E.M. Tran, DAUGHTERS OF THE NEW YEAR: A Novel
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[1:13]E.M. Tran is the author of Daughters of the New Year novel
[1:17]This episode is one of our special guest-hosted ones by Julianna Goldman who runs mama den
[1:23]E.M. Tran writes fiction and creative nonfiction her debut novel Daughters of the New Year has been reviewed and
[1:30]Exerpeded in places like the Georgia review joyland magazine prairies cooner
[1:34]Harvard review online and more she spent an
[1:37]Inordinate proportion of her adult life working towards an emma fane creative writing from the University of Mississippi and a PhD in
[1:42]English and creative writing from Ohio University
[1:45]She is from and currently lives in New Orleans, Louisiana with her husband and two dogs
[1:49]She was born in the year of the earth snake ask her about Gilmour girls or the bachelor franchise if you want to be her friend
[1:55]E.M. Tran. Thank you so much for being here to discuss your amazing novel Daughters of the New Year
[2:02]Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. I have to say that I loved reading
[2:10]Your book and part of it is I come from a family of three girls
[2:15]We have a very complicated relationship with our mother with
[2:21]we had one sort of with our grandmother and have always been so
[2:25]fascinated my grandmother was first generation and have always just been so
[2:29]fascinated by lineage and the relationships between women and what stays the same
[2:37]What doesn't and so I would just love for you to tell us about
[2:42]Daughters of the New Year and what this book means to you
[2:46]Yeah, well, thank you so much for that compliment really means a lot especially because I
[2:52]Made a very conscious decision to focus on the women in this family
[2:56]There is a father figure, but you know, he's kind of like off to the side
[3:00]It really is revolving around the mother and the relationship between three sisters
[3:05]And then as you go farther back like it's almost like men disappear entirely
[3:11]From the narrative so which was intentional because I really wanted to center women's narratives
[3:16]So I really appreciate that and for me like it you know this book
[3:21]It's fictional, but I also came from a family that was very women centered
[3:25]I have two older sisters my dad was always at work
[3:29]So it was like my mom was at the house a lot and so writing this book was kind of like a love story to
[3:35]All of the women in my life and how complicated it could be
[3:39]Especially growing up in like a first generation immigrant household, but yeah, I I really
[3:47]It's as much about immigrant narratives as it is about
[3:51]The different places or the roles that we think we have to fulfill as like different members of the family, right?
[3:59]Like there's all these stereotypes about the oldest
[4:02]Daughter the youngest daughter the middle child, you know, Jan Brady is like
[4:07]The ultimate middle child, so I was really interested in exploring those those themes and you know
[4:14]Just I feel like women are so complex and wonderful and nuanced and I really wanted to write about that
[4:21]So that's what I set out to do in daughters of the new year
[4:24]And I love how it starts or you write that this all kind of started with a trophy
[4:30]Yes, tell us about that. Yeah
[4:33]Well, so swan Trung is the mother of the mother figure in the beginning of this book and she
[4:41]Wanna beauty pageant in Vietnam, which you
[4:44]She tells her children about all the time and there's this trophy that sits in the living room and
[4:50]The you know, it's kind of this mysterious object
[4:54]well, it's it's a plastic trophy that she you know spray paints and
[4:59]And mix as an imitation of the trophy that she had won for this beauty pageant in 19 in the 1970s
[5:06]And it's kind of mysterious and the kids, you know, don't really know about
[5:11]That much about the pageant. They're really not that interested and as you go farther back in time
[5:16]Because the narrative and stack words you learn about you know
[5:22]Some of them swans secrets, right? Like maybe secrets is too strong of a word
[5:27]It's just stories that she didn't tell her kids because maybe they were to traumatizing or
[5:34]She wants to keep something for herself
[5:36]You know, there's all these different reasons why she doesn't tell her kids
[5:40]And that's you know very common with immigrant narratives the and also like immigrant experiences
[5:46]We often have that chasm between the first generation and the immigrant generation
