Stephanie Danler, STRAY: A MEMOIR
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[1:45]I'm excited to be talking to Stephanie Danler today, who's the author of the International
[1:49]Bestseller, Sweet Better, and the executive producer of the Sweet Better series on Stars.
[1:54]Stray, a memoir, her latest book comes out in May 2020. Her writing has appeared in the
[1:59]Sowani Review, Bogue, The New York Times Book Review, and the Paris View Daily, among many other
[2:03]publications. Her nonfiction received an honorable mention in the Best American Essays 2018,
[2:08]and her criticism won the 2019 Robert B. Holman Award from the Sowani Review.
[2:13]A graduate of Kenyon College with an MFA for the new school and fiction. Stephanie currently
[2:18]lives in Los Angeles with her husband, her toddler, and her student to be daughter.
[2:22]Welcome Stephanie. Thanks for coming on Mom's time to read books.
[2:26]Oh, thank you so much for having me. I wish we were talking in person, but this is a really
[2:33]good substitute. Better than nothing. Yes. This is what we're all having to do right now.
[2:40]Yes, we're escaping mid-coronavirus. Well, everybody's at home. But I have to say,
[2:46]Stray has gotten me out of my own head more than almost anything else lately, because it's so
[2:52]immersive and beautifully written. And I just needed it right now. And it came for me at such a
[2:58]good time to just get into your head and the way you see the world. So it was like a gift for me.
[3:04]And I don't always say that. So I just wanted to say that from the start. Well, thank you.
[3:09]Can you tell listeners what Stray is about? Stray is a memoir about the months when I returned home
[3:19]to California. I moved there from New York City. And I had reckoning with my past, with my parents,
[3:29]with my childhood in California. It is about being the child of addicts and the inheritance
[3:36]of damage. And I think that so often when we look at the sort of genetic factors of addiction,
[3:46]looking at a one-to-one ratio, which is my mom's an alcoholic, therefore I'm an alcoholic.
[3:53]And while that wasn't my story, I think the period of time I'm writing about it as
[3:59]in Stray is when I realized that I had inherited a lot of their darkness and their recklessness
[4:07]and their propensity for self-harm, even if I wasn't technically an alcoholic or a crystal
[4:14]meth addict. And so the book is about trying to move past that and give myself a different life
[4:22]or a possibility for a different life. Did it help you to write it? Emotionally, it wasn't really
[4:27]hard. Like how was it to go into all of that? It did not help. No. It was a horrible mistake.
[4:35]It was a mistake. It was a mistake. Your book, I wrote it so quickly and with such urgency
[4:43]and there was a lot of force behind it, which I think you can feel when you read it.
[4:49]Very, it's very raw. But I living with that part of myself with the darkest parts of myself
[4:57]was really difficult, especially given that I was writing it while I was a brand new mother.
[5:04]My son was five months old when I started the first draft and the sort of disparity
[5:12]between having this family and having a wonderful supportive partner and this beautiful,
[5:19]healthy child, which is a miracle. And then going back in time to a person that I was who
[5:25]didn't believe that any of that was possible was really hard. It was hard to traverse. It was hard to
[5:30]be in the office and to come out and nurse and just connect with my son and my husband.
[5:38]And then I am so grateful now that people are reading it and the way that they're responding
[5:44]really smart people that I admire. I'm getting notes and feedback and people are moved by it.
[5:53]And so that's really gratifying, but I don't feel great about the book itself. It feels like such
[6:01]a dark book to me and I think it will just take time. I don't think it being dark is anything negative.
[6:11]It's not. It's just, I think in comparison to something like sweet bitter,
[6:15]which had an element of fun and levity to it. This book doesn't have it. And I think about
[6:24]my children reading it. I'm now pregnant again and I'm having a girl, which somehow seems more
[6:29]fraught to me. I know if that's true or not, but it based on my own relationship with my mother.
[6:37]I feel like I'm entering into potentially complicated territory. But I think about my children
[6:44]reading it. And I just hope that they can, I hope that what comes across at the end of that
[6:50]book is about hope and love and connection and not just a catalog of ways that I've been hurt.
[6:59]It doesn't come across that way. Yeah. I mean, everybody has the circumstances into which
[7:04]they were born. And this is how you process yours and in a very place oriented time period
[7:10]constricted way. And I think it was really awesome. I mean, it helps. I mean,
[7:15]works for me. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. And it's great to hear from readers.
