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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, a debut novel from a former daily show writer who is also a lawyer. Tells the story of Aretha, a Brooklyn-based attorney who falls in love with a guy who happens to live with survivalists, and I mean bunker in the backyard, emergency go bags, large [unintelligible 00:00:25] of gun survivalists right in Crown Heights. Toiling at a corporate firm, Aretha hopes to make partner and to find one too.

She meets Aaron, a sweet Texas transplant who runs a coffee roasting business. They've both lost their parents and they bond so quickly that Aaron invites Aretha to move in with him in a brownstone he co-owns. There's just this thing about Aaron's housemates, Britney and James, they are hardcore survivalists. They're amassing guns, they're selling some illegally, preparing for the apocalypse. They eat protein-packed bars, exclusively do drills in the yard.

Aaron is okay with it. You see, he has PTSD from Hurricane Sandy. At first, Aretha thinks this survivalism is some overblown hobby, but when Britney and James start involving her in their illegal endangered schemes, Aretha may be in too deep. Kashana Cauley, as I said, is a former writer from The Daily Show, a Columbia Law School grad, and is currently writing for the Fox Sitcom, the Great North. The survivalist is her debut novel, and she joins me now to discuss. Hi Kashana.

Kashana Cauley: Hi.

Alison Stewart: I think people think survivalists, they think somewhere in the middle of the country, deep in the woods, you put this right smack in Brooklyn. How did you decide to set this story in Brooklyn? Did Brooklyn and then the yin-yang of it happen or did you want to write a story about survivalists and then said, "Hey, Brooklyn?"

Kashana Cauley: I was living in Brooklyn at the time, but I saw two news articles about New York City-based survivalists right before I started writing this novel. Some of them was in the Village ninth, between fifth and sixth, one of the really nice stately homes. It was a pair like a Bonnie and Clyde type in their 20s, stockpiling guns. The other one was at the end of my block in Brooklyn. A guy above a trendy ramen shop also stockpiling guns. Everybody was just afraid of the end times. I was incredibly, incredibly inspired by that.

I also grew up in a household where my parents stockpiled food and a few guns and just in case. We were in Wisconsin, said just in case could be an ice storm or intruders at your door. They were never very specific about it, but they wanted to feel prepared.

Alison Stewart: Thinking about your Google searches, and I thought, "Oh, I hope she did this incognito," because of the way you would have to-- [laughter] the things you would have to search. How much time did you spend time on Reddit threads and on forums on YouTube? Tell us a little bit about how you learned about how survivalists live their days.

Kashana Cauley: I did spend my time in those places. I did watch a lot of YouTube videos of people showing their bunkers, their preparation, everything. I also had a friend whose boyfriend, he called it his preparedness hobby. I hung out and talked to him a great deal. What causes one to prepare in the middle of Baltimore, it's a perfectly nice place. No one's going to attack you. There's no war, there's no end times. I went back and I talked to my parents and I thought about my conversations with them too.

Alison Stewart: The other culture you really tap into is that of the life of a rising young attorney, because when we first meet Aretha, how is she feeling about her career? How is she feeling about her life?

Kashana Cauley: She is nervous. She's in a really high stakes, high-pressure law firm white shoe. I did my time at one of those. She really wants to make partner on one level because it's what comes next. She's a rule follower. When you graduate from law school, you do know that that's the point. She's not sure either that's going to happen for her. That's something she wants anymore. She doesn't love the practice of law necessarily. She defends a lot of large corporations. It doesn't necessarily line up with her values. She's looking for something else.

Alison Stewart: She knows she's an achiever so she's supposed to be thinking about this making partner, thinking about saying the right thing. Thinking about the first one to finish the brief.

Kashana Cauley: Yes. On top of that, I think she doesn't know what she would do if she actually left the firm. She has no backup plan. She didn't have anything else she dreamed of doing. She's just at a crossroads and confused.

Alison Stewart: Aretha's parents are dead. They died in this car accident. We won't talk about it, we'll let people read the book because it's important. It's important detail. Then we learn Aaron's mom, this nice guy she meets died as well. The dad's out of the picture. How does not having parents make these people vulnerable and why was that the vulnerability you wanted to tap into?

Kashana Cauley: I think not having parents causes them to search harder for family and community. I think Aretha and Aaron end up in a pretty intense relationship because of it. They're looking for more out of each other than people might necessarily look in a dating scenario. I wanted to give Aretha that particular vulnerability so she truly felt alone. I think a lot of people, if you stumble out of the law firm or your big career path, you can go back to your parents. You have that support system. What if she didn't? What if she wasn't? If she didn't have that as an option, what is she going to do?

