Claire Bidwell Smith, THE RULES OF INHERITANCE
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[1:16]I'm thrilled to be interviewing Claire Bidwell Smith today.
[1:19]Claire is the author of the amazing memoir The Rules of Inheritance.
[1:23]She also wrote after this, when life is over, where do you go?
[1:26]And most recently, anxiety, the missing stage of grief.
[1:30]The Rules of Inheritance has been published in 18 countries,
[1:33]and is currently being adapted for film.
[1:35]Claire has contributed to many media outlets,
[1:37]including The New York Times, HuffPost, Slate,
[1:39]and many TV radio shows and podcasts.
[1:42]A graduate of the new school with a master's from Antioch University.
[1:45]She is a grief counselor and Los Angeles.
[1:48]She lives in Santa Monica with her husband and three children.
[1:51]So welcome, Claire.
[1:52]Thank you so much for being here.
[1:53]I'm really beyond thrilled to be interviewing you today.
[1:55]So thank you.
[1:57]So let's start with you telling listeners
[1:59]who might not know what The Rules of Inheritance was about.
[2:02]And we're sharing this microphone.
[2:03]So for any delays, I'm passing this back and forth
[2:05]for technical issues.
[2:07]So anyway.
[2:08]I also need to mention that I have my three-month-old baby here.
[2:10]So if we hear him, it will just add to the fun.
[2:14]The Rules of Inheritance is my first book.
[2:17]It's a memoir about losing both of my parents to cancer.
[2:20]They both had cancer at the same time when I was 14.
[2:23]And I'm an only child.
[2:24]So it was really challenging to kind of go through all of that
[2:28]and feel really alone and set apart from my peers.
[2:32]My mom died when I was 18 and my father died when I was 25.
[2:36]And I didn't know anybody who was going through anything like that.
[2:39]Most of my friends were living normal lives, going off to college.
[2:42]Kind of on the usual trajectory that we're supposed to go on.
[2:45]And mine was really skewed.
[2:46]And my mother's death was really hard.
[2:49]She was my world.
[2:51]I loved her.
[2:52]We were incredibly close.
[2:53]And she and my father had very different deaths.
[2:56]She really struggled to face hers and to come to terms with the fact
[3:00]that she was dying.
[3:01]And she kind of tied up until the end to go through various things.
[3:04]And so when she died, it just completely floored me.
[3:08]I didn't see it coming.
[3:09]My father died seven years later when I was 25.
[3:12]And his death was really different.
[3:13]He kind of really embraced it and really helped me to embrace it.
[3:17]And so it was just a different experience completely.
[3:21]But throughout both of them, I was always writing.
[3:23]I've been a writer since I was a kid.
[3:25]As an only child, I think it was kind of this internal thing I did.
[3:29]I read all the time.
[3:30]My parents were older.
[3:31]And I just kind of got dragged around on a lot of trips.
[3:33]And they were always having parties with grown-ups.
[3:36]Yeah.
[3:37]That's my baby.
[3:38]And I just have my nose in a book all the time.
[3:41]And so I started writing at a really young age.
[3:43]And it became my outlet for understanding the world and making sense of things
[3:48]and myself.
[3:48]And so when they were sick and going through all of their things,
[3:53]and then their deaths, I just wrote through it all just to kind of keep myself sane.
[3:57]You know, I had so much internally that really was helpful to get it out in writing.
[4:03]And so after my father died, I started writing even more.
[4:06]I was writing about him while he...
[4:09]Oh, Mr.
[4:11]I'm going to pick him up.
[4:12]Okay.
[4:13]You could ask me another question in the middle.
[4:15]Okay.
[4:16]You had such a beautiful scene, by the way,
[4:19]with your father.
[4:20]And he was like, you just have to let me go.
[4:22]I was like, ready to cry.
[4:24]It was.
[4:25]Anyway.
[4:26]Hi.
[4:27]Oh, sorry.
