conversation with COLLEEN OAKLEY

Tell us about your new book.

©SarahDorio

The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise is about Louise, an eighty-four-year-old woman—who may or may not have perpetrated the largest jewelry heist in American history—and her twenty-oneyear-old caretaker Tanner, who ends up on the wrong side of the law with her. It’s a road trip book that’s fun and propulsive and very near and dear to my heart, as it’s part homage to my grandmother, who I had a very close relationship with up until her death in 2020.

What do you feel are the main themes/issues that are addressed in The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise ?

There are so many—the beauty and importance of intergenerational relationships, and the moral ambiguity that lies in sometimes doing the wrong thing to do the right thing—but I think the main theme is really examining what it is to be woman in America in its current climate, looking at both how far we’ve come and what a long way we still have to go.

Thelma & Louise partially inspired this novel. Can you speak to the film’s influence and the impact it had on you?

Thelma & Louise is one of my favorite female-empowerment movies of all time. I watched it for the first time when I was around thirteen. Like most young teenagers, I was furious most of the time and didn’t really know why—but I did have the sneaking suspicion that my anger ran deeper than just fluctuating hormones. I was technically being raised in the first generation being told that we as women could do and be anything we wanted to be, while at the same time there had only been four female CEOs at Fortune 500 companies in the history of the Fortune 500, and Anita Hill and Lorena Bobbitt were punch lines, and if you showed too much skin you were “asking for it,” but the top songs on the radio were “Daisy Dukes” and “Baby Got Back.” It was confusing, to say the least, and I certainly couldn’t put any of those feelings into words. But watching Thelma & Louise was the first time I started to understand my anger at these societal contradictions and felt validated in it. Since I’m dealing with some of those same themes in The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise, it only made sense to me to give a nod to the first and best feminist duo of the big screen.

Another major inspiration for this book was your late grandmother. In what ways did she inspire this novel?

My grandmother, Marion Oakley, was my very favorite person on earth, and not just because she only had one rule: cocktail time was strictly at 5 p.m., and if you were visiting her, your presence was required. Every single day she poured herself two fingers of Finlandia over ice, garnished with an olive, and over drinks, we would fill her in on our lives, or talk about current events—and laugh. The laughter is what I remember the most.

Toward the end of her life, she was diagnosed with late-onset Parkinson’s disease. It’s a terrible illness that, in conjunction with the bevy of drugs one is on to deal with the symptoms, creates very strong dreams and hallucinations, making it hard to distinguish what is real and what isn’t. On our weekly phone calls, my grandmother started sharing some alarming news—like that she owed tens of thousands of dollars in gambling debts to a man in New Jersey. Or that my aunt had been in jail, guilty of murder. They were the kind of stories that she herself—when she was healthy—would have found hilarious.

The wheels in my novelist brain began turning and I wondered—what if any one of these absurd things my grandmother was saying were true? What if my grandmother, who lived an incredible life in her own right—graduating from Cornell at a time when most women rarely went to college, traveling the globe, even meeting Jimmy Stewart!—had lived another, secret life? One that not one of her children or grandchildren knew about. And what if she did owe thousands of dollars in gambling debts? Or she had killed a man? Or she had traveled so much because she had actually been an international jewelry thief?

And that’s when the character of eighty-four-year-old Louise Constance Wilt was born.

The relationship at the heart of the novel—that of Tanner and Louise— is an intergenerational one. Why was that important to you?

In American culture, I think it’s pretty clear we don’t revere aging (and do anything we can to stop it, actually) or aging adults. They often become invisible, as if they have nothing left to offer, which is wild because they have literally decades of lived experience on this earth, a rich fabric of stories and advice and knowledge.

I learned so much from my grandmother—mostly the importance of never missing cocktail hour, but also how to be a woman in a world where it’s not always easy. My grandmother lived through and was part of major world-changing events—civil rights, the invention of the birth control pill, women earning the right to apply for credit cards without their husbands co-signing, Roe v. Wade. And now, we’re actually losing the rights that her generation and others before us had to fight for. In that respect, I believe intergenerational relationships—especially between women—are more important than ever. Not only do we need to honor the generations that came before us by not letting their work be in vain, but we need to learn from them, and in many cases work together to create a better country for women going forward.

The book is told from both Tanner and Louise’s perspectives. Did you enjoy writing one character more than the other? If so, who and why?

Definitely Louise. My grandmother died just as I was starting this novel, and I was able to give Louise many of my grandmother’s funny quirks and character traits, in a sense bringing her back to life, even if just for a short time. It was wonderful to spend so many hours as I was writing feeling closer to her.

Did the book require any special research? If so, what was your research process like? And what was the most surprising or unexpected discovery you made?

I did a lot of research on the second wave of feminism, since that was the time period when Louise would have been in her twenties and thirties, really figuring out who she wanted to be in this world. I learned so many things about that era, but I think the most surprising (aside from women needing to have their husbands co-sign on a credit card before 1974) is that the first battered women’s shelter (which is what they were called back then) didn’t open until 1973 in St. Paul Minnesota. 1973! Until then, there were really and truly no options for women who were victims of domestic violence, which I think speaks volumes to how little the needs of women were considered for so long in our country. I also learned there were zero female CEOs on the Fortune 500 list until 1972, when Katherine Graham became CEO of The Washington Post. This year, we set a record for the highest number of women CEOs ever to be on the Fortune 500 list—and it’s forty-four. Out of 500. That’s 8.8%—which, granted, is better than .02% when Katherine blazed onto the list, but that was fifty years ago. That shocks me.

What do you hope readers take away from this novel?

First, I hope they revel in the escapist fun of it all. And I hope it makes younger readers want to spark up conversations with the older people in their lives: ask them questions, hear their stories. Who knows? Maybe your grandmother was a notorious jewelry thief who’s wanted by the FBI, too.

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