Jodi Picoult, WISH YOU WERE HERE: A Novel
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[0:38]Enjoy the show.
[0:40]Jody Pico is the author of Wish You Are Here.
[0:43]She is the number one New York Times best-selling author of 27 novels,
[0:48]including the Book of Two Ways, A Spark of Light, Small Great Things, Leaving Time,
[0:52]The Storyteller, Lone Wolf, Sing You Home, House Rules,
[0:56]Handle With Care, Change of Heart, and My Sister's Keeper.
[0:59]And with daughter Samantha Van Leer, two young adult novels between the lines
[1:03]and off the page.
[1:05]Jody lives in New Hampshire.
[1:07]And I wonder if she can even remember all the names of her 27 novels.
[1:11]I wish I had asked.
[1:12]Welcome, Jody.
[1:13]Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to read books to discuss.
[1:16]Wish you were here.
[1:18]Thanks for having me.
[1:19]Oh, it's my pleasure.
[1:21]Wow, this book was so good.
[1:23]And also so intense on the heels of COVID and all the details.
[1:28]And oh my god, I just feel like I was reliving the whole thing.
[1:32]Tell me, I mean, you must have written this and I read in the acknowledgements.
[1:35]It was like in two seconds.
[1:36]Like tell me about this whole thing and what it was like to incorporate COVID into a novel
[1:42]and relive it through someone else's experience.
[1:45]Well, I like to think of this as the book that I never wanted to write or intended to write.
[1:50]This book was not under contract.
[1:52]This book was not something I ever really considered writing even when the pandemic began.
[1:57]But as a writer, I was thinking at the beginning of the pandemic, how are we going to chronicle this because that's kind of the job of the writer.
[2:03]And I could not figure out how to do it.
[2:06]And then one day I heard about this tourist who went to go visit Machu Picchu and got stranded there because they shut down the whole country.
[2:15]So he not only didn't get to see what he'd come to see, but he was stuck there, he was Japanese.
[2:20]And he wound up becoming part of the community.
[2:22]He started teaching martial arts to the kids and the families in the area.
[2:26]And they began to petition the government for him months later to open up the historic sites that he could finally see what he'd come to see.
[2:33]And he did what no one else gets, which is he got this, you know, John view of Machu Picchu by himself with any other tourists.
[2:41]And I started to think about that. I started to think about what it would be like to be imperative when the whole rest of the world is falling apart.
[2:48]And suddenly I thought, I know how I'm going to write this story.
[2:52]But I have never been to Machu Picchu and I certainly was going nowhere in 2020.
[2:58]And so I started to think, well, what are some other bucket list destinations?
[3:02]And I have been to the Galapagos I took my kids there when they were little.
[3:06]and I thought, all right, I think I can make this work. And sure enough, I found a tourist who was stranded in the Galapagos and hunted him down and interviewed him and the families that we stayed with and the people that he got to know all the stuff there for months.
[3:19]And I began to sort of craft this novel around this concept, the idea of someone who is a planner and whose life is completely upended by the universe.
[3:29]And I think it was something that we all felt in 2020.
[3:33]For me, it was also really therapeutic. I didn't plan to sell this book. I started writing it for myself because I really needed to make sense of what happened to me in 2020.
[3:45]I am a doer. I am always on the go. I have a million projects lined up and everything just went blank.
[3:52]Pretty serious asthma. So I didn't leave my house for 16 months. My husband did all the grocery shopping. The only time I left my driveway was to go hiking in the woods.
[4:03]And for me, that was a complete sea change. It's just not the way I live my life. And it was really, it was demoralizing and upsetting and confusing and writing down a story in this book helped me put 2020 into context for me.
[4:21]And I gave the book as I was writing it to a couple of writer friends. And to my great shock, their comment was, oh my gosh, this feels like the hug I couldn't have last year.
[4:33]This is the validation I was waiting for. And I started to think maybe this book was for more than just me.
[4:39]So one day, I literally sent it to my editor as an attachment to an email, the subject line surprise.
[4:47]That was in March of 2021. And you know, we talked a little bit about the book. She loved it. She said, I really think we should publish this.
[4:56]And we talked about the timing. And we feel that now is the right time to publish this.
