Amy Bloom, IN LOVE:A Memoir of Love and Loss
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[0:54]Amy Bloom is the author of in love a memoir of love and loss. By the way, I loved this book
[1:04]Amy Bloom is the author of four novels white houses lucky
[1:07]S away and love and benefits us and three collections of short stories where the god of love hangs out come to me
[1:13]Which was the finalist for the national book award and a blind man can see how much I love you
[1:17]Which was a fan list for the national book critics circle award
[1:21]her first book of nonfiction
[1:24]Normal transsexual CEOs cross-dressing cops and her mafferedites with attitudes is a staple of university sociology and biology courses
[1:31]Her most recent book is a widely acclaimed New York Times best-selling memoir in love
[1:36]She has written for magazines such as the New Yorker the New York Times magazine Vogue
[1:41]L the Atlantic Monthly Slate and Salon and her work has been translated into 15 languages
[1:46]She is the director of the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University
[1:49]Welcome Amy. Thank you for coming on Bob's Don't Have Time to Read books to discuss in love a memoir of love and loss
[1:56]I'm happy to be here. Great. This is a special podcast because we are doing this as a hybrid also book club for zivis virtual
[2:03]Book Club so we will have a conversation but also bring in questions from the book club group as well
[2:09]Amy for those who have not read your
[2:11]Absolutely beautiful book which by the way, I completely loved an adorn
[2:15]Could you explain a little about what your book's about and even why you decided to take this time of your life and turn it into a book?
[2:22]Okay, I don't know that I would say that it was anything as
[2:26]Internally directed as take this time in my life and turn it into a book. I'm not a memoir writer
[2:32]I had no aspirations to be a memoir writer. I barely read memoirs
[2:38]However several years ago my husband was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's
[2:45]and having probably had it for the preceding three years and during that time
[2:51]He made the decision which did not surprise me that he did not want to go through the next 10 years of
[2:59]The slow
[3:00]sometimes not so slow decline of Alzheimer's and
[3:05]Asked for my help in doing some research about how he might find a painless
[3:11]Way to end his life when he felt it was time and among the other things
[3:16]He asked me to do is he asked me to write about it because he felt this was a subject that people
[3:23]Tended not to talk about tended not to plan about and certainly tended not to look at the details of and he felt that it was important
[3:31]I would say that for Brian
[3:34]The right to choose in all points of one's life was always very important to him
[3:41]This is a guy who had been a football player at Yale and since he was 19 years old
[3:46]Had worked as an escort at the Planned Parenthood clinic up the street in New Haven
[3:51]And continued to do that for the next 40 years
[3:54]Well, it was absolutely beautiful the way you wrote about it and the way you tracked the decline
[4:00]The decisions that were made at the end and all the individual moments of it
[4:04]I think that was the most powerful
[4:06]We're just the small moments at home the interactions between the two of you the research. Yes, and all of what came next
[4:12]But just the moments the flashbacks the moments were so
[4:16]poignant I found
[4:18]Ashley Rice here would like to ask you a question about structure
[4:22]Sure
[4:24]So Ashley
[4:24]I was wondering about the structure of your book and it seemed the chapters are very short
[4:30]And I wondered if that was intentional based kind of on the way people would imagine Alzheimer's kind of have a shorter thought wave
[4:39]That's an interesting question
[4:40]I it is really based on the fact that you don't have to have dementia in the modern world to have a short attention span
[4:47]And I thought that
[4:50]Really two things but yes, it was intentional, but the intent was really
[4:55]To sort of in some ways make the narrative bearable. I mean, I I really did feel that 30 pages at a time
[5:03]Of someone's decline from dementia or
[5:06]His exploring ways to end his life was just hard to take
[5:11]And shorter allowed me to move back and forth
[5:15]Through the past and the present and that that was very much intentional
[5:20]I mean, I always saw the book as
[5:22]Basically braiding together the more distant past the near past and the present
[5:29]Thank you. It's very beautiful book
[5:31]Oh, thank you
[5:32]Megan you're in Jarvis. Hi. Thank you so much for the book. I gave your book to a bunch of folks
[5:39]mostly because
[5:41]I
[5:41]Defined it sort of like as a as a love story that doesn't get written that can't specifically be written except maybe only by you
[5:49]I wanted to ask about writing from the wound
[5:53]Versus sort of writing about the wound
[5:55]What already was mentioned was mentioned before you came on the call the tightness and like the word I kept thinking was crisp
[6:03]Like the crispness of the writing not just what's in the chapter
[6:06]But also what's not in the chapter that all the noise of what must have been around you is not there and which
[6:14]Creates all this intimacy. I wanted to know about your process like the emotional process
[6:21]Were you writing knowing you were writing the story that your husband had
[6:26]Asked you to write or was it sort of like that wrapping your head around the narrative so that it made sense to you?
