Courtney Maum, Author of "Touch"

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[0:37]Today I'm excited to be with Courtney mom, who is the author of two novels, touch and I am having so much fun here without you.

[0:44]She inked a non-fiction book deal just last month, ironically called After the Book Deal, which will come out in 2019.

[0:50]Touch is about a trend forecaster hired to predict the next trends in technology for a giant tech company.

[0:57]Problems arise when she starts to feel like the next big thing is going to be returned to in-person interactions.

[1:03]Touch was rated one of NPR's best books of the year and it was a New York Times editor's choice.

[1:08]The graduate of Brown University, Courtney has published essays in the New York Times and owe the Oprah magazine,

[1:13]and has co-written films that have premiered at Sundance and won awards at Cannes.

[1:17]She has worked as a trend forecaster, a creative brand strategist, a corona promoter in Paris, and a corporate name her for Matt Cosmetics.

[1:25]She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Connecticut, where she founded the collaborative retreat, the cabins.

[1:30]So welcome, Courtney. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Thank you for having me.

[1:35]So for listeners who haven't read your latest novel touch, can you tell me a little more about it and how you came up with the idea?

[1:41]Sure, I'd be happy to. So touch is my second book and it is about an American trend forecaster named Sloan Jacobson,

[1:50]who has lived in France for about the past two decades and she's called on assignment to New York City

[1:58]to work for what's basically a turduck in of Google, Amazon and Apple, specifically she's tasked with forecasting the next trends in technology.

[2:12]But while she's there, she starts to feel like the next trends in technology are going to be no technology at all of return to face to face interactions and touch and intimacy.

[2:25]This is problematic because it's against her clients' interest, stated interests in their bottom line.

[2:34]And also she has a life partner, a zany French guy who's been going around publishing these op-eds on post-sexuality and the death of penetrative sex

[2:46]and our fearless heroine finds herself in a little bit of a conundrum.

[2:52]And I came to write touch. It actually came out of as many of my books do a failed attempt to write a different book,

[3:05]which when I showed that draft to my agent, she said, you know, the only thing, she said it nicer than this, but she said the only thing worth holding on to

[3:16]this book is this woman's job. Her job is very interesting. In that particular rendition of the book, the Sloan character had been a prop stylist, specifically for Creighton Barrel.

[3:29]And I was sort of circling around my past where I had worked as a trend forecaster, but I don't know, I hadn't worked up the courage to go there yet.

[3:41]I was a little bit of an abstract occupation that a lot of people don't understand. It's also, I was under a lot of ND, a non-disclosure agreements.

[3:52]But I guess this was in 2015. I started thinking of the idea and around that time I was, for me, at least in my social circle, that's when I started noticing that my friends were just everyone was looking at their phone all the time.

[4:10]And letting their phone make all the decisions for them. If they were hungry, they'd ask their phone what they should eat and where they should eat.

[4:18]And so I was thinking, well, gosh, I wonder if intuition is something that if you don't practice and if you let it get rusty, could human beings actually lose their sense of intuition?

[4:33]And I thought about my prop stylist trend forecaster and I thought, well, what could I do with a woman who makes her living off of her intuitions, what if she starts to, what if intuition is an interesting to people anymore?

[4:49]And so slowly I started building the book that would many drafts later have become touch.

[4:57]Do you feel like you have that same intuitive, intuitive sense of intuition where you can almost predict things that are coming at times?

[5:05]I mean, I do sometimes feel that. I mean, I don't think that I'm alone. I think a lot of artists have a little bit of a heightened awareness and certainly novelist or I think they're paying more attention than most people. They're thinking perhaps more than most people about people's motivations and it's our job to be aware.

[5:30]Yeah, I think maybe I've lived now in the countryside for over a decade, so if I did have a skill, it's distilled a little bit because I'm mostly around trees and squirrels and senior citizens now.

[5:48]I'm not really in the heart of the trends that are happening, but yeah, I mean, it's there a little bit.

[5:55]I feel like another big element of touch is the relationship sort of what happens to families after you lose a parent because I felt like that whole dimension was like a whole other part of the book that was super interesting and moving.

[6:09]Yeah, I mean, I think when the book first came out, the press was very nice to me, but they focused a lot on the technology aspect.

[6:21]Where in fact, the family struggles and slums present inability to connect with people in her life was for me really at the heart of the book actually because what we're dealing with is someone who's hyper successful.

