Gabriel Byrne, WALKING WITH GHOSTS
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:13]Please sign up for my newsletter at zibiowens.com for weekly updates about my podcast, events, and more.
[0:20]Also, follow me on Instagram at zibiowens and also at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:26]And finally, join my virtual book club called Zibi's virtual book club, which meets every other Tuesday at 2 p.m.
[0:32]Eastern Time until 3 p.m. and features half an hour of book club discussion, followed by 30 minutes of Q&A with the author whose book we've just discussed.
[0:41]You can sign up on my website zibiowens.com under the virtual book club section or even on Instagram, under the link in my bio.
[0:49]I hope you'll find me in all these different channels and enjoy this podcast.
[0:53]Today's sponsor is Tim Tebow's book Bronco and Friends, A Party to Remember, a new book from the New York Times best-selling author and football star.
[1:03]In a world that often expects everyone to look and act the same, standing out can make us feel less than.
[1:09]But as Bronco and his friends learn, bringing your own particular gifts to the party makes it more fun for everyone.
[1:15]This sweet story and adventure to remember reminds children and their favorite adults that every one of us is special, wonderfully made,
[1:22]and essential to God's big party. Find out more at Tim Tebow.com slash Bronco and Friends.
[1:28]I was so excited to interview Gabriel Byrne and we had a lot of technical difficulties, so I'm hoping that the end result sounds good to you.
[1:37]But during our conversation, he had to move from sitting on his couch to going outside and trumping in the snow until he finally did the interview from his car where assorted animals leapt up.
[1:51]I think they were goats. I don't even know on the back of his car while we were talking, so it was technically kind of a funny conversation.
[1:57]But that didn't stop us from really getting into it, and I truly enjoyed what we talked about and have been a fan of his mostly since entreatment,
[2:06]which if you have not watched that series, it was on HBO like a million years ago, but I watched every single episode in it.
[2:12]It's called Intreatment for anyone who's interested in psychology, which I am. It was really amazing.
[2:17]But you don't need me to suggest Gabriel Byrne films because he's so prolific. But anyway, here's his real bio.
[2:22]Gabriel Byrne was born in Dublin and is best known for his roles in the usual suspects and entreatment.
[2:28]He's also an accomplished director and producer. Gabriel has starred in more than 70 films and won a Golden Globe for best performance by an actor in a drama television series for his work on entreatment.
[2:39]He has also been nominated for a Grammy multiple Emmys, a Tony, and more. In 2018, Byrne was awarded the Irish Film and Television Academy Lifetime Achievement Award and was recently listed by the Irish Times as one of Ireland's greatest film actors.
[2:52]Walking with ghosts is his first memoir that is hilarious and heartbreaking, as well as a lyrical homage to his people and landscapes and the ones that shape our destinies.
[3:03]So please enjoy this podcast. I know I did.
[3:06]Welcome, Gabriel. Thank you so much for coming on Moms. Don't have time to read books to discuss your beautiful memoir Walking with Ghosts.
[3:13]Thank you so much, Olivia. It's lovely to talk to you. Thank you.
[3:16]Your memoir was absolutely gorgeous. I loved every word. You're a phenomenal writer.
[3:23]When did you even realize you could write in addition to act and everything else that you do?
[3:27]My mother was the one who encouraged me to read. She would read out loud to us at night time.
[3:32]And she would also tell us the stories of both. So I knew all of her twists and pimp and all those
[3:40]Dickens characters long before I came to read the books. But she read Jane Eyre to us over over six months and then Rebecca.
[3:49]She was really reading them for herself. We just happened to be sitting there listening in on it.
[3:54]But so I was introduced to the world of gothic Victorian romance at a very early age.
[4:00]And then she read as little women, which was a really interesting experience for me because
[4:05]a little woman, there was a time when people say, who's your favorite people? Well, I used to say,
[4:10]who's my favorite of the little women. You had said your mom read books for herself,
[4:15]which is hilarious. And you were an unexpected beneficiary of her just reading for herself.