[5:02]Because yes, we are still living through this pandemic. We're in a different place than we were in 2020. We have vaccines. And as far as I'm concerned, that's hope.
[5:11]But I think five years from now, people are going to want to push this so far in the rear view mirror, they wouldn't be able to sit down and read a book that really asks them.
[5:21]What did you lose. What did you learn. And what are you going to do with that.
[5:25]Well, I'm so glad that your therapy project ended up, you know, coming out and hitting bookstores and all the rest because well, student because, you know, to go back when it was at when the pandemic was happening.
[5:38]I feel like in addition to everything else going on, I was always thinking like, well, what is the worst? What is happening to other people?
[5:45]Like, I'm going to hear these stories later. I'm not hearing enough of the stories. Like, what are some of the consequences, right?
[5:52]I was in the midst of my own universe, right? And so this story, even though it's not real is one of those things where you were wondering, what if, what if I had gotten stuck here, what if this had happened, what if you were separated from this person?
[6:04]And even though even having her, you know, not fiance, but boyfriend, hopefully fiance deep into the medical part of it was really interesting.
[6:14]Yeah, so I was also wondering when you did that part because you included so much. It sounded like you, and I saw that you had interviewed a bunch of doctors, but like it was very detailed as if like you were saying, do not forget this like here is the record.
[6:29]Yeah, this is what it was like. Don't forget in the book when Diana winds up taking this dream vacation without her boyfriend because the book opens on March 13 2020, which is the day that everything shut down in New York.
[6:41]And he's not allowed to leave the hospital. He's a resident. And so she gets stuck in the Galapagos without him. And she gets intermittent email responses from him basically.
[6:50]They are the stories of what's going on in the hospitals in New York, which of course was overwhelmed and we all saw that on the news.
[6:56]When I did my research for this by zoom, I should ask because it was 2020.
[7:02]I interviewed a whole, a whole ton of doctors and nurses and in particular, I was looking for young medical residents whose, whose work and jobs were put on hold by the pandemic who were reassigned because of the pandemic.
[7:19]You know, like they were surgical residents, but there were no more elective surgeries. So what do you do you wind up in a COVID work because that's all there is in the hospital.
[7:26]And it was so heartbreaking hearing their stories and their exhaustion.
[7:32]And for me, the, the anger at the dissonance between what they were seeing and what they were hearing when they walked outside of the hospital after a 36 hour shift exhausted where, you know, 18 out of 20 of their patients had died.
[7:47]And then they're fearing people say, this is like the flu. This is nothing. You don't have to wear a mask. Don't worry about it.
[7:54]I cannot imagine how invalidating that would be for a person. I actually think that we are going to see in future years a lot of fallout from this in the medical community.
[8:05]I think we've already started to see an exodus of people who can't work there anymore because of the trauma of COVID.
[8:11]I think that there's going to be a lot of mental health care needed for the doctors and nurses who are really on the front lines.
[8:18]It is just heartbreaking. And of course that was the, that was half the research.
[8:21]The other half of the research was with 40 people who had very severe COVID to the point of being ventilated and survived it.
[8:29]And again, it was what was weird about it was two very different groups of people. And when they were talking to me, you could cure their motivation. They kept saying over and over.
[8:39]It's so important that this story is told. I want my story out there. I want people to know what it was like.
[8:45]And you know, like you said, we saw it on the news. We saw pictures. We heard things, but we didn't care the individual stories.
[8:52]And these people so badly wanted their information in the world in some way to validate their experience of, you know, what COVID had been for them. So it was really exhausting and draining and scary to do all that research.
[9:09]And again, also, you know, from the cocoon of here of my little office, I was safe.
[9:14]Yeah, I don't know if, you know, my mother-in-law had very severe COVID and was on a ventilator, but did not make it.
[9:20]And it was horrific. And we were with her every stage. So some of the things with the doctors like these are things that we had been hearing and on our every three hours, these calls and talking to her and her saying, I can't wait to get out of here so I can tell everybody what's going on.
[9:36]I kind of fell to us a little bit on my husband and his sister and me and every anyway. So reading about it again was just like, Oh my gosh, like I'm so, you know, the impact like what if she had survived, what would you be saying about it now, right.