[6:41]She's well paid, she's respected, but she doesn't have a lot of friends, her relationship with her, you know, I love her, I guess is there's no love in it.

[6:54]You know, there's no sensuality, there's no touch in it.

[6:57]And a lot of that stems back from the loss of her father because he's, you know, you know, and you know that from having children, but when you decide to love, completely make yourself incredibly vulnerable.

[7:11]And she really, really loved her father and was when he passed away, she was still young enough that she was just innocent and completely open to the love and didn't really, she wasn't old enough to have been hurt yet and realized that you can lose people.

[7:26]You know, and so he, his death was really a pivot in making her the somewhat cold-hearted, untouchable person that we meet when the book opens.

[7:41]Right, because when the book starts, you have her pegged as the ultimate anti-mom.

[7:46]And you've been had her quoted as saying, reproduction is akin to ecoterrorism.

[7:51]And then she called reading short-sighted that she's even helping out with a conference called reproduction with the rekind of background stuff.

[8:01]And asking, you know, what will we make when we stop having kids and are the needs of people who for whatever reason decisively remain childless going to be different than those who reproduce?

[8:12]Was it the death of her father that made you want to create a character that didn't want children, or did you think that was sort of just a good mechanism for contrasting?

[8:23]I think it's both, really. I mean, it took me a while to get there, but it really felt like putting her specifically on a task force that was coming up with products for the voluntarily childless, not only made sense in terms of future forecasting, because the world is overpopulated, right?

[8:44]I mean, I think it's not the best idea to have children that could choose not to, but the idea that, you know, perhaps it's not environmentally the best idea to have more than one or two children, that's something that could be argued.

[9:00]It was really for, I wanted to set up a sterile environment, both literally and figuratively where consumerism and overconsumption was incredibly heightened as was sort of a modern American society's lack of empathy and compassion.

[9:23]So, when you read the book, you're exposed to a lot of these brainstorming sessions where they're literally trying to think, well, what can we come up with for people who decide not to have children?

[9:34]What cosmetic products will they need? What kind of furniture? What's their house going to look like? What's their car going to look like? Does it have, you know, is it driverless, is it so on and so forth?

[9:44]So, the way that they're speaking about the people who are going to be using these products, it's in a very robotic cold manner where I do think the minute you invite children into the equation.

[10:00]There's 100,000 different ways to parent, but I think a common denominator, if you're

[10:06]going to try to be a good parent, is a compassion, right? Empathy and ability to be sensitive

[10:14]to other people's feelings. So that was too much kindness for the beginning of the book.

[10:21]I was important to have her in an element of stability and also she's 40, she's moving

[10:33]past 40, so she has decided she's not going to have children, but her in theory it might

[10:42]not be too late if she changed her mind. I love to have in the story you had all these

[10:46]20 somethings talking about what they do with their furniture versus people with kids

[10:50]and have, you know, people with kids like you use your sofa so much more versus just

[10:55]occasionally sitting on them for one, she's like, yeah, yeah, I'm thinking of myself as like,

[10:59]oh my gosh, you know, all the pillow kitchens become like, you know, a raft and you know,

[11:03]everything is ever used before, everything becomes something else and make it sweet.

[11:07]It's funny, yes, because I have friends, I have a lot of friends who are much, much younger,

[11:12]I have some friends who don't have children and it's so true that I would go to their house and

[11:15]the way that they were setting up, you know, the wine and the cheese was so specifically like

[11:20]oh, I decided to use this coffee table and it's going to be used for this one thing where

[11:25]our coffee tables just, we don't even have one anymore because it became a hazard.

[11:31]Even what you said about the fridge, which everything you have ever said, like how people with

[11:35]kids open the fridge, open and close, open and close, open and close all the time and you don't have

[11:39]to think so much about the supplies you need whereas people don't have kids yet or aren't home

[11:44]as much, you know, every so often they're like, oh, I wonder what's in the fridge.

