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Juliet and I snag a corner spot in Adams Morgan’s The Potter’s House. Between the shelves, we chat about Juliet’s role in Moishe House Adams Morgan, her debut novel, getting vulnerable with readers, knowing your friends’ Social Security numbers, fostering cats, and how to fight with people you love.
Samuel: What brought you to the DMV?
Juliet: I graduated from undergrad and got a job in the area! I was an energy consultant, working on renewables. I left briefly to go to business school, but my friend group is here, so I came back to the DMV to settle because of them. I’ve been [back] for a little over two years.
Samuel: What, besides your friends, was calling you back?
Juliet: You can’t understate the friend group piece of it. I just bought a house with three of my best friends. The other piece is that I like DC as a city. I grew up in and out of New York, and I love New York so much, but DC is a little bit quieter and wider and lower. It’s just an easier place to be and breathe and have access to green spaces, to have a life.
Samuel: This house is so exciting – not only are you buying a house with friends, but its also going to be Moishe House Adams Morgan! What’s the story there?
Juliet: It’s a series of absolutely wild decisions.
Samuel: In a good way.
Juliet: In a fantastic way. In the best way. Everyone jokes about buying a house with their friends…I don’t know why we ended up actually doing it. Maybe because we are a pretty practical group of people, and we have complementary strengths that combined to lead us to actually put the legwork in to move forward. There have been a lot of challenges, both expected and unexpected, about how to navigate the experience in an ethical and human-forward way –
Samuel: Yeah, I’m so curious about the human dynamic. So many of us have had that DC experience of living with a bunch of roommates and acquiring grievances over the dishes or who takes really long to shower or whatever…how do you navigate that with a mortgage involved?
Juliet: There have been a few components. One, we hired a lawyer to help us write an operating agreement, and we’ve had to have some really difficult conversations, like around finances. I know my friends’ social security numbers now, which is ridiculous. It was a lot of really serious, in-depth conversations, and we noticed it was really eating into our friendship time, right? Every conversation was about the house. We had to stop and readjust and say: We’re doing this for a reason. The reason is that we like each other.
So, we’re going to try to refocus on the liking each other part and set boundaries around when we talked about [the house]. Then, finally, we had to really discuss how to fight. Which is something you might do in a long-term relationship, but you don’t usually do with your friends.
Samuel: How do you fight?
Juliet: I always win. Just kidding. A lot of it is communicating and stepping back and understanding everyone’s communication styles and trigger points and things that are going to set someone off. There are times when what you’re fighting about is what you’re fighting about, and then there are times where you’re fighting about some deep, ingrained situation that happened to them when they were six, and you need to back up and figure out how to navigate around that.
Samuel: I have friends who I love, but wouldn’t want to buy a house with. How’d you identify these people as, like, The Ones?
Juliet: Jonah – my partner – and Ben and Tali lived together [before]. They were all roommates when I met them. They had familiarity. Last year, Tali read The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen. It’s a really interesting book that I haven’t read, but everyone recommends to me. The gist is that we’ve ended up in a situation where society looks at families as nuclear and romantic, and takes away a lot of support structures from people. Relationships can look different than that. This is my village, and it’s easier if you live near your village.
Samuel: As you’ve started hosting for Moishe House Adams Morgan, what’s been one unexpected challenge and one unexpected joy?
Juliet: It’s been interesting not having a set space. It’s forced us to be creative – like hosting a book club at the West End Library. The biggest joy has been meeting people who come back, having repeat visitors and getting to know them.
Samuel: Switching gears. You just had a book come out! What has that been like?
Juliet: I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories, period, is sitting at my parents’ computer hutch and typing on a desktop that was, you know, twice as big as my head, and being so excited about it. I’ve actually written five manuscripts prior to A Fae in Finance. I think A Fae in Finance is a moment in time – we’re in a moment in time where people are thinking about their corporate jobs and corporate lives, and it is a satire of corporate work. That’s what I was thinking about as I wrote it.
Samuel: What do you remember about the moment you learned this book was becoming a reality?
Juliet: For actual months afterward, I was like: What a wild dream I had. Weird that I hallucinated that! I was so anxious – [before they offered to acquire it,] my editor emailed and said “Can you hop on a phone call?” I was going on vacation and said that I could call today, or in a week, and can we please do today…she replied and was like: Okay, talk to you after vacation! It was so stressful. My dad spent the whole vacation making fun of me. He was like: What are you worried about? She’s not going to call and say “I hated your book so much I had to tell you over the phone.” I’m like: Dad, I wasn’t worried about that, but now I am.
Samuel: This book is informed by your time in a corporate job – why did it take the form of a fantasy novel?
Juliet: I’ve always been a big fantasy reader. As I was processing the experience of working in banking, and being a woman in male-dominated spaces, [writing] was also partially an escape. I was looking back at early conversations I had with my writing group friends, who read the earliest draft, and I kept saying that [the book] had nothing to do with me. Now I look back and I’m like: That was me really processing something. Real life sneaks its way in. I thought I was doing this fun escape. My friends reading it said they had to stop in the middle because it was too depressing, and I was over here like: Guys, this is hilarious! And they were like: Are you okay?
Samuel: Does the book feel particularly Jewish to you?
Juliet: The main character is Jewish. Her mother is a Jewish mother, and I think anyone reading who has one of those will say: Oh, hi Mom!
Samuel: What else is alive for you Jewishly?
Juliet: One of the ways Judaism resonates with me is giving in ways that people can’t give back, or to people who cannot give back. I do Shemira and Tahara with a group from Adas Israel. I also foster cats, which is not a Jewish activity, but I think of it in a similar way. A cat is never going to give you anything for letting them stay in your home. They are going to bite you or snuggle you or whatever. But that’s the way I’ve been most engaging with my Jewish identity recently, by trying to give to people who can’t give back.
Samuel: Okay, two quick ones to close. You’re hosting Shabbat dinner and can invite any three people. Who are you bringing?
Juliet: Naomi Novick, who wrote Spinning Silver. Tamsyn Muir, who wrote Gideon the Ninth. And Jane Goodall.
Samuel: Finish the sentence: When Jews of the DMV gather…
Juliet: We join the Moishe House Adams Morgan book club!
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