[4:28]I already want to sit on my laptop.
[4:29]Here.
[4:30]Here.
[4:31]I'm going to read a scene while you deal with your baby.
[4:33]And we can come back to it.
[4:35]There were so many things I wanted to quote from your book.
[4:38]But I want to start with this whole thing about grief.
[4:40]Because I feel like you're this brilliant writer about grief.
[4:44]And now you've dedicated your whole life to helping others get through it.
[4:47]After three years without your mom, you wrote in three years,
[4:50]my grief has grown to enormous proportions.
[4:52]Where in the very beginning, I often felt nothing at all.
[4:54]Grief is now a giant sad whale that I drag along with me wherever I go.
[4:58]It topples buildings and overturns cars.
[5:00]It leaves long for a trenches in its wake.
[5:02]My grief fills rooms.
[5:04]It takes up space and it sucks out the air.
[5:06]It leaves no room for anyone else.
[5:08]Grief asks, like, a jealous friend reminding me that no one else will ever love me as much as it does.
[5:13]Grief is a force and I am swept up in it.
[5:15]And then later, after your father passes away, right, if grief was once like a whale or like a knife,
[5:20]it became a vast, nothing expanding outward from the very core of who I am.
[5:24]All so beautiful.
[5:26]So just the whole book was like gut wrenching and beautiful and addictive and amazing.
[5:30]Tell me how you feel your grief.
[5:32]You almost like chart the waters of where it goes and sort of its shape shifting over time.
[5:36]Can you tell me a little more about that and how you were so aware of your relationship with the grief as you went through it?
[5:42]I wasn't always aware of it.
[5:44]When I wrote that book, I was very aware of it.
[5:46]And at the time that I wrote the book, I was 30 and I was newly married and had just had my first daughter
[5:51]and I was working in hospice.
[5:52]That's a grief counselor.
[5:54]And when I started working in hospice, I began to see grief in a much more three-dimensional way.
[6:00]I'd always known my own grief.
[6:02]But when I really started to see so many other people who were grieving,
[6:06]it was a different experience and I really began to understand it and understand my own journey and process
[6:11]through that lens too.
[6:12]So it was really helpful in that regard.
[6:14]And there was a lot of my journey in grief that I didn't recognize at the time as grief.
[6:19]You know, it was just confusing.
[6:20]I just thought I was angry or there was nothing wrong with me or I just tried to ignore it.
[6:25]And then as I moved through it and then later working in hospice and then really diving into the grief world,
[6:30]I saw all of my journey for what it was.
[6:33]And so when I sat down to write this book, it's organized around the five stages of grief.
[6:37]So denial, bargaining, depression, anger, acceptance.
[6:40]And I divided the whole book up into that.
[6:43]And what I did was I sat down and I wrote those five stages down.
[6:47]And then I wrote down three times I had been in each of them.
[6:50]So three times I'd been in denial.
[6:52]Three times I'd been angry throughout my journey.
[6:55]And really it was kind of born out of, again, working in hospice.
[6:59]And people kept coming to me to talk about the five stages.
[7:02]And they had a lot of confusion about them, all my clients and people I was working with.
[7:05]And they would come and they would say, I don't get these five stages.
[7:08]I think I'm stuck in one or I skipped one or I'm, you know, I'm circling back to another one.
[7:13]And do I have to go through them in this perfect fashion?
[7:15]And I wanted to show how fluid they are and how they're not that linear.
[7:20]And so my story became nonlinear as well.
[7:22]And just kind of like these layers of grief that I went through.
[7:25]And you mentioned, you mentioned in your anxiety book, anxiety,
[7:30]the missing stage of grief.
[7:31]You mentioned how the stages were originally for people who were dying,
[7:34]not the people coping with loss.
[7:36]And how there's like a lot of confusion about that.
[7:38]And how anxiety is also should be a part of that.
[7:41]But unfortunately, it's not.
