![]() SIMON: She tells herself she's making a breakthrough for women in the corridors of power, doesn't she? And she ends up using her own sort of powers of observation and ability to construct narratives, to do storytelling for the oil and gas industry. And it is intentionally pretty accidental that she does end up working for a, quote-unquote, "small, family-owned oil company." But over time, you know, she looks around and says, well, this is the ladder I'm on, so I'm going to try and climb it. So, you know, oil is part of her background in the novel, although in ways she doesn't really think about. She's from Texas, the Golden Triangle area. KIESLING: You know, Bunny's family is from oil country. SIMON: So how does somebody who you think knows the seamy underside of the oil business as well as Bunny become Elizabeth, the young woman who goes into the oil industry? ![]() But certainly, the writing is informed by what I kind of saw of those years in the '90s and early 2000s. And so that's a different experience than the experience of my father in the foreign service. So this was the time when sort of foreign powers were looking at the way that oil got to different markets from its sources and really doing a lot of horse-trading and scheming about how they could make sure the pipelines went through countries that were amenable to U.S. goal in Azerbaijan was directing and ensuring pipeline access. And he is in a place at a time when the primary sort of U.S. I gave Bunny's father a slightly different professional track. So his career and experience was incredibly formative for me and certainly feeds into the material of the novel. And we should note that your father, John Brady Kiesling, was a diplomat who notably resigned over the invasion of Iraq. SIMON: Tell me a little bit about the father in this novel. And so Bunny does have these observational powers that I tried to sort of exploit in the novel. And I think teenage girls are much more observant than most people give them credit for. But yes, she spends a lot of time watching soap operas, reading magazines like Cosmopolitan, scheming about things that she wants to buy, but also watching the people around her and noticing the people around her. KIESLING: Well, I think, you know, Bunny's smarter than she gives herself credit for. Does she not want to seem too interested? SIMON: Bunny is much more interested in soap operas than the kind of drama unfolding around her, isn't she? Or is she posing in a sense? She doesn't want to - she's a teen after all. ![]() Our life stories are a little different, but definitely the experience of being a teenager in a place that is unfamiliar to you, surrounded by adult business and feeling a little blase about it. KIESLING: So, you know, I think Bunny and I share some of the same DNA. Where are the resemblances between you and Bunny? SIMON: Well, OK, you preempt my next half-question. I grew up in the foreign service, much like Bunny Glenn did. SIMON: You're from a foreign service family, too, aren't you? LYDIA KIESLING: Thank you for having me, Scott. How and why does she come to make a life in ways she once disdained in big oil? "Mobility" is the new novel from Lydia Kiesling, author of the acclaimed novel "The Golden State," and she joins us from Portland, Ore. Bunny is the daughter of a diplomat, wry, skeptical, a teenager who often seems more interested in soap operas. ![]() Elizabeth "Bunny" Glenn came to adolescence in a place where the beach smelled like oil and the oil smelled like money - Azerbaijan, after the Soviet Union had come apart and global superpowers poured into old Soviet satellites along the Caspian Sea for oil rights and pipeline access. ![]()
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