[6:33]Does my question make sense. Yeah, no, I do understand. Yeah, I think maybe
[6:39]Maybe it was a little easier for me when it didn't feel that way at the time
[6:43]but because I'm a writer like that's my gig and so
[6:49]You know, I would
[6:51]Take Brian to his appointments or do whatever we were doing and I might make a few notes in my office
[6:58]And after his death at the end of January of 2020
[7:03]What two things happened one is the pandemic fell down upon us and so my younger daughter her wife and their baby
[7:11]Moved in with me for six months, which is not what I thought
[7:15]I needed but it turns out somebody had a better idea and it was it was great. It was
[7:22]There's an image in a in a poem about um
[7:25]A dead log in the forest that has fallen over and then the life that comes back in the dead log and the grass and the flowers
[7:32]And that's really how it felt so we would trade places so that my daughter and daughter-in-law
[7:39]Could work in the morning because they they were in Brooklyn. They had no child care
[7:43]And they had a very lively three-year-old and they were working full-time
[7:47]So I would do baby care in the morning and then and then lunch and then after lunch
[7:53]They would take over and I would come to my office and it turns out you can type and cry at the same time
[8:00]and
[8:01]That was
[8:03]What I did but I it was not it was not cathartic for me in the sense that it wasn't like journaling
[8:11]I I knew I was writing to be read and I had a very funny interview with somebody who had said to me
[8:19]Oh, you know, did your husband ask you to write this book and I said no, he told me
[8:24]You know told me told me there's something I don't exactly know how to say this
[8:29]But I do write memoir and I love memoir and I only read memoir and I I don't always love like I care about the characters
[8:38]But I think the reason I gave the book is like I I loved you both in the book
[8:43]Like there was so much intimacy and
[8:46]Constructed between you that even though we're complete strangers
[8:51]I you invited you invited me. I won't speak for anyone else
[8:55]Into into not just the pain of the story, but like the exquisite love of the story
[9:01]It really left me breathless and I'm very grateful to have read it. Oh, thank you so much
[9:06]I did feel that you know, you sort of shape it as you go along and I did find myself thinking
[9:13]Oh, I want
[9:15]I want
[9:16]I want people to be able to see Brian
[9:18]I didn't feel like I was gonna be able to hide much of myself and there was probably you know
[9:24]The good and the bad, but I really wanted people to be able to see Brian and see a person who was making
[9:31]This decision and how people come to it. So there you go. Sydney
[9:36]Marcus Dallas has a related question
[9:38]Sure. Yes. Hi. Thank you for joining us today. I wanted to ask
[9:43]Did you vacillate when you were writing? How did you work with your inner editor and were there parts that you you said?
[9:51]No, I'm not gonna put that in and then you came back and said I will
[9:56]Brother things that whether it was to intimate or to reveal
[10:00]Ling or if you just thought it was superfluous or was it suddenly seeming like you were over romanticizing Brian or
[10:07]Was there anything in your internal process where you really got hung up?
[10:11]Well, I have a pretty good relationship with my internal editor
[10:15]But I also have a relationship with my external editor and so at one point
[10:19]I have sort of turned in the first draft and my editor whom I we are very close and we have worked together for a very long time
[10:27]She was like, I don't feel like you're saying anything about the development of his symptoms and what was that like?