[11:47]It's so funny that you noticed the fridge thing because I think I had to edit out,

[11:51]I was a little obsessed with this fridge thing because I was writing it at a time where my husband

[11:58]and I live in Litchfield County now, but for 10 years we lived in the Berkshires in a town called

[12:03]Sandisfield, it's pretty hard to get more remote. Like the post office was up for sale,

[12:09]I mean there's not a lot going on and we lived a half an hour from anything you wanted,

[12:14]a cup of coffee, gas, it's a half hour in the car and when we had our chat, you know, we lived

[12:21]in this sort of Lucy Gucci manner, we rarely had, like the fridge wasn't ever stocked enough,

[12:26]but we just made pasta, we were both artists, it didn't care. Then we had my daughter and started

[12:32]to really, really matter, you know, if my husband would go out and forget something from the

[12:37]grocery list of milk, if he forgot the milk, it became this tremendous thing, like that would

[12:42]be an hour out of my day or his back and forth to get this, the fridge became, like what was in

[12:48]the fridge became, it became so, so important, so yeah, I have a whole fridge obsession. I feel like

[12:57]as soon as I go into people's homes, I'm seeing like, I know you want to look, yeah, it's like

[13:00]being in the grocery line with someone, it's a very intimate thing, you've seen how they feed themselves

[13:05]and if they have a family company, like when I go to my mom's house and the first thing I do is

[13:09]up in the fridge now, it's like so empty and sad in there. Oh, you know, they're like mommy,

[13:13]I'm no food, right? Because we had, we were like the last stock, you know, obviously very lucky,

[13:17]you know, they were all in this like world that we can afford to get everything else, but

[13:21]you know, we have like things just flying, you can barely pack it all in. Yeah, no, I mean,

[13:26]some people have more than one fridge. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so I'm not to keep going on with it.

[13:29]Well, I'm glad I'm glad I'm not sure. It's my pleasure. Speaking of moms, for a book about someone

[13:36]who didn't want to be a mom, I feel like you did such a great job of painting a picture of

[13:40]Sloan's mother and that dynamic between them. And I love the scene when Sloan wakes up in her

[13:45]mother's house in the morning after she spent the night there for the first time in years.

[13:49]And she's, her mom wants to make her pancakes and she's like, no, don't do it. And then it says

[13:55]Sloan looked at her mother's mismatched eyes and her wild hair and the bathroom with the

[14:00]tea stains. And she wanted to fall down on the floor with her and lean against the cupboards

[14:03]and let everything out tell her mother that her partner preferred rubbing up against strangers

[14:07]and touching her in bed, tell her that there was a darkness in her decision to work for mammoth.

[14:11]But instead, she just stood there at the fork between the way she wanted her relationship with

[14:15]her mother to be like, and the way it actually was. And then she says toast would probably be easier.

[14:20]Makes me really sad. I mean, I know I wrote it, but it still makes, I still am very touched

[14:26]by that. Yeah. The mother not relationship is another really key motor, I think, to this story.

[14:35]And I mean, what you have is someone, her mom is the exact opposite of Sloan. She gives of herself

[14:44]readily, generously. She self-effaces a little bit. She really, Sloan has a sister and her

[14:53]sister is about to have her third child. So her mother's joy is really taking care of other people.

[14:58]And she went into overdrive when her husband died. And Sloan was unable, she's just not selfless

[15:10]that way. And so she's somewhat repelled by her mother's emotional generosity as well as probably

[15:19]being jealous of it. Because she just, that means a beautiful thing to see. And she just doesn't

[15:27]have it. And doesn't know how to communicate with a woman. I mean, it's just so clear in all of

[15:34]their scenes how much the mother just wants Sloan to just stop. But you know, and touch her,

[15:46]just hug, you know, like you just read. She's like, gosh, if we could just embrace. But it's not as

[15:52]easy as it sounds. And I mean, definitely their relationship was inspired by my own relationship with

[16:01]my mom, who is that kind of woman who just gives and gives and gives. And another commonality is

[16:08]that Sloan and her mother completely struggle from a lack of, I don't want to not respect the

[16:17]understanding regarding what the other person does. So Sloan's not a mother. She's not a very

[16:23]maternal person. So you can't really understand where her mother's coming from. Whereas,

[16:30]you know, even Sloan's colleagues don't really understand what she does. Her mother doesn't

[16:34]really understand. She doesn't speak any other languages. She has a daughter who lives in France.