[5:51]So I was trying to create that but the trophy is really this symbol for
[5:57]beauty for for loss
[6:01]for
[6:02]spectacle and
[6:04]It's based on a real trophy in my in my own life
[6:09]My mother was a beauty queen in
[6:12]Vietnam, and it was this mysterious
[6:13]I mean
[6:14]When I was younger, I like didn't care about the beauty pageant and then when I got older
[6:18]I was like, wait, this is like kind of a weird thing that my mom was a part of and I don't know anything about and we have this gigantic
[6:26]silver like solid silver trophy and in our in the piano room and
[6:31]So the more I kind of dug into that
[6:33]Personal narrative the more it was interested in putting that in the fictionalized one as well
[6:38]It's so true
[6:38]You know, you grow up and there are just certain things that you might see in your home that are
[6:43]That like you don't think anything of and then someone and then someone else walks in and they see it
[6:49]And it's like oh, what is this? And it's not until you get older that you can kind of become this outside observer
[6:56]in your own life and your own upbringing
[6:59]Absolutely
[7:00]I thought it was normal and then it actually wasn't until I had gone to grad school and I had to write a
[7:05]Personal essay about something and it looks like I guess all right about this trophy
[7:10]And then I started trying to write about it
[7:12]And I was like, I actually don't know anything about this trophy
[7:15]And that's kind of embarrassing because it's like this giant object in our home that I don't that is like really weird
[7:21]So yeah, you're totally right. And then when I brought the essay to the other writers in my workshop
[7:26]They were like, what
[7:32]Yeah, so totally true. I love how you write
[7:36]What happens when we have the ability to go back and cover a truth that is in reality forever obscured
[7:41]What would be discover how often does history repeat itself without our knowing the same pain and joy
[7:48]Experienced again and again. I think like oh
[7:52]That that passage in particular just gave me such
[7:55]Goosebumps right because you think that
[7:58]Like you're charting your own
[8:00]path, but some of the
[8:03]Like currents of our past just
[8:07]Run through our blood no matter how hard we try
[8:10]Yeah, yeah, you know, I was thinking about
[8:13]Generations like the book the scope of the book is very large and that I was just thinking like
[8:18]All of us are here now because someone in our past survived right like there's no like every single there's seven
[8:25]Billion people on earth and every single person is alive because someone before them somehow managed to live through you know
[8:33]The the horrible reality through each generation. I mean y'all go through traumatic things and I was just thinking like
[8:42]That is massive like there are just and we forget like
[8:48]Sure, we remember our mothers and our fathers lives
[8:52]Maybe and to a very limited extent and maybe we know our grandparents
[8:56]And maybe we know a little bit our great about our great grandparents
[8:59]But you really can't go much farther beyond that like most people don't know about their great great great great great grand parents
[9:06]And so it really is you do people get forgotten right but that doesn't mean that
[9:12]What they went through or what they experienced like it just seemed to me so interesting like
[9:18]Probably we all go through the same things over and over again. We just don't know
[9:22]Right and it's possible that it happens over and over and over again because we just keep forgetting because each generation
[9:29]You know, it begins another generation and gets another one and and so I think that our memories are very short as human beings and
[9:37]Part of my project of the book was like interested in going back far enough to think about
[9:42]Okay, like what things happened over and over again
[9:46]So there's a lot of repetition and a lot of cycling that happens in the narrative
[9:50]It's so powerful and I love how you go backwards and also tell that narrative through the voices of the different
[10:00]characters, but through their voices from older to younger.
[10:04]So like they've kind of start with more perspective, right?
[10:07]And then they, as they go, as you go backwards,
[10:11]it's sort of like their, their core selves.
[10:15]Yeah.
[10:16]And what's interesting too is that like,
[10:19]when they go, when the younger they get,
[10:21]they kind of slowly fade away, like they kind of disappear.
[10:25]And we start moving into the perspectives
[10:27]of the older generations.