Alison Stewart: Was this character always named Aretha?

Kashana Cauley: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why?

Kashana Cauley: I don't know. I just wanted to give her what I considered to be a warm Black name. A name that I associated with comfort and happiness and Aretha Franklin, who is fantastic.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kashana Cauley. The name of the book is The Survivalists. The roommates. The roommates are something else. James is a disgraced journalist. In terms of James, in your opinion, did he capital P plagiarize or lowercase P plagiarize?

Kashana Cauley: Capital P plagiarize. A lot of articles, a lot over a long period of time. He really convinced himself that he was doing this for a greater purpose in the sense that people really needed to read articles about climate change. I think on some level he's aware that this didn't work out, that wasn't the way to do it, and he's been tossed through journalism for a good reason.

Alison Stewart: Britney, what are some adjectives you would use to describe Britney, so our audience can get Britney's vibe?

Kashana Cauley: I call her militant, really self-sufficient. She thinks it's her against the world on some level. She has flunked out of a lot of traditional job environments and lost touch with a lot of her friends. She's just alone and defensive about a lot of things as well.

Alison Stewart: You've got James, you've got Britney, and then you've got Aaron. Aaron who Aretha has fallen in love with and Aaron starts adjacent, survivalist adjacent because his apartment flooded during Hurricane Sandy. In your mind, what happened to Aaron that it still haunts him?

Kashana Cauley: He was really living a carefully life in a way. He was a bartender. He didn't love his job, but he was living in a neighborhood he liked. He put together this life and then all of a sudden he was concerned that he might drown in his apartment floods. He's just like, "I didn't know about any of this. I was working at the bar. I didn't listen to the warnings. I didn't take them seriously. Why did this happen to me? I don't ever want to feel like I'm going to die again for something that perhaps I have known that was coming in advance and do something about."

Alison Stewart: What kind of research did you do into how things like natural disasters where people really don't have control, what kind of trauma they leave?

Kashana Cauley: Some internet stuff, but also I got stranded from my own apartment for four weeks during Hurricane Sandy because I lived south of power, I think they called it at the time, and had gone to Wisconsin with my husband so he could take an actuarial exam. Then we realized we could not take a flight home and then our power plant blew up on YouTube. I spent weeks and weeks and weeks just dying to go home. To come home, my apartment building flooded, his office flooded.

We had to throw out everything in our fridge. Our neighbors were like, "Yes, you couldn't step out on the street." Some internet research, some talking to people, my friends who lived in the neighborhood, our neighbors, but also just the experience of just feeling adrift for an entire month living in Chicago by accident unable to come home.

Alison Stewart: That's amazing. It's interesting. Well, conversation for another time about trauma, you just think of-- I can remember that I was in a hotel shortly after 9/11, a fire alarm went off and we got down to the street and there were only six of us who ran. We all were like, "You're from New York, aren't you?" We all were just like fire alarms, you don't stay put anymore, you run. It was really that physical response to that stimuli.

We have our characters, we know who our different people are with Nia, we have to mention that Aretha does have a friend Nia, who's like, what are you doing moving in with this man you just met? Who does seem to have red flags on every shoulder in every pocket? Why isn't Aretha open to hearing from Nia? What is she missing about these red flags with Aaron?

Kashana Cauley: I think Aretha always saw in part. Well, she's in love with Aaron, but she also saw herself as a person who would get married and have the 2.5 kids in the fence and make partner. She loves Aaron and he is also just a part of the plan. She thinks Nia doesn't understand that on some level because Nia is just a very happily single type. It doesn't really get into relationships. She's not big into commitment. She's thrilled about that. She loves her single life and all that that entails. Aretha does not necessarily trust Nia relationships in part because they want such different things. Also, after a really rough period dating has just developed this deep emotional connection with Aaron. Even if his roommates are a little weird. She was like, you date people, their roommates are weird. If you love them, can't we overcome that a little bit? Then she realizes just how weird they are and starts having some second thoughts.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The Survivalist. I'm speaking with its author, Kashana Cauley. Aaron has a coffee business. Would you tell our listeners about the coffee business? Its name, how it got its name?

Kashana Cauley: It's called Tactical Coffee. The Bag has a person running with a cup of coffee that's full in one hand that's sloshing out over the top and a gun in the other. The tagline is, because you don't want to fall asleep during the apocalypse. I did not know about Black Rifle Coffee before I wrote the book, but was absolutely thrilled to discover them two or three years in 678 drafts in, because they're a right-wing coffee company that does a lot of like military blends and they support right-wing causes.

