Mary Laura Philpott, BOMB SHELTER: Love, Time, and Other Explosives
[0:01]Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast.
[0:05]Moms don't have time to read books, and speaking of books, I have two of my own books
[0:10]coming out this spring and summer.
[0:12]Princess Charming is a picture book, which debuts on April 19th, and bookends.
[0:17]A memoir of love, loss, and literature comes out on July 1st, and it is truly a labor of love.
[0:24]I hope you'll pre-order, order, and join me on tour as I go across the country.
[0:28]You can find out more at ziviowens.com or bookendsmemoir.com, and you can follow me on Instagram
[0:35]at ziviowens, because I always post about everything.
[0:38]Enjoy the show!
[0:41]Mary Laura Philpott is the author of Bomb Shelter, Love, Time, and Other Exclusives.
[0:46]Mary Laura was the author of the National Bestseller I Miss You When I Blink.
[0:50]She writes essays that examine the overlap of the absurd and the profound in everyday
[0:54]life.
[0:55]Mary Laura has been featured frequently by The New York Times, and appears in such outlets
[0:59]as The Washington Post, The Atlantic Real Simple, and More.
[1:02]A former bookseller, she also hosted an interview program on Nashville Public Television
[1:06]for several years.
[1:07]Mary Laura lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her family.
[1:10]Welcome, Mary Laura.
[1:12]Thank you so much for coming back on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss
[1:15]Bomb Shelter, Love, Time, and Other Exclusives.
[1:18]Thank you, Zebi!
[1:20]And explosive is a perfect word for the success of this book.
[1:24]You are here in New York at the beginning of your tour, which started off with a lot
[1:29]of airplane issues and all of that.
[1:32]And I feel like, you know, the universe is like shaking you around.
[1:36]Good, bad, up, down sideways as you go through this tour.
[1:41]Oh my gosh.
[1:42]Yeah, it's a people keep asking, like, how is book tour going post COVID?
[1:46]And I'm like, I, you know, what I have learned is we are not really quite post COVID.
[1:50]The world is pretty functional, but, you know, we got to be flexible and things travel
[1:56]changes.
[1:57]Sometimes you've got to switch out of moderator because somebody gets sick at home or whatever.
[2:01]But it's, I mean, you know, that is kind of what I write about rolling with uncertainty.
[2:06]And it's two things.
[2:07]Keep experience up.
[2:08]So that's true.
[2:09]I guess, I guess I'm on theme.
[2:11]Yes, you're on brand.
[2:12]It's perfect.
[2:13]Well, for those who are not familiar with you, I just wanted to excerpt this,
[2:20]New York Times, like, glowing glow fest, which I read, like, in the actual paper
[2:27]yesterday.
[2:28]And had I known you didn't have a copy, I would have saved it in mail to two or whatever.
[2:31]But I was like, I don't know that I read a better review than this.
[2:34]This is like, amazing.
[2:36]It feels like a miracle.
[2:38]And I still sort of feel like, did I dream it?
[2:40]Judith Warner, my new hero.
[2:43]She's awesome.
[2:44]She was on this podcast, by the way, and it's amazing.
[2:46]And just at the end of this review, she says, I want to say something negative about
[2:51]this book to be this positive is I fear to sound like a nitwit.
[2:55]So then she finds some random thing.
[2:58]And then she says, the story is still being written.
[3:00]And that's all right.
[3:01]The only problem is having to wait to read what comes next.
[3:05]And basically the whole article is just one big, glowing thing.
[3:09]It's just amazing.
[3:10]It's just amazing.
[3:11]So bravo to you and thank you, Judith Warner for, thank you.
[3:16]The idea of pure positivity, I mean, it feels like the best luck in the world that it landed
[3:21]in her hand.
[3:22]So I'm grateful to whoever assigned that for sure.
[3:25]Oh, and also, did you see Margaret Rinkle's piece that you were also getting?
[3:30]Yes.