[10:33]And I I must have said to her three times. I think it's fine the way it is
[10:38]I don't think you need any more information about that people people know about all timers
[10:42]They understand the kind of things that happened and she was like
[10:45]I really think you should let us see some of that and each time I was like
[10:50]No, I don't I don't think it's necessary and then finally I sort of recognize that of course
[10:55]It wasn't necessary and useful to people, but also
[10:58]It was I won't say it was unbearable because I wrote it, but it was hard to write that was actually
[11:05]Harder to write than almost anything else was sort of the
[11:09]You know the growing list of symptoms the signs of decline because for most people
[11:15]Alzheimer's really is a diagnosis that you only understand in hindsight
[11:20]And you know so to look at the preceding three years
[11:24]And you know maybe even a little more and begin to ask myself questions about it
[11:30]Which are also fairly pointless was was really hard so
[11:34]That was that was my big struggle. I don't feel I mean
[11:39]You know I sort of left out some of Brian's more annoying qualities because I did really want people to love him and see him
[11:47]And I certainly didn't romanticize myself, but I don't think I romanticized it too much. I mean it was it was it was
[11:53]A happy marriage
[11:55]From the outside looking in it comes across as extraordinarily real
[12:00]And so you know it's it's only real to you and we accept it on faith and and it's powerful. Thank you
[12:09]Thank you
[12:10]Daphne has has a quick follow-up question to one thing you've already mentioned
[12:15]When I read this beautiful book my first response and before you came on was that
[12:20]You wrote it my guess was that you wrote it because it was your way of managing it
[12:25]But now I'm understanding that you wrote it because Brian asked you to my question is
[12:32]Would you have written it if he had not asked you to write it? Absolutely, you know
[12:37]Absolutely, no, I
[12:38]As I say I I you know I think the more it was a great genre
[12:43]I can't say I've never been a memoir. I think I read three of my life. I thought they were all terrific
[12:48]Not something that I ever found
[12:50]You know, I mean, I to me
[12:51]I was no more than a writer memoir than I was gonna write a collection of limericks. I mean, it's like
[12:57]not me
[12:58]But Brian had a really strong wish about this and I know that for him
[13:04]Part of what made it easier for him to leave this life that he enjoyed so much
[13:11]Was knowing that I was gonna write about it
[13:13]And that this story was gonna get shared and I know I mean
[13:17]Know that that mattered to him because he told me that
[13:20]Diane seemed has another question
[13:23]Thank you so much for writing this book and for being here with us today
[13:28]I was so moved by it, but I also had this this loud
[13:33]Call in my heart about
[13:37]About you're feeling about him leaving
[13:40]At the time that he did and I really it was a burning question
[13:44]I couldn't wait to speak you know or ask this question if it was up to you totally and
[13:51]He left it up to you 100% would you have wanted him to leave at that point or would you have wanted him to stay longer?
[13:58]If it was up to me, he wouldn't have had all summers
[14:01]You know, no, but I mean if it given the reality of the situation
[14:06]Given the reality of the situation and given Brian's wish to have a
[14:10]Painless and peaceful and legal death our choices were actually incredibly limited
[14:16]You know people would say things like oh, but there are all these right to die states in America
[14:21]But what people tend not to understand is that if you have dementia
[14:28]There is none of those 10 states are available to you because you also have to have cognitive function
[14:33]You have to be able to display judgment and discernment
[14:37]Well, so if you are
[14:39]terminally ill and close to the end with dementia
[14:44]You are not somebody who's gonna have that kind of judgment. So I think for me truly I never
[14:52]You know what I wished is that he didn't have all timers and I also wanted very much for him to have the kind of
[15:00]end of life that he chose and
[15:03]If somebody had said oh, we have magic and
[15:07]We can tell you that he can go another two years and
[15:12]still be himself and still feel at ease in the world and
[15:17]Have his relationships and his own sense of self and dignity of course I would prefer that
[15:25]but
[15:26]there was
[15:28]nobody
[15:29]Who could tell us that at all and partially because he had early onset Alzheimer's
[15:36]It's not a it's not a slow moving river. It's a fairly rapid moving river and I think one struggles
[15:45]You know with the wish to keep your beloved with you as long as possible
[15:50]but also a
[15:52]wish to
[15:53]He felt so strongly
[15:56]About his wish to continue to be himself. We had seen Alzheimer's close up in our family
[16:02]and also early onset and he
[16:05]He was also a fairly combative and aggressive guy and so when he said I
[16:12]Prefer to die on my feet and live on my knees
[16:16]I not only knew that he meant it. He had meant it his own life and so
[16:21]Yeah, I mean, yes, I would have like to have kept to have kept him in this world with me as long as possible
[16:28]But as it turned out possible
[16:30]It's gonna be that long
[16:33]Can I ask one other quick question? Why did he want you to write this book?