[10:30]And it's a reversal, right?
[10:32]Like we often think that, you know,
[10:35]we often forget about the people that are before us.
[10:38]And we also are very focused on the individual
[10:41]always moving forward.
[10:43]I think that that is a very,
[10:45]I mean, I think it's very particularly Western
[10:48]and very American.
[10:49]Like this idea that the individual is always growing,
[10:53]always moving forward.
[10:54]We're always thinking about the future.
[10:57]And it's very focused on the eye.
[10:58]And so I was, I wanted to, to destabilize that
[11:02]and de-center that and think about,
[11:04]okay, well, what happens when actually we,
[11:06]we go backwards when people associate with going backwards,
[11:09]they think about regression.
[11:11]But that's not necessarily true.
[11:13]There's so much that happens in the past
[11:15]that isn't regressive.
[11:17]And it's actually very similar to what the characters
[11:19]in the present, which I have then turned into the past,
[11:23]go through.
[11:24]So I was interested in like subverting that.
[11:26]And really turning it on top of itself.
[11:29]This is such a tribute to your family, to your lineage
[11:32]and to the women who came before you.
[11:36]How did you do that research?
[11:37]I know you say that a lot is, is forgotten to history
[11:40]and a lot is fictionalized.
[11:43]But what tell us about your process?
[11:45]Yeah, so I did a lot of reading and research
[11:50]on colonial Vietnam, on the rubber plantation.
[11:54]I just started looking up different things
[11:58]about life, living life in Vietnam during the colonial period
[12:03]and during Indochina.
[12:04]And I started finding like,
[12:07]one of the things that I found was,
[12:09]well, particularly for the social elite,
[12:11]I found that they hung out at a place called
[12:13]the Circle Sportif, which is like a recreational club.
[12:17]And so I started, I would find things like that
[12:19]and then I would do research on it
[12:20]and then I would include it in the book.
[12:21]So there's the Circle Sportif in the book.
[12:24]And then there's also like the Buddhist monk
[12:26]that burns himself.
[12:28]And so I did a lot of research into that.
[12:29]And what's really fascinating about a lot of this historical
[12:32]research was that because the Vietnam War,
[12:37]or the Vietnam Civil War happened in the 60s and 70s,
[12:42]a lot of it is televised.
[12:43]And a lot of it is like on tape,
[12:46]like you can look up video of an audio
[12:49]of the Buddhist monk burning himself.
[12:52]And so a lot of my research was that just like going
[12:55]through news articles from the New York Times,
[12:58]they had like a lot of the archives up
[13:00]and going through videos and things like that.
[13:03]And just like getting a feel for what it was like
[13:05]to be alive from that time,
[13:08]the really difficult part was thinking about it
[13:11]not from an American perspective,
[13:13]but trying to imagine what it would be like
[13:15]to be a Vietnamese person in Vietnam during a civil war.
[13:18]So that was really hard.
[13:21]But I found actually that it was easier in a way
[13:25]to write that the second half,
[13:28]the things that I had really made up,
[13:30]going farther and farther back in time,
[13:32]that it was to write like the stuff closer to the present day
[13:36]because some of that felt like I had to purposefully
[13:39]remove the autobiography from it
[13:41]so that it was more interesting.
[13:45]Like I feel like sometimes our tendency
[13:47]or at least for me is when I'm writing,
[13:50]I'm writing from a lot of it is based in experience.
[13:53]And then I feel really attached to the experience
[13:56]so that I don't do what's best for the writing.
[13:59]And I'm like, but this is what really happens,
[14:02]but it actually doesn't really matter because it's fictional.
[14:04]So I found that the second half stuff with the research
[14:08]and all of the listening to audio clips
[14:11]and newspaper stuff was freeing also in a way
[14:14]because I could really imagine outside of my own experience.
[14:18]Did you sit down with your mom
[14:20]and have longer conversations about her upbringing
[14:26]and what was that like?
[14:28]Yeah, well, you know, actually my mother is very guarded
[14:31]with her stories.
