Malcolm Hansen, THEY COME IN ALL COLORS
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[1:13]I'm here with Malcolm Hansen who's the debut author of They Come in All Colors and Novel.
[1:18]He is the winner of the BCALA Black Caucus American Library Association Literary Award for a first
[1:25]novelist and was nominated for a 2019 NAACP image award. Malcolm was born at the Florence
[1:31]Crittenden home for unwed mothers in Chattanooga, Tennessee and adopted by two civil rights activists.
[1:37]He grew up in Morocco, Spain, Germany and the U.S. He attended Stanford after only two years
[1:42]of high school after which he worked for several years in the software industry before traveling
[1:47]throughout Central and South America and Europe for a decade. He then returned to the U.S. to
[1:51]complete an MFA in fiction from Columbia. He currently lives in New York City with his wife
[1:56]and two cents. Is it welcome, Malcolm? Thanks for coming on Moms and her time to read books.
[2:00]Thanks for having me. Can you please tell listeners what They Come in All Colors is about?
[2:05]Absolutely. Well, first, is it okay if I use swear words? All right. Okay. Thanks for the heads up.
[2:10]Okay. Great. Get the kids out of the car. Yeah, this is for Moms who swear.
[2:16]So yeah, it's about a 15-year-old named Huey Fairchild who I royally fucks up. And we learn early on
[2:25]by a pretty quickly in the story what it is he's done. So basically he's poisoned. Who was at
[2:30]that point his best friend and uses an anaphylactic shock almost kills him. The question that the
[2:37]story deals with is why did he do that? So what we learned is that there's been a betrayal
[2:44]and in the eyes of Huey Fairchild a pretty big deal. And so he spends the story explaining
[2:52]himself to us and so in a sense it's a maya koopa and he's explaining why it is that he's done what
[2:58]he's done. So over the course of that explanation we discover he takes us back seven years to one
[3:06]summer when he was seven years old. It's actually eight years back and he recounts the circumstances
[3:13]and events that he went through that summer and that helped shape him as a person at that point
[3:19]his childhood and as that thread unfolds we also discover the nature of the betrayal. And so
[3:26]both of these things get unfolded and we come to understand why Huey has done the thing that
[3:35]he's done and why the nature of the betrayal was so I had the effect that it had on him and thereby
[3:42]understanding him a little bit better. And what inspired you to write this book? Why this is your first
[3:46]novel? Why this one? I think because it had an urgency to it that it was that I couldn't ignore.
[3:53]So I have you know with disappointed as a young reader and even as an adult reader with
[4:00]stories that dealt with kind of pretty heavy interracial issues and I wasn't you know happy with
[4:08]how those were written and how they were dealt with and I wanted to take a stab at it. I thought
[4:14]you know I wanted to see if I could do better. And I just have a random question. When he was
[4:19]spending that summer, when he was spending the summer in the fields, digging with these,
[4:23]you spent a lot of time describing these these like two feet holes and sticks. Can you just
[4:28]explain to me what they were doing in the fields like so I? Yeah so there's stack pools. So a stack
[4:35]pool has to be dug because it's the backbone for a haystack. So if you don't have the haystack
[4:41]it's built around the stack pool or else the haystack doesn't kind of stand up. So he's been
[4:46]his his father's a peanut farmer on the south in Georgia and so his entire summer is with his
[4:53]single kind of helping hand that they have Tobias Muncie working in the fields putting in these
[4:59]damned stack pools that are going to be once they harvest their peanuts where they they set them
[5:04]out to dry. I get it. Yeah. Sorry I kept I feel like I was like in these fields for so long.
[5:09]And I mean what exactly how does the how do the mechanics of this work so thank you for I mean
[5:12]I know it was in the book but it's always good to have you explain it. And then it's so ironic then
[5:18]as somebody who's worked on a peanut farm to then poison his classmate years later with peanut
[5:25]butter in the sandwich. Right. And how he made that whole connection. Right. Which as a mother of
[5:31]children with peanut allergies it was like horrified to me. It was like during my stomach but
[5:36]I like how you brought that back. Yeah. So you decide to have Huey who has this very you know it's
[5:44]takes also this book takes place a long time ago. This is like in this early 60s right. Yeah. So yeah.
[5:50]And then he moves from this farm stack pool trying to get into the one pool in the neighborhood
[5:58]existence. You can feel the heat like bearing down on you and it's like very you can just feel it.