[7:21]It's also happening so quickly. Like I started that first draft less than a year ago. And so
[7:27]that's why I think it's going to take some time to process and feel the sort of like period
[7:33]at the end of the sentence. It just doesn't, it feels kind of like open and loose and
[7:38]everywhere all around me still. But you did choose like, did you want to write it? Like,
[7:44]could anyone tell you you had to write it? Like, no, I was under, I am under contract for
[7:50]a second book from Canoff. But I sweet bitter season two, the television show wrapped four days
[7:57]before I gave birth to my son. Oh my gosh. And I was so ready to talk about something else
[8:05]to write about not a 22 year old girl or not the restaurant industry. I love both those things.
[8:12]And I'm so grateful that I got to delve into them deeply. But I had been sitting on this book
[8:19]for years. And so my editor flew out to LA when my son was seven weeks old and we had lunch.
[8:27]And it was my first time leaving the house and like, my boobs are leaking. And I've still got
[8:32]eternity pants on. And I was like, do I have a glass of wine at lunch? Am I still a human? What's
[8:37]happening? And he said, you know, your next book is due in a month. They set up deadlines. And I'm
[8:45]like, Peter, that's a joke. I have not written a word. And I have a seven week old baby. And he
[8:55]said, well, when do you think the next book will be ready? And I could have said 2022, they don't
[9:02]force you to write a book. But I said June. I was like, end of June. I can do it. And I think I was
[9:10]just wanting one to still be a writer. I think that the postpartum period, if you are a creative or
[9:20]professional or let's say for any woman, your sense of identity is so shaken. And I wanted to
[9:27]feel like a writer again. But I also had been wanting to work on this book for a long time. So I
[9:33]gave myself the deadline of the end of June. And I turned it in the first week of July. That's not
[9:40]bad. It's pretty close. It was very close. Very close. Yeah, it's so hard to go back and forth. I
[9:47]mean, I feel like even if I like sit and watch a sad movie or I'm like, have a difficult
[9:52]conversation to then like open the door and go be a mom and be all upbeat and mom-ish is hard. So
[9:58]for you to have to spend, I know you
[10:00]your baby was so little, but even just to that on off switch,
[10:04]it's a lot.
[10:05]There was a lot of crime.
[10:07]I think when I look back on the period of time,
[10:11]we went to extraordinary lengths at a practical level
[10:15]in order to ensure that I could write the book.
[10:18]I mean, we moved to Europe.
[10:20]We settled our home.
[10:21]My husband quit his job.
[10:23]We did everything possible, but when I,
[10:25]and it was a beautiful time period,
[10:27]and that's why I was able to write it.
[10:29]So quickly, there's just a lot of crime.
[10:32]Baby's crying, mom's crying, husband's drinking.
[10:35]Look at what his job is like trying to have a glass of wine
[10:40]and some hormone serrano, and everyone's crying.
[10:43]So it was not seamless, no.
[10:48]I feel like that mirrors the traditional path.
[10:51]I feel like no writer says, oh, that worked out.
[10:53]How easy was that?
[10:54]I feel like most of the time it's like a messy in a type
[10:57]process, but this is particularly more so than maybe most.
[11:03]I think that I kind of mythologize these writers
[11:07]who worked with daily schedules and wrote six days a week,
[11:13]a thousand words a day.
[11:14]You always hear about those people that really
[11:17]show up at the desk.
[11:19]And I am just not so well integrated.
[11:22]I had to remove myself several time zones
[11:25]away from my life in order to find the focus.
[11:32]And I needed a beyond, at one point,
[11:35]I was interviewing nannies.
[11:37]And you're talking about hours.
[11:39]And 40 hours a week, it doesn't cut it to write a book.
[11:43]I'm like, I need to be able to go to work until 8 p.m.
[11:49]if I need to.
[11:50]And so I really, really could not have done it
[11:52]if I didn't have a primary caretaker for those months.
[11:57]Yeah, I just wish I didn't have to upend my life.
[12:03]That is the way this book needed to be written.
[12:05]That's great.
[12:06]Because now every book you write,
[12:07]you can pick a new exotic locale and just settle in.
[12:10]And justify it totally, totally.
[12:13]I might be divorced, but totally can do that.
[12:18]Oh, sorry, thank you.
[12:21]But yeah, you know.
[12:24]So before we talk more about the book,
[12:27]I have to just fast forward to the present day
[12:30]because I read years to one interview article
[12:33]about how you were stuck in Hawaii.
[12:35]And you had gone there on vacation.