[7:42]And so people often miss it in a way.
[7:45]They do.
[7:46]Yeah.
[7:47]So I've gone on to become, I've written three books now.
[7:49]I'm a therapist specializing in grief.
[7:51]And I keep seeing these, this confusion on the five stages.
[7:54]So I've written about them in every book I've written.
[7:56]And I love Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who coined the five stages.
[7:59]But like you said, she was originally intending them
[8:02]to be for people who were dying.
[8:03]And they make a lot of sense in that regard.
[8:05]Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
[8:08]You go through those five stages when you face a terminal diagnosis.
[8:11]Not so much with grief.
[8:13]There's more stages.
[8:15]They're not this perfect formula.
[8:17]But the reason that everybody clings to them
[8:19]is because we want a perfect formula when we're grieving.
[8:21]It's so hard.
[8:22]It's one of the most difficult things we'll go through.
[8:25]He is trying to grab the microphone.
[8:27]And it's very cute.
[8:28]No, it's fine.
[8:29]It's very cute.
[8:31]I just want to make it clear for anyone who's listening
[8:33]to what that noise is.
[8:35]So how did you go?
[8:37]So you had some sort, you were writing a blog while you were
[8:39]going through all this.
[8:40]Let's go back to Roseman Heritage.
[8:41]Sorry to keep jumping around.
[8:42]But you were writing a blog.
[8:44]So the writing you did to sort of help yourself.
[8:46]You were sharing with others.
[8:47]And then it was mentioned, you said in the Roseman Heritage
[8:50]that there was an article about the top 20 blogs at the time.
[8:53]And yours was one of them.
[8:54]And then I guess there was some demand for your book.
[8:56]So tell me about how it went from blog to book.
[8:59]And you had a lot of misgivings about it in the middle.
[9:03]And how did it take this form?
[9:05]Sure.
[9:07]I was an early blogger.
[9:08]They were still called web blogs back then.
[9:10]It was 2002 when I started blogging, which is a long time ago.
[9:14]I know.
[9:15]And it felt like a natural extension of all the writing I had
[9:18]been doing in school.
[9:19]I just graduated my undergrad.
[9:21]And I used my link in her.
[9:24]I really missed writing and having somebody to be accountable to you.
[9:27]So I felt like a blog was a good way to do that.
[9:29]And then my father began actively dying.
[9:31]And it became this really necessary outlet for me.
[9:35]And I was writing all the time.
[9:37]And then all these people started reading it.
[9:40]Because I was kind of writing this really raw stuff about my
[9:43]father.
[9:44]And he died while I was writing that blog.
[9:47]And then a couple, like a month later out of nowhere this
[9:51]Sydney Morning Herald in Australia named it one of the top 25
[9:56]blogs or whatever it was in the world.
[9:58]And I got all these readers and attention.
[10:00]in an agent.
[10:01]Yeah, this, I had, I got this big fancy New York agent right away.
[10:03]This agent was asking me if I wanted to write a book.
[10:05]And I was like, yeah, but I was 25 and my father had just died.
[10:08]And I, the story wasn't done yet.
[10:10]I didn't know how to do it.
[10:12]So yeah, but I kept up with it.
[10:14]I, so the story about Roosevelt inheritance that a lot of people
[10:17]find interesting is that I wrote three versions of it.
[10:20]The one that that is published in on shelves is the third and final version.
[10:23]But I wrote the first two complete full manuscripts that are all three manuscripts
[10:29]are different and it took me writing it three times to really nail it.
[10:33]And it took eight years.
[10:35]And I just kept writing it and kept coming back to the story.
[10:39]And I feel like when people talk about writing books,
[10:41]like they see this book and they, they've heard of it and they'll, you know,
[10:45]they think it's just something I just kind of dashed off, right?
[10:47]Like it was some easy thing and it was not easy at all.
