Will Schwalbe, WE SHOULD NOT BE FRIENDS: The Story of a Friendship
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books.
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[1:03]Will Schwabby is the author of We Should Not Be Friends, The Story of a Friendship.
[1:07]This is Will's second time on the podcast, and I was delighted to have him back.
[1:11]He has worked in book publishing currently as an editor at McMillan, in digital media,
[1:16]and as a journalist writing for various publications, including The New York Times and
[1:20]South China Morning Post.
[1:21]He's the author of Books for Living, The End of Your Life, Book Club, and co-author with
[1:26]David Shipley of Send.
[1:27]He lives in New York.
[1:29]Welcome, Will.
[1:30]Thank you so much for coming back.
[1:31]And moms don't have time to read books to discuss your amazing new memoir.
[1:34]Tell us all about it.
[1:36]Thank you so much.
[1:37]So I'm really excited, Zippy.
[1:39]And first of all, I'm just so excited to be back on your podcast because of all the
[1:44]book conversations I've had with all the people about some very different book yours is
[1:48]one of the most favorite conversations I've ever had before.
[1:52]I did so deeply about issues of friendship and loss, and I think friendship is about
[1:58]as important a topic as there is.
[2:00]And so in this, my new book, we should not be friends, the story of a friendship.
[2:05]I wanted to explore one of the things that's given me great joy, which is my 40-year friendship
[2:10]with someone totally different from me.
[2:13]This obnoxious chalk, I was this perm-haired, out gay, AIDS activist, and he was a nationally ranked
[2:23]wrestler lacrosse player, rugby player, frat boy, and it is fair to say he was a little
[2:29]prejudiced against me, but I was way more prejudiced against him.
[2:33]And what I never could have predicted is that this guy has a heart of gold, he's smart,
[2:39]he's turned out to be an educational leader, and he's been one of the most important
[2:43]people in my life for 40 years.
[2:44]Chris Maxie, founder of the island school, Navy Seal, awesome guy.
[2:48]Oh my gosh.
[2:50]What your story about him was crazy because it also seemed so unlikely, like for the
[2:55]the whole first section or the first third of the book or something, I'm like, I don't
[2:59]feel like these guys are really going to be friends, like maybe the story is going in a
[3:03]different way.
[3:04]I don't know, because it doesn't seem like they have, I mean, you obviously had wonderful
[3:08]conversations in your rooftop tugs and all of that, but I don't know, you even had
[3:12]times when he would come to New York and not even call you.
[3:15]And I'm like, what?
[3:17]Yeah.
[3:18]I really wanted to cross, because I think we've all had friends like that.
[3:22]And one of the beauty of a long friendship is if it has a deep foundation and ours did,
[3:28]and if there's desire on both parts to be friends, you can sometimes go decade without
[3:33]talking.
[3:34]And you can hurt each other's feelings and have misunderstandings, but if you both want to
[3:39]be friends and you both work at it a little bit, it can be one of the most rewarding things
[3:44]there is.
[3:45]But yeah, I wanted to make it clear, I love Maxie, he's not my best friend, I have several
[3:51]best friends.
[3:52]He's just someone I admire deeply who plays an incredibly important role in my life.
[3:57]So I have a lot of people I admire deeply and play nice roles in my life, but I haven't
[4:00]written books about them.
[4:02]Why did you write this book about him?
[4:04]I actually admire Maxie so much after serving six years with the Navy SEALs.
[4:08]He founded that incredible school I mentioned, the island school.
[4:12]And I just like him so much, he's such a great guy that I proposed to my publisher,
[4:17]the legendary Sunnymata and Dan Frank, that I write a biography of Maxie.
[4:23]Got it.
[4:24]And they took me to lunch and Sunny was famous for his long pauses and was a long pause
[4:29]at the end of lunch.
[4:30]And he said, I think the book you really want to write is about your friendship with
[4:35]Maxie.
[4:36]And he was right.
[4:37]He was totally right.
[4:38]That was the book I wanted to write.
[4:39]I also felt it was really important now to explore being friends with someone very
[4:47]different from you.
[4:48]I think we're so siloed.
[4:50]And even at a place like we were both prepsies, we were both yalies.
[4:54]And yet we considered ourselves totally different.
[4:58]Go to any high school and you'll see the theater kids at one table and the jocks at another.
[5:03]And I think we need to broaden our definition of who we can be friends with.
[5:08]And that's another reason I wanted to write this book.
[5:09]Wow.
[5:10]I love that.
[5:11]I love that.
