realizes this is a way she could teach this young person.

[00:15:30] And the only thing missing in Rosie's portfolio is a portrait, and she doesn't know how to do portraits. So here we have a, a kind of invisible setup going on behind the scenes where they both are working together, but neither of them believe that they are. And then Ellie finds out what Rosie's doing. So I love that complication again.

[00:15:48] I'm using that word a lot, but the, the idea that there is wisdom in the young people that comes into the older person's life. So, my repeating themes in my books are throwing these younger and older people together in story just to see what they can teach each other and I, I think, um, you know, Ellie has to go kind of between her concern for Rosie crushing on this older man and what Trevor's going to do about that because it, it just brings back terrible memories for her of Lily.

[00:16:21] Her sister. And then also this, um, desperation to finish the portrait. She has to finish the portrait. And so, you know, she kind of like, I don't know if it's engages Rosie, you know, thinking, well, this person's sneaking in my room. I might as well use her. So there's like this positive negative thing going on. But I think you, you mentioned Ellie's talent.

[00:16:42] Um, I think the main thing to bring out there is that since she was a child, she's had ability to see the future. She's got a paranormal talent. So when she was young, she could see people's future. But then her dad, who was a professional gambler, latched onto this, and when she was in her teens, he employed her, in a way, to be next to him in backgammon tournaments, and tell him what the board was like a few moves down.

[00:17:10] So this is kind of a la Queen's Gambit. And she hated that. She resented his using her. She hated the feeling of cheating. She hated the sickness that would come over at her afterwards. But then I, you know, again, the mean writer that I am, I put her on this Island where she's desperate for money and it's a high stakes backgammon center for the Caribbean.

[00:17:34] So here she is again facing the same situation and she has to, you know, it's so tempting to her because she can, she can win those games and they're, they're really a lot of money. So she says, okay, maybe I'll win like four or five games, get a lot of money and then leave. But then she gets hooked. So I wanted to play with that positive, negative side of a talent, something that we do out of instinct or it's a natural talent and whether we use it for good, meaning selfish, selfless reasons or whether we use it to self serve and what the pros and cons of it are and how Ellie decides what she's going to do with this talent now that makes her sick.

[00:18:16] So, you know, it's just, um, again, complicated. And I'm fascinated by that topic because I think a lot of us have intuition. We have the ability to see things that are not rational. And I just pushed it a lot with Ellie to see, you know, would she be able to take what she sees in, like, if she's doing a portrait, she sees the future of the subject.

[00:18:40] What if she, you know, was put in that backgammon situation again, and had to, had to deal with it, and what, what would happen? So that's kind of a twist of the book, if you, if you want to call it that, that she has this paranormal side. 

[00:18:54] Pam Uzzell: Well, I liked Ellie so much that I didn't want to believe it was cheating.

[00:18:59] I felt like, I felt like she can do this. The people that she's playing against are either so ungodly rich that who cares? She really needs the money. Take theirs or so terrible, such terrible people that I thought, good Ellie, but you're right. It does. It does. It does take something out of her.

[00:19:21] She gets progressively weaker, physically weaker and weaker as the more she does this. And I don't want to give this part away too much about the actual non metaphorical rescuing that happens. But throughout the book, there is a hurricane sort of sitting off the coast of Venezuela, and there's this whole question of, is it going to come to this island?

[00:19:50] And it sits there, it's just like this dark menace through most of the book. And that adds a lot of [00:20:00] tension in terms of, there's a sense in so many ways that Ellie needs to accomplish what she came to do, but she's really racing against something and I'm not going to give away the book, but that brooding storm that everybody's watching plays a huge role in becoming a hero.

[00:20:25] Mary Carroll Moore: It does. 

[00:20:26] Pam Uzzell: Yeah. And I liked that because first of all, it feels very current in terms of what a lot of places in that part of the world are going through and are going to be going through. And so you might say it's metaphorical, but you might also just say it's also very accurate. When you were writing about this storm coming, and we don't have to give away what eventually happens,

[00:20:55] what were you thinking in terms of that being like a, a menace that wasn't related to any of the, of the characters in the story? 