[16:39]And that is very similar to me and my mother when my touch had already come out. And I had an

[16:46]op-ed in the New York Times. And my mom called me and she was like, did you know you have an

[16:53]article in the New York Times? Like, how did that happen? Do you know someone there? And I was,

[17:00]you know, I was like, oh, this is just a really big divide. Do I know someone there? And like,

[17:03]no, I've written two books. And this is sort of how it works. And I didn't know whether to be offended

[17:08]or just spell it out for her. You know? And so that's, yeah, that's a personal struggle. I

[17:15]happen with my mother. You're like, my other daughter relationships are complicated. Yes, I

[17:21]sometimes I look at my two little girls now. And I'm like, I don't know how is this going to evolve

[17:26]Oh, I joke with my husband. I'm like, I think our daughter won't go to boarding

[17:31]school for high school, but I will. I just feel this coming. She's really stuck. She's very much

[17:36]like I was. And I hope against hope that I'm wrong, that I foresee some cloudy weather.

[17:46]You start the book with Sloan being so deprived of physical contact that she'll jump on the

[17:51]crowded subway just to kill people again. And you know, at the end, you know, not to give anything

[17:56]away, you have her sort of engaged in this very passionate physical relationship, like the complete

[18:00]opposite from the beginning. Were you trying to illustrate what's sort of lost with the advent of

[18:05]technology or just sort of hit home on this sort of universal need for for touch and human contact?

[18:12]Yeah, there for this book, I interviewed a professional toddler named Samantha Hess out in Portland

[18:21]and she's she's actually one of the people who started this movement of a professional touch

[18:28]professional hugging. And she was telling me that even for people who didn't buy into this whole

[18:36]thing of, you know, professional embraces, all it took was an actual hug from, you know, total

[18:45]stranger, normally to just get them crying, sobbing. Just the simple touch, they didn't need to

[18:53]explain why they were there, what the problem was, or how confusing it seemed to need to solve

[18:59]the obstacles between them and sobbing. Their problem just just the embrace was so comforting

[19:06]that people just sobbed. She says most people come to her office just to cry and someone else's

[19:13]arms. And so it was very important to me at a certain point in the story that we allow

[19:25]slown a little bit of that unlocking that physical unlocking as well. You know, when she's finally touched,

[19:33]she's basically frigid. I mean, her partner doesn't not only doesn't not touch her, but he's

[19:40]pronounced to the New York Times that he's never going to. He's quite proud of his post-sexuality

[19:46]and she's so busy. She's pretending to be fine with it, but she's not fine with it. You know,

[19:50]and she's completely isolated. Even her closest friend is her driverless car. You know, she has no

[19:57]touch in her life. And, um...

[20:00]So when she finally has a little, it's just the floodgator are completely open and then you know

[20:07]it's fun to have a little sex in the summer book. I think it's fun. I like to write those scenes.

[20:13]I said the winds of paper back in the end. Oh, yes. Yeah, perfect. It's been.

[20:19]I know I've honed in a lot on touch because I really loved it and just finished it.

[20:23]It's like stirred up so many different thoughts. No, it was really great. But can you tell me a

[20:28]little more generally about your path and how you became an on a novelist and all the different

[20:33]works in the film. Oh, everything. Yeah. Well, let's see. I think I have somewhat

[20:40]a non-typical path in that I didn't I didn't study English in college. I went to Brown University and

[20:47]I studied comparative literature and French translation. And then I moved to Paris after

[20:54]college and was working sort of under the table as a translator. And then my official job was a

[21:03]party promoter for Corona extra, which it's a long story. I don't even really like that beer,

[21:09]but it was a way to get a visa. And actually it was a great job for a writer because I worked at

[21:14]nights. So I wrote all day and I had been working at that time. So I never got an MFA or anything.

[21:21]I just had always loved to write and read and was working on a short story, which was not

[21:28]short. It was just getting longer and longer and it was getting it was at 30,000 words and

[21:33]I showed it to a girlfriend and she said, well, I think this is a novel. And what was great

[21:39]because I didn't have a formal background and writing was that there was no fear.

[21:44]It was just not in my mind to think about, I don't know, agents or competition or anything.

[21:52]I thought, oh, so no, okay, well, I'll keep going. You know, and I was writing the book that

[21:57]would eventually become my first book. I'm having so much fun here without you. I wrote it very

[22:02]quickly and actually I got an agent and an editor very quickly, but I was like a little girl.

[22:09]And I was 23 or something and I just didn't know enough about the way the world works.