[16:38]Well two reasons
[16:40]One is to put it in the nicest possible way he had a fairly strong sense of self
[16:46]So there's that he certainly thought it was worth writing about and also he really cared about the subject
[16:52]He had always cared about the subject of sort of right right to choose your life
[16:58]Whether it was for planned parenthood whether it was for end of life
[17:03]Whether for people who were disabled. I mean just the right to choose was very very important to him
[17:11]And I think that's why he wanted me to write about it because he thought
[17:16]As he said well, I could hurry up and try to write about it, but people aren't going to read it
[17:21]You know you write about it people read it. Thank you. Thank you so much
[17:26]At least I'm arcs
[17:28]Thank you so much for joining us today
[17:31]The book is beautiful and when I tried to explain to people why they should read it and then it was a book about dying
[17:37]but it was actually like
[17:39]warm and at times very funny and
[17:42]Like it made you feel very full and and and at times even joyous. So
[17:49]How I guess my question is it's part of the process to do intentionally infuse your humor to lighten it a little bit
[17:55]Or is that just part of your relationship and I just it's remarkable to me that you could have a book that kept time people
[18:02]It's about her husband, you know basing his end of life, but it's so lovely and you won't you will feel down
[18:08]But you won't feel down. It was a very hard thing to explain to people
[18:12]So I'm curious in your process how you were able to balance that well
[18:16]I think mostly it's my nature
[18:18]You know possible. I've sat at slightly more deathbeds than some other people, but one of my
[18:25]really formative experiences when I was
[18:28]quite a bit younger was the
[18:30]Man who had been sort of my surrogate father and a great mentor to me
[18:35]was in the hospital for the last time and so I was driving out from Connecticut to you know sit by his bedside in the hospital
[18:43]And his other really close friend who was a man his own age
[18:47]These are guys and they're
[18:49]probably about 80 that goes about 40 and so I would come in and there would be like Wagner playing and
[18:57]You know this old man sitting there
[19:00]Talking about the war whatever it was
[19:03]So nothing that made me feel particularly welcome and he would see me and he would sigh and I would sigh
[19:08]I don't mean my friend. I mean the other friend and then he said I'll go get a cup of coffee, you know, you guys visit
[19:14]so I would then
[19:16]Change the room freshener change the music
[19:19]Bring him a cup of chamomile tea instead of the hospital coffee and this would go on for days
[19:25]And we would sort of take turns and it made me laugh every time. I thought we are still fighting about who's his bestie
[19:32]Even even as he's leaving this world and I think
[19:36]So I think it's mostly my nature. I think this is a terrible and beautiful world and
[19:43]Things are
[19:45]just
[19:46]Greatously painful and also pretty funny. Well, thank you because I mean it just it made the book just feel so much more
[19:54]close and personal because like this full of
[19:57]bosadness and
[19:59]comedy kind of
[20:00]mix in one. And you just have a perfect balance in there for that. And, you know,
[20:05]just your relationship was so real from that. So thank you.
[20:08]Francine, thank you so much for coming to be with us today and hearing from you. I loved your
[20:14]book. I will say that reading it kind of hit me in the face because I'm husband has shown some
[20:23]memory loss. Did you, you mentioned that your husband had shown some like three years prior
[20:30]to being diagnosed? Is that accurate? Yes. I mean, you know, part of what is so difficult, it seems to me
[20:39]around dementia is who is to say. How do you, and if you think it's your spouse, how do you get your
[20:46]spouse to go and get like anybody was there? Yeah, I'm fine. I'm driving. What are you talking about?
[20:53]Everybody forgets where they put their keys. What, you know, what are you doing? Why are you trying to do
[20:58]this? You know, and there were so many times when after Brian had decided that what he wanted to do
[21:04]was go to Dignitos, which is an accompanying suicide place in Switzerland, where it's legal and
[21:08]painless. We had to find his birth certificate and I'm thinking, oh my goodness, how are we going to do
[21:15]that? Brian goes, I know where it is, goes upstairs, goes to his office, gets his birth certificate.
[21:22]At which point, I'm like, this is the man who's going to end his life because of his loss of self.
[21:30]On the other hand, that same day, he was going to work on a stained glass project, which is about
[21:37]five minutes from our house and we live in a very small town. And he left and he came back
[21:44]about two minutes later and he said, I don't know where it is. He'd been going there for about
[21:48]three years. And so, you know, there are all these peaks and valleys of memory and cognition.
