J. Ryan Stradal is the author of New York Times bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest and national bestseller The Lager Queen of Minnesota. His debut won the American Booksellers Association Indie's Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year, and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for the year's top novel. The Lager Queen of Minnesota won the WILLA Literary Award and was a finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Granta, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. His third and newest novel is Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club. Born and raised in Minnesota, he now lives in California with his family.

There are few public settings more unique to the northern Midwest than the supper club, and J. Ryan Stradal’s new novel, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club, is his love letter to them and to the people who made them their home away from home. In this colorful, vanishing world of relish trays and brandy Old Fashioneds, filled with honest, lovable yet fallible Midwestern characters, two restaurant families over three generations grapple with love, loss, and marriage, and what our legacy will be when we are gone.

The Write Process - Season 6

J. Ryan Stradal on Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club

Hillary Yablon lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young sons. She is a graduate of Princeton University and earned her MA in poetry from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. This, her debut novel, received the Allegra Johnson Prize at UCLA.

In Sylvia’s Second Act, Sylvia’s husband’s cheating on her. She hates Boca. Sylvia is mad and she isn’t going to take it anymore. She’s moving back to the city of her dreams—with her best friend, Evie, in tow. When sixty-three-year-old Sylvia finds her husband in bed with the floozy of their retirement community, she’s shocked and furious...at first. Sylvia realizes that actually, this isn’t what she wants anymore. So she enlists her best friend, the glamorous older widow Evie, to join her in setting up a new life in Manhattan. Sylvia doesn't want to be twenty-five again. Her age gives her wisdom, experience, and perspective. A career, sex, fun, and a new romance—her entire second act is stretched out in front of her.

The Write Process - Season 7

Hillary Yablon on Sylvia’s Second Act

All writing is a tightrope walk from where the idea originates to the moment a book, movie, or TV episode emerges in the world. In The Write Process, Charles Jensen, director of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, asks writing instructors and students who’ve walked the tightrope and come out the other side to talk about their process. Each episode tells the story of how one writer took one project from concept to completion, showcasing the various—and varied—paths we take when we follow one good idea all the way home.

Hillary Yablon on Sylvia’s Second Act

UCLA Extension Writers' Program

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