[22:15]And so I was doing everything, I was revising all summer long for this editor and I was doing

[22:20]everything without a contract and long story short by the time I got back to New York and was

[22:25]supposed to meet this editor. She quit her job and the project was just completely

[22:32]orphaned. And it actually wasn't published for 10 more years. And it was not that I wrote the

[22:40]book from scratch 10 years later. So, you know, in those 10 years, I mean, in the interim,

[22:49]really wasn't very much part of the literary community. I work in branding on the side and

[22:54]kind of kept my word chops up that, you know, writing copy and I work as a nameer and

[23:05]my husband's French. I don't know. We started writing films together and then

[23:09]and then what? And then I don't know. After 10 years, I really reached a point where I thought

[23:16]okay, well, I thought I would have a novel, like I guess I'll be a published person in a

[23:22]different way. Maybe it'll be little pamphlets or these funny pieces online and I kind of

[23:29]took it as a tried to feel kind of free and joyful about it. So, I started publishing a lot of

[23:35]weird stuff, whatever I felt like doing. And, you know, Agent started reading and I got this agent

[23:44]and she was like, you must have a novel, you know, and I thought, oh, it's in a box. Anyway,

[23:53]long story short, I wrote it over completely from scratch and yeah, that was, I am having so much

[23:59]fun here without you. Yeah, yeah, I see it there. And can you tell me more about the cabins?

[24:08]How does this retreat that you? So, the cabins? So, I don't, I'm not, my husband Diego

[24:15]Ungaro is a filmmaker and we used to collaborate together more than we do now. We would write

[24:22]screenplays together and our films would go on. The film festival circuit and I would go to

[24:27]these film festivals and I would meet only filmmakers, not even screenwriters, just film makers.

[24:33]And then I would go the next weekend to a writer's festival of a writer's conference and I would

[24:39]only writers and I would go back and forth and think, oh, you know, this short film maker should

[24:46]really meet this short story writer. I wish I had a way to get everyone together and I started

[24:51]thinking of a program where it would be interdisciplinary and people could not just network,

[24:57]but learn from each other, but just literally as just so overwhelming by where am I going to do

[25:04]this, how am I going to do it? But when we moved from, so I got a web domain for it, I mean,

[25:10]this idea was in the back of my mind for years, but when we moved to Norfolk, Connecticut,

[25:17]it's an old town that historically has a lot of, you know, great families that lived there and

[25:23]they have these estates that roll down to this beautiful lake and they have lake cabins and

[25:28]little by little I started meeting all these people who had spare houses and spare cabins and

[25:34]I started thinking, wow, I've got my places. I could do this here, you know, there's enough

[25:39]room and by that point in my life I had enough contacts I felt. So the cabins, I founded it in

[25:45]2016 and it's an interdisciplinary collaborative retreat based on skill sharing and across disciplines.

[25:57]So we keep it low cost that students are the teachers, so everyone comes as of a caliber where

[26:04]they can teach an hour-long masterclass in the subject of their choice and the only caveat is

[26:11]you can't get up there and read your own work. We do a sort of closing evening where everyone gets

[26:19]to get up and perform their own. Like a talent show, basically, but that's only on the fourth day

[26:24]and up until then it's really about learning from other people and being a little bit more

[26:28]humble and open-minded and so it's like an intellectual summer camp really you could have a weekend

[26:34]full of, you could have a dance class followed by a class in carpentry or stone engraving or

[26:44]something that seems boring but so important like writing for, you know, grants, grant applications

[26:52]or something like that and how many people go at one time? So it's very small we keep it like

[26:58]nine people maximum so it's usually between six and nine we form the group by it's symbiotic,

[27:08]you know, like who can learn from who can learn from who so it's it's really neat so this

[27:14]applications are open so July 1st and it'll be our fourth session so it's exciting.

[27:20]Yeah it's the cabins retreat dot com. The cabins retreat dot com everybody write that down.

[27:28]So aside from so you have a nonfiction book coming out after the book deal. So it's after

[27:33]so it's going to be two books in one actually and since we last and the first part of the book

[27:40]will be before the book deal and then hopefully you'll I think this is how we're going to do it,

[27:44]you'll flip it over and you'll have after the book deal so it'll be a cool resource that

[27:50]people can graduate from, you know, so it'll it'll be like a giant giant and if you don't get a

[27:56]book deal you can just tear off half of it. Absolutely. Yes. So funny. Yeah. And you said you're

[28:03]working on two other novels. Yes, I have a novel coming out next summer 2019 called Cold Coast

[28:10]Delangue and then another book I'm working on right now that I can't say the title of because

[28:16]superstitious. Okay. Can you say what either of those books that are going to be about?