[3:31]It is necessary.
[3:32]Are you friends in Nashville?
[3:33]We are.
[3:34]We are friends and neighbors and we write together.
[3:35]So she knows this book.
[3:37]She has known this book since it's tiny, tiny infancy.
[3:40]Oh my gosh.
[3:41]OK, well, I've jumped in too fast for people who don't know what your book is even
[3:45]about, aside from the subtitle, can you give like your elevator pitch?
[3:50]Yeah.
[3:51]So I'm shelter isn't memoir.
[3:53]It's one of those sort of slice of life memoirs where you get sort of a chunk of time
[3:58]from someone's life.
[3:58]And it's a two year period in my life where a lot of the things that have been stable
[4:03]for a long time were beginning to destabilize.
[4:06]And this was something I was starting to write about a lot anyway a few years ago.
[4:09]Things like, you know, I've always tried to feel like my parents take care of me.
[4:12]But suddenly we're getting to that time where I'm
[4:14]taking care of them, which is strange.
[4:17]My children are really not children anymore.
[4:19]They're teenagers.
[4:20]They're getting close to leaving the nest.
[4:23]Everything that I took for granted about how my own, you know, human self-worked doesn't
[4:27]work that way anymore.
[4:28]Because guess what?
[4:29]I'm middle-aged.
[4:30]Everything is changing.
[4:32]So I was beginning to write about the process of letting go and how you hang on to who
[4:37]you are and the positive parts of who you are when some of that letting go feels really
[4:42]daunting.
[4:43]And something happened that kind of kicked that entire theme into a different gear, which
[4:48]was that one morning when my son, the oldest of my two teenagers, was in 10th grade.
[4:53]My husband and I woke up to this sound that we, I thought it was somebody knocking down
[4:59]our front door.
[5:00]It was bang bang bang bang.
[5:01]It turned out to be the sound of his body hitting the bathroom floor.
[5:04]He had gotten up to get a glass of water at 4am and just dropped cold, hit the tile.
[5:10]He was having a seizure.
[5:11]We found out.
[5:12]At the beginning of bombshell, I tell this story of that morning of finding him calling 911
[5:18]this day, this long day we spend in the hospital at the end of which we find out.
[5:22]He has epilepsy.
[5:24]And this is not a book about my son.
[5:26]It's not a book about his epilepsy journey.
[5:28]That's a book you'll have to write one day if he wants to.
[5:30]This is very firmly anchored in my perspective as a woman and a mother and a human being who
[5:38]is trapped in a mortal body and loves other human beings who are trapped in mortal bodies.
[5:43]And suddenly I'm having to really reckon with that kind of heavy change in my life or
[5:50]that heavy understanding in my life and try to find my way back to what is normally
[5:57]my optimism in my sense of humor.
[5:59]So I write in this book about how I'm an anxious optimist, which I think sounds like
[6:04]oxymorons that is actually a pretty common phenomenon.
[6:07]Anyway, long answer to your question, but that's what bombshell is about.
[6:11]That's amazing.
[6:12]And for everyone who read your first book, which you were on this podcast about and
[6:16]which was amazing called, I miss you when I blink, you had this passage, I don't know
[6:22]if this is even, it is my original, how do you like that?
[6:24]I had like all these copies of your book all over my apartment.
[6:27]You had this passage which still like gives me goosebumps when you realize and can I read
[6:33]this on page 50 and say, yeah, when you realize that not only does your son have epilepsy
[6:38]but that he may have had it all along and that part of it could be that when he blinks,
[6:43]he's almost having like a seizure that he's almost unconscious, but you can't really
[6:47]tell.
[6:48]I didn't explain that very well.
[6:50]Maybe I should just read it.
[6:51]Oh, and there's another fascinating type of seizure called an absence seizure out loud.
[6:55]You pronounce it the French way, absence, but when I see it in writing, I hear it in my
[6:59]head as the English word absence, as in being absent, which makes perfect sense to me because
[7:04]the way this seizure works, the person is there, but they're not there in an absence seizure,
[7:09]a person has a brief lapse in consciousness.
