Lee Cole on the ethics of writing about home, and the people who stay and leave small towns

Welcome to the latest episode of the Rippling Pages. I’m having a coffee with Lee Cole, the American writer from Kentucky. And we’re talking about balancing the feelings and ethics of writing about home.

Now living a humdrum life in Kentucky, Emmett spends his days packing boxes in a warehouse. But what happens when he begins to dream of another life—and when those dreams start to fracture his family relationships?

These questions lie at the heart of Fulfilment, Lee Cole’s second novel. The book follows two half brothers whose clashing ambitions—Emmett’s longing to be a screenwriter and his brother’s academic ideals about “rural despair”—go beyond a simple difference in worldview. Something deeper threatens to pull them apart.

Lee is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is also the author of Groundskeeping. Both his novels were published by Faber in the U.K. The New York Times has described his work as “Anne Tyler by way of Sally Rooney.” Originally from Kentucky, Lee joins me today from Philadelphia.

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1.35 - Ann Tyler and Sally Rooney

5.05 - why Kentucky 

7.25 - people who leave and stay in small towns 

9.30 - why does Emmett wish he had what Joel has?

11.10 - southern fried rendition of Marx

12.10 - warehouses 

16.12 - the difficulty of warehouse jobs 

18.30 - Kentucky’s beauty 

19.45 - backgrounds and worldviews 

21.45 - guilt about writing about home or 

22.30 - rippling pages bookshop

23.35 - Alice’s role

26.15 - Alice’s dream of owning a farm 

28.50 - knowing what our desires are 

32.50 - writing about writers impulses

Books

Wendell Berry

Annie Dillard

Sigmund Freud

Aldo Leopold

Karl Marx

Sally Rooney 

Anne Tyler

John Updike