[10:50]I really had to kind of wrench this book out of me and write it many times
[10:56]to understand how to tell the story.
[10:59]So, did you just curious?
[11:01]So you chose not to use any punctuation marks.
[11:04]Was it always like that or not like any?
[11:06]No, no, I'm sorry.
[11:07]Yeah, punctuation.
[11:08]Yeah, there's no, no punctuation in the whole thing.
[11:10]There's not a single variant.
[11:11]Yeah, I'm sorry.
[11:12]There are no quotes around any of the dialogue.
[11:15]Which I feel like it worked so incredibly well.
[11:18]And like you don't indent.
[11:19]Like it's like a whole, it's almost like stream of consciousness.
[11:23]Like almost like poetic in a way in its form.
[11:26]Was it always, was it like that in all the drafts?
[11:28]Was that like a later invention?
[11:30]No, it was only the final draft that I did that for.
[11:34]And it was only the final draft that I did that for.
[11:37]And the other ones were much more traditional.
[11:40]And one of the big things that changed with this final draft was writing in present tense.
[11:46]And the lack of rotations and the lack of indentations kind of came with the present tense
[11:51]writing.
[11:52]It was very like just kind of poured out at me at that point.
[11:55]And the present tense is I think kind of what makes a lot of things about this book.
[12:00]Like work the way it dies.
[12:01]And just to be clear, this is, yes, it's about losing your parents this book, but you
[12:05]have so much more in there.
[12:07]I mean, I even found that in the beginning, you talk about when you went away to college.
[12:12]And of course, you did it to show, you know, the dresses and what happens after your
[12:15]mother's visit.
[12:16]But even just, let me find this quote.
[12:19]I wrote about your mother visiting here in college.
[12:22]As you said, as the weekend went on, my mother grew too loose with me.
[12:26]She let me ignore her.
[12:27]Let me smoke cigarettes in her rental car and invited my friends out to dinner with us
[12:30]on the second night.
[12:31]She seemed desperate for me to let her in, but I had only just discovered how to be
[12:34]without her.
[12:35]Why would I want to let her in?
[12:37]On Sunday, I watched her drive away, my lip between my teeth, blood on my tongue from the
[12:41]force of it.
[12:42]And that was just like, I felt like it clarified for me like, why was I rude to my mom
[12:48]all college?
[12:49]Do you know?
[12:50]I was kind of sort of getting into each moment in life, not just the laws, but figuring
[12:54]out like, you know, why it's so complicated, right, especially mother, daughter, relationships,
[13:00]separation, anxiety, and the whole thing.
[13:01]And I don't know.
[13:02]I felt like that passage.
[13:03]I was like, starring it and like, turning down the page, I was like, yes, that's it.
[13:07]Like, you finally learn to be independent.
[13:10]And so you're reluctant to, it's like, it feels so tenuous that you can keep it that way.
[13:14]So anyway, just, it's still brutal to look back on sometimes, you know, and especially
[13:19]being a mom now, I have almost ten year old and she has these moments where she just
[13:23]pushes me away and she's so, you know, I hate you mom because I won't let her wear sweat
[13:27]pants to school.
[13:28]And I flashed back on all that time with my own mom.
[13:31]But you know, I think I wasn't aware of being like that in the moment.
[13:35]It was only later.
[13:36]But it was, it came so fast when she died.
[13:38]The moment she died, all of a sudden our relationship was finite, you know, it was over
[13:42]all these things.
[13:43]The ways I could have repaired that or apologized forward or come through in a different
[13:46]way later on.
[13:47]All of that was lost and gone.
[13:50]And I couldn't help but review our relationship and all those moments like that.
[13:54]They just, they ate me up for a long time and writing about them helped me to release
[13:59]them and to kind of forgive myself as well.
[14:01]In your other, your third book, Anxiety, you give advice to people like write a letter.
[14:07]Or how to address the guilt that you feel because if there's also obviously a letter
[14:10]of guilt for what isn't said or how you handled it.