[5:12]You had this one scene where you were in the cafeteria, not the cafeteria, one of the
[5:15]colleges.
[5:16]As I told you and said, we have so much in common.
[5:20]It was amazing to go through and I'm like, okay, there he is at Naples and there it's
[5:24]like, I can see walking into it.
[5:26]It's just amazing.
[5:27]So thank you for the memory lane factor of the spec for me personally.
[5:31]But you have one moment in one of the colleges dining halls where he's with a bunch of his
[5:35]friends and something happens like the elbow to you or something spilled and you kind
[5:41]of your groups were just like diametrically opposed me almost anyone like make eye contact
[5:45]contact with him because he was in that group and you were in this group.
[5:49]And you were like, let's just let it go and pretend that our friendship is not sort of
[5:52]cutting through these invisible barrier lines because we're with all these other people.
[5:58]It's exactly what happened.
[5:59]Our friendship at that point was so tenuous and so fragile.
[6:03]That's a better way to say it.
[6:04]And I was with this marvelous character, this incredibly, eccentrically dressed, another
[6:12]out gay kid at Yale who dressed like a young Roman and he had sandals and vambraces on
[6:19]and Maxie was with his pack of jocks and I was, I was worried on both fronts.
[6:24]I was didn't know what, what the jocks would make of us and what that would do to Maxie.
[6:29]And I knew my friend quite rightly loathed a lot of those jocks.
[6:33]So I just hoped we hadn't seen each other and we went to different parts of the dining
[6:38]hall crisis averted.
[6:41]It's sort of like sandy and danny and grease.
[6:44]You know, like the wrong, like they can't make eyes of each other because they're in
[6:47]the wrong groups.
[6:48]Anyway, obviously it's not really like that one.
[6:51]Oh my God.
[6:52]It's actually very, very much like that.
[6:53]I mean, it is a kind of platonic love story.
[6:57]Yeah.
[6:58]That's all friendships really are.
[6:59]It's all friendships.
[7:00]Our friendships are love stories.
[7:01]So yes, it has a lot to do with something like grease.
[7:04]We met under four circumstances in our case of secret society that we were thrown into.
[7:10]and otherwise our paths never would have crossed.
[7:14]I never would have known him and my life would be much less rich.
[7:17]I love reading friendship stories like this one because yes, it's about the friendship.
[7:22]But they also tell you so much about each person in the friendship.
[7:25]So I got to know you so much better through this book, which I loved.
[7:29]I was like, oh my gosh, it's amazing.
[7:32]One, I would like to see a picture of this hairstyle that you referenced from your
[7:35]yell days because I could barely picture it the way you described it and I just have to
[7:40]see that at some point.
[7:41]But also you really charted for us your own trajectory of being out and gay and what that
[7:47]was like and working through the AIDS crisis.
[7:50]And it wasn't that long ago.
[7:52]And yet the way you wrote it in the book, it's like a different era or something with
[7:56]so much like all this being illegal in some days and just so few people even being out
[8:01]at Yale at the time talk about like the crazy difference and how I bet people today
[8:07]like can't even imagine.
[8:08]It wasn't so long ago.
[8:09]It was just a few years ago.
[8:10]Yeah, it's very hard to describe to people what it was like in a short form and that's
[8:17]one of the other reasons I really wanted to write this book is to convey what it was
[8:22]like to be a young gay, outactive gay men in the early 80s when AIDS struck, when friends
[8:30]got sick and died of this mysterious thing, when no one knew how it was spread, what caused
[8:36]it, when there were all these crazy theories, when the homophobia, especially around
[8:42]AIDS, was so virulent that people like William F. Buckley were proposing that people with
[8:48]AIDS be tattooed, they were proposing literally concentration camps.
[8:53]And yet the rest of society knew nothing, didn't talk about it, didn't think about it,
[8:58]we had a president who didn't even say the word for, I don't even know how many years.
[9:04]And when I first became aware of it, it was under 50 gay men, a rare cancer.
[9:08]When during the time I write about in college, it was 1500 and we knew some of us that
[9:16]it was going to be a tsunami and it was like no one would listen to us.
[9:20]But I also really wanted to convey how long it was that we had that sort of damnically
[9:27]is hanging over us.
[9:28]But I really did think that there was an extremely good chance based on people that I had
[9:36]slept with, that I had AIDS, if I did, it would be almost certain that I would die.
[9:41]And that was really my entire 20s.