[9:49]And like what what can you do with that.
[9:52]And what do you do with all of this. Yeah, all of this pain.
[9:56]You do this. You do this. You do this. Yeah.
[9:58]Yeah, you know what you do is you.
[10:00]take the small corner of the world that you have a hold on
[10:03]and you use your voice to amplify it.
[10:05]And this is the way I can do that.
[10:07]And you know, obviously you can do it too
[10:09]because you're an icon in your own field.
[10:12]And so you can do the same things.
[10:14]You let, you tell people stories
[10:16]when they can't tell them themselves.
[10:17]That's, that's honestly what it comes down to.
[10:20]That's true.
[10:21]I guess.
[10:22]Thank you for seeing me.
[10:23]And again, I'm so sorry.
[10:24]I mean, again, I had very close friends
[10:27]who lost family members.
[10:28]And I can't think, I cannot imagine the devastation
[10:32]of that of not being able to sit next to somebody
[10:35]who you love when they need you at that moment.
[10:38]I mean, that is, that's a privilege
[10:40]that none of us ever thought was a privilege.
[10:42]Yeah, I love the scene in your book
[10:43]when you had what is his name, Quinn, something like Quinn.
[10:46]No, what's Finn?
[10:48]Finn, sorry, I'm really bad with names.
[10:49]When Finn at the very beginning, right,
[10:51]when he left the room and it took him forever
[10:55]to disrobe and do all the protocols and whatever.
[10:57]And then he couldn't wait to get out
[10:59]because he was so worried about himself
[11:01]a little bit at the start being like a surgical resident
[11:03]and everything.
[11:04]And yet he saw this one nurse who had just sat there
[11:07]with the patient and literally brought tears to my eyes
[11:10]because there are these like not that doctors aren't giving
[11:13]or comparing Finn to the dot, you know,
[11:15]just this magnimity or whatever.
[11:18]I don't know what you call it where you just give up
[11:20]yourself like that with so many healthcare people did.
[11:24]Yeah, and I will say, you know,
[11:25]I have so many of the doctors that I spoke with
[11:28]really called out the nurses for that
[11:30]because they were the ones who were on the front lines
[11:32]and in there with the patients, the doctors were in and out.
[11:35]And yeah, they were doing risky things, you know,
[11:37]that exposed them to COVID if they were putting in Drake tubes
[11:40]but on the other hand, the nurses were the ones
[11:42]spending time in the rooms.
[11:44]It is, we're so lucky to have people like that.
[11:48]And even how you described it with like everybody
[11:50]coming in gasping for it, I mean, it's just, anyway.
[11:54]But it's also, it is important to know that I should say
[11:57]that I'm sorry this as a COVID book because I'm sorry.
[12:00]No, no, you're right.
[12:01]And it's to me, this is a book about human resilience, you know?
[12:04]And I think that is it's set in the time of COVID.
[12:07]That does, that to me is a difference.
[12:09]And yes, you're going to live through Finn,
[12:10]what he's going through and maybe a front, you know,
[12:13]front row, open eye way that you didn't get to see
[12:16]from someone in the medical profession.
[12:18]But you're also going to see a lot of the other experiences
[12:22]of what it felt like to be in the same boat
[12:24]as everyone else, but completely isolated,
[12:26]which is what all of us were feeling in 2020.
[12:28]Yes, and I'm sorry, I'm only.
[12:31]No, I totally have like us, it's because of my own experience
[12:34]that I have such a spotlight on that.
[12:35]But I know that was not the whole book.
[12:37]So let's talk about Diana and her wilderness experience
[12:40]and like, you know, poisonous apples and breaking out in hives
[12:44]and wearing crazy t-shirts and, you know, that's what's cool
[12:47]about this because everyone had a pandemic experience.
[12:51]Everyone on this planet, which means technically you can pick
[12:55]up this book and you can relate to it in some way,
[12:58]which is kind of cool.
[12:59]I don't think I've ever written a book that everybody
[13:01]find themselves in, you know, like, wow, all right,
[13:03]nail that one next.
[13:04]Yeah.
[13:06]My target audience is everybody.
[13:07]Thank you very much.
[13:09]No need to refine our messaging.