[14:12]And I feel like in a world's of inheritance, you were like, I wanted to give you a
[14:15]hug.
[14:16]I love so much.
[14:17]I could like on that drive down and you're, oh my gosh, that passage was like insane.
[14:22]I read it out loud to my husband.
[14:24]I was like, listen to this.
[14:25]Oh my gosh.
[14:26]Yeah.
[14:27]It's one of the things I see in grieving people more than almost anything is I haven't
[14:30]really come across anyone who hasn't walked away from a loss without something they
[14:34]feel guilty about, something they wish they could go back and change or do differently.
[14:37]And those things can really eat us up.
[14:39]And even though that relationship, you know, is over in many ways and we can't actually
[14:43]go back and change things, we can still kind of work through it internally.
[14:47]Yeah.
[14:48]Yeah.
[14:49]Yeah, that's true.
[14:50]We can work through it and we can make amends, you know, and we can make amends within
[14:53]ourselves and even with those people maybe spiritually.
[14:57]So there's a lot there.
[14:58]I lost my best friend on 9.11.
[15:00]She was my roommate, I'm like closest friend.
[15:01]And I had a lot of, you know, unresolved and we were 25 when she died.
[15:06]And I ended up like taking her mom after lunch and like apologizing for some of the things,
[15:11]you know, that just happened over the course.
[15:13]Because there's no way to tell the person, you're sorry, like, hey, I wish I hadn't
[15:17]handled things.
[15:18]So I'm truly when like you were staying in my mom's house at the time or whatever.
[15:21]I wish I had called you more than twice and I went to the school or, you know, all these
[15:25]things.
[15:26]So I was like, I just sat with her mom and I was like, here are the things I'm sorry for.
[15:29]Yeah.
[15:30]And that's beautiful.
[15:31]And we have to, we have to be able to do that.
[15:32]You know, we have to otherwise those things kind of live inside of us and they fester.
[15:36]And yeah, we have to let them out.
[15:38]It was great.
[15:39]It was like getting through the memoir and then you have like this companion.
[15:43]And I haven't, I didn't read your other book yet, but the companion to like getting
[15:46]through.
[15:47]I don't know.
[15:48]It was just a great, you also do a really beautiful job of talking about what happens when
[15:52]you're in a really unhealthy relationship, which could be its own book.
[15:57]Honestly, it was so good.
[15:59]And just the way you write about relationships in general, like with this boyfriend you
[16:03]had early on, you said, I feel like actually he wasn't even really a boyfriend.
[16:07]Well, he was.
[16:08]I feel like I'm constantly on the verge of scaring him off.
[16:10]I stay still make no sudden movements.
[16:12]I'm careful with my senses.
[16:14]I'm always amazed that he is still sitting there.
[16:17]I felt like that was such a perfect way of that insecurity, you feel around some people
[16:21]you're with.
[16:22]Like you're almost like you're going to jinx it if you say the wrong thing.
[16:25]And like, you know, you had like idolized the sky and the motorcycle and the whole thing.
[16:29]And you know, I don't know.
[16:30]And then later on when you have get into this sort, not abusive, but just very unhealthy
[16:34]situation and the way you write about that and finally your ability to break through it.
[16:40]I mean, I feel like that is in its own an inspirational book.
[16:43]I mean, I was also wondering as I read it, like, did he ever read it?
[16:47]Like was that his real name?
[16:48]Did he read it?
[16:49]What happened after?
[16:50]Did he?
[16:51]I don't know if he's read it.
[16:53]He's here in Los Angeles and I haven't seen him in years and years.
[16:56]I changed his name and you're going to dig it.
[16:59]Yeah, sorry.
[17:00]We're passing the baby.
[17:03]I changed his name and some of his identifying characteristics.
[17:06]I mean, nothing that would that change the story at all, but just to keep him like from
[17:10]suing me, which is, you know, something that you kind of go through after you write
[17:13]the book.