[21:56]I will say by the time our application was accepted in Switzerland, he had, for example,
[22:05]forgotten the names of all of our grandchildren. Love them, called everybody darling, could not
[22:12]summon up their names. And so, you know, it's this series of sort of pockets and ditches and
[22:23]obstacles that were overcome a few days ago, but no longer overcome and then will never be overcome
[22:30]again. It was that kind of process. And so, I don't know what I would do. I don't know that I
[22:36]would have done anything differently when the first signs were occurring. In the book, I write
[22:42]that I had written a script for TV show I was working on. Brian was always a big reader of my
[22:48]work. And I think really hoped that we would move to LA. He left it on the floor on his bedside.
[22:58]And you know, I don't want to be like, oh, had you read my work? Is it great? But you know,
[23:03]like after a couple weeks, I said, honey, did you, did you read the script? And he said it's too
[23:08]hard to follow. And he said it with no, no, chagrin, no embarrassment, just like, I don't know what's
[23:15]wrong with it, but it's, and this is a guy who had probably, I mean, put say in his lifetime,
[23:21]it probably went 40 television scripts. He was like, it's too hard to follow. I don't understand the
[23:25]formatting. Well, you did a beautiful job of making us love him and you. It was the
[23:32]I thought it was a beautiful love story. I liked the humor. I cried a lot in it. Thank you so
[23:38]much. And thank you for answering my question. And as I said, it was kind of smack me in the face
[23:43]of like, whoa, something, something. It changed my way of looking at things around here.
[23:50]Right. And anything I can do, I realized you didn't ask me, but anything I can do to persuade you
[23:57]to get your spouse to go to his primary care physician. And, you know, suggest that maybe this is
[24:06]just something to check out would be a good. Thank you. Well, I would have asked, but now that you
[24:12]volunteered, thank you. I appreciate that. And I, I will have any hesitation about that. Thank you
[24:18]so much. Thank you. You have time for a couple more questions. A. M. Richard, I do want to say how
[24:27]I guess amazing. It was to me that you just did everything that Brian wanted you to do,
[24:33]even though that might have not been your choice. And you could have said, well, they haven't called
[24:40]me back or we can't find anything or you could have probably made up a million different excuses
[24:46]and just put it off, put it off, put it off, put it off. But you were just diligent about doing
[24:52]everything he asked, even when you would like stop and cry to yourself and struggled through
[24:58]that, how amazing that was to me that you did it for him. And that just as the book's called,
[25:06]like in love, like that love you have for him to do that, even though it hurt so deeply,
[25:14]that is just so admirable. And I really admired that. So I just wanted to say that.
[25:19]Thank you. You know, I don't think that in the rest of my life anybody would describe me as
[25:26]sort of a milk toast or, you know, just, you know, just a very beautiful wife. I don't
[25:35]remember the guy as spyher to be a beautiful wife. But I also felt that he was so clear about what
[25:43]he wanted. And I did respect him. And I also understood the choice. I mean, I think if I had
[25:49]for example, a deeply moral or spiritual objection to his choice, I would have struggled even more.
[25:57]But I did understand it. And we had seen what the end of life looked like with dementia. And it was
[26:07]it was just heartbreaking in our family. And I, so I thought, I can do this. I certainly can't do
[26:14]without crying all the time. But I can do it. So I will. Okay, two more questions. I lean and then
[26:20]Olivia. So thank you very much for being here this afternoon. I really love the book. And I thought
[26:27]it was brave in so many ways, brave in everything that you went through and brave in writing it
[26:34]and telling the story in the way that you did. The question that I have is not so much about the
[26:39]content of the book, but about the fact that you said that you don't like memoir. And you don't
[26:45]like reading them and you don't like writing that. So I was wondering if there's anything that you
[26:49]did differently having read a few memoirs or that would have that made it wanted you to make this
[26:57]different than other memoirs. No, I mean, there are a lot of great memoirs out there. So it's not that
[27:02]I am uninterested in the genre because I think it's terrible. It's just, I mean, it's it's not
[27:09]unlike the way I feel about science fiction. I have read two science fiction writers, Octavia Butler
[27:15]and Ursula Le Guin. And I feel that I am lucky to have read them and improved by reading them.