[13:12]Blast it out.
[13:14]Exactly.
[13:16]So meanwhile, you have Diana who has these series of relationships
[13:20]that she forms and, you know, gets stranded in the Galapagos
[13:23]and this kind woman takes pity on her.
[13:26]I literally was putting myself in her shoes.
[13:28]You know, as many people have traveled over the years
[13:30]and had things go wrong, you know, every single thing went wrong.
[13:34]And every call she made was the wrong call.
[13:37]And yet, and all of a sudden, she was like,
[13:39]um, yeah, I know.
[13:42]And I mean, you know, for me, one of the great lessons
[13:44]that I learned during this pandemic is that I am an absolute
[13:47]control freak.
[13:48]Perhaps I knew that going into it, but it was never so clear
[13:51]as in 2020.
[13:53]And, you know, for me, whenever something goes wrong, this is me.
[13:56]I'm like, OK, how are we going to fix it?
[13:59]And I don't care what it takes.
[14:01]I'm going to find a plan.
[14:02]I'm going to find a way out.
[14:03]And when it feels like the universe is conspiring against you
[14:06]and you can't fix it, you don't have the tools or the resources
[14:09]to fix it, that is incredibly unsettling.
[14:13]For me, that was like, that was devastating.
[14:15]I'm not someone who suffers from depression,
[14:18]and I was really low for a long time,
[14:21]because I just couldn't find my footing.
[14:24]And, you know, to me, that was what I wanted to recreate
[14:27]in Diana, this person who has mapped out every inch of her life
[14:32]to the point where she can see them, stretching out
[14:34]like telephone poles in the distance.
[14:35]These are the high water marks of my life.
[14:37]Here's where they're going to happen.
[14:39]All of a sudden, she's blind, or if there are no telephone poles
[14:42]or whatever, but it's all gone.
[14:44]You know, so I think that I really needed to put her
[14:47]in the situation where she was completely lost, completely lost.
[14:52]And not only were all of her defenses stripped away,
[14:55]but also all of her resources were stripped away.
[14:58]Yeah, and there was no Wi-Fi for a while and no ATMs.
[15:02]And like, first of all, I was worried she was going to starve
[15:05]at the beginning.
[15:05]I was like, I hope this book doesn't end up being some like,
[15:08]she's like going to starve herself to death on a desert island.
[15:10]Like that would be so depressing.
[15:11]But anyway, so I'm glad you figured it out away.
[15:14]And it is true.
[15:15]Like that's all very true.
[15:16]There really is not good internet on that island.
[15:19]The guy who I spoke with, the guy like Ian Melvin,
[15:21]the Scottish kid who was stuck there for months, he was teaching.
[15:25]And he was supposed to be teaching remotely.
[15:27]And he was like, you know, he couldn't get a signal.
[15:31]He had a British cell phone.
[15:32]It wasn't until like three or four months into it
[15:35]that he was able to get a phone that worked on a local network
[15:38]that would allow him to connect.
[15:39]I mean, you know, it was the whole thing.
[15:40]That in itself would be absolutely, you know, a non-starter for me.
[15:44]I need my internet.
[15:46]But I think though what seemed very clear to me reading this
[15:51]is like when Diana got to the island,
[15:54]it didn't occur to her what it being closed meant.
[15:58]Like nobody had any conception of what it would mean.
[16:01]Like, okay, something's closed.
[16:03]But the idea that like everything around could be abandoned
[16:07]and closed and shut and everything.
[16:09]I mean, none of us could have processed what that looked like.
[16:13]Oh, no.
[16:13]And I mean, and it did happen, right?
[16:16]I mean, you know, every business, even in America,
[16:18]I had to figure out a pivot so that they could stay afloat
[16:20]and some made it and some did not.
[16:22]What becomes really intriguing about the Galapagos
[16:25]is that, you know, in a way I'm really grateful
[16:28]that that was the bucket list destination
[16:30]that I went to because metaphorically it works so beautifully
[16:33]with this story.
[16:34]And, you know, when you look back to what Darwin discovered
[16:38]when he was in the Galapagos and his theory
[16:40]of natural selection,
[16:41]the idea that great adversity and stress
[16:43]is what makes an organism begin to adapt
[16:47]and change for the better is exactly what I would like
[16:51]to believe 2020 did for all of us.