[4:20]And that's how you developed this love of literature. Tell me a little bit about how your
[4:25]love of reading turned into a love of writing. Well, the writing was something I had always admired
[4:31]writers. And it always seemed to me to be an inaccessible, magical kind of process.
[4:40]The few writers that I had known, I asked them, how did they go about writing? And most of them
[4:49]unable to describe how of why it seemed to be some kind of strange alchemy that happened between
[4:56]the brain and the page. And I had written little bits of things here and there. You know,
[5:03]I wrote a little book of love poems to my first girlfriend, which would make me sure,
[5:08]if I looked at them now. But in fact, I think I remember one small little one. There was a place
[5:15]where we went to, I can't believe I remember this. And secondly, I can't believe I did this.
[5:22]But anyway, look, I was 18 or 19 at the time. It's a place called Delgane.
[5:27]On Delgane's day with my dear one, I lay glad to be near one who loved me well and wouldn't
[5:33]tell that I had a love chance. I love that. And I thought, well, you know, and then I stopped after
[5:42]that. And then I went to university and I wrote kind of, you know, academic kind of stuff.
[5:49]But I'd always read and my taste in literature became wider after I left Ireland. In the beginning,
[5:56]I think like a lot of people, I was looking in literature for myself. I was looking for answers
[6:02]to who I was, looking for answers to what the world was about. And that's why I began, you know,
[6:09]with Irish literature because it was a world I felt I could understand. But nobody was writing
[6:15]about the kind of place that I came from. And so I brought doubt into British and American
[6:24]literature after that. So when it came to the writing of this, I thought I would just experiment a
[6:31]little bit and see how it went. Because finding a voice, if there's a goat in the background here,
[6:39]a goat is just jumped up on the back of the car. You're kidding. Oh, my God. I'm not kidding.
[6:44]And they, they, they, they're crazy. Go out. So they like to get in and do whatever you're doing.
[6:50]Oh, yes. I can see the big line of the goat. Okay. And now it's gone. Is that, can you see him?
[6:54]Right. Okay. So do experiment and just see because finding a voice is, is difficult.
[7:01]And trying when you're writing a memoir, especially trying to find a voice that's authentic to you.
[7:09]And, and so I did about 10 or 15 pages. And then I sent them to a friend. And I said,
[7:14]look, have a look at this and see what you think. And he said, I think you should do more. And then
[7:19]I did about 40 pages. And I sent it to an agent, not expecting very much. And she said, look,
[7:24]I think I can do something with this. And it was a total shock to me because I didn't expect this
[7:30]that happened at all. I had written something years ago, an experimental kind of memoir, but I wrote
[7:38]it in three weeks. I didn't really put much store by that. But I suppose it was a combination
[7:45]of trying to find my writing voice and not being intimidated. Well, the great thing about your memoir
[7:54]is that not only do you go into the most painful areas of your life, which is just,
[8:01]which immediately connects the reader to you, right? You reveal so much and so much pain over the
[8:08]years. And in all these different ways from losing your childhood friend to your parents, to your
[8:15]addiction, like alcoholism, the abuse. I mean, it's a gift to the reader to share all of this,
[8:21]but also it's the form in which you did it at even, you know, even the dashes instead of quote
[8:27]marks and the lyrical quality of writing, just the format. I don't know, it combines to make a
[8:34]very intimate, powerful memoir. And I feel like celebrities might be for celebrity memoir, it's like,
[8:42]oh, you have to overcome the fact that you're a celebrity. It's almost like people's expectations
[8:48]might not be for literature. But this is true literature. This is a work of art versus, you know,
[8:55]this is how I got into acting. And you of course include that. But I don't know, it's almost like
[9:00]you have to work against what people might think. Did you feel that when you started writing it? Like
[9:05]did you feel like you had to sort of overcome maybe what people might think or was this just like
[9:11]a natural thing? What do you think about that? That's interesting. Yeah. Well, the first thing is that I
[9:18]don't think of myself as a celebrity in any shape or form. I don't, some people might think so.