[7:11]They might be sitting in class or having a conversation and then all of a sudden they're
[7:15]staring off into space or blinking.
[7:17]Their teachers may describe them as having difficulty concentrating or spacing out.
[7:22]Kids who have this kind of seizure often go undiagnosed for years.
[7:25]If a kid like that spaced out at the dinner table and his blinks were long enough that
[7:29]he appeared to be sitting there with his eyes closed, a parent might think the kid is just
[7:33]having wacky table manners.
[7:35]A parent might spend a decade wondering what her six-year-old meant when he told her,
[7:39]I miss you when I blink.
[7:41]A parent might realize then after 10 years that when he blinked, he was absent.
[7:46]A parent might finally understand that whether he fully knew it or not at the time, her
[7:50]child had been trying to tell her something very important.
[7:53]She might wonder, should I have known?
[7:55]Yeah, that should I have known comes up so much in this book because, you know, I'm
[8:02]somebody who likes to imagine that I have control over things and that the more I know,
[8:07]like if I just research everything and I understand everything and I fill up my little brain
[8:12]with facts, I'll be able to control the outcome of everything and then no one will have any
[8:17]unpleasant surprises and it'll all be great and that is one example of a time where I was
[8:24]just pouring over the past and going, was there a sign I missed?
[8:27]What did I not know to look for that if I had looked for it, I could have spotted it and
[8:32]then somehow I could have prevented pain suffering on the part of my loved ones and that's
[8:39]a crazy-making cycle to put yourself in and part of what I'm doing in bombshell,
[8:45]just trying to get myself out of that cycle because I really, especially after this happened
[8:50]with my son but there were other things as well, I really got into a type of
[8:54]world pool of this, oh no, what did I not control? How did I let all these things happen?
[9:00]Which is a nutty thing to say how did I let it happen as if I am the big puppet master in the sky
[9:06]you know, controlling what happens in the world? Oh my gosh. Well, it's just beyond moving and
[9:12]I don't know, the way you are, that's one of the most memorable passages of the book ever.
[9:17]I feel like that gives me such goosebumps. When you were here with Lee Newman who was
[9:23]talking about her book, nobody gets out alive, the two of you had this like amazing conversation
[9:27]about craft and how you wrote and one of the things you said that's really stuck with me
[9:31]is about how people feel like they know you and that actually you're a private person and that
[9:36]you know what, you told 38 chapters or 39 chapters, that's 38 stories that you chose to tell,
[9:42]that's not a life. So tell me about that like curation and the illusion almost that you're
[9:49]sharing everything and yet you're being very intentional about what you're sharing.
[9:53]Yeah. Well, what I wanted to do with bombshell chair that I was probably trying to do this
[9:58]with I miss you when I blink two, but I-
[10:00]wasn't conscious of it.
[10:01]Like I was really trying with bombshell to deliver a book that would engage and entertain
[10:08]on the same level as, you know, the most engaging novel or TV show or movie or any other
[10:15]piece of entertainment that you engage with.
[10:18]I think sometimes there's an assumption that like memoir isn't really craft, memoir
[10:22]is your diary.
[10:23]Yay, you know, you just print it off against.
[10:26]I mean, you know this.
[10:27]You've been writing personal nonfiction.
[10:28]It is when it is done well, you apply all the, you know, tools and tips of the trade that
[10:35]any storytelling, you know, like showrunner would use.
[10:41]But it also means that when it's done well, you have connected with the reader in a way
[10:46]that makes them feel there right there in your brain, in the moment, ideally you do want
[10:53]them to come away going, oh my gosh, I know that character's so well when it's memoir
[10:58]and the character is a, it's a me character, you know, based on me, they think they know
[11:04]me so well.
[11:05]So I got, you know, I go out on tour or just out in the world and people are like, oh, I feel
[11:10]like you're my best friend.