[14:34]And that's partially what the book is about, right?
[14:36]Like it's about not being able to talk to your parents
[14:40]about things.
[14:41]And so I did actually try to ask my mother
[14:44]about some of her experiences
[14:45]and she didn't really want to talk about them.
[14:49]Yeah.
[14:49]So she was a part of the social elite in Vietnam.
[14:53]She was a beauty pageant queen and she went to a lot of balls.
[14:57]And I tried to ask her about going to these balls
[15:00]because I was like so interested in the exclusivity
[15:05]of that particular social class in Vietnam.
[15:08]Like it's so interesting to me.
[15:09]They're in a kind of weird liminal space
[15:11]because they're Vietnamese and they're not, you know,
[15:14]front, white French, European, but they're still very wealthy.
[15:18]So I wanted to know about it.
[15:19]And I asked her about going to balls
[15:22]and I asked her if she'd gone to the surf sportif ball
[15:25]at the recreational club.
[15:26]And she was like, I don't know what you're talking about.
[15:30]I've been to so many balls.
[15:33]I was like, what about them though?
[15:35]She's like, I don't remember.
[15:36]I went to so many.
[15:37]So she was very guarded.
[15:39]I think that maybe she, it's very difficult
[15:41]for her to talk about it.
[15:43]But a lot of the stories that I got,
[15:45]why is it, why do you feel like it's so difficult for her?
[15:48]Or why?
[15:49]I just think that it was a very traumatizing time for her.
[15:53]And I think to revisit it, even the really,
[15:55]the fun parts of the joyful parts of her childhood
[15:58]bring up something that, you know,
[16:01]even it's painful still because it's a pass
[16:03]that she doesn't have access to anymore.
[16:05]You know, she read.
[16:07]Does she read the book?
[16:08]She has not read the book.
[16:09]Did she plan to?
[16:11]I don't know.
[16:12]I'm giving her a copy, but I mean, I hope she reads it,
[16:17]but she's not a big reader.
[16:19]And I think part of that is also the language gap.
[16:23]But she, the thing that she mostly reads
[16:26]is like horoscopes in her little horoscope almanac.
[16:30]So I hope that she reads it.
[16:31]She's gonna have a copy, but you know,
[16:34]I did give her the essay that I wrote about the trophy
[16:36]and she read it and she was like, yeah, sounds good.
[16:39]Yeah, I'm like, mom, tell me more anything else.
[16:48]Yes, she's very, very, very guarded with her stories.
[16:51]So I think that it's probably because she's been through a lot,
[16:55]you know, and even nostalgia.
[16:58]I mean, I think probably especially nostalgia
[17:00]for the things for times gone past are like really,
[17:03]really hard for her.
[17:04]So, but the person that I did actually get a lot of stories
[17:08]from was my dad who was also a writer.
[17:12]And he, like, when he found out that I was a writer,
[17:15]he was like, let me tell you about all my stories.
[17:18]So he was very, you know, he was very generous with those.
[17:22]Oh, that's, I kind of, that's neat.
[17:24]You know, the book still tells the story through women,
[17:29]but your dad was also instrumental in helping craft
[17:34]that narrative.
[17:35]Yeah, definitely.
[17:36]Yeah, he's like, he's not the cone of the book,
[17:40]but he is a very complex man who was like very much
[17:45]like a masculine.
[17:46]I mean, I think that Vietnam really,
[17:48]Vietnamese culture really prizes, you know, the first son.
[17:52]And, you know, the masculine archetype of like the Vietnamese man.
[17:59]And so he was very much, he was the first born son
[18:02]in his family and you could definitely tell like he had
[18:06]a lot of confidence.
[18:08]And he was, you know, he was like,
[18:11]he just did things in his life that were like,
[18:13]could only be born of the confidence from someone
[18:16]who had been celebrated his whole life by his family.
[18:20]And so he's very interesting person.