[9:25]But I didn't want to write one of those things of, you know, I did this movie and I did that
[9:31]movie. If there's a movie mentioned, it's for a reason. If there's an actor mentioned and they're
[9:35]very, very few, it's for a specific reason. I didn't want to write a kiss and tell and intimate,
[9:42]you'll never, you know, eat lunch in this town again. I could have done one of those because I do
[9:46]know where the bodies are buried. So this, but that didn't interest me. What interested me is,
[9:52]I think what almost everybody can do. It's an exercise to look at oneself and to say what
[9:59]were the influence?
[10:00]and says that form the person I am today.
[10:02]What were they, familial, of course,
[10:05]societal, of course, cultural, of course,
[10:09]geographical, of course, religious.
[10:12]All these things go to combine a kind of a huge influence
[10:16]that determines the kind of person you're gonna be.
[10:18]And I wanted to look at that
[10:20]and see how much I was the result of it.
[10:24]And I think anybody can trace their development
[10:28]in that way.
[10:30]The next biggest thing I think in terms of writing a memoir
[10:33]is that you can't assemble, you can't bullshit,
[10:38]you're faced on every page with, is this the truth?
[10:42]And do I tell it?
[10:43]And fiction, on the other hand, if you're writing a novel,
[10:47]you can farm out all these characters and ideas
[10:51]and their fictional characters.
[10:52]And you can hide all your perspectives
[10:55]behind them and memoir requires the truth.
[10:59]Because it deserves to the reader
[11:01]if you're bullshitting and you're not telling the truth.
[11:03]Because at the point you make there is
[11:06]that we are all fragile creatures.
[11:09]We all hunger for the same things.
[11:12]We all fear the same things.
[11:14]Some of us are better equipped psychologically
[11:16]than emotionally to deal with them.
[11:18]But what unites us, and I think what makes us empathize
[11:22]with a great novel or a poem or a painting
[11:26]is that we feel that it's speaking to us about us.
[11:30]And so I thought, two things, if I can write the truth
[11:33]about myself, then somebody else will read this
[11:36]and say, that rings true to me.
[11:39]And I can perhaps learn something from this,
[11:42]not that I was able to teach anything.
[11:44]I was just saying, I would just like you to hear this
[11:47]and what you think about it is up to you.
[11:50]And the second thing I thought was that by telling my own story,
[11:54]I was also telling the story of a particular time
[11:57]and a particular place.
[11:59]So rather than do a book of essays or a novel,
[12:02]I found that this was the most potent way
[12:04]to see it through the lens of my own emotion.
[12:07]And there were many times when I thought,
[12:08]I don't want to put this down.
[12:10]I don't want to be going around having to answer questions
[12:13]about this, but that's the very thing that keeps us trapped.
[12:17]Silence and shame are bedfellows.
[12:21]And the things that were most ashamed of and the things
[12:25]that were the most silent about are the things that need
[12:28]to be brought out into the open.
[12:30]And by doing that, we find freedom.
[12:32]There's no freedom in silence.
[12:34]And there's certainly no freedom in shame,
[12:38]but the liberation of the self through revealing,
[12:42]having the courage to reveal oneself honestly.
[12:45]It's not that there's a resolution
[12:46]where there's a big orchestra playing
[12:48]and then everybody gives each other a big hug.
[12:50]And that was that problem.
[12:52]Life goes on, life goes on being tough
[12:55]and unpredictable and joyful and beautiful,
[12:58]but also unexpectedly sorrowful.
[13:01]That is life.
[13:02]And my biggest battle I found is that I find it hard
[13:06]to stay in the reality of now this.
[13:10]There's always a thing in me that wants to do something else
[13:14]to get out of the isness of the moment,
[13:17]whether it's alcohol or drugs or I don't shop,
[13:23]but all those cigarettes food,
[13:26]all those things that we think will,
[13:28]this will take me out of the moment.