[6:03]I feel like I'm in these fields then Huey zooms up to New York City and it's suddenly like
[6:09]basically attending St. Bernard's or I don't know where you had him go but like this
[6:13]a school on the upper east side and trying to fit in with that whole scene which is just such a
[6:17]juxtaposition from the other part of the book like two completely different worlds. What made you
[6:23]have Huey come up here? Right. So there are a few opportunities opportunities there that I felt
[6:29]had to take. One was you know the last wave of the Great Migration. So his mother is on that
[6:36]last wave. So you know these are African-American Jim Crow South trying to make a better life for
[6:41]themselves up north. So that's Huey's mother in a nutshell by the upper east side because you know
[6:47]it you know within the framework of the north it epitomizes the establishment and old money.
[6:53]So I wanted you know in a way for Huey to come full circle because although he establishes
[7:01]the pardon me although he escapes the south he finds himself steel confronting with the same types
[7:06]of racial issues that he you know that he dealt with down there albeit in a different way
[7:13]and I thought that was an interesting juxtaposition so it was one that I you know so Huey is up north
[7:20]and he still finds himself very much in a way right where he started. You have such a moving scene too
[7:25]with his mother at the day after he gets accused of I won't give it away but after he's something
[7:30]happens in school and they go home and he's just like I hated here what are we doing here and it's
[7:34]just him and his mom he's like you know and she sort of says to him you think I'm really out here
[7:39]having a blast it's like the housekeeper and nanny to this family and taking care of this lady's
[7:44]twins as you can go get a Medicare like my life pretty much sucks to you but what can we do about it.
[7:48]I mean it was such a move I just like it was so visual too and he's sitting there wondering like
[7:53]well did you make a better dinner for the people you take care of than you're making for me
[7:56]and oh it was it was a heartbreaking moment really I mean. And so it's a fictional school right
[8:02]I want to say that upfront that he's in this very prestigious elite school that he's in but I
[8:06]think that we can we get the idea and of course as we learned in within you know a few years of
[8:10]that experience it shapes him right so that provides another layer of complexity to this character
[8:16]he evolves. Wow so can I ask a little more about your background actually like so fascinating
[8:23]so you were born in Tennessee yes to a home for unwed mothers yes you were adopted by
[8:27]civil rights activists and then moved all over the world yes tell me a little about your upbringing
[8:32]and then how it's shaped your writing like winded writings fall into this when did you start
[8:38]writing and the whole thing. So I was adopted to an interracial couple first of all so my my adopted
[8:44]fathers white and my adopted mothers black and they're both very political although my father was
[8:51]arguably more kind of an activist than my mother was and he was a project director at the Arkansas
[8:58]Project Director for SNCC a very active but he left the country after I was both he and my mom left
[9:04]the country when I was one and a lot of it had to do with the way in which things were you know
[9:10]this country was politically men and he had basically I think in his eyes he had given
[9:15]the civil rights movement some of his best years and he was confronting kind of the new realities
[9:20]of that movement and how the movement was as a white individual he was beginning to feel you know
[9:27]that his place was kind of in question what his role was so he left and they first went to
[9:35]Morocco briefly and then to Spain my earliest childhood memories are in Spain and then they settled
[9:41]down in Germany on an American military base and my mother worked with a civil servant past tense
[9:47]and she since passed and she worked as a psychologist and my father was at that time a graduate
[9:54]student and they stayed there for the next several years they actually separated there my mother
[10:00]came back before he did, relocated in Virginia, again,
[10:04]on a military base, someone a naval base,
[10:07]to continue working as a civil servant,
[10:09]as a psychologist, substance abuse,
[10:12]was her area of specialty.
[10:14]And my father came back to Boston,
[10:17]pursuing his doctorate at that time.
[10:20]And so I came back when they separated,
[10:23]my mother were having returned before he did.
[10:25]I came back and lived with her in Virginia.
[10:27]And with your brother and with my brother.
[10:28]And so you can probably play some of that with,
[10:31]like, a story that you might have read,
[10:32]a short little thing.
[10:36]And then when my father joined us back state side,
[10:38]a few years later, my brother and I both came and lived
[10:41]with him in Boston and stayed with him from there, they're on.
[10:45]Wow.
[10:46]So when did you find writing?
[10:49]When did you realize that you loved it?
[10:51]Or do you, I mean, I assume you love it, because you do it,
[10:53]but I shouldn't assume that.
[10:54]You're right.