[11:11]I know everything about you and I don't want to burst the bubble, but at the same time
[11:15]you know, you know, 32 things about me.
[11:17]Like there's so much of my life, the vast majority of my life has lived outside these
[11:24]pages.
[11:25]And I'm very protective of my own privacy and of my loved ones privacy.
[11:29]So it's kind of a funny little, in my mind, a funny little disconnect.
[11:33]But I love that people do feel like they know me really well.
[11:36]That means that they feel like they know that me character well, which hopefully means
[11:41]I've done the job.
[11:43]Wow.
[11:44]I love it.
[11:45]And talk about your sentence diagramming.
[11:48]I was, so did you, I mean, it's cool that you love like diagramming that to that.
[11:54]Oh my gosh.
[11:55]I loved it.
[11:56]It was like the first time I learned like the subject goes here and the verb goes here.
[12:00]And then you put a line and there's the adverb that to me unlocked this whole visual
[12:05]way of thinking about language and I loved it.
[12:08]So I've always loved taking apart language and actually spatially mapping it out on a piece
[12:12]of paper.
[12:13]But when I was with you and your apartment a couple weeks ago, we were talking about
[12:17]when I was first transitioning out of what I used to do for a living, which was speech
[12:22]writing and ghost writing and writing op-eds and things like that in the voices of other
[12:26]people and other people's violence into writing in my own voice writing personal essay.
[12:32]I studied how other people write personal essays and I vividly remember trying to map
[12:38]like diagram David Sedaris essays because his are different because he does what feels
[12:46]very natural to me and what feels very comfortable to my brain, which is that he takes a
[12:51]lot of digressions and I knew like when I write, I'm going to sort of follow the way
[12:55]my brain works and there will be digressions that might make you wonder at first where
[12:59]should you in here?
[13:00]But that will bring them back.
[13:01]I promise there will be payoff, there will be reward.
[13:04]So I wanted to see how we did it and mapping out of David Sedaris essay is this really
[13:09]it creates this very funny little zigzag shape that looks like chaos.
[13:16]But when you map them again and again and again, you can kind of see there's, you
[13:19]know, there's wisdom to it and there's a plan and he really, he knows what he's doing
[13:24]and that to me was very comforting to be like, okay, I am getting this overall effect
[13:29]from reading his essays where I laugh and I guess but I have this whole, you know, full
[13:34]emotional experience and he's doing something very carefully and very on purpose and I
[13:39]loved, I still do that when I read sometimes I'll take a part of story and go, okay, how
[13:43]did they do this?
[13:44]It's fun, I love it.
[13:46]Dirty fun.
[13:47]Do you think that authors when they're writing those pieces are aware?
[13:51]Do you think it happens unconsciously or do you think other people like you are thinking
[13:56]about their language as building blocks?
[13:58]I know you had also talked about your love of Lego, Legos in some way or how you think
[14:02]of things as Legos and, you know, I'm convinced you are a complete spatial, like you
[14:07]probably parallel park really well, right?
[14:09]Like you know, I failed my driving test because I couldn't parallel park.
[14:14]Oh my gosh, I'm wrong.
[14:15]Okay, I thought it was just me.
[14:17]I failed my driving test twice.
[14:19]Awesome.
[14:20]But I feel like the way you think about things is much more spatially, linearly, you know,
[14:28]taken apart.
[14:29]I just assumed it would have practical.
[14:31]My spatial awareness inside my mental head space is much better than my spatial awareness
[14:38]in the actual world.
[14:39]In the actual world, I walk into doors, I can't parallel park, I drop things as the
[14:43]well.
[14:44]But in my mind, my mental head space, it's all very, yeah, you're right.
[14:49]It's very spatial and you're making me realize like I've never really put this together
[14:53]before.
[14:54]I wrote my thesis way back 90 billion years ago about Sylvia Plath's poetry and psychological
[15:01]space and how she builds space in her poems, beehives and rooms and doors and hallways and
[15:07]all that sort of stuff.