[13:31]And the moment doesn't have to be particularly traumatic.
[13:35]It can be just the boringness, the grainness,
[13:38]the predictability of now that seems like a weight.
[13:43]And we need to escape from it.
[13:45]And that's the biggest battle I have
[13:47]is remaining in the present and not wanting or wishing
[13:51]to be on URLs, to be with anybody else,
[13:55]to have some kind of other career,
[13:58]to accept the way it is now.
[14:00]And out of that comes a kind of a contentment
[14:03]because I don't believe in happiness as a permanent state.
[14:07]I think it's huge delusion.
[14:10]And there's a footballer who died a few days ago,
[14:13]an Italian football, a carpal, a raucet, a great footballer.
[14:18]And I was watching a little interview with him.
[14:21]And he talked about winning the World Cup in 1982,
[14:24]the summit of his childhood dreams,
[14:27]beyond telling.
[14:30]And he said, it made me think,
[14:32]as I held that cup up before the world, is this happiness?
[14:37]Is this what it is?
[14:39]And he said, because if it is, it was gone in two seconds.
[14:43]Because happiness is only glimpsed.
[14:45]It's like something you see a room in between trees,
[14:47]you see it, then it's gone,
[14:49]and then it's, then you see a little bit of it again.
[14:52]What's much more, I think, worth striving for is contentment.
[14:57]And contentment comes out of an acceptance
[15:00]of the way life is.
[15:02]That's, you know, that's why in the memoir,
[15:05]I just said, this is the way it was.
[15:07]And this is the way it is.
[15:10]You know, people would love you to say,
[15:12]well, everything's great now.
[15:13]And it's wonderful.
[15:14]You've got all these problems behind you.
[15:16]That isn't life.
[15:18]And I don't regard myself as being courageous.
[15:21]I'm lucky that I survived.
[15:23]I'm very lucky that people who loved me said, stop this.
[15:26]You got to take care of yourself.
[15:28]But I didn't listen to them for a long time.
[15:30]And I don't drink anymore.
[15:33]And I don't, like one of the things I wanted to take on
[15:37]in the book was the notion of fame, success.
[15:40]What is success?
[15:42]It's actually very like the notion of happiness.
[15:45]And I've been around enough people
[15:47]who have mega, mega fame that you can't,
[15:51]they can't even go out the door for a coffee.
[15:53]But there's an avalanche of people
[15:56]saying the same things that they've been told for 20 years.
[16:00]And it's really difficult for those people.
[16:04]People think, oh, well, if I got to be that famous,
[16:07]everything would be cool.
[16:08]I'd have loads and money.
[16:09]I'd have loads of friends and so forth.
[16:12]And the little bit that I've had has allowed me to see
[16:16]that I don't want anymore of it.
[16:18]And that it's actually not something
[16:20]that I want to pursue in any serious way at all.
[16:23]I'd like to do my work, of course.
[16:25]But I don't want anything more than beyond that.
[16:29]And I think the things that we are led to believe,
[16:33]like I was talking to somebody yesterday,
[16:35]it was a woman who was saying to me,
[16:38]oh, God, the COVID thing I put on.
[16:40]I've put on so much weight.
[16:42]She said, feel that.
[16:43]And she offered her little watch to be failed.
[16:48]And I gave it a bit of a squeeze.
[16:49]And I said, that's nothing.
[16:51]And she said, I know what he is.
[16:52]I'm forced to know these jeans.
[16:54]And so I said, listen,
[16:56]I've worked with some of the greatest,
[16:58]most beautiful actresses of the last 30 years.
[17:01]Every single one of them has a problem with their body.
[17:05]Every one of them.
[17:06]So I thought to myself, what is that?
[17:09]It's because there's some ideal out there,
[17:11]like happiness, that if you get to that ideal place
[17:14]and you get that ideal body,
[17:17]there's no such thing, it's a delusion.
[17:21]So men get caught up in it.