[10:55]And it's, you know, although I do love it,
[10:57]I will say that it's, it was I have a very quirky relationship
[11:01]with, you know, with the whole,
[11:04]I wasn't an early reader, I very much kind of my father,
[11:08]you know, just I felt was a very heavy-handed father.
[11:11]And so both his activism, his politics and his, you know,
[11:16]and his ideas about schooling were things that I resisted kind of,
[11:19]I think by nature, I'm a very resistant person.
[11:22]I have to kind of come to certain realities on my own.
[11:25]So early on I resisted them, but then sure enough I came around
[11:29]and I began to see I think the light in his ways
[11:32]and then became quite a heavy reader.
[11:34]And I always felt like I had something that I,
[11:38]that I wanted to write, but I lacked the courage to do it.
[11:41]It took me kind of going on a professional route after I graduated
[11:45]college and kind of seeing the flesh and blood
[11:48]of what the realities of the professional life looked like,
[11:51]even for, you know, a business or a profession
[11:54]that was valued and supposed to be exciting
[11:57]and knew and I'm referring to this, you know, internet and software
[12:01]in the mid-90s.
[12:03]I was very disillusioned with it and didn't find much meaning in it.
[12:07]And, you know, figure that if I was going to be miserable,
[12:09]I may as well be miserable pursuing my dreams.
[12:12]And so I think that was the first step.
[12:15]That's a funny way of looking at it.
[12:18]Like maybe your dreams won't make you some miserable.
[12:20]I mean, I'm hoping.
[12:21]And did it work?
[12:22]Well, you know, I went all in.
[12:24]So I worked, you know, as I said in software for a few years,
[12:27]I had some money saved.
[12:28]And then at the point in which I chose to break from that profession,
[12:31]I sold everything that I had.
[12:33]And I've been a motorcycleist since my adolescence
[12:35]and wrote down Ecuador over land on motorcycle.
[12:38]And I made a promise to myself that I didn't know what I wanted to do next
[12:42]with my life, but that on that trip I would figure it out.
[12:45]So I ran out of money in Ecuador and I pulled the bike over
[12:49]and I found a place to stay.
[12:50]And I bought a typewriter and I started writing.
[12:52]and I didn't stop.
[12:54]So I told myself that I wouldn't return to the States until I had a manuscript.
[12:57]So that's what I did.
[12:58]Wow.
[12:59]For years later.
[13:00]That's like, I feel like that's from another era of that story.
[13:03]Like it is.
[13:03]A typewriter and a dirt road.
[13:05]A motorcycle.
[13:06]Yeah, well, there were cumbersome laptops,
[13:08]but I didn't have one with me.
[13:10]And I quickly got a laptop.
[13:12]So I wasn't with a typewriter for very long.
[13:14]You can borrow mine if I wanted it.
[13:16]So, but yeah.
[13:17]Wow.
[13:18]That's crazy.
[13:19]So you wrote a letter on your website,
[13:22]which I wanted to talk about also.
[13:23]So you, as a boy, you said you felt neither dark or light enough.
[13:27]So meanwhile, can I ask you a silly quote?
[13:28]I mean, this might sound ridiculous.
[13:30]So your adoptive parents are biracial.
[13:32]Yes.
[13:33]Do you know what your biological parents were?
[13:36]Yeah.
[13:37]So, you know, my wife, this was, you know, something that
[13:40]pursued me through adolescence.
[13:42]I mean, I resisted.
[13:43]I told myself I didn't care.
[13:44]And that I didn't, I couldn't, you know, I didn't,
[13:47]couldn't be bothered.
[13:48]There were too many more immediate issues in my life that I had
[13:51]to, you know, give my attention to to kind of look back.
[13:55]And so of course, when I got married, when we started having kids,
[13:58]that changed that, right?
[13:59]And it's like, well, there's something you need to be,
[14:00]you need to know if you're the benefit of your kids health wise.
[14:03]Right.
[14:04]So I was convinced to, you know, to initiate that search for my biological
[14:08]parents and, and I did and discovered, you know,
[14:11]a little bit about my father and my mother,
[14:13]thankfully, through the Georgia adoption registry,
[14:16]there were some pretty detailed records that I had access to.
[14:19]So it was a trove and it was an amazing experience.
[14:22]Unfortunately, my biological father died in the drowning incident early on
[14:27]in his life and my biological mother is still with us.
[14:31]But because of complicated, you know, I was adopted,
[14:35]I was given upward adoption, not just because she was a young mother.
[14:38]I mean, she was 17 years old.
