Julie Orringer and Adrian Tomine on Parenting (While Trying to Make a Living as a Creative)

Bookable features established authors and emerging talent in conversation with host and author Amanda Stern, perhaps best known for creating the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series at New York’s famous Joe’s Pub and Symphony Space. With an immersive sound experience designed around each episode, Bookable takes you on an audio exploration of a book—usually new, sometimes classic and occasionally obscure but always worth knowing about.

You may remember Julie Orringer from Episode 4 of Bookable when she talked to Amanda about her novel The Flight Portfolio and the amazing Varian Fry who saved thousands of cultural creatives during World War II. In this engaging bonus episode, Julie returns with her upstairs neighbor—the one and only New York Times bestselling cartoonist Adrian Tomine. There’s no time like the present for this wide-ranging conversation about working from home, parenting (while trying to make a living as a creative) and Tomine’s new memoir The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist.

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Julie Orringer is the author of two award-winning books: The Invisible Bridge, a novel, and the short-story collection How to Breathe Underwater, both New York Times Notable Books. She is the winner of The Paris Review‘s Plimpton Prize and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn.

Adrian Tomine was born in 1974 in Sacramento, California. He began self-publishing his comic book series Optic Nerve when he was sixteen, and in 1994 he received an offer to publish from Drawn & Quarterly. His comics have been anthologized in McSweeney’s, Best American Comics, and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and his graphic novel Shortcomings was a New York Times Notable Book. His most recent book, Killing and Dying, appeared on numerous best-of lists and was a New York Times graphic bestseller. Since 1999, Tomine has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.