[18:23]But yeah, a lot of his, he was very funny
[18:26]because when I wrote that essay about the trophy
[18:29]and then when I was writing this book about mothers and daughters,
[18:32]my dad was kind of like,
[18:33]when are you going to write a story about dads?
[18:37]I was like calm down.
[18:42]This is only a debut novel dad.
[18:44]Like, there will be more.
[18:46]Yeah.
[18:48]Your Twitter profile says that you are a writer,
[18:51]Gilmore girl and Kardashian expert.
[18:54]And I'd love to unpack this because,
[18:56]because I do love the way through the book,
[18:58]you kind of weave in pop culture,
[19:01]but reality TV in particular.
[19:03]So whether it's the beauty contest or the bachelor.
[19:08]Anyway, tell us about that.
[19:10]Yeah. Oh my God.
[19:12]I love reality television and actually like the amount of reality
[19:16]television that I watch is disgusting.
[19:18]Like, you know,
[19:21]I'm sure people are like, when does she write?
[19:22]She's watching reality television.
[19:24]So okay, when do you write when you're?
[19:27]How do you, how do you divvy up at the time?
[19:30]I write in bursts.
[19:31]So like some writers wake up like a dawn
[19:34]and they're like writing every day.
[19:37]I'm not that person.
[19:38]And actually I think it is good for those writers.
[19:41]Like I actually really envy them,
[19:43]but I also think that that that kind of belief
[19:46]that you have to do that is sometimes damaging
[19:48]because there are so many people
[19:50]who don't have the time to do that.
[19:52]Like moms, for example, don't have time
[19:54]to just, you know, every single day
[19:57]because they still need to write.
[19:58]Sometimes they have to write at night.
[20:00]or, you know, whenever that's not me, I'm not a mom.
[20:04]So I have to write between my reality television binges,
[20:07]but I write in verse and usually at night
[20:12]and I'll watch reality television, you know,
[20:13]whenever, whatever it is.
[20:17]And do you watch it live or record?
[20:19]Like, do you binge it or do you wanna like...
[20:24]Yeah, I'm a recorder, I'm a person who records.
[20:28]Although I will say it is much more fun
[20:30]to watch something live because then you feel
[20:32]like you're a part of like this communal thing,
[20:36]like all these other people are watching it.
[20:37]Like if you watch something like the voice live,
[20:40]it's way more fun because you can do voting
[20:42]and they have an app, like yes, I've downloaded the app.
[20:46]You can't say like, but yeah,
[20:50]and watching I watch a lot of the bachelor,
[20:53]although it has felt like more of a job than a joy lately
[20:57]because there's like so much content.
[20:59]But yeah, I really loved, I just love it
[21:04]because it's so ridiculous.
[21:06]Like it is like who would,
[21:08]if you went back like 50 years or like 100 years
[21:12]and you're like one day,
[21:13]there is going to be a show called The Biggest Loser
[21:16]or The Fat.
[21:17]Is that, yes, it's called The Biggest Loser, right?
[21:20]I think so.
[21:20]What about weight loss?
[21:23]And there's a show called The Biggest Loser,
[21:24]where, or there's a show where this woman goes on
[21:27]and she makes out with like 30 men
[21:30]and then finds a partner from that.
[21:33]Like they would be like, no, there's not.
[21:35]That's ridiculous.
[21:35]So I love the kind of over-the-top ridiculousness,
[21:39]like the gall to have a show like that.
[21:42]I love that the spectacle of it.
[21:44]Like I always think about like the people
[21:46]that are on the show, like what is their motivation
[21:49]for being on the show?
[21:50]Like why put yourself through this,
[21:53]agony, this screwed me.
[21:56]And so I love thinking about each person's motivation
[21:59]on a show like that.
[22:00]And it's just such a situation that's potential
[22:03]for such conflict and rice.
[22:05]And so I thought, you know, why not include it in a book?
[22:09]Like you would be crazy not to.
[22:10]It was also like some of the funnier
[22:13]and lighter moments of the book.