[17:14]But that was an intense relationship.
[17:15]He had been through his own grief.
[17:16]I have been through my grief.
[17:17]We were living in Manhattan together in our early 20s and we were just like a hot mess,
[17:22]you know, drinking all the time just in pain all the time.
[17:26]And there were beautiful things about that relationship too.
[17:28]It's such a dark and twisted relationship and so unhealthy and I know it's painful to
[17:32]read from the outside as well, but when my mother died and I just felt so alone and he
[17:39]was this person that understood this, this whole inside of me, you know, and are you smiling
[17:45]away at me?
[17:46]Yeah.
[17:47]And so there were a lot of, there was a lot of beauty in it too.
[17:49]And when the way the book is arranged since it's told out of fashion, you don't actually
[17:53]see us connect and fall in love until towards the end of the book.
[17:56]And so you've seen a lot of the darkness in that relationship before you actually get to
[18:00]the, you know, the sweetness of the very beginning of it, which I think was an interesting
[18:04]way to do it.
[18:05]Somehow made sense to me to do it that way.
[18:08]And then you also later show not that it's the way out to help other people, but you
[18:13]did show that, you know, after you got to a place where you were helping others when you
[18:18]did the tutoring.
[18:19]I mean, helped with day beggars project in LA, how giving back made you so much.
[18:26]I'm sorry with the baby screaming.
[18:28]But anyway, tell me how the act of sort of throwing yourself into helping others took
[18:32]you out of your own grief for a little bit.
[18:34]Yeah.
[18:35]That was the thing that really saved me.
[18:36]I felt so empty and purposelessness and life felt very meaningless after my parents
[18:43]died.
[18:44]I just, I was so deep in my depression and I couldn't figure out what I was doing, what
[18:48]the point of anything was.
[18:50]He looks so happy.
[18:52]And he's sitting on some of his left, just looking so happy.
[18:56]She's bouncing him as I talk.
[18:59]And you know, I knew day beggars.
[19:01]His book, Harper, he worked with Tiger and Jesus had come out around the same time and
[19:04]he was a few years older than me and he'd also lost his parents and I was like, oh my gosh,
[19:09]perfect.
[19:10]We're going to get married.
[19:11]He's a writer.
[19:12]He's cute.
[19:13]I'm a writer.
[19:14]Our parents are dead.
[19:15]This can be great.
[19:16]And totally get married and everything's going to be perfect.
[19:17]And we did not get married.
[19:19]He married a lovely woman in Venda LaVida and I did end up working for him though.
[19:25]And because I thought we would get married, I was following him and following his work
[19:29]that he did.
[19:30]And he'd opened a nonprofit tutoring center and that works with underprivileged and underserved
[19:35]schooled systems.
[19:36]And I ended up working there really just intent on trying to marry day beggars.
[19:41]And then found that it completely changed everything and healed me to be, you know, giving
[19:47]of myself and working with these kids and I was getting up in the morning and having
[19:52]a place to go and something like that was worthwhile of my time.
[19:56]And it just was the thing that finally pulled me out of my...
[20:00]impression and gave me kind of purpose and life again.
[20:03]And I've never gone back from there.
[20:04]I went from that job to working with homeless people,
[20:07]went from there to grad school, out of grad school.
[20:10]I worked in a lot of like under-serve mental health
[20:12]clinics, and then I'm in private practice now.
[20:15]And yeah, buddy.
[20:17]And so it's always, now it's become just like a huge part
[20:19]of my life to be of service in some way all the time.
[20:22]So the rules of adherence is maybe going to be a fail,
[20:24]or is it?
[20:25]So Jennifer Lawrence picked it up right away,
[20:28]even before it had even come out on the shelves,
[20:30]and she read it, and she loved it.
[20:32]And this was right before she went
[20:33]and asked her for silver linings.