[27:21]But it's not a genre I'm drawn to. It was really very much the same thing. I mean, I thought,
[27:27]well, let me let me try to do a good job. But since it wasn't my wish in life to be a memoir writer,
[27:35]it was let me let me do a good job with this one thing that God willing, I will never do again.
[27:42]Okay, and now Olivia Cohen, Cutler. Hi, I am a great fan of your work. I always have been
[27:50]beginning with a way. So I was excited to be able to read this new book, especially since it was
[27:57]such a departure from the things that you've done before. And what I would like to ask is where did you
[28:04]find the bravery to be so vulnerable? Because in your other books, you are behind the characters.
[28:13]And in this book, you are the character, the person you love most is the character and your story,
[28:19]which is deeply personal is what you are offering to the world. Where did you find that bravery?
[28:25]I suppose the good news is that when you are in the middle of it, you don't notice so much.
[28:32]You know, when you're climbing the mountain, you don't want to look down. I just thought
[28:36]I'm just going to put one foot in front of the other. I'm going to write about all the things
[28:42]that happened. I'm going to do my best to tell the truth. And I'm going to work very hard. I'm
[28:49]not thinking about how much is revealed, which by the way, I actually also do it with my fiction.
[28:55]I mean, I just try very hard not to think about how much people will see or that they will see
[29:02]that they, you know, once gave a reading, my sister was in the audience, my big sister who's a
[29:08]ferocious divorce lawyer. And it was an early story of mine about two sisters, one of whom was a
[29:15]schizophrenic and one of who and who in the end dies at the end of the story.
[29:21]And a woman in the audience got stood up, she was lovely and she said, I just want to tell you,
[29:26]I really understand what you have gone through because I too have a mentally ill sister,
[29:32]which point my sister was fairly involved, person leaps up and goes, I'm fine.
[29:39]Listen to the story and like you're not helping. But I think, you know, for me writing this,
[29:45]I just thought, well, people will see what they see. And my job is to tell this story.
[29:53]And my job is not to worry about how people judge me afterwards.
[29:58]Well, I don't.
[30:00]and getting one judged you in any way,
[30:02]but a positive judgment.
[30:04]I think that this story is extraordinary
[30:07]and the love story of it is extraordinary
[30:11]and the way you told it is one that draws people in
[30:16]in a way that you simply don't see coming.
[30:20]It is really a masterpiece.
[30:22]Thank you for writing it and thank you for being here today.
[30:25]Thank you so much.
[30:26]I appreciate it.
[30:27]Thank you for everything.
[30:29]I just have one quick question of my own,
[30:32]which is what do you miss the most about Brian today?
[30:36]Oh, I don't think there's a one thing.
[30:38]I mean, you know, I miss his being here in the world.
[30:42]I miss his being here for the grandchildren.
[30:44]I miss his being here for my children.
[30:47]All of this.
[30:48]I have a, I think I say in the book,
[30:51]I have a tree, the Brian's tree,
[30:54]which is in my yard and sort of surrounded
[30:57]by perennial white flowers.
[30:59]And that is something I'm really glad that I did.
[31:02]That was not his idea.
[31:04]That was my idea.
[31:05]And, you know, it's a way of having his presence.
[31:08]So for me, not one thing,
[31:11]but I will say one of the things that I certainly learned
[31:14]from him was, you know, to move forward
[31:18]and to not be daunted.
[31:20]You're fine.
[31:21]Thank you so much for sharing all of your time with us
[31:24]and for sharing in love with the world
[31:28]and all of this time for our collective questions.
[31:31]Thanks for coming on mom's don't have time to read books
[31:33]and everybody in the audience, the audience,
[31:36]so to speak.
[31:36]Thank you everybody.
[31:37]Thank you for doing a live podcast
[31:39]for Zoe's virtual book club.
[31:41]Thank you all for coming.
[31:42]Thank you so much.
[31:43]Okay, we'll see you next month, everybody.
[31:46]Okay, thank you, Amy.
[31:49]Thanks for listening to this episode of mom's
[31:51]don't have time to read books.
[31:53]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[31:55]at Zebioans and at moms don't have time to read books.
[31:58]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebioans.com
[32:00]and sign up for my virtual book club
[32:02]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[32:05]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan,
[32:06]that texture sound for the sound editing.
[32:08]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[32:10]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.