[22:15]I love a lot of the interactions
[22:18]and when the bachelor was like,
[22:21]I just love the way you kind of poke fun at it.
[22:24]And well, I wouldn't say you poke fun at it
[22:27]because like you're a consumer and you love it,
[22:30]but you highlight some of the silliness and absurdity.
[22:35]Yeah.
[22:36]I mean, I think it's fair to say that I poke fun at it.
[22:39]Okay, fine.
[22:40]I think I can definitely make fun of the fact
[22:44]that I am a consumer of this ridiculous thing.
[22:47]But you know, I also just think that
[22:50]people judge reality television for being trash TV,
[22:53]which I mean, yes it is,
[22:55]but it's also like the way that it's constructed
[22:59]is also a kind of art.
[23:02]Like there are many narratives in a show like the bachelor
[23:07]that come from just raw material,
[23:10]like just hours and hours of footage
[23:12]that would otherwise be nothing.
[23:15]Like they're just creating storylines from nothingness.
[23:19]And the Kardashians too is a really great example of that.
[23:23]We're like, they're just living their lives.
[23:24]They're just, you know, Kendall's just cutting a cucumber
[23:28]and they make a story out of it.
[23:30]Thank God.
[23:31]Yeah.
[23:33]It's incredible.
[23:34]So I do sometimes watch it for like,
[23:37]okay, let me see, let me see the artfulness here
[23:40]and figure out what they're doing.
[23:42]So I do watch it for that as well.
[23:43]And I also just want to let everyone know
[23:45]people are listening to this,
[23:47]but I feel like it's okay for you to speak very confidently
[23:50]about this passion of yours
[23:52]because behind you right now,
[23:54]you have about 200 books on your book wall.
[23:58]So it's not like it is sacrificing your time writing
[24:02]or reading either.
[24:04]Yes. Yeah.
[24:05]Yeah. And you know, like I think that there's so much
[24:09]snobbery with genre and medium.
[24:12]And if we think about someone like Charles Dickens
[24:16]who wrote serialized novels, that was considered
[24:18]like the equivalent of trash TV.
[24:20]Like you got it in the mail and you consumed it.
[24:24]And it was like this little, just little bit of joy.
[24:27]And it was considered, you know, just like throw it.
[24:30]Like you literally throw it in the trash afterwards.
[24:33]I didn't Shakespeare too, right?
[24:34]Like there are fart jokes and Shakespeare,
[24:36]but fast forward a couple hundred years
[24:38]and people are like, oh, this is high art.
[24:40]So I think that there's something worth
[24:43]interrogating about ourselves whenever we say
[24:45]that something is trash because it doesn't have,
[24:49]we don't have to consider it trash just because it's enjoyable
[24:53]or it, I think also it's sometimes conflated
[24:56]with women's books or women's television is often considered
[25:01]trash.
[25:02]And I think that, you know, again,
[25:05]interrogate that.
[25:06]Like why do you consider it trash?
[25:09]I'd love to do a time capsule and we'll see
[25:12]if in five hundred, sorry, a book just in my face.
[25:15]If in like several hundred years,
[25:17]keeping up with the Kardashians is likened
[25:20]to Hamlet, Earth, Ella, or...
[25:22]Yes.
[25:23]Yeah, well, and generationally, the book is about generation.
[25:29]Right.
[25:30]Real quick, Phoebe Bridgers, you had on repeat
[25:33]while you wrote your book?
[25:34]Yes. Oh my God.
[25:36]I love her.
[25:37]I don't know.
[25:37]Normally I write in complete silence
[25:42]and like I need to be like alone.
[25:45]I need no sounds.
[25:47]Sometimes like my husband will come in
[25:48]and be like, do you want water?
[25:50]Like he's like trying to be nice.
[25:51]I'm like, thank me alone!
[25:52]Yeah, he's like being super nice.
[25:56]And I'm like, I need silence.