[16:53]And so, you know, the reason that Darwin was able to study
[16:57]all of his, not his finches, but his mockingbirds
[16:59]as you will learn in the book is because the islands
[17:02]are so far apart that there isn't across, you know,
[17:05]pollination of species, basically.
[17:07]So when you're locked down on that island,
[17:09]you are locked down on that island.
[17:12]And what was so cool to me was talking to the locals
[17:14]who, you know, began to move into the hills of Isabella
[17:18]and farm plots of land and trade, you know,
[17:22]they had a whole like a bargain network
[17:25]instead of money being transferred.
[17:27]It was goods and services.
[17:29]So like if you loaned your wetsuit to a guy
[17:31]who was gonna go out and go lobster diving,
[17:34]he would bring you and your family lobsters for dinner too.
[17:37]You know, just crazy stuff like that
[17:38]that feels very primitive, but actually was incredibly advanced
[17:41]given what they were going through.
[17:42]The crazy part to me is that all of this stuff happened, right?
[17:45]It all happens in the book and in real life.
[17:47]And now we're sort of catapulted back into pseudo reality.
[17:51]And now what?
[17:52]We're supposed to just like, you know, brush off our old clothes
[17:55]and keep going, you know, dust off the high heels?
[17:58]I don't know. It just feels like,
[17:59]how do we reconcile that?
[18:02]Well, that's kind of why I'm really excited
[18:04]about this book coming out.
[18:06]I mean, I know, look, there are gonna be a lot of people
[18:08]who are like, why is she writing about a pandemic?
[18:10]We're in the middle of the pandemic, which I think is fair.
[18:12]And you might not be ready personally to read this book.
[18:15]And that's okay.
[18:16]It's still gonna be there for you when you are.
[18:17]I think though that this is exactly the right time
[18:21]because we are coming out of this.
[18:23]We are in a different place than we were in 2020.
[18:25]And I should be so lucky as to think
[18:28]that maybe this will serve as a blueprint for some people
[18:31]on how we move forward.
[18:33]You know, when I think about what I want people
[18:35]to take away from this book, it's very specific.
[18:38]I want you to ask yourself, what did you lose?
[18:40]Because everyone lost something.
[18:43]It might have been a graduation.
[18:45]It might have been a birthday celebration or a vacation.
[18:47]It could have been going to your freshman year of college.
[18:50]It could have been the ultimate loss of a person.
[18:53]And I think we like to play the game
[18:55]of my loss was worse than your loss.
[18:56]But the truth is everyone felt that feeling
[19:00]of having to give something up that they didn't want to.
[19:02]And that's valid.
[19:04]And so you're allowed to grieve that.
[19:06]The second thing I want people to do is to ask,
[19:08]well, what did you learn?
[19:09]And you know, when we were forced by the universe to stop
[19:13]and take a breath, I think we all started to realize
[19:16]that our measures of success might not have been
[19:19]as ingrained as we thought.
[19:21]I think we tend to measure success by promotions,
[19:24]by money, by degrees earned.
[19:26]When it turned out that success meant being healthy,
[19:29]having a roof over your head, having food,
[19:32]being able to sit at the bedside of someone you love who sick,
[19:35]that's what success meant.
[19:36]And then the next question is,
[19:38]what are you going to do with this knowledge?
[19:40]Because that's how we move forward.
[19:42]And for me, I really needed to sort of recalibrate.
[19:47]If you had told me that in 2020,
[19:49]the highest point of my year, what was it going to be?
[19:53]I would have told you, oh, it was watching a show
[19:54]that I've been working on for eight years,
[19:56]debut off Broadway.
[19:57]As it turned out, it was playing four square
[19:59]in my draw.
[20:00]I weigh with my adult children on a court that we made out of flour and water based.
[20:04]And it was amazing.
[20:05]And spending all that time with them truly was a silver lining and a gift.
[20:09]And then the last bit is what has changed, you know, how do we identify what has changed?
[20:15]There is no question the world is never going back to the way it was, but neither are we.
[20:20]We've evolved to.