[14:39]I think around when she gave birth to me,
[14:41]but it was an interracial relationship that she had had,
[14:45]you know, we're in 69 in Georgia.
[14:47]And so there were racial motivations behind, you know, my adoption.
[14:52]And so she proceeded to...
[14:54]And was your mother what race was white?
[14:56]Yes, she was white.
[14:57]And your father was black.
[14:59]Okay.
[14:59]Yes.
[15:00]And so there were, you know, she couldn't,
[15:02]she, she's something that wasn't something that was permissible
[15:05]and being a child out of white luck with a black man.
[15:08]And so she went on and had another life.
[15:10]And so we have been in correspondence.
[15:12]We had one letter exchange and,
[15:14]and she answered some of my more urgent questions.
[15:16]But unfortunately, and she was very kind about it,
[15:18]very gracious about it.
[15:20]But I had wanted a picture and she wasn't able to share that with me.
[15:23]And she wasn't, you know, at a place where she could reveal her identity
[15:26]because she has a life and, and it doesn't permit her
[15:29]being able to go back in that way.
[15:31]And she has kids and all kinds of things that don't know about this,
[15:34]this part of her past.
[15:35]And, and I understood that it's a little bit, you know,
[15:38]it's not easy, but I understand it, such as life.
[15:41]That is hard.
[15:42]I mean, not, I mean, that's just, to get that phone call or just,
[15:46]I mean, that's just, I'm sorry, I'm, I'm just putting myself in your shoes
[15:51]and thinking like, how much you would just want,
[15:52]like I would feel like you would answer so many questions if I could just
[15:55]meet this person or like, you know, it's such a crucial part of your identity
[15:59]as much as you want to put it aside, right?
[16:01]But like, where you come from is just one of these like face things.
[16:05]And then to her to still deny that to you.
[16:07]That's just seemed so mean.
[16:09]Well, it's, I mean, I understand.
[16:11]I understand.
[16:11]I, I, I, I, I tried.
[16:13]Yeah.
[16:13]And so for me, I have to remind myself that I think my takeaway is that
[16:18]the past is still with us.
[16:20]And I, I feel that my personal experience bears that out
[16:24]in a very kind of poignant way.
[16:26]So there are very real consequences for me that relate to,
[16:30]you know, you know, nothing more than kind of racial improprieties or
[16:34]social improprieties that are still with us is still
[16:37]way on people and affect what they feel that they can and can't do in
[16:40]places that they are not willing to go.
[16:42]Right.
[16:43]And the, you know, interestingly, her mother is still alive.
[16:46]So my biological, my maternal grandmother is still alive.
[16:49]And of course, she was, she was a huge maternal figure in the household.
[16:53]And as I've come to learn and was with, you know, my, obviously,
[16:58]was there when this whole, when she was 17 years old, part of this
[17:01]whole playing out.
[17:02]And so it's a pretty, yeah, it's a second novel maybe.
[17:06]I was just going to say this is a movie.
[17:08]This whole thing is a movie.
[17:10]I mean, you should just skip the fiction and just go straight to memoir.
[17:13]I mean, no, well, see, I love what I really enjoy doing is,
[17:18]I enjoy creating a world where I can somehow bring the emotional
[17:22]kind of truth to these types of experience to the characters that I create.
[17:26]And in that way, get, you know, because there is something that I can,
[17:30]when you craft these, these fictional stories that you can bring to light in ways that
[17:35]we don't, there aren't too many other ways that we can do this in a world.
[17:39]And so I feel that's, that's very special and, and that's why I love fiction writing.
[17:44]To be honest, fiction writing essentially is like an exercise in therapy,
[17:48]for me and the everyone who writes.
[17:49]I mean, I've talked to some people now.
[17:51]I mean, it's really like how we all work through different issues,
[17:54]but you're, you're like, it's as if you're a trap, not, not you,
[17:58]but I'm thinking about my kids, like in play therapy, right?
[18:00]They have you draw a picture and that like brings out all your feelings.
[18:03]And here we are as grownups and we're writing, oh, like here are the characters,
[18:07]but I'm going to put all of my feelings onto these characters.
[18:09]And then that way get them out and like, and deal with them and help other people
[18:13]while I'm at it.
[18:14]I told my wife for many years early on, pre-publishing that, you know,
[18:19]what even if, even if it all failed, it was like it was still therapy for me.
[18:22]Yeah, no, you needed it.
[18:23]So I was allowed to go to places where I wouldn't be able to go otherwise.