[17:23]And men think, oh, that's what women should look like.
[17:25]Because that's what she looks like on the cover of a magazine.
[17:28]Women don't look like that for the most part.
[17:32]Why is it that those beautiful women
[17:34]are adored by millions and millions and millions of people
[17:37]still look in the mirror and say, yeah,
[17:40]but one of my knees is a bit kind of what?
[17:43]And you say, I would never even notice that.
[17:46]So this ideal that we're all kind of culturally
[17:50]impaled towards of what beauty is,
[17:53]of what success is, of what happiness is.
[17:56]These are things that we really have to look at
[17:58]for ourselves and answer honestly what they mean to us.
[18:02]Because none of these things are the answer to content.
[18:06]Wow, that was amazing.
[18:08]You're like, you have such wisdom
[18:10]and that was incredibly inspiring,
[18:12]although not sure if that makes me feel better about the watch.
[18:16]I could have you poke.
[18:17]But anyway, I'll just leave that be.
[18:20]When you said you were lucky,
[18:22]I feel like that's what I kept thinking reading this book.
[18:25]Like, wow, how did he turn this whole thing around?
[18:29]When you were washing dishes
[18:31]and you were getting fired from every job
[18:34]and I was thinking, how is this story
[18:37]gonna turn itself around?
[18:38]How, just because you were sitting wearing a leather jacket
[18:41]one day in a restaurant,
[18:42]did you and someone spotted you and put you on a soap upper
[18:45]and all this stuff, it would have been so easy
[18:47]for you to have remained in the state of trying to find yourself
[18:53]and trying to figure out your path
[18:55]when you're a dream of your childhood dream
[18:57]of being a priest or fell apart
[18:59]and you were trying to pick up the pieces.
[19:01]And then again, when you were passed out in a doorway
[19:04]with your tooth hanging out
[19:05]and that's when I heard you had dental work.
[19:07]I'm like, well, maybe it's cause of that tooth.
[19:08]I don't know.
[19:09]Anyways, like how did you keep the faith inside yourself
[19:14]to keep going and to keep waiting for the turnaround
[19:17]whether it came internally or externally?
[19:19]That's a good question too.
[19:21]And I would say that it doesn't come externally.
[19:25]Everything has to come from inside
[19:27]because there were all the signs around saying,
[19:30]don't do this, don't do that.
[19:32]You don't pay any attention to things like that.
[19:35]It has to come from inside
[19:38]and eventually you get sick and tired of being sick and tired.
[19:42]And you say, is a better life possible for me?
[19:46]And what does a better life mean?
[19:49]And in my case, I traced it back to the fact that
[19:54]I was drinking just way too much.
[19:58]I never liked the taste of it.
[20:00]you could hand me a bottle of Budweiser or a 3000 bottle of dollar bottle of wine with dust on it.
[20:08]It wouldn't make any difference to me. That wasn't the point. The point was oblivion. The point was
[20:13]escape removal from the present. The simplest thing stuck in my brain, I had read this thing once
[20:23]about. I had lived through a Buddhist book looking for some kind of hope of something.
[20:30]And one of the things that stuck with me was every journey begins with a step. A journey of
[20:36]a thousand miles begins with a step. My problem was that I had been trying to go to the thousand
[20:41]miles. Then how do I get there? What can I do to be in our place? What I didn't realize is that
[20:48]you have to take the first step and the second step. And two steps is better than no steps.
[20:54]And ten steps is much better than one. And bit by bit by bit by bit. And I've used that in many ways.
[21:01]Like for example with children. The fact about it is that the children leaving is a terribly
[21:07]traumatic thing when children decide to go. But the signs are there all along. I remember my
[21:15]daughter was very young. And she used to be in the car seat. And every morning I would put her in
[21:19]the car seat. And one day she said to me, Dad, I don't need the car seat anymore. I can book on
[21:25]myself in. And I looked in the garage and I saw the car seat. And I said, this is one of these
[21:31]invisible markers. And this is the end of a time in my life and in her life. And life is full of
[21:39]those invisible little markers. And going back to this Buddhist thing of a step at a time.