[20:22]And so now how do we take all of those changes and all of those moments of understanding
[20:27]that we had in 2020 where we really reckoned with ourselves and take a step forward.
[20:32]How do we do that and not lose what we've learned?
[20:34]And that ultimately is for me why I want people to read this and what I want them to take
[20:39]away from it.
[20:40]Is that all?
[20:41]I mean, it's all over there, but hopefully they enjoy it, but you know, for me I also just
[20:50]love the escape to the glove because I've never been there.
[20:52]I'm always like read about it, heard about it.
[20:55]I just love books with a strong sense of place like this where you literally feel like you're
[21:00]walking down the road and in the water and oh my gosh, it was such a, you know, you could feel
[21:05]and, you know, it was very sensory experience to read her Diana's experience from me.
[21:12]I get my publisher to do a book tour and the Galapagos, but they mixed that so not so much.
[21:17]Maybe eventually, maybe you could like lead a tour or something, right?
[21:20]Everybody gets, everybody gets a book.
[21:23]So this was not the plan for you.
[21:25]What is the plan?
[21:26]Like what else?
[21:27]What other books do you have coming out or big exciting projects?
[21:29]Like what else?
[21:30]I know you always have a million things.
[21:32]I do.
[21:33]I actually have a whole bunch of things.
[21:35]I've got this year, well next year is going to be insane.
[21:37]So this book is actually the second book that I wrote in 2020 because I was under contract
[21:44]to write a book that was going to come out in 2022 and still is co-writing it with Jenny
[21:48]Boylan who's an incredible author.
[21:50]And the funny thing is we weren't supposed to start working on it until like the end of September
[21:55]because that was kind of when our schedules aligned.
[21:57]And in March of 2020, she called me up and said, hey, I don't know about you, but my
[22:01]schedule has just totally cleared.
[22:04]Want to get started?
[22:05]And so I did.
[22:06]And we started working on this in 2020.
[22:09]And of course, the first thing we did was say, okay, I guess we're going to have to figure out what
[22:13]our timeline is because we didn't want the pandemic to be part of this particular novel.
[22:18]And we moved it back a year, which cracks me up because at the end of the book,
[22:21]I just keep thinking those poor people don't know what's going to hit them next.
[22:24]But Jenny and I wrote this book together.
[22:27]And that was really important for me because I was a wreck at the beginning of the pandemic.
[22:31]I couldn't read it, I couldn't write, couldn't do anything.
[22:33]And so that sort of got me back into the groove of working as a writer.
[22:37]Then that will come out in 2022.
[22:39]But before that, what's that one called?
[22:42]Oh, that's called Mad Honey.
[22:43]And it'll come out in October of 2022.
[22:45]And I'm really excited for it.
[22:46]That's a great title.
[22:47]Thank you.
[22:47]I also have this show that I thought was going to come out.
[22:50]It was due to come out in April 2020 off Broadway at Second Stage Theater.
[22:54]It's between the lines.
[22:56]It's based on a book that my daughter and I wrote years ago.
[22:59]We've been working on adapting it as a musical for eight years.
[23:02]And honestly crossing that finish line was like, we're so close.
[23:07]And then of course, Broadway shut down.
[23:09]So that is actually going to open again at Second Stage or for the first time.
[23:14]And that will open in June of 2021.
[23:18]So we're super excited about that.
[23:20]2022.
[23:21]2022.
[23:21]Sorry, thank you.
[23:23]June of 2022.
[23:24]We're very excited about that.
[23:25]And then in September of 2022, we will open the musical adaptation of The Book Thief,
[23:32]which I also co-wrote.
[23:33]Oh, my gosh.
[23:34]I'm really excited about that.
[23:36]Marcus DuSek is an incredible author and it's been such an honor
[23:39]to turn that into a musical.
[23:40]It's very beautiful and very deeply moving.
[23:43]And it will open in the UK in 2022 in September.
[23:48]And then I'll go on my book tour in October.
[23:50]And before all of this, one of my sons is getting married.
[23:52]So that's my year.
[23:53]Wow.
[23:56]I loved The Book Thief.
[23:57]Like, basically.
[23:58]Yeah, right.
[23:59]But oh my gosh, a musical.
[24:01]Wow.