[15:08]And I think I've always been sort of drawn to psychological space, but I can't speak
[15:14]for any other writers, but I am assuming that if you've done well, if you've gotten
[15:21]to where you're very good at the craft of writing, there's got to be a really granular
[15:28]attention to every little thing, you know, the word, the order, the sentences.
[15:34]Maybe people don't draw things out like I do on a piece of paper to see what shape they
[15:40]are.
[15:41]Maybe that might be a little loony, but yeah, I think everybody's got their own way that
[15:45]they've worked out in their head for how they organize thoughts and words and things.
[15:50]I thought for a while that to identify future writers, you could just find like the most
[15:58]anxious child in the classroom.
[16:01]It should be so wrong, who loves to read, right?
[16:06]The child who's anxious but loves to read, like I feel like I should go and like scatter
[16:11]little cards, like calling it 20 years, but I think another one, I do feel there's this
[16:19]usually this pull between being so inside, inside your brain and always analyzing things
[16:27]and observing and whatever.
[16:30]And then this complete lack of awareness in the real world, like physical space, like
[16:37]what you were saying.
[16:38]So, you know, my theory of view is disproved, but maybe it's all to justify the fact that
[16:42]I'm constantly walking into people and like has been has to take me by the shoulders
[16:46]and airports.
[16:47]So I'm not like walking into everybody.
[16:50]Yeah.
[16:51]Yeah.
[16:52]I'm constantly, if I remember, you know, pre-COVID the days of actually shopping and
[16:56]stores.
[16:57]I was always apologizing to mannequins because, you know, that I would think were people
[17:00]because I would like walk up and oh, sorry, wait, you're not real.
[17:04]Yeah.
[17:05]Okay.
[17:06]So for those listening, if you have walked into someone else lately, you might be
[17:10]a writer.
[17:11]Yeah, you're just, you're just very busy in your interior, you've got things going on
[17:16]on the inside.
[17:17]It's fine.
[17:18]So you have been around people lately who have been reading your book and giving you
[17:24]feedback.
[17:25]And just for at the LA Times book festival, you've been out in the world touring, what
[17:30]does this feel like?
[17:31]What does it feel like aside from people feeling that they know you to interact with the
[17:37]people who essentially you're writing it for?
[17:40]I mean, some of this feels like you're writing it almost for you, right?
[17:43]You're making sense of time that was very stressful.
[17:46]And it wasn't just about the epilepsy, obviously, it goes far, far, far beyond that in
[17:50]your parents.
[17:52]So much in this book.
[17:53]But when you come face to face with someone who takes just that information and talks
[17:57]to you about it, like, how does that feel?
[18:00]And do you like, how are you feeling about that?
[18:02]Or has there been a conversation that you're like, this is why I did this?
[18:07]It's been a huge relief.
[18:09]You know, there's this, and I know you know this feeling this hope where when you are
[18:13]building the book, you are hoping that it makes sense outside your own head and that
[18:18]other people will read it and go, oh, yes, this is what I wanted to read.
[18:22]When you write a memoir in essays like this, which like you said, it's not just about
[18:27]one thing.
[18:28]It's about a lot of things that do ultimately come together.
[18:32]My hope, of course, is that people are going to want to read it and then read it and
[18:36]feel glad that they did.
[18:38]One of the things that people have been saying, and I've heard it now more than once,
[18:42]and I'm really clinging to it because I love it.
[18:43]Oh, this is the book I didn't know I needed to read because, you know, you might not
[18:48]walk into a bookstore and go, you know what I need?
[18:51]I need a memoir by a person who hasn't done anything really that remarkable, and it's
[18:56]about a million different things, and it's maybe it's got a turtle on the cover.