[21:46]One of the things, I'm not a Buddhist by the way, but I'll steal from any place I can get.
[21:53]The Buddhist say that a child's first step is a step away from you. That's a tremendously
[21:59]powerful notion to contemplate because they are going to leave. It's inevitable that they will
[22:06]leave us behind. And how do we cope with that, with the sadness of that? Well, that little piece
[22:13]of Buddhism helps me deal with that too. And one last one, which is the idea that your lot is harder
[22:21]than somebody else's. And this has happened unto me. And it's not fair and way, way, etc. And it was
[22:28]the story of two monks walking along. And one of them had a big bag of rocks on his back. And he
[22:34]said, you know what? If you had to carry these honest, the good, I'm worn out carrying these things.
[22:38]And now we have to go up the mountain with it. And now we have to cross the bridge. And the
[22:42]helmet going to get across the river with this bag of rocks. And they get to the other side. And the
[22:47]first monk says to him, why don't you just leave down the bag of rocks? And it sounds like it's a kind of
[22:56]you know, that it's not really a powerful thing. But it is sometimes that you say, you know what,
[23:05]I don't want to do that anymore. I'm tired carrying around this baggage. And I'm not going to do it.
[23:11]And I tried to do that with stuff now. I just said, do I really need to be thinking about this or dealing
[23:17]with this crap? I just want to put it down. And you know, to go to Seneca, the Roman philosopher,
[23:23]who said, life is short, but the days, if you live them properly or long. And so there,
[23:31]there are my little bits of wisdom that I hang on to and try to make part of my, part of my life.
[23:36]So when I came to write the memoir, I said, okay, I'm going to be honest. I'm going to be truthful
[23:40]in this. And if people, you know, run away from me and, you know, say God almighty, what do you,
[23:47]I'm going to say, okay, you know what, that was my choice. Because in the book I talk about
[23:54]where people think that people act or, you know, that actors are always acting and they're not
[23:58]truthful. Well, that's a stereotype. And it's a false idea. Because the job of the actors to tell
[24:08]the truth, the job of the writer is to tell the truth. The job of the artist, full stop, is to be
[24:13]the dog that barks before the earthquake. He's the one that says, this is happening. Here's the truth.
[24:20]I'm holding up the mirror, look into it. That's what the function of an artist is. And so
[24:26]by telling the truth in performance and on the page, you're helping somebody else to look into
[24:34]a mirror. And by me, same where I went wrong in my life, hopefully, there'll be some guys sitting
[24:42]on a chair somewhere else say, well, I'm not making that mistake. I'm sure there will be a lot of
[24:46]people on chairs nodding their head and being inspired. There are a lot of theories about trauma and
[24:54]the way it affects our development. And I feel like you had so much trauma and especially growing up.
[24:59]And I mean, I go back to losing your friend, Jimmy. I mean, that alone could have set somebody off
[25:05]on a different page or your relationship with your sister Marion and what ended up happening to her.
[25:11]Just all these things that you had to go through, the priest and when you called him back,
[25:17]oh my gosh, that was like insane that moment. What do you think about sort of the presence of trauma
[25:23]and how carrying that through your life affects you? I mean, some people get tons of therapy for
[25:28]things like this. I didn't get the sense that that's the way you approached that you didn't
[25:34]approach it that way. Like, what do you do with all this trauma that collectively builds up?