[00:21:06] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, in my fiction study, in my classes, in my MFA, uh, one of the elements that is talked about quite often is the ticking clock. So in, um, to make a fiction. have a tension that's carried and built throughout the story from the beginning to the end,

[00:21:24] there has to be some kind of ticking clock and something is, is going to be lost unless something else happens before it. So I played with lots of different options. Um, One of the options is that Ellie's ex husband has died and he's not divorced from her. So she assumes his debts and she's going to lose her, her house, her townhome in, in Washington DC where she lives.

[00:21:50] So that was a ticking clock. She had to earn enough money or get enough money to pay off the debtor. before the house was foreclosed. So that was one, but that didn't seem like enough, you know, it was something happening in another place, not on the island. So I tried to think of what could happen on the island, a fire, um, you know, gosh, a murder, but that's not where I wanted to go with it.

[00:22:12] I wanted something that was outside of Ellie and Rosie that would set up some kind of a tension. And so everyone on the island now, you know, this is another thing with the myth of islands that you get away to paradise, but instead, you meet trouble, you know, so I thought, what kind of trouble can I bring to this island so that the hurricane I had to do a lot of research about that.

[00:22:34] And what would happen if the hurricane was threatening enough to people, everybody's running, then a few of the gamblers, high stakes gamblers who are really into the game, don't run and Ellie decides not to run and Rosie's father who's a gambler, he decides not to run. So they're stuck. So I wanted to create this, uh, you know, people are not using their common sense They're they're staying for the wrong reasons But that that created the ticking clock for me.

[00:23:05] So the hurricane is looming in the background. It's a character for sure and it influences the dives. They're all scuba divers. It's influencing the dives the danger of the dives, and then, like, we're not talking about the ending, but what happens in the end is a big part. 

[00:23:21] Pam Uzzell: Yeah, and one thing, you brought up Rosie's father.

[00:23:26] The other thing I liked about this book is of the main characters, nobody is, a bad person. You set it up in the beginning that Rosie's father is maybe a little bit bad. But as we go on, we understand his motivation. And, you know, you've sort of hinted at this older man, younger teenage girl, but nobody is completely bad.

[00:23:52] Everybody is very nuanced and there are motivations for why they might behave in ways that are not so great. And as you said, Rosie's father is a gambler, but he has really good reasons too for wanting to win a lot of money. Both of your two main characters, Ellie and Rosie, have faced deep betrayal from people close to them.

[00:24:21] You brought up the husband and her ex deceased husband, but he cheated on her with someone close to her, a woman close to her, and Rosie experiences in her teenage version the same things. 

[00:24:42] Mary Carroll Moore: Her boyfriend goes after her sister. There's a lot of male betrayal in this book, but I'm glad you saw that the characters are nuanced enough.

[00:24:51] I thought the father, you know, like you said, he's very, he appears to be kind of, um, Um, a not, not very [00:25:00] ethical person, but in the end, his love for his daughter and his desire to do the right thing by her wins. And that's what I wanted. I wanted, you know, again, like he's pressed to the wall too, to see what's he going to do when it comes down to it.

[00:25:13] Is, is love going to be the guiding force for him? Is it going to be the thing that he makes decisions based on, or is it going to be greed? And so I think I went for love with most people. One thing I wanted to say, it was really cool, um, that you noticed this. So it's really hard to write good villains.

[00:25:32] It's very hard as a writer. I've been challenged by that in all my books. And then I, I caught on to something that I think you picked up. If you can figure out what the longing is in this bad person, what do they long for? Then you can make them nuanced because all of a sudden their longing, which is a human tendency, you know, we all long for things is something everybody can relate to.

[00:25:56] So what are they longing for? And once I figured that out, I could take the less appealing, shall we say, characters and figure out what their longing was and then write to that. And then they started becoming not stereotypes, for instance, and not all bad, but people that had this kind of quality of longing.

[00:26:17] So I thought that that was a really cool thing to learn. And I'm still learning about it, but I practiced it a lot in this book. 

[00:26:24] Pam Uzzell: Yes, there is one bad character, though, that I would say Is bad and Bob Bob. Yes, Bob, but I also thought Bob felt like such a real person, you know, like I feel like we've all somewhere met Bob and Bob also does a lot to bring Ellie and Rosie into each other's corners.

[00:26:50] So even though he's horrible, he plays a role in this book to this developing friendship, mentorship that's happening between Ellie and Rosie. 

