In this episode of Unreadable, Ross speaks with Shelby Van Pelt about her novel Remarkably Bright Creatures, this year's Forsyth Reads Together selection. Van Pelt’s debut novel, published in 2022, remains a New York Times bestseller and features the unique perspective of Marcellus the octopus as a narrator. Van Pelt spoke with Ross about how she developed her characters, some based on true life and others based on people (and marine life) watching at the Georgia Aquarium, and she shared her excitement about the upcoming film adaptation.
An Evening with Shelby Van Pelt is Mar 11, 2025 at the Forsyth Conference Center. The event is ticketed and currently full; however, there are a plethora of events related to the book taking place at all the Forsyth County Public Library branches. You can find out more in our event calendar.
Introduction
Ross Gericke: Hello and welcome to Unreadable, the official Forsyth County Public Library Podcast for news, upcoming programs, and recommendations. I’m your host, Ross Gericke, the branch manager at Hampton Park.
In this episode, I talk with Shelby Van Pelt about her breakout debut hit, Remarkably Bright Creatures, which is also this year’s Forsyth Reads Together selection. Numerous events for all ages associated with Remarkably Bright Creatures will be taking place across all our branches in February and March, so make sure to check out our events calendar online for all the details.
Now on with the show.
Interview
Ross Gericke: Shelby, welcome to the podcast.
Shelby Van Pelt: Thank you.
Ross Gericke: So, first I want to talk about the 800 pound gorilla or, I guess in this case, octopus in the room. So, this podcast usually functions as an advertising vehicle for library programs, but your Forsyth County Reads Together event is already full. 1,000 seats. We have never had an event that big. So, I'm thinking that the book you wrote is pretty popular.
Shelby Van Pelt: Well, you know, he's a 60lb octopus, which is about as big as they get in captivity, which I learned when I was researching Remarkably Bright Creatures. No, that's wonderful to hear. That's a huge number of people, and I am so excited for this event. I lived in Atlanta for many years, and I think this is my first kind of Atlanta-area book event that I've ever done.
Ross Gericke: Welcome back home, right?
Shelby Van Pelt: Yeah, and you know, I was living in Atlanta when I started writing this book, and it very much feels like home. So, I'm really excited.
Ross Gericke: And I think that your book has sold pretty well at this point too. You got well over a million copies.
Shelby Van Pelt: Oh gosh, yeah, it's wild. I mean, it's been popping on and off of the New York Times hardcover list. As of this January 2025 was still on the New York Times hardcover list, which I mean even my publishers at this point are kind of like – I don't want to say surprised – but it's just like it truly has taken on a life of its own, and I think so much of it is due to word of mouth, to people pressing it into the hands of a friend and saying, “You've got to read this. Just trust me. I know it sounds weird.” Although I think a lot of people, at this point, have sort of heard of it, so maybe it doesn't seem that weird anymore. But yeah, definitely a lot of very organic word-of-mouth support from librarians and library folks, support from book clubs, independent book sellers. It truly just has been really, really fun to watch.
Ross Gericke: I don’t think I’ve seen your book on the shelf since it came out. It’s just constantly on request lists. It’s never ever here. I mean, did you ever - this is your debut novel, too, right? Did you ever think it would be such a big hit? I mean, we all want that to happen, right? But did you think it would actually happen?
Shelby Van Pelt: Oh my gosh, no. I never thought anyone was going to read it when I was writing it. I was mostly just writing it for my own entertainment, I guess, to see if I could write a book. I'm not trained as a writer. I had a whole career in something completely not writing related before I went down this path, and I truly started dabbling in writing fiction really as kind of a personal fulfillment thing – to do something creative that felt good after years of having a job that really didn't give me that satisfaction. And to have been able to turn it into this kind of career is just truly beyond anything that I ever could have imagined for myself.
Ross Gericke: So, how did the novel originate? How did you come up with the idea to feature a sort of sardonic talking octopus as one of the narrators in your book?