[24:02]It's so good.
[24:03]It feels so epic and deeply, deeply moving.
[24:07]And it was so interesting to come back to it after the pandemic.
[24:11]Because I think we have a whole new relationship with what it means to trade in the currency
[24:18]of kindness, which is really what The Book Thief is about.
[24:21]What makes humans worth saving?
[24:23]I mean, come on, if ever there was a metaphysical moment to look at that, it's now.
[24:29]So it's been very interesting playing around with that.
[24:31]And it's really fun for me writing librettos is something I only started recently doing.
[24:35]I love it because it's the antithesis of writing a novel.
[24:39]I'm always here alone when I'm writing a novel.
[24:41]And the librettos is a very collaborative experience.
[24:44]So super fun.
[24:45]But yeah, 2022 is going to be a great year.
[24:47]And I will, unfortunately, not be home very much.
[24:52]I mean, hopefully that's the way it plays out.
[24:55]Yeah.
[24:57]I feel like with every plan I have, I'm like,
[24:59]oh, this is my plan if plans are plans.
[25:04]And if not, right?
[25:05]Oh, hey, like, everything is kind of like, I don't know.
[25:07]I mean, I'm hoping to get there, but we'll see.
[25:09]I know it is.
[25:11]I have a very different relationship now to planning because of the pandemic.
[25:15]Yeah. Well, this was a very deep conversation for early in the morning.
[25:20]So thanks for having my coffee.
[25:23]I know I need to go get another cup at this point.
[25:25]Well, thank you so much.
[25:26]Thanks for the chat and the book and the escape to the island.
[25:31]I mean, it's like the whole thing.
[25:32]So thank you.
[25:33]And thank you for reading it.
[25:34]And thank you for taking it to heart.
[25:36]I hope it was, I hope it was valuable.
[25:39]Sorry.
[25:40]It was very valuable.
[25:41]Thank you.
[25:42]Okay.
[25:42]Maybe in my future, I can have a bookshelf like that.
[25:45]I'm just blown away by it.
[25:47]I should start offering my services.
[25:48]I should just go to people with something.
[25:50]But funny as I can look at the colors and be like,
[25:53]I bet there's a casey McQuiston book on the purplish slide over there.
[25:57]You know, like, I could base on the spine.
[25:59]There's an idea.
[25:59]There's, I don't think there is.
[26:01]Well, she's into the purples and the pinks on the bottom there.
[26:05]Yeah, I don't think.
[26:07]One last stop.
[26:08]That's, that's the color palette.
[26:10]All right.
[26:10]I love it.
[26:11]So impressed.
[26:12]Thank you.
[26:13]You can do it.
[26:13]You have all those shells right there.
[26:15]I mean, these are all like, uh, no, this is all,
[26:18]this is my work stuff, all my research stuff.
[26:20]It would not take long.
[26:21]You should just put in your count.
[26:22]You just carve out like three hours.
[26:25]Just give it to the pandemic.
[26:26]I can do it.
[26:27]You could just do one shelf.
[26:28]Try one shelf and see how that goes.
[26:31]I should.
[26:31]You're right.
[26:31]That would be one shelf.
[26:33]That's how I started.
[26:33]I didn't mean to even do this.
[26:35]I meant, my husband said, try one shelf.
[26:37]Just try one shelf.
[26:38]And I was like, okay.
[26:39]And then, you know, I'm crazy.
[26:40]So I did the whole thing.
[26:41]I love it.
[26:41]I just love it.
[26:42]Okay.
[26:43]Well, it's really nice to meet you too.
[26:44]Nice to meet you too.
[26:45]Yeah.
[26:45]Thank you so much.
[26:46]So for our, our paths will cross in real life.
[26:48]I hope so.
[26:48]Thank you.
[26:49]Okay.
[26:49]Bye.
[26:51]Thanks for listening to this episode of moms.
[26:53]Don't have time to read books.
[26:55]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at ZB Owens
[26:58]and at moms.
[26:58]Don't have time to read books.
[27:00]Also sign up for my newsletter at ZB Owens.com
[27:03]and sign up for my virtual book club.
[27:04]And meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[27:07]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan.
[27:08]In fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[27:11]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[27:12]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.