[00:27:05] Mary Carroll Moore: Oh, it's so cool to hear you feed back to me what you got out of this kind of people. Bob. Because I worked really hard on that. And my writers crew for, you know, I took three years maybe to write this book.

[00:27:18] And they would say for months, they'd say, Bob, you've got to work on Bob. He's, he's so predictably bad, you know, and, and so making him nuanced was really a challenge. Really a challenge and finding a role like you said finding a role for him in the story because you can't just have a bad guy without any reason so at least I can't so I had to figure out what does he do?

[00:27:40] What does he contribute? And like you said, yeah, good catch. Thank you, Pam. 

[00:27:46] Pam Uzzell: Yeah, and 

[00:27:46] and both Ellie and Rosie are fierce. So. Yeah, Bob is definitely, whether he realizes it or not, he's in way over his head. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, it was a really, really, it's like the best of a summer beach read, which it was summer when I started reading this because there's a lot of unexpected things.

[00:28:13] You know, you, you think you're just going for maybe a carefree romance on an island, but that's not at all what this book is You know, there's one big thing we have not talked about and that is the diving 

[00:28:28] Mary Carroll Moore: Yeah. 

[00:28:29] Pam Uzzell: The scuba diving in this it's a both a very It became menacing at one point too, but it's also very healing like the the characters really they all get something from this. Why was this important to you to include?

[00:28:45] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, the idea for the book came when-- I'm a scuba diver and I was on Bonaire, which is where the book takes place. Um, that's one of the ABC islands off of Venezuela. And I was sitting at a tiki bar after one of our dives and this guy next to me, I didn't even know him. He said, I just lost my yacht. And I thought, oh my god, he's had a shipwreck..

[00:29:03] You know, what happened? And he said, no, I just lost it in a backgammon game. And I thought this, is this possible that people actually bet a yacht and lose it? And so we, my friends and I were questioning him and it was actually true that there was high sticks gambling happening and people would bet their houses, their yachts or whatever.

[00:29:22] You know, I thought this is fascinating. So I wanted to create that situation of, of high risk. Why do people risk? And then add in the scuba. Scuba is a fairly risky sport. So the idea of all these people gathering to scuba during the day, you know, go under the water and face, uh, the dangers of being underwater like that.

[00:29:46] And then at night they face the dangers of the gambling table. And so, you know, what does it bring out in all the characters? Well, also I love scuba diving. I was diving off the great barrier reef some years ago and I [00:30:00] surfaced too quickly and my eardrum got damaged. So I was not able to dive again, but I dived all over the world and I just loved, loved, loved it.

[00:30:09] And it's the feeling of, um, kind of like an Island, you know, you escape from yourself and you're underwater and there's this beautiful otherworldliness about it. The colors of the fish and the fact that you're weightless to some extent and you're breathing through this tube, but all you can hear is your own breathing.

[00:30:28] And I wanted to make, um, a play on the environment differences in the book. So above ground, certain rules are established and certain enmities are established and friendships and underwater everything changes. So underwater, Ellie can be on a dive with Bob and not have that, uh, antagonism. That doesn't last by the way, but there's this idea that you play with these different, the underwater and the above ground environments and what each one of those would do for a character.

[00:31:00] So when I was first thinking of this book, I thought, okay, I've got to have scuba diving in there. And the scenes of the scuba diving were some of my very favorite to write because it brought back those years of diving that I loved. 

[00:31:13] Pam Uzzell: Your characters are risk takers and in a way, I felt like with the scuba diving, the person who had the most wisdom, which this doesn't last either, was Rosie, the youngest one, who she gets a lot of responsibility for someone her age.

[00:31:33] And I felt like, wow, she's, in terms of the risks and safety and things like that, she is actually the one who is showing the most wisdom here with a lot of adults who really quite often would not listen to her. So.

[00:31:49] Mary Carroll Moore: Exactly. 

[00:31:50] Pam Uzzell: Yeah, it was really interesting. In a very non harmful way, both Ellie and Rosie are also pulling fast ones on Trevor.

[00:31:59] And I like that because again, the motivation behind it was not bad. There were really good reasons why. You know, Trevor seemed to be, I liked him as a character, but the least aware character of, I would say the foursome, the dad and Rosie and then Ellie and Trevor, I would say that that Trevor floated through the story, not always seeing what was happening.