[9:45]And so I wanted to convey what that was like, but also, and this is really important,
[9:50]there's a writer who I love named Andrew Holloran, and I've been lucky enough to be his
[9:54]editor for the last 30 years.
[9:56]And I'm going to paraphrase him badly, but he said, the 80s were...
[10:00]like a marvelous dinner party if you were a gay man,
[10:03]but periodically, one of the guests was taken out and shot
[10:07]and we were all supposed to go on eating.
[10:10]And so that's the other part of it.
[10:13]We did, we went to movies, we saw our friends,
[10:15]we had jobs, it just people kept dying
[10:18]and we thought we were probably next.
[10:20]So that's the background of the book.
[10:23]And in some ways, I really wanted to pair it
[10:26]and I know they're very different with the fact
[10:28]that Maxi joined the Navy Seals
[10:30]and enlisted for six years as an officer in the Seals.
[10:33]And so we were both at war,
[10:37]just varying different kinds of wars.
[10:40]So interesting.
[10:41]I was actually surprised when he got into the Navy Seals
[10:43]in the book, the way you described.
[10:45]I was like, I don't think that's gonna work out for him,
[10:47]but then he did, and that was great.
[10:49]I was also really moved by when he started the school
[10:52]and he went to Elusura, Elusura.
[10:56]Yeah, and talked about how when he was in the Seals,
[10:58]one of the things they had to do was bomb the coral reefs
[11:01]to get at whatever their target was.
[11:03]And how he was like, I don't want to bomb reefs,
[11:05]I want to save reefs and I want to go down here
[11:07]and start a school and educate people
[11:09]and he was so at home in the water
[11:11]and just marveled at everything oceanic
[11:14]and decided to devote his life despite hurricanes
[11:18]and everything that happened to going down there
[11:21]and just doing it, I loved that.
[11:23]So tell me about that and like, what did you think
[11:25]at the beginning and netting him?
[11:27]He is so fast, so yeah, he Maxi told me
[11:31]that he got into the service, got into the Navy Seals
[11:33]because he wanted to be of service.
[11:35]He wanted to do something useful,
[11:37]but also he was a physical guy, he loved the water,
[11:40]he loved teamwork and sense of purpose and of challenges,
[11:45]but among the reasons that he got out in the book,
[11:48]I finally tells me why he did leave the Seals.
[11:52]Among the reasons was he said, I want to save reefs,
[11:55]I don't want to blow them up
[11:56]and he's become this awesome eco warrior,
[11:59]he founded an amazing school to help educate kids
[12:02]and really make them scientists.
[12:05]When the students are there,
[12:07]they're not studying science, they're doing science
[12:11]and it's so exciting.
[12:12]And it's just a fun place too.
[12:14]And I hope in this book that there's a lot
[12:16]of poignant moments because it's chronicles 40 years
[12:19]and I wanted to put it all down,
[12:21]but we've had a lot of fun over the years.
[12:24]That is one of the most fun human beings I know
[12:26]and I'm tend to be, I'm like a Yuzibi,
[12:28]I'm like so happy curled up on a sofa with a book.
[12:33]We're what I used to refer to as indoor kids.
[12:37]But Maxie brings me out of my shell
[12:39]and he's that kind of chaos element
[12:42]that some of us have in our lives with our friends,
[12:45]the one who makes us laugh and gets us to do things
[12:47]we wouldn't otherwise have done.
[12:49]I love that.
[12:50]I know even when I'm in LA people are like,
[12:51]do you want to go on a hike?
[12:53]No, I want to just walk up and down my sidewalk.
[12:55]If you would like to walk up and down my sidewalk,
[12:57]we can call it a hike because it's steep, but no.
[13:01]Yeah, no.
[13:02]Another thing that was really interesting
[13:04]is how you describe your both of your relationships,
[13:06]your longer term relationships over time
[13:08]and the ups and downs and starts and stops
[13:11]of his own relationship and your relationship
[13:13]and his having kids and you're not having kids
[13:15]and how those sort of all kept weaving through
[13:17]as like an undercurrent of all of your,
[13:19]both of your stories, Pam and Maxie's relationship.
[13:23]I don't know.
[13:24]I kind of wanted to watch a movie just of that
[13:25]and like get a little deeper in what was going on there.
[13:29]So tell me about your sort of cool flowing relationships.
[13:33]That's one of the other joys of a 40 year friendship
[13:36]is that if you're lucky, your friends find wonderful people
[13:41]with whom they want to spend their lives
[13:43]and if you're really, really lucky, you do too.