Shelby Van Pelt: So I will tell the full story of this at the talk for anyone who's able to attend that, but the simple answer is I got the idea from YouTube, which I sort of hate to admit, because my children – they're 9 and 11, and they're obsessed with YouTube, and I'm constantly kind of going on about how – “Well, that's kind of garbage;” “Don't waste your life on YouTube. You could be doing something better.” And like here I am, having had the seed of this idea for this book come from going down a YouTube rabbit hole of naughty octopuses, and just thinking it would be fun to give that octopus a voice – a fictional voice. So yeah, that's kind of the short answer.
This was sort of right at the beginning of when I was really starting to play with the idea of writing fiction. I had always loved writing. I've always been good at writing, but I hadn't really done much creative writing, much fiction writing at that point. So, I was really searching for things to write about and sort of hunting for characters in the wild. And that was the frame of mind that I was in when I went on this YouTube adventure with these misbehaving octopuses and sort of just thought that would be a fun thing to sort of harvest as a character.
Ross Gericke: And, I really like how Marcellus – he almost functions sort of like a Greek chorus. Like, he comes into the story line, and he just sort of comments on everything that is happening right outside of his tank. He’s pretty funny. I really enjoyed him and his observations of human nature, sort of that “Lord, what fools these mortals be” kind of approach.
Shelby Van Pelt: Oh, absolutely. And, you know, he was also the best cure for my writer's block when I was writing this book. When I would sit down, if I was stuck that day, or working on a scene that I just couldn't seem to get enthusiasm for, I would just step aside and say, "Well, what's Marcellus up to?" and just, kind of in my head, pop over to his tank and be like, “What's he spouting off about today?" and truly imagining – if you spent any time at aquariums, zoos, really any public space where you have a lot of people just sort of filtering through, you just think of, “Well, what would you observe that, if you could step away from your own humanness, would just sort of make you roll your eyes?” And there's a lot of material there. When I was in the very very early stages of creating Marcellus, I spent a lot of time at the Georgia Aquarium, and it's a wonderful wonderful place and very great for observing all the marine life. It's also really great for people watching. You go there on a Saturday, you will see all kinds of people and things that are just fun to observe from a detached point of view like Marcellus.
Ross Gericke: Yep. It’s full of lots of sea life, but full of lots of humans, too.
Shelby Van Pelt: Human dramas. Yep.
Ross Gericke: So, I always thought that as funny as Marcellus is in the book, he's sort of balanced out by how realistic and tragic that Tova's life is. She suffers the death of her son in a freak accident at age 18 and then later the death of her husband from cancer. But even when we meet her in the novel and she's contemplating the final stages of her life, she's pretty stoic and put together. Do you think Tova's tragedies have made her tough or was that already like an intrinsic part of her character?
Shelby Van Pelt: I think it's an intrinsic part of her character, but I think it becomes entrenched in her by what she has sort of been asked to carry. I based the character of Tova largely on my grandmother, who passed away several years ago. And she, like Tova, was from Sweden. She was this tiny little woman who was always cleaning, and very, very sweet, very loving, but had a shell around her when it came to her emotions, her problems. She did not want to depend on anyone. She dreaded the thought of being a burden, which of course she lived into her 90s and as she got into those later ages that became a real day-to-day issue, that it was hard for her to accept help.
Then of course, with the actual events of Tova's life, the loss of her son, and all of that's fictional. So, I think I took this very real template that I knew very well. I grew up living next door to my grandmother, and I spent so much time with her. I feel like I knew that person down into my bones, and probably, I am that person, somewhere in my genetic material as well. [I] took that very real person, and then you sort of superimpose these bigger tragedies to make it be a little bit bigger than real life in the fictional world. That's always the balance for me is trying to write characters that seem so real and so relatable, and when you read them, you think “Oh gosh, I know this person” but they also have to be a little bit bigger than real life in order to be interesting on the page. So, that's always a balance, and I think that's where I was going with Tova, was taking sort of this baseline real character and then adding these additional weights to kind of, I don't want to say make it more dramatic, but I guess just make everything feel bigger.
Ross Gericke: Yeah, that's the magic of fiction, right?
Shelby Van Pelt: Yeah.