They're not exactly the inspiration of the book because I discover them later. There is this right-wing prepper ethos about them, and there is also a desire to make consumer products prepper-ish. There's concealed cherry chinos. He is run to a guy with khakis, he might be dangerous. I was just obsessed with that entire line of products, this idea that people could seem like they were ready to shoot you if you were attacking them or whatever with their clothing or their other consumer products. Tactical coffee comes from that obsession.

Alison Stewart: Aretha starts to realize how deep this survivalist behavior goes, and that Britney and James are really engaging in some illegal activity. There's just this moment where she could have turned away from all of it. She could have just be no, peace out, I'm done, but she doesn't. In writing Aretha, knowing Aretha's backstory, why doesn't she make that decision? Which seems like the saner decision, given how agro Brittany is especially and how drunk James is.

Kashana Cauley: Aretha has the misfortune of running into a group of people who are engaged in illegal activities right at a point where she's falling out of love with the law herself. She wanted to be a lawyer and be successful in all that, but she's also a Black woman who's watching the law play out at her job and realizing that she's not one of the groups of people that the law is necessarily meant to protect or that the law is meant to work for. On top of that, she doesn't necessarily love the client she's defending or the work she's doing.

She's at this point where she's at this real career crisis where she's like, "Do I like the law? Is this something I want to do? Is this something I believe in just because I make money doing it?" For them to be engaged in the thing that is the opposite of her entire life path and tweaks her on a deeper level, she goes, what is on the other side of the law? What is it that I've been missing? It's not necessarily that she starts out wanting to be a lawbreaker, but she's curious. She lets that curiosity lead her down this path to hanging out with these survivalists and getting involved in their illegal activities.

Alison Stewart: As I mentioned, Aretha's Black, Britney is a Black woman as well, who feels very strongly about arming herself. There's been a lot of reporting in the past few years about Black Americans considering buying guns for the first time in light of police brutality, other issues. How are you thinking about what it means to be a Black gun owner when you were working on this book?

Kashana Cauley: I grew up in a house with guns. My parents were just like if we want to be able to hunt, we should be able to do that. If we want to be able to defend ourselves, we should be able to do that. We are Americans. The Second Amendment applies to us as well. They're liberal Second Amendment people, but they very much were just like, this is our constitution, this is our land, our territory, our rights. Which is a really edgy position, I think, being Black. In a lot of ways, I have a lot of respect for that. This is also my country. I want to be able to claim the things that it stands for.

I don't happen to own guns, but I want to believe in America as much as they have in the sense that even if we are not necessarily the most embraced people, we too can claim the rights and privileges of being American. I think this plays a lot into the gun discussion. I think Britney is one of those, this is my country too. The second amendment is my amendment. Why can't I take full advantage of the rights, and granted to me as an American? She's defending herself in her place in the country with her gun ownership. She's also just irresponsible and ridiculous, but she's got this philosophy, this patriotic Black philosophy. We're Americans too.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about The Survivalist, the new novel from Kashana Cauley. I'm not going to talk about the plot anymore, we'll leave it there because we don't want to do any spoilers. I think if somebody's sitting here and they're listening in lunch hour in their law firm and they think I want to be a writer too, what was your big leap? What made you take the leap?

Kashana Cauley: I crashed out of my law firm, and I have a very supportive husband who's like, "You've always wanted to write, you've been writing books for years." I wrote a book while I was at the firm. I wrote another one in the summer when I graduated from law school before I joined the firm. None of these worked out, but I really kept wanting to stab at it. He's like, give it a shot. I also started writing short stories and non-fiction on the side and freelancing, but I always wanted to write my novel. I did that. It's really nice having supportive folks in your life who can pay your rent sometimes and support you.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The Survivalists. It's really good. My guest has been Kashana Cauley. Kashana congratulations on the novel.

Kashana Cauley: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for this week. All Of It is produced by Andrea Duncan-Mao, Kate Hinds, Jordan Lauf, Simon Close, Zach Gottehrer-Cohen, L. Malik Anderson, and Luke Green. Our intern is Katherine St. Martin. Megan Ryan is the head of Live radio. Lucius Jackson does our music. If you missed any segments this week, catch up by listening to our podcast, available on your podcast platform of choice. If you like what you hear, please leave us a great rating. It helps people find the show. I'm Allison Stewart, I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you and I will meet you back here next time.

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