From Late-Night TV to Novelist With The Refuge

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday morning. With us today is Carly Hillman. And she was the producer of the late night show with Stephen Corbett for 10 years. And now she’s also a writer. And she’s with us this morning. And Carly Hillman, well, welcome to WABC. And thank you for coming on this Sunday morning. And you have a new book. It’s called

0:21 The Refuge. And it takes place in Montana, where I’ve been a few times. And tell us about the book.

0:31 Speaker 2 Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to chat with you. And yeah, the book is called The Refuge. And it basically tells the story of a mother and daughter who live and work on this Montana wildlife refuge, living this isolated but really beautiful life. But as the daughter is getting older, she starts to question the story

0:51 she’s always been told about how her mother ended up living there. And she starts looking into things, investigating her own family history and accidentally reopens a decades old missing child case. So it’s a fun mystery and it’s been such a joy to have it.

1:07 Speaker 1 Otherwise she was one of the missing child.

1:11 Speaker 2 Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out, but, um, the mother was, is the missing child. And, um, You know, as her daughter is growing up, she’s starting to realize that her mother has lied to her about how she ended up living on this wildlife refuge.

1:29 Speaker 1 And at what age do you think we have to read the book to find out what age she moved in with the mother?

1:39 Speaker 2 The daughter has always lived there, and she’s grown up with the impression that her mother had always lived there as well. But as she starts to dig into her family past, learns that her mother was actually discovered there as a seven-year-old abandoned child, and the staff had been complicit in kind of a cover-up to help her stay there.

1:58 Speaker 1 And what brought you around to doing that kind of book?

2:06 Speaker 2 You know, it’s funny because I had a full-time job working, as you said, at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I produced the interviews there and I loved that job. It took... But it took a lot of time. So for a while, I had this idea for a book.

2:22 I wanted to be a writer, but I also had this full-time job and I wasn’t writing because I just felt I didn’t have the time. But ultimately, it was that job where I got to interact with so many incredible people who are coming on the show to give interviews.

2:40 And it accidentally became this like 10-year masterclass in studying successful people. Because if you’re making it on a late night stage, for the most part, you know, you’ve achieved some degree of success. And the more and more I interacted with people, I realized that Every single one of them had had to believe in themselves before anyone else

3:00 believed in them enough for them to do something. So, you know, it’s actors. No one was asking them to act. No one was asking these musicians to make music. People were believing in themselves. And then the rest came from there.

3:13 And so after years of kind of sitting with this novel in my head, I thought no one’s going to knock down my door begging me to write a book. I have to be the one that that wants to do it for myself. And so it really was that job that kind of helped inspire me to sit down

3:27 and get writing.

3:28 Speaker 1 Well, it’s Carly Hillman and the name of the book is The Refuge and takes place in Montana. And I understand it was published in September of 2026, which is just a few weeks ago. And where can you buy it?

3:44 Speaker 2 You can buy it wherever your books are sold. Local indie bookstores are great or Amazon. Wherever you like to buy your books, you can find it there. And I’m grateful that you’re chatting about it today.

3:55 Speaker 1 Well, I look forward to it. Is it available in audio, too? Is it just published or hardcover?

4:02 Speaker 2 It is. It’s available on audiobook as well. So you can listen, you can read, however you’d like to get your books.

4:10 Speaker 1 Well, I will definitely be buying it, and thank you so much, and thank you for coming on, and good luck. It’s called The Refuge by Carly Hillman at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookstore. Thank you, Kathy, for coming on, and we’ll talk again real soon.

4:29 Speaker 2 Thank you so much.