[25:58]So it's very, it's actually very, it was odd
[26:01]that I was listening to music at all
[26:03]while I was writing.
[26:04]But I think later on in the book,
[26:06]I, writing a book is such an enormous endeavor.
[26:10]Like it's so time consuming.
[26:12]And you just spend hours and hours
[26:16]just slaving away, trying to wrench the words
[26:19]in yourself.
[26:20]And I think that because I spent so long on it,
[26:24]I was like, I need to change it up.
[26:25]Like I need to listen to something,
[26:27]maybe some ambiance.
[26:28]I don't know, something that's unintrusive, unobtrusive.
[26:33]I don't know how I happened upon Phoebe Bridgers,
[26:36]but I think I just randomly found her on Spotify
[26:39]and just started playing her music.
[26:41]I was like, oh, this is kind of relaxing.
[26:43]So I started off just having it very, very low.
[26:46]Like the song was just on like volume one.
[26:50]And then I started recognizing some of the songs
[26:53]like subconsciously.
[26:54]And I was really drawn to garden song.
[26:58]There's this one line in the song
[27:00]that's like the doctor said that my resentment
[27:03]is getting smaller and he like feels her liver,
[27:06]her kidney or something, some organ
[27:08]and says that her resentment's getting smaller in it.
[27:10]And I remember hearing that line of thinking,
[27:12]oh, that's like really, that's really quite artful.
[27:15]As then I started just like turning the music
[27:17]a little bit higher and listening to the song.
[27:19]And then I just started repeating garden song
[27:22]over and over again.
[27:23]So it kind of turned into this whole thing
[27:25]where I had to have garden song on while I was writing.
[27:27]And actually one of the chapters at the towards the end
[27:30]of the book, one of the ancestors is digging in the garden
[27:36]and finds, you know, an object in the dirt
[27:39]and then has her first period that that was actually,
[27:44]I was like, I have to write like an homage chapter
[27:46]to garden song and that's what that chapter is about really.
[27:50]Oh, I love that.
[27:52]Yeah.
[27:53]Yeah.
[27:55]Well, I feel so indebted to Phoebe.
[27:57]So I had to do something.
[28:00]Phoebe, if you're listening.
[28:02]Yes, please.
[28:04]Please come here and hang out with me.
[28:06]I love you.
[28:08]I'll come over for that too.
[28:10]No.
[28:10]Yeah.
[28:11]I'm like, hey, Phoebe's here.
[28:15]Well, Ian, what's next for you?
[28:17]And where can we find you?
[28:18]Where if listeners want to learn more about you
[28:21]when you're writing?
[28:22]Where do we go?
[28:23]Well, I have a website, Elizabeth M. Tran.com.
[28:27]And I usually post my publications there on one of my pages.
[28:32]So and I update my events there.
[28:34]So I'm doing a bunch of events this fall.
[28:37]I'm going like all over the place.
[28:39]I'm actually going to, you know, Virginia, New York,
[28:42]and Texas.
[28:43]So I'll be all over the place if you want to see me read.
[28:46]And I'll be working on, you know, going forward.
[28:49]I'll be working on my next novel.
[28:51]It is about sorority women in the South.
[28:55]And it is based in a fictional town in Northern Louisiana.
[28:59]And you're some Indian mounds, a real place
[29:01]called Poverty Point.
[29:03]And so I'll be working on that novel.
[29:06]Well, fascinating.
[29:07]I can't wait for it to come out and to read that.
[29:10]And in the meantime, Ian Paren,
[29:13]daughters of the New York, congratulations
[29:15]on this amazing debut novel.
[29:17]Definitely, definitely recommended for the hot cup of tea.
[29:21]Yes, thanks for having me.
[29:23]Thank you so much.
[29:26]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[29:28]to Read Books.
[29:29]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens
[29:32]and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[29:34]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com
[29:37]and sign up for my virtual book club
[29:39]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[29:41]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound
[29:44]for the Sound Editing.
[29:45]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[29:47]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.