[00:32:28] Mary Carroll Moore: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:32:30] Yeah. I think that's really true. Again, he was hard to write. I made him really handsome at first. My writer's group was so good. They're just fabulous people. And they said, this is way too, he's way too good looking for this book. So I had to make him kind of disharmonious in his features, but still charming.

[00:32:47] There's a, there's a tension of attraction then Rosie wants to use him. To kind of get back her status on social media after her, uh, the scandal of being fire girl who started a van fire, you know, and so she's taking these surreptitious movies with her and Trevor and she's sending them on putting them online.

[00:33:07] They're going viral. And at the same time, she's trying to get her life back. That's her way of doing it at 16. 

[00:33:13] Pam Uzzell: Right. 

[00:33:13] Mary Carroll Moore: And Ellie's trying to get her life back by earning a lot of money for this portrait, which also doesn't happen. So both of them try these avenues that they think are going to succeed with Trevor and they, neither of them work. But he's a, he's a nice guy, but he's, he's a little vanilla, you know, he's a little bland compared to Rosie's dad, who's very, um, I think he's a very colorful character.

[00:33:36] He's one of my favorites to write. 

[00:33:38] Pam Uzzell: But of all of them, I think Trevor had a very clear moral center. 

[00:33:42] Mary Carroll Moore: He does. 

[00:33:43] Which gets tested. That gets tested because that's what Ellie perceives that he's gonna try to seduce Rosie underage. And she's like not gonna let that happen. So she's watching Trevor like a hawk.

[00:33:56] Like prove to me that you're a good person and that you're not gonna take advantage of this, this young woman. 

[00:34:01] Pam Uzzell: Yeah. 

[00:34:02] Mary Carroll Moore: So he's, but he's very clear. He's very clear about where his lines are. 

[00:34:06] Pam Uzzell: Yeah. 

[00:34:06] Mary Carroll Moore: I like that about him. Yeah. 

[00:34:07] Pam Uzzell: Yeah. No, I did too. I did too. I did not want to dislike him. So I'm glad that he didn't cross

[00:34:17] lines. 

[00:34:17] Mary Carroll Moore: The end, they have to, they have to unite over him. They have to unite in a, an unexpected situation that again, I'm not going to blow the ending by giving it away. People have told me the endings are really a surprise and unexpected and, and very satisfying. So the last thing I want to do is get your listeners, to know what happens until they actually read the book.

[00:34:39] Pam Uzzell: Well, speaking of that, where can they find this book and more about you, Mary? 

[00:34:46] Mary Carroll Moore: Well, the fastest way is my website, which would be marycarrollmoore. com. And that's two R's, two L's and two O's, Carroll Moore. And you can also go to any online bookstore. Everybody has it. Bookshop. org, [00:35:00] Amazon, Barnes and Noble. And my third place to share what I have to offer is my Substack.

[00:35:08] I've been writing my weekly Friday Substack for gosh, how long? 2008 was when I began it. I wrote it on Friday. I know. Can't believe it sometimes, but it's on Substack. So if you look for maryCarrollmoore. substack. com. It's, um, about writing practice and creative practice and how to sustain it. So every week, um, I have some techniques or ideas for keeping going if you're creating, and then I talk about sharing your creations and things like this.

[00:35:38] So it's been fun to write and I'm still hot on it. So that that's another place to find me. 

[00:35:44] Okay, well, it was really fun to talk to you about this book. It's a perfect read for any time of year, but if you're looking for a summer read and want to be a little bit surprised in terms of the typical summer read, this one is really, really good. 

[00:36:02] So I hope people do pick it up and read it.

[00:36:10] You're listening to Art Heals All Wounds.

[00:36:36] Thanks so much to Mary Carroll Moore for coming on the podcast to talk about her latest novel, Last Bets. She's really turned the summer beach read on its ear to create a book that's great reading in any season. I'll put her info in the show notes so that you can learn more about her and her work.

[00:36:57] Do you have any stories about art and creativity in your life? I'd love to share it on the show. Just go to my website and leave me a voicemail by pushing the widget that says leave Pam a voicemail. If you feel you're able, you can also leave me a small donation through my website. Just click on the link that says buy me a coffee.

[00:37:18] This podcast is completely independent, so anything you donate really helps me out a lot. Thanks for listening. The music you've heard in this podcast is by Ketsa and Lobo Loco. This podcast was edited by Iva Hristova.