[12:37]And as you were there, the whole coronavirus panic
[12:40]sort of broke out.
[12:41]And you wrote this beautiful, like literally,
[12:43]I felt like I was reading your diary of what should you do.
[12:47]It was like, she could have emailed this to me, basically.
[12:50]But you were like, that I put my family at risk.
[12:53]Others at risk, are we thoughtless and reckless people?
[12:55]Will we be trapped here?
[12:56]Are we safer in dense, germ-ridden Los Angeles,
[12:59]pacing our 800-square-foot house with a toddler?
[13:01]Or are we safer on this island,
[13:03]meaning Hawaii cooking all our own food?
[13:05]I selected a nature where my San Julian collects pieces
[13:08]of coral in a bucket.
[13:09]Underneath of that, the one question,
[13:11]the only one any human can be thinking right now, are we safe?
[13:15]No, we are not safe.
[13:17]And then you ended the article and didn't tell the reader
[13:19]what happened.
[13:20]So I was like, tell me what happened.
[13:23]So Adam Ross, the editor at the Sowani Review,
[13:26]asked for a letter, a slice of life letter,
[13:30]as if we were writing him about where we were on March 14.
[13:37]And at that point, writing that letter,
[13:40]I had been calling Delta on a Monday.
[13:44]I'd been calling Delta since Saturday.
[13:46]I could not get through.
[13:47]I had been on the call back list twice.
[13:50]And then finally, Delta just said,
[13:52]please call back at another time and disconnected people.
[13:56]We were on the verge of just going to the airport
[13:59]to fly standby, but anyone with kids knows that that is a
[14:03]last, last, last resort.
[14:05]That you don't want to be hanging around an airport
[14:08]for six hours, maybe getting on a flight.
[14:12]And at the same time, we were fine.
[14:14]We were cooking our food.
[14:16]Julian had plenty of space to play.
[14:18]There were no other people around.
[14:20]We hadn't had contact with anyone.
[14:22]I mean, there were other people staying in condos,
[14:24]but I hadn't been in a restaurant
[14:27]or in the same room with people in over a week.
[14:30]And we really did not know what to do.
[14:36]The news was coming so quickly
[14:38]and changing our by hour.
[14:40]And then this rainstorm started.
[14:43]And the bridge connecting the town we were in,
[14:46]Hanalee Bay, to the rest of the island of Kauai,
[14:50]went underwater.
[14:53]And we even if we had wanted to go fly standby,
[14:58]we couldn't get out of Hanalee Bay with no clue where it was
[15:03]ending.
[15:03]And so that letter is really a slice of when is this rain
[15:07]going to stop what's going to happen to us?
[15:09]Now what happened to us is that night the power went out
[15:13]on the entire island of Kauai.
[15:15]It happened around seven o'clock.
[15:17]My husband and I went to bed.
[15:19]And we were like, this is not great.
[15:20]We have a whole fridge full of food
[15:22]and an electric stove in this unit
[15:25]and a toddler who eats more than I do.
[15:28]And we woke up in the morning, still no power.
[15:33]By the afternoon, I was starting to panic.
[15:37]The hotel had made like bowls of canned chili
[15:41]on a grill in the parking lot.
[15:43]And I can't do that.
[15:45]To do that, I can.
[15:47]This is not an issue of snobbishness.
[15:49]I'm a terrible snob, but I also,
[15:53]I just can't feed that to my son for multiple meals.
[15:57]And the supermarket in town got a generator.
[16:01]And what happened was a friend of a friend
[16:05]had an open cottage with a generator.
[16:08]I'm not kidding.
[16:09]This was so crazy in random.
[16:12]And the friend of a friend said, please go stay there.
[16:16]It was a beautiful cottage.
[16:18]Cottage, like I said in my home that I live in.
[16:22]The power was out for 24 hours, but we had a generator
[16:25]and it was a gas stove.
[16:26]And I went from eating crackers and canned chili
[16:31]to being able to make meals for my son.
[16:37]The bridge did not get out of water for two days.
[16:40]And at that point, we were 24 hours away
[16:42]from our original flight.
[16:44]And those last, it did not stop raining.
[16:49]We took our flight home.
[16:51]And I mean, I relief.
[16:54]We're relieved to be home.
[16:55]Hawaii is very beautiful.
[16:58]I think that even as you were just
[17:00]saying about New York City before we started this podcast,
[17:03]I think the desire to be close to your home,
[17:06]even if you know that it might technically not
[17:09]be as safe as someplace else, is really strong in all
[17:13]of us right now.