[18:27]And, and one of my big learning experiences and the writing process was realizing that
[18:31]all, not all writing is fun writing, that there was actually some places,
[18:36]you know, places that I had to go creatively that were actually quite painful and difficult.
[18:41]So that was a big learning process for me.
[18:43]And now you're trying to figure out how to bring all of this and all of your sort of feelings,
[18:48]especially about race coming from essentially two mixed race fairages in a way to now you're
[18:54]having children and trying to, you have an essay on your website where you're going about to go
[18:59]swimming with your son and how much do you tell him about what's been in the news?
[19:03]What should you stop?
[19:04]And what do we give our kids?
[19:05]It's a grappleist.
[19:06]So I don't know, how are you feeling about it in terms of being a parent now?
[19:10]You know, it's, it's really complicated and it's not easy.
[19:14]And it's no, you know, it's no easier than it was when I was a kid.
[19:17]I kind of had to sort through it all a father who thought he was helping me.
[19:22]And, you know, perhaps wasn't helping me in the way that I needed to be helped her as much
[19:27]as he thought he was helping me, but he did what he could.
[19:30]And I try to do the same with my two sons and try to be aware of my own limitations
[19:35]because I'm not to kind of impose on them too much of my reality and what, you know,
[19:40]I carry with me from the past.
[19:41]And so I try to let them be themselves as much as possible.
[19:45]I try to take a minimalistic approach to parenting in the sense of, you know, no,
[19:49]I try not to be heavy-handed, although admittedly I struggle with that.
[19:52]So, but when racial issues, you know, come up, we've had conversations,
[19:57]but I try to let them kind of muddle through that as much as-
[20:00]possible. I try not to kind of dictate what reality is. And certainly, you know, the racial
[20:05]landscape has changed so much, especially for, you know, people of kind of multiracial descent,
[20:10]especially for people who are fair-skinned and don't look, you know, their race, you know,
[20:15]because you can imagine in, you know, the early mid-60s, it's like we were still very much under
[20:20]the kind of principle of this one drop rule. You know, it doesn't matter how you look. If you
[20:25]know that you have a black individual somewhere in your ancestry, you know, that's what you are.
[20:31]That defines you. And that's changed certainly to a degree where we have a more kind of
[20:37]nuanced and sort of fluid sense of identity, which is helpful in some ways. And certainly,
[20:42]you know, we have the languages more evolved. But things certainly crop up. So, you know,
[20:47]I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that my two children don't look as if they have African
[20:53]American ancestry. And so, it's something that they have to be aware of. And I try to just remind them
[20:59]of that. It's really hard to do because my wife is Swedish. And certainly, my mother's passed,
[21:03]so their maternal grandmother, who was black, I'll be at my adoptive parents no longer,
[21:09]they're even as a figure, you know what I mean? Does someone to point back to my earliest,
[21:14]my son, my elder son has a vague, distant memory of her, one Christmas. But that's it.
[21:19]So, trying to make, you know, that part of their, their, you know, their, their family known and
[21:26]real and immediate and urgent and important. It's a struggle. And I feel like that's probably
[21:31]the most important obligation I have. And then what they do with that is very much up to them.
[21:37]I love the fact that there are that, you know, they're at a school where there are other people
[21:42]that are multiracial. And that's a big deal because I didn't have that. And so, it's not, you know,
[21:47]they don't feel so, I think, completely different. You know, they can see other like brownish
[21:52]individuals of ambiguous kind of raised and, but they're working through it, you know. And,
[21:57]and certainly, it's what's fascinating is what's it going to look like when their parents
[22:01]and on the grand that I mean, we realized just how fluid all of this is. And we can't be married
[22:06]to our beliefs too much because things are always changing. Well, that's the whole thing too. I mean,
[22:11]I feel like we're at a point right now with so much divisiveness in the country. And people
[22:17]wanting to like draw so many lines and there's so much hate and anger. And yet, you know,
[22:24]the US has traditionally been known as this melting pot and everybody has a little bit of
[22:28]everything. I mean, even as you were talking, maybe think of the Holocaust drink because you could
[22:32]be killed if you had, you know, you great, great grandmother was Jewish. Like it doesn't matter how
[22:36]much, right? It's in there. Right? And they can figure it out. So it's almost the same. I mean,
[22:42]there's some similarities there. But as someone who sort of embodies the mixed race persona in
[22:48]a way, especially as you write about all these different issues, like, where do you come out on this
[22:54]whole race racial anger situation when so many people are a combination of things? Yeah, you know,
[23:01]I mean, so for me, I was writing with, it was important that part of why I wrote the story and
[23:08]that part of why it was really urgent to me was because I didn't want for people to forget about,
[23:13]you know, a period. Well, let me just back up a second. I've had people tell me, oh, you're so lucky.