[13:46]And so I wanted to tell the story of how I met
[13:49]my husband David in a bar in Hong Kong at a time when
[13:52]the penalty for homosexuality in Hong Kong
[13:54]was life in prison, how Maxie was lucky enough to meet Pam
[13:59]in a dive bar when he was, it was pure
[14:03]an officer in a gentleman kind of situation,
[14:07]but she really surprised him
[14:08]because she wasn't at all who he first assumed she was.
[14:12]And the ups and downs of both of our relationships
[14:16]over 40, almost 40 years.
[14:19]And it was a really fun thing to write
[14:24]but really meaningful to me too.
[14:27]And the final dedication in the book is of course
[14:30]to David and to Pam for putting up with us
[14:33]for all years of years.
[14:35]How is he going on tour with you?
[14:37]I haven't looked like is there a, are there appearances?
[14:40]Did I miss them already?
[14:41]I'm sorry.
[14:42]No, you haven't missed anything.
[14:43]And Maxie and I on pub date are going on the road.
[14:45]We're doing an event, big event at Barnes and Noble
[14:48]on pub date, which is the 22nd,
[14:51]the day before actually I'm doing a thing at RJ Julia.
[14:54]And then Maxie and I are going on a road trip to Florida
[14:57]together and doing a couple other events.
[15:00]And there's one especially important character
[15:03]in the book, the sky David Sanger.
[15:06]Yes.
[15:06]And he's the bridge between us.
[15:08]He's a lot of me and a lot of Maxie
[15:11]and incredibly smart accomplished,
[15:14]and incredibly curious, wonderful human being.
[15:16]And when Maxie and I would fall out of touch,
[15:18]he'd always bring us back together.
[15:20]And so Sanger is hitting the road with us as well.
[15:23]Oh my gosh.
[15:24]All right.
[15:25]I have to get to us.
[15:25]It's a college road trip.
[15:26]That is so cool.
[15:27]I even loved the when Sanger convinced you
[15:30]to just like drop everything and take two days off
[15:32]of work and go down to visit.
[15:34]Maxie when he was having a tough time
[15:36]and you wanted to see the school.
[15:38]And I could feel you being like,
[15:39]well, I can't take a fork and did it on.
[15:40]You just went.
[15:41]And I feel like that's seen in particular
[15:43]for anybody who's working hard
[15:45]and is reluctant to sort of take them off.
[15:47]It's just a reminder.
[15:48]Like if you don't take those trips when they come
[15:51]and like land at your feet,
[15:52]look at all the stuff you could miss
[15:54]and look at how those define those key moments of your life
[15:59]if you just do them.
[16:00]It was a turning point.
[16:01]And I had all these excuses.
[16:02]I can't afford it.
[16:03]Sanger said frequent flyer miles.
[16:05]I can't wait the time.
[16:06]Sanger said we'll go for 48 hours
[16:09]and showing up for your friends.
[16:12]This book is a celebration of friendship.
[16:15]Yes.
[16:16]And there's nothing more important than showing up.
[16:18]And it doesn't matter how many years you've let go by.
[16:20]It's never a bad time to pick up a phone
[16:23]or send a text or an email and just say,
[16:26]hey, you're an important person in my life.
[16:28]I'm thinking about you.
[16:29]I'm checking in.
[16:30]I want to see how you're doing.
[16:31]And if I hadn't gone on that trip with singer,
[16:35]I don't know if our friendship would have survived.
[16:40]We would have been cordial
[16:41]if we'd seen each other.
[16:42]But that was the refresher, the jolt, the tonic we needed.
[16:47]And that was also a time when we started getting much
[16:50]realer with each other, where we really confided things
[16:56]about our lives that we don't casually share,
[16:59]all of which I put in the book.
[17:02]And one thing which is one of the many remarkable things
[17:05]about Maxi is when I embarked on this project,
[17:08]I said, I'm going to show you the manuscript.
[17:10]Our friendship is more important than any book.
[17:12]You have carte blanche to take out anything you don't like.
[17:15]Just tell me what you don't like, out it goes.
[17:18]He read the book and he said, don't take out a word.
[17:20]Aw, that's so nice.
[17:23]That is so nice.
[17:24]So one of the other things we bonded about
[17:27]and it's something that I hope strikes people deeply
[17:32]is we both were in the situation in college
[17:36]of really not knowing what we wanted to do with our lives
[17:40]and being scared and anxious and feeling impostered syndrome.
[17:43]And I know you have, you have rapping with me.
[17:46]Did you mean you