[17:14]It's an illusion of control.
[17:16]It's my home.
[17:17]It's my bed.
[17:18]That's my market that I go to.
[17:20]And here we are, new and I are both sitting.
[17:24]And I were in the middle of a self quarantine, shelter
[17:28]in place order in Los Angeles and similar in New York City.
[17:34]Yeah.
[17:35]It's really hard to believe.
[17:37]I know.
[17:38]And I feel like that to go back to the book,
[17:41]because you're probably sick of talking about it.
[17:42]But I know, please.
[17:44]I feel like your book is so much about that sense of home
[17:47]and the search for home.
[17:49]And what does it mean?
[17:49]And going home again and revisiting
[17:52]and having to deal with your parents again,
[17:55]all the stuff that opens up, right?
[17:57]So sometimes I feel like going home
[17:59]is maybe the most painful choice you can make in a way.
[18:04]Absolutely.
[18:05]I think I had spent a lot of that year
[18:10]that I moved back here, 2015, traveling.
[18:13]And there were very lovely places that I could have ended up,
[18:18]if I really wanted to leave New York.
[18:20]And I could have just stayed in New York.
[18:22]I did feel this poll to know this city again as an adult.
[18:29]And I did not realize how complicated it would be, of course,
[18:34]when I got here.
[18:35]I think that the landscape of California
[18:39]has this sort of fragile, volatile, doomed quality to it,
[18:45]the way that the hills don't hold in place,
[18:47]the way that we go into droughts,
[18:50]then into mudslides, then into fires.
[18:54]And I realized that while I had taken all that for granted
[18:58]as a child, that anxiety had really come to define my life.
[19:03]And I couldn't reckon with that anxiety
[19:06]from New York City.
[19:08]I had to be here.
[19:10]And what I found is that this city is nothing
[19:13]like what I remember it as and seeing it from adult eyes.
[19:19]And with the help of someone, the love interest in the book
[19:24]who has a completely different lens on the world than I do,
[19:28]I don't think that I'll leave California.
[19:31]I mean, I might leave LA, but I think this is where I live now.
[19:36]This is where I want to spend whatever days are left to me.
[19:41]No, that's so dire.
[19:44]I mean, we're talking, we're like talking about children,
[19:46]but no, no, I know.
[19:49]You know exactly what I know.
[19:51]I know.
[19:52]I had this moment when things were looking particularly grim.
[19:56]Like right now, I mean, not that they look much better,
[19:58]but I was sort of.
[20:00]Invents that I was going to die in the next two to three months.
[20:02]This is like a week or two ago.
[20:04]Now I feel like, oh, okay, maybe I won't, but I don't know.
[20:06]Now it was before I sort of settled in here and, you know,
[20:10]like hid, essentially.
[20:13]And I was like, okay, so if this is the last two or three months
[20:17]of my life, like, how do I want it to go?
[20:19]Might do I want to change anything?
[20:20]Like, then I realized, no.
[20:22]Like, I still want to do like Zoom calls and Skyveson, you know,
[20:28]I still want to be busy and I still want to be with the kids.
[20:31]And I don't know.
[20:33]And then acknowledging that sort of made things a little easier.
[20:37]So maybe what you're saying, like, that you want to stay there forever.
[20:39]It's like, okay, well, you know, just like,
[20:41]I'm going to go into cruise control.
[20:43]And this is what I got and I'm going to go with this.
[20:45]And we'll see what happens.
[20:47]Yes, absolutely.
[20:48]Well, I think that I spend so much time fantasizing about different lives,
[20:52]which is how I ended up in Barcelona on a whim to rate this book straight.
[20:57]But I think having a sense of belonging here is really different for me.
[21:03]I don't know.
[21:04]I think I have such a complicated, beautiful relationship with New York City,
[21:08]like everyone who lives there.
[21:10]But I never ever, a single day that I live there,
[21:13]I thought I'm going to be here for the rest of my life.
[21:16]And so I think that that feeling is now what I equate with home.
[21:21]And it could have been Portland, Oregon, or Boulder, Colorado,
[21:24]or the Catskills at a certain point.
[21:26]But it's California.
[21:28]It's the Pacific Ocean.
[21:29]There's something about it that has settled that question for me.
[21:34]You grew up in the city.
[21:35]I'm there because I'm from there.
[21:38]Like, I feel like if I had been born in a small town in Kansas, I would be there too.
[21:41]Do you know what I mean?