[19:00]No one comes into a bookstore describing this exact book, but I think many people out there,
[19:07]at least what I'm seeing is that many people out there are in a state where they too
[19:12]have had something that has turned their world upside down, or they've been recently
[19:17]through some kind of phase of life where stability got destabilized, and they too are trying
[19:23]to find a way back to feeling good and feeling like themselves, and they want to kind of have
[19:29]this full cathartic experience where they can have a good cry and then have a bunch of really
[19:34]good laughs and get to the end and go, okay, I feel good.
[19:39]I may not be as just one little individual able to fix everything that's wrong in the world,
[19:44]but the things I am doing in my everyday life do matter. That's where I land in bombshell
[19:49]truth. What I do matters, I find meaning in this everyday existence that I have, and I think a
[19:54]lot of people are looking for that meaning. So the more I hear from people who are validating that
[19:59]and kind of...
[20:00]Saying that all back to me, I feel are hugely relieved because I feel like okay, maybe I actually did it
[20:07]Have there been books for you that you felt like you didn't know you needed and then you read it and you were like, oh, thank god
[20:14]Oh my time. That's my my favorite feeling in
[20:18]Reading a book or were watching a movie or whatever is pleasant surprise when I go into something
[20:24]I'm like, I'm really not gonna like this and then I love it like I remember during the height of the pandemic
[20:29]But we were home, you know all the time and my family watched more TV
[20:34]Than in all the years of my life prior to that combined. I mean, we're just not a big TV family
[20:40]But we have become a big TV family and I've never watched super hero movies like those just they've never appealed to me
[20:46]There's a lot of explosions and stuff and it sort of hurts my eyes. So I'm always like, I can't watch this. We watched one division
[20:53]Have you seen this? Have not?
[20:55]Okay, I'm telling you
[20:57]Watch one division. Okay, I went in I went into it with the lowest expectations because that you know my kids are like
[21:03]It's Marvel. It's the universe and I was like, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know what any of this means
[21:09]It's a it's like seven or eight episodes. They're almost like many movies about
[21:14]And here's where you're gonna know that I don't watch these movies because I don't know what I'm talking about
[21:18]But it's Wanda she's his character. I think she's also like a witch and she has powers
[21:22]But anyway, it is about love and family and getting through grief and
[21:29]the magical thinking that we do in our minds when we want to be able to control the outcome of everything
[21:36]but we can't and
[21:38]Three or four episodes into this little eight show
[21:41]Arc and we were watching it like as it was released each week along with the rest of the world
[21:46]So I was also following along on Twitter as people were tweeting about it people were going
[21:50]What is this show about this is so strange and my kids were like what is this about I was sitting on this stuff
[21:56]And I get it
[21:58]It is about motherhood
[22:00]And it is about love
[22:02]And it is about
[22:03]And I had that like I said surprise feel like I'm thinking I thought I wasn't gonna get this at all and then I loved it so
[22:12]That's I try to be open-minded in my reading in my in my consumption of all sorts of entertainment because
[22:20]There is so much out there that you don't know you need, you know
[22:24]The whole memoir
[22:26]genre like the everyday life memoirs to me are always that way
[22:31]I can I feel pretty confident that if I walk over to the wall of the bookstore where
[22:35]The biographies of non-celebrity people live
[22:39]I can pull almost anything down off that shelf and feel pleasantly surprised by it in the end because it will if it's by someone who's a good writer
[22:48]They will have found some universal
[22:51]Feeling that is familiar and gives me relief and makes me feel less lonely when I read it
[22:57]So I'd love to be pleasantly surprised it's fun
[23:01]I completely agree about that section
[23:03]I love
[23:05]memoir and yours is like a perfect example of this but like
[23:08]People getting through anything people just getting through life. That's all we do right
[23:12]We all have a moment. There's nothing more we have in common than trying to get through life
[23:17]Exactly
[23:18]Exactly
[23:19]Yeah, totally
[23:19]And it doesn't always mean that there has to be something major
[23:23]Right, it doesn't have to be a memoir about you know being in the middle of you know
[23:27]It's not one of these extreme situations because for the most of us
[23:30]Right
[23:31]Although we've had everyone's had their share of stuff
[23:35]Most the time you're living a pretty
[23:38]You know
[23:38]Non right
[23:39]You know, you know what I mean
[23:41]I totally do. Yeah, like I mean, I'm happy to read a memoir by someone who
[23:46]You know
[23:47]Escaped being kidnapped by pirates. That sounds very interesting. Yes, but if that book about escaping
[23:55]Pirate kidnapping is any good. Yep. What that writer will have done is tapped into something
[24:02]Universal that makes me identify with that kidnapped person on a pirate ship and that universal thing they're tapping into
[24:10]We can also tap into in any story about anything
[24:15]Even the most mundane daily existence
[24:19]Which on a plot level maybe matches more up with the way most of us live
[24:23]Very true. I love it. Amazing. So what are you? Are you gonna work on next?