[25:39]I mean, how do you come to a point where you're sitting in a car at your age looking back and
[25:44]having such wisdom about everything? How do you go from there to here? I don't honestly know the
[25:49]answer in relation to myself because I don't know if trauma ever leaves the system. The idea that
[25:57]you deal with the trauma and move on, move on is a word that I anytime somebody says to me and
[26:05]move on. I don't trust that. I think it's always there in some form or another. The thing about
[26:12]abuse, it's not just about sexual abuse. It's domestic violence. It's emotional abuse. It's
[26:20]anytime somebody abuses their power over another person. I had to work a lot to get trust back
[26:28]because trust is broken with abuse. I still find trust a difficult thing. I trust the people I love
[26:36]of course, but I have areas where I think to myself, why do I just trust that? There's absolutely
[26:44]no reason to distrust that particular thing. So I don't know that it ever goes away. I don't know
[26:50]that you ever completely resolve it. It's like the idea of forgiveness. What is forgiveness
[26:57]for giving yourself and those things that have passed into the common kind of culture.
[27:05]Remember meeting a Jewish couple in New York, she had survived Auschwitz with her mother.
[27:12]That alone is a story that it's hard to comprehend to help somebody. The father was the man who
[27:21]had met her in a transit camp in Marseille in 1945 for 46. I said to the woman, do you believe in
[27:32]forgiveness? She said, I forgive the German people. I forgive the people that were the cause of
[27:42]the Holocaust. I forgive them because I have no choice except to forgive them because if I don't
[27:49]forgive them, I'll be eaten up with incredible anger, nonstop. But I have forgiven the German people.
[27:56]And our husband hit the table so hard that the crockery jumped up into the air and he said,
[28:01]there is no such thing as forgiveness. And right there is the dichotomy. It's a dilemma that
[28:13]I still can't solve. Can you absolutely forgive? Can you absolutely rid yourself of trauma?
[28:20]I think the answer is no. I think that I'm suspicious of absolutism. I believe in the relative
[28:30]examination of things. I can forgive what I don't. I've dealt with a trauma, but I really don't
[28:37]know whether I have. I've given up alcohol. I haven't drank for 24, 23, 24 years. But I could
[28:45]start again in five minutes and I could be dead tomorrow. So have I given that up absolutely.
[28:53]I like to think so. But there's vestiges of all the experiences of our life in who we are. That's
[29:00]why I wanted to look at that. What bits are left inside me from then? And how do they go to make
[29:06]me the man that I am today? I don't regard myself as why is or anything like that. I just
[29:14]felt that I had to hunt around for scraps of things that made sense to me and take in one step
[29:20]at a time and that I've gotten to this place where not that terribly much impresses me any more
[29:26]to be honest. Well, I feel like I could listen to you talk all day. I feel like you have a way of
[29:32]putting things into perspective. And in my own little life, knowing your theory, it makes it easier
[29:40]to forgive and to put down the bag of bricks, knowing that you've done so before me. Whatever
[29:45]everybody's bag of bricks on their back happens to me at this very time. So your words are
[29:51]inspiring to me. And I loved your book. And I'm so impressed with your ability to put it out there.
[29:59]And
[30:00]be open and help other people. And I mean, that's the most human thing you could you could do.
[30:06]It's really that's that's it. It's connecting to other people. It's just that's the most
[30:10]beautiful thing someone can do to somebody for somebody else. So anyway, I just want to thank you
[30:15]for that. And I truly loved your book. And thank you for talking to me today in your part.
[30:19]Thank you so much. It was it was a pleasure to talk to you. And I thought we were going to be talking
[30:25]about literature in Dostoevsky and Philip Roth and everything. And it ended up, I sounded a bit more
[30:30]like an Oprah than somebody who was going on to talk about it. But I think it's all connected.
[30:35]And literature, it's it's all connected. And we've got going on that jag and it was a good one.
[30:40]Oh, good. Well, I'm sure you could have talked to the whole time about Dostoevsky. And maybe we'll
[30:45]pick that up next time I need a good dose of Dostoevsky. I'll try to get in touch with you. But this was much
[30:49]more interesting to me. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Thanks again to Tim Tebow and his book
[31:00]Bronco and Friends, a party to remember for sponsoring today's episode. Go check it out at Tim Tebow.com
[31:06]slash Bronco and friends. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[31:11]Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[31:16]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots
[31:21]of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the
[31:26]sound editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and