[21:42]I think that's, but anyway,
[21:44]there's something about coming home to where you kind of started where it all began.
[21:48]But for a while, I did live in Laurel Canyon, which is part of your book.
[21:51]I lived right in Wonderland, and that was so funny because I was like,
[21:54]I didn't even realize when I lived there.
[21:55]People were like, did you hear about the murders?
[21:57]And I was like, ah, is that why I got this great deal on this rental?
[22:02]I was 21 years old, so like what did I know?
[22:04]But anyway, I mean, Laurel Canyon is really this bubble.
[22:07]The land that time forgot.
[22:09]It's so beautiful.
[22:10]I miss it all the time.
[22:11]But I really equate it with being alone.
[22:14]And I don't know that I could have the life I have now with the walk.
[22:20]It's not very walkable.
[22:21]Did you notice that?
[22:22]Yes, I did.
[22:23]Really, I could barely arrive.
[22:26]I could really drive there.
[22:27]It's like the roads are, it was, yeah.
[22:29]Not totally.
[22:30]So, but I do think of it fondly, especially when in spring months,
[22:35]when everything gets so green.
[22:37]After you came out a sweet bitter and it became a TV show and like all the rest of it,
[22:41]did your head just spin?
[22:43]Like what was that like for you having all of that success?
[22:46]Like just come.
[22:47]What was that like not to say you didn't work hard at it?
[22:49]But like what was that, what was that like?
[22:51]How did that change your life?
[22:52]Well, there's, yeah, it changed every aspect of it from the day to day to what I was able
[22:59]to imagine myself doing or what I could aspire to.
[23:04]I first, there is this element of luck and I did work really hard.
[23:12]But what happened with sweet bitter was so much bigger than me personally or any talent
[23:18]I have as a writer that is about luck and timing and I was so aware that something
[23:28]like that probably doesn't happen multiple times in a lifetime.
[23:33]And so I said yes to absolutely everything.
[23:37]And so what it felt like to have all that happen was a lot of work was a lot of, I
[23:42]toured with sweet bitter for a year where I only had one month that I didn't travel.
[23:50]I mean, I go to Wichita, I go to Tampa, Florida.
[23:53]If someone asked me to Skype into their book club, I ended up stopping doing that.
[23:58]But in the beginning, I was like, yes, yes, yes.
[24:01]I will be up.
[24:02]I will write for free for any public, any online publication.
[24:06]I mean, I totaled it up once and I think I wrote like, and this was early 70,000 free
[24:12]words.
[24:13]In so far as like little pieces or interviews that I wrote back, yes to everything.
[24:21]And then I was making television and I said, yes, I want to be involved as involved as
[24:26]possible.
[24:27]I want to work the 22 hour days and be on set at two in the morning.
[24:31]I want to get into arguments about casting.
[24:34]I want to read every script.
[24:37]And so it felt like struggle, success felt like struggle.
[24:43]And I had enough sense not to be too attached to maintaining it.
[24:49]Like, oh, sweet bitter is going to go on forever.
[24:51]This is a television series.
[24:52]It's going to go for 10 years.
[24:53]It's the new friends.
[24:55]I was so aware that it was a moment and I would never get another chance like that.
[25:02]And very easily, I could have a really nice writing career.
[25:06]I could possibly never have another book that hits like that and still have a very nice
[25:11]career, like a lot of writers do.
[25:13]And so it felt like a lot of work and it felt like a lot of conflict, you know, just in
[25:22]getting work done and in learning an entirely new medium and an entirely new workplace, which
[25:28]is television, and it felt like a lot of my life was on hold, which I think when we got
[25:40]pregnant with Julian and I was living away from my husband living in New York for six
[25:48]months of that year, doing everything long distance, making television at 30 weeks pregnant.
[25:54]Oh my gosh.
[25:55]I was very ready for that roller coaster to end and see who I was at the end of it.
[26:02]Now becoming a new mother doesn't really help you see who you are.
[26:08]It maybe distances you even further, but I think writing stray helped.
[26:15]Yeah.
[26:16]Having months of not traveling helps quiet.
[26:19]Well, now you don't have to travel so much right now with a skuck.
[26:22]My God.
[26:23]No, I know.
[26:24]And you know, I was going to be 30 weeks pregnant for that poor, but I have mixed feelings
[26:30]about it.
[26:31]I think that connecting with readers is a really important part of the job.
[26:36]I often say, and it's not for everyone, but you don't give birth to the child and
[26:43]then drop them off a daycare the next day and say, good luck, you're out in the world.