[24:30]Oh, man, I gotta figure that out. I don't know
[24:33]I have such envy of all my friends who do have this like rhythm where they finish a book turn it in while the editor has that book
[24:39]They start their next book. I that's I stay so in the headspace of
[24:44]The full-book life cycle, so I'm very much still in bombshell to world because I'm on tour right now
[24:49]The bombshell to I
[24:51]My hunch would be that once
[24:54]The travel slows down and I'm back home and I'm back in the place where I tend to
[24:59]Do all my thinking which is like sitting on my back porch staring off into the trees
[25:04]Something will bubble up, but I have no idea what so that sort of a scary
[25:09]For me, this is a this is always a scary part of the life cycle because I'm like
[25:13]What if that was it? What if that was my last good idea? I have nothing left
[25:17]I vividly remember that when I got home from my miss you when I blinked to her going
[25:21]Well, it's been a good run. I hope everyone enjoys my one and only book and then you know sure enough like days later
[25:28]This book started coming to life. So I'm hoping that that that life cycle degenerates. I'm not worried
[25:36]Thank you
[25:39]Last question. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[25:43]Oh gosh. Yes, right right right right right every single day
[25:47]If you can if your life does not support an everyday writing habit, that's fine right when you can
[25:53]Read like crazy and read with a pencil in your hand so that you can take notes on what other writers do well
[26:01]What you think other writers don't do well and you want to avoid in your own writing underline sentences
[26:08]You love read sentences that you love out loud. So your ears can
[26:13]Learn that melody and learn that rhythm so that then when you're writing you can kind of find your way to your own melody in rhythm
[26:20]And just you know hang in there. I think we I think we talked about this when I was visiting you
[26:25]A couple weeks ago
[26:26]You are in your writing career even when you are in the part before
[26:31]You have a contract and before you are making money and before you are known as an author
[26:38]The writing career doesn't begin when your book comes out your writing career begins when you start writing so even if no one else takes you
[26:47]Seriously or believes that you are a
[26:50]Writer or believes that you are an author if you believe it and you work at it as if it is your job
[26:57]That's how you keep going
[26:59]I love that when I was at home with my kids for years and years and years
[27:04]In my head I was joking like but I should answer. I'm a non-practicing writer
[27:08]You know all these non-practicing lawyers get to say that
[27:11]Like what's happening right exactly
[27:14]I said that you actually probably were a practicing writer because if I know you you were probably applying those writing
[27:20]Those writing chaps to like everything emailing that we could play group. That's really really good email
[27:28]I'll have to go back in different name different email address right what I have in there
[27:33]Anyway
[27:36]Well Mary Laura congratulations on the success of bombshell chair, which I'm completely not surprised about and I can't wait to
[27:44]Read what bubbles up next for you and in the meantime
[27:47]I hope you get through this tour without any more major incidents
[27:50]But hanging on all the positivity that's come and all the good news, which is so well deserved
[27:55]Thank you, Zibi. All right. Thanks so much
[27:58]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens and you're listening to the award-winning podcast
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