[20:34]So she was like, she was famous,
[20:37]but then that same time, she really hit it big.
[20:40]And it was amazing.
[20:41]We had, there was a whole deal that went through.
[20:44]I talked and met with her many times.
[20:46]She was great with it.
[20:47]There was a writer, a director, producer on the project.
[20:50]And then it just like, as things do in Hollywood,
[20:52]it eventually fell apart.
[20:54]She got really busy.
[20:55]The screenplay had trouble.
[20:57]And it just kind of all fell apart.
[20:58]And it was fine.
[20:59]I was never quite sure about the whole movie aspect of it.
[21:03]It's still kind of circulating.
[21:04]Emma Roberts was more recently interested in it.
[21:07]I've been trying to adapt the screenplay myself
[21:10]at the urging of my film agent.
[21:12]And I'm not a screenwriter.
[21:13]And this book is really hard to adapt.
[21:16]It's a tough one to put together in a screenplay.
[21:19]So it's kind of always kind of simmering,
[21:23]not currently.
[21:24]And do you have plans for another book?
[21:27]I don't know.
[21:28]I've written three books and had three babies.
[21:29]And they've all come together.
[21:31]And so I'm kind of nervous to start another book.
[21:33]Because I'm worried it's going to get me pregnant somehow.
[21:35]And I don't know if I can have right a book without having
[21:37]another baby.
[21:38]And I don't want to have any more babies.
[21:39]Even though you're so cute.
[21:41]I have so many babies now.
[21:43]But no, of course, I will definitely write another book.
[21:45]I don't know what it is yet.
[21:46]Each one I've written, there's kind of a postpartum
[21:49]period where I just need to let the book be out in the world.
[21:52]And then, oh yeah, is that funny?
[21:55]Often whatever shape that book takes.
[21:58]And like all the things it brings into my life
[22:00]and the opportunities and the people I meet.
[22:02]And that usually kind of informs what the next book will be.
[22:06]So my second book, which was about the afterlife,
[22:09]I just kind of got more into the grief world.
[22:10]And I started hearing a lot more from people.
[22:12]And that's when I started to see all this anxiety.
[22:14]And then so that was the next book.
[22:16]And so I'm not sure yet what's coming.
[22:18]Relationships are a big one.
[22:19]People keep talking about relationships.
[22:21]And I'm very interested in relationships.
[22:23]Some of my second marriage now and have step children.
[22:26]And I just see how much relationships are impacted by grief as well.
[22:30]How much of those things change with the grief process?
[22:32]So that might be the next book.
[22:36]And do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
[22:38]Oh my gosh, just to write all the time.
[22:40]But to not overthink it, I think that's
[22:42]one of the things people sit down and they want to write
[22:45]a perfect first sentence, a perfect first paragraph,
[22:47]the perfect book.
[22:48]And it's never that way.
[22:49]I'm going to throw away two entire books that I wrote
[22:52]before I could get to this one.
[22:54]But I'm grateful to them.
[22:55]I couldn't have written this version
[22:57]without having written all the bad versions, right?
[23:00]So we have to be patient and just diligent
[23:03]and keep writing and writing and writing and writing.
[23:06]Thanks to you and Everett for coming on months.
[23:09]Don't have time to read books.
[23:10]Do you have anything to say, Maddie?
[23:11]What do you think?
[23:13]Do you want to talk?
[23:14]Oh, you want to eat the microphone?
[23:15]No, we're not going to do that.
[23:17]Thank you so much for coming on.
[23:18]Thank you.
[23:20]Today's episode was sponsored by cereal box.
[23:23]S-C-R-I-A-L-B-O-X dot com cereal box.com, delivering
[23:27]addictive book content in short listen or read installments.
[23:31]Thanks to Ryan and Steve at Texture Sound
[23:33]for the audio editing and mixing.
[23:35]Thanks for listening to Momstone Have Time to Read Books.