Ross Gericke: You're telling truth by telling lies. I see exactly what you mean – that idea that because she feels very real, and I'm glad to hear that she's based on a real person because it feels that way, but people don't have these arcs exactly – you know what I mean – that you need to have in a narrative like that. So that makes good sense. And, I thought that Cameron – he's kind of the opposite, right? He also has a bunch of tragedies. He doesn't know who his father is, and he's abandoned by his mom who has drug issues, when he's very young, but he's a bit of a mess, like he can't hold down a job or relationship. Do you think his tragedies unmade him, or is that also just kind of his personality?
Shelby Van Pelt: So yeah, I mean he is the hot mess express. [Laughs] I think if you asked him he would deny this, but I think he clings to his tragedies as an excuse not to be better. And I think that's something that I think a lot of people do. Maybe not in such a spectacularly obnoxious fashion compared to Cameron, but certainly, I can recall in a situation that's about as different from a 30-year-old guy as possible, I remember being postpartum with my kids, having little kids, and I'm dealing with all of the anxiety and depression, all of the PP things. And almost feeling that chip on my shoulder, I was just kind of angry. I was angry that I didn't have any family around to help with my kids, and everyone else seemed to have it together and I didn't, and this was so hard. I remember that moment of realizing like I am clinging to this chip on my shoulder as an excuse not to try to move past it. And I think I moved past it eventually. I don't know, maybe my husband would disagree. It was a hard few years, and again, I probably wouldn't have recognized that at the time, but now in hindsight, when I look at Cameron and what I see him doing as he's trying to move through all of these burdens that he is bearing and trying to really grow up, I'm like, "I think I can see how I've done that, too." I can see how people do that in their own way. How sometimes it's easier to stay stuck in a bad situation. To almost cling to that victimhood, if you will, rather than rising above it and moving forward.
Ross Gericke: I think you are very generous to him as a writer, too. I think a different approach – he could have been a very negative character, but he feels very sympathetic. It definitely comes through the writing, whether intentional or not. Again that’s the magic of fiction. He is a very sympathetic character, regardless of how he's just kind of this disaster.
Shelby Van Pelt: I feel like we all know Cameron. Everyone has that friend or that family member who they just can't seem to get it together. You kind of just want to shake them and help them get out of their own way.
Ross Gericke: For sure. Switching topics a little bit, are you excited that the book is being made into a film starring Sally Field?
Shelby Van Pelt: It's so unreal, isn't it?
Ross Gericke: Wow.
Shelby Van Pelt: Yeah. I mean, talk about things that I would not have ever imagined happening. I'm always a little bit “I don't know how much I can share about this” because it's Hollywood and whatever, but I think it's safe to say it's moving forward. It's been green lit. It's slated to start filming this spring. Maybe even by the time I am meeting y'all in Georgia, it might be underway, hopefully. Again, it's Hollywood. Who knows, anything can happen. But yeah, it's moving along and it's really exciting.
Ross Gericke: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask if you were involved in the process at all. I know that a lot of authors usually are not, but you're just a fan like the rest of us potentially.
Shelby Van Pelt: I've gotten really lucky. I love the producer that I'm working with. I love the director that we're working with. They've really included me in a lot of the process of reading drafts of scripts and having input into some of the creative directions and choices. Obviously, I'm not there day-to-day on the set or involved in the day-to-day decisions, but big picture, they've been really great about looping me in. I know that doesn't always happen, so I'm very grateful.
Ross Gericke: It definitely means that when the movie does come out, your book will have a long waitlist on it again. [Laughs]
Shelby Van Pelt: And, if the movie comes out and you hate it, then I had nothing to do with it. [Laughs]
Ross Gericke: [Laughs] You disavow all knowledge. That’s right.
Ross Gericke: All right. Well, Shelby, thank you for coming on the podcast.
Shelby Van Pelt: Thank you for having me and I'm so excited to see you all in Georgia soon.
Outro
Please subscribe to our podcast on the Apple Podcasts app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Contact the podcast directly with any comments by email at Unreadable@forsythpl.org
Keep up with all the excitement happening each month on our interactive calendar available on our website, www.forsythpl.org. You can also stay connected with the library through Facebook and Instagram @FOCOlibrary.
Our theme music is “Open Those Bright Eyes” composed by Kevin MacLeod. This and other compositions by Kevin MacLeod are available at Incompetech.com
I’m Ross Gericke, and this podcast has been Unreadable.
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