[26:47]I do think that there is a lot of work that comes after publication if you're up for
[26:52]it.
[26:53]If that's your style.
[26:54]So after stray, do you have ideas for your next project?
[26:59]I'm working on a novel and it is set in Los Angeles in the 90s.
[27:05]Awesome.
[27:06]Very close to my heart.
[27:08]I think I will always kind of write from life that seems to be my path at least right
[27:14]now.
[27:15]Seems to be going well.
[27:16]Might as well stick with that.
[27:20]When you run out of material, that's not right about dystopian future societies or something.
[27:27]I know.
[27:28]I like fantasize about being that kind of writer of being able to imagine alternate worlds
[27:35]and I'm so stuck in this world, nothing about it makes sense to me, but I want to understand.
[27:41]Well, you can tell.
[27:43]You can feel you're sorting it out in the book and that's, I think, makes you just unable
[27:48]to put it down because you're just like you're so rooting for you and wanting to see
[27:52]what you come up with.
[27:53]So do you have any advice to aspiring authors?
[27:57]Like how did you learn to write this well?
[28:00]Did you, I mean, I know your teachers that do you from a very young age like, oh, you're
[28:04]a writer, but did this just come or did all of your training help and what advice do
[28:08]you have?
[28:09]That was a lot of questions.
[28:10]Yeah, it was a lot of questions, but I got it.
[28:13]Training does help.
[28:14]I've always written like this, my journals from childhood are really interested in feelings
[28:22]and relationships and questions of identity and fear and I was drawn at a very young age
[28:32]to poetry, which has informed my style, my whole life.
[28:39]Training helps because sentences and a vocabulary are unfortunately probably 5% of it.
[28:48]There is pacing, there's storytelling, there's an eye for capturing detail.
[28:55]There are lines of dialogue that are wrote and then lines of dialogue that make a piece
[29:00]come alive and a lot of those things you can learn and I know that to be true, especially
[29:09]with television, like I learned so much about writing.
[29:14]After feeling like I kind of knew the ins and outs of style.
[29:19]So my advice and the way that I learned all that was just by reading, I mean, I read
[29:24]scripts and I've been a reader before I've been a writer for my entire life.
[29:30]So I still learned by reading.
[29:32]When I wanted to write a memoir, I had no idea how to write a memoir and I had never read
[29:36]most of them.
[29:37]It was a genre that I didn't disregard it.
[29:41]I was just so interested in fiction and literature with a capital L and poetry that memoir
[29:50]had kind of just fallen by the wayside.
[29:54]So I read, you know, I read 50 memoirs and I looked at how they were constructed and
[30:00]Which one stuck with me afterwards and what was possible and what are the rules and then how do you break the rules and
[30:08]Then the other advice that I give to aspiring writers
[30:12]Often is to finish what you start when you have identified yourself as a writer and your full of ideas and you have this life
[30:21]That's giving you all of these unique experiences and this voice and point of view
[30:27]It's really easy to start projects over and over and over again
[30:32]and that's I'm gonna write a hunger game style YA novel today and today
[30:38]I'm gonna write an earnest Hemingway style short story and today
[30:43]I'm gonna write an
[30:45]Elajiah piece about my mother and
[30:48]When I was in graduate school sweet bitter was the first thing that I turned in I did not write anything else for the two years
[30:55]I was in school and I had a book at the end of it that book needed five drafts before it was ready to be published
[31:04]But I wouldn't have ever gotten there if I didn't just get to the end
[31:11]Yeah, it's so hard, but if you can get to the end of something then you can look at it and say oh this has potential. Oh
[31:19]This needs help here
[31:21]But until then I think it's all you're just practicing. I love that
[31:26]Thank you so much. Thank you for coming in this podcast and momstone time to read books and sharing all your stories
[31:33]And I'm such a big fan. I really am and this book is so good. So thank you
[31:38]No, thank you. It's such a pleasure to chat about this. It's especially at this time
[31:45]So really
[31:48]Thank you
[31:49]You've been listening to moms don't have time to read books with zibi Owens
[31:53]Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter at zibi Owens.com to get more updates about episodes like these and also lots of live
[32:00]Events thanks again to good pods for sponsoring this episode of moms don't have time to read books
[32:05]You can follow me on Instagram at moms don't have time to read books
[32:09]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at texture sound for the sound editing and thank you to morning moon productions for providing this
[32:16]Fantastic intro and now trim music. Thanks for listening. You could always email me at zibi at zibi Owens.com