[23:19]Oh, both from the point of view of like, oh, you have such a cool kind of, you know,
[23:25]a racial, you know, background. And so cool is the descriptive word or that I have the source
[23:32]of all of these stories as being, you know, this could these kind of experiences that have been,
[23:37]you know, painful and difficult ones is being something that, oh, that's so cool. You can, you know,
[23:43]this is this is now for you to kind of part of your treasure chest that you can explore and kind
[23:48]of, you know, create stories from. But there's a lot of pain there and there's a lot of,
[23:53]you know, sadness and there's a lot of, you know, I grappled with a lot of just not really knowing
[23:58]who I was and not really knowing how I, and even to this day, it never goes away. And that's
[24:02]something that I want, you know, that's a very big part of this toy where, you know, kind of
[24:06]is that this main character, Huey Fairchild kind of comes along. He's not where he started,
[24:10]but he's not all the way there by any stretch. And so that's just an important, it's important
[24:17]to capture a time in our history where looking like I look, you know, didn't feel and wasn't the way
[24:25]that it was today. And in case anyone forgets, I want this story to be there for to help people
[24:30]remember. And, you know, hopefully you can, it'll put you in the flesh, in the shoes of this
[24:36]individual and you will get to see a firsthand account of of what reality looked like for someone
[24:41]who was, who looked like that at that time in our history. So it shouldn't be that far from us,
[24:48]you know. And tell me a little about your writing process. Where do you like to write?
[24:52]Yeah, so I'm an early morning person. I'm just now getting back into the groove. You know,
[24:56]the first year after publication was just crazy. I was just done. And I wasn't sure that I would
[25:01]ever write anything again, because it was, it literally squeezed me for all I was worth. And I put
[25:06]everything that I had into it. It felt like it was my once in treated it. Like it was my once
[25:11]chance. I treated it like, you know, what I'm going to go, I'm going to assume that I only
[25:14]have one story to tell. And this is it, damn it, you know, I better, I better put every last
[25:19]ounce of energy that I have to dedicate on this topic and to this character in this book,
[25:24]because once it's done, it's done. I'm not, you know. And so it was, you know, I was just,
[25:30]I was toast. I felt like I had no more to give. And after that first year, and so slowly I've
[25:37]been coming around and I feel like I'm becoming more rejuvenated and have kind of gotten in
[25:42]sight onto, you know, what I want to tackle next. So what I did this past summer, my wife and kids
[25:47]went off to see their grandparents and Sweden and I hunkered down here in the city and just,
[25:51]you know, pulled the curtains closed and said, I'm going to figure out this, this next book
[25:56]and this is my chance. You know what life is like with kids. You don't, you have to make that
[25:59]happen. It doesn't just, you know, it doesn't just happen on its own. So I felt like that was a
[26:04]very productive period for me. I was able to get back to a place of creativity and energy and
[26:10]urgency and I have more in me. So yeah, the mornings are, the mornings are where it's at,
[26:16]the earlier I can get started, the better I like to really harvest those first juices of the day.
[26:21]And that person, I try to get into shifts, you know, pre and post and I, you know, and then come
[26:27]eight or nine. I'm done. Eight or nine at night? Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I'm not done with a writing,
[26:33]but like, you know, the writing will end at six or seven. But I mean, your brain, everything else
[26:38]is just like you've given the day, everything that you have to give and it's you're ready to call
[26:42]it a day. Yeah. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors? Yeah, I do. I was actually thinking
[26:48]about this and I think one of the things that has really helped me along the way is to never
[26:54]throw anything away and be a hoarder of words and treat them, even though, you know, they come out
[27:01]and you might not be happy with them and you might be frustrated with it. You might be completely
[27:04]dissatisfied and disappointed and depressed, assume that they mean something and that you just
[27:10]haven't figured out what they mean. I like that. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming
[27:14]on mom's no time to read books and for your beautiful novel. My pleasure. Thank you so much for
[27:19]having me. Of course. You've been listening to moms don't have time to read books with Zibi Owens.
[27:23]Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter at zibiowans.com to get more updates about episodes
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[27:41]at moms don't have time to read books. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for
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[27:51]out trim music. Thanks for listening. You can always email me at zibiatzibiowans.com.