[28:21]Yeah, Coast Delangue is a big departure for me. It's a little bit more experimental. It's about

[28:30]the surrealist artists who were exiled from Europe during World War II. It's heavily inspired

[28:39]story of Peggy Guggenheim who the American art artist who helps it helps a lot of European

[28:49]intellectuals and artists escape Europe before Hitler invaded. In real life they went to New York and

[28:57]my book they go to the jungle in Mexico and the whole book is written in a diary format from

[29:04]Peggy Guggenheim's daughter, a 15-year-old daughter. Wow. That sounds really interesting.

[29:10]Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And what's in the other book you didn't want to talk about? Oh,

[29:16]you don't have to. No, it's okay. I can tell. It's all right. Don't worry about it. Yeah, I'm too

[29:20]too clean. Okay. Yeah. I will say it's going to be another portrait of a troubled couplehood.

[29:29]Okay. Well, yeah. Well, right. In terms of your writing and how you do your best work and everything,

[29:36]what are your what's your go-to schedule or having a child care? It all comes out of quality child

[29:41]care in my child being healthy. If those things are intact then I came out. How did your daughter?

[29:47]She's four. She's four. Well, thankfully I have a very supportive partner who actually does a lot

[29:54]of bulk of the child caring. So, perfect week.

[30:00]in a perfect world looks like we get our daughter on the bus at 817 and then from

[30:06]830 to 2 I will write more or less right I mean you know you have there's some emailing there's

[30:14]some lunch but I really try to write and then by 2 I'm sort of tapped out and I try to do

[30:23]something nice for myself that involves exercise and then that's it you know the days

[30:28]we got to go get my daughter and then and then I try to be a mom and a wife and not work

[30:36]once she's home and I'm pretty strict about it if I'm not careful with myself I'll just work

[30:42]myself to death so I try to set up these you know don't work in the evenings and I don't work on the

[30:47]weekends and I find I really I need that and and that when Monday comes around I'm actually excited

[30:55]to work again rather than feeling and I go oh my god and just working myself into the grave so

[31:02]it tries to work really hard when I'm working and then not work do you have any advice for

[31:10]aspiring authors out there? Of course I have a whole book coming out about it yeah but a couple

[31:17]thing yeah no yeah how long do you have? No no I have to have two pieces of advice and one is craft

[31:24]one is just practical the practical piece of advice is do not go into the writing life expecting

[31:30]to support yourself by writing you know be smart about it and get a job preferably with health

[31:38]insurance something that you don't hate where you're not gonna come home a miserable shell of a person

[31:43]or if you have someone to support you fantastic and don't look down on you know wait for

[31:50]seeing or bartending or babysitting is actually the hourly rate is really good compared to

[31:55]you'll make more babysitting than you do as an adjunct so you know don't knock these like simple

[32:02]or what comes off as a sort of hourly per I don't know occupations and then craft wise

[32:13]don't let perfectionism get in your way I speak to a lot of people who

[32:20]are just so they feel like what's on the screen needs to be perfect and what's coming out of

[32:28]the printer needs to be perfect and the first draft is the one that's going to get them the book

[32:32]deal and you know you shouldn't it's good to push yourself obviously and try to come up with

[32:37]something beautiful that you're proud of but just know that ultimately if you keep working really hard

[32:43]you'll have a support team around you at some point you know hopefully you'll have an editor

[32:48]an agent some writing friends and these people will help you get it just right but if you don't

[32:55]get the words on the page you're never gonna get there so don't for so long no one's gonna see

[33:02]your work so you might as well put stuff on the page and have fun and don't sit there not writing

[33:08]because you're you're ashamed it's not gonna be great it's not gonna be great the first drafts

[33:13]are terrible terrible. Awesome well thank you so much. Thanks for coming in I'm excited for

[33:20]what you have coming down the pike. Thank you I'm very pleased to be here thank you for having me.

[33:25]Of course okay thanks for listening to mom's don't have time to read books this episode was

[33:31]sponsored by bobble botanicals b-a-b-o botanicals.com please subscribe to the podcast and leave a

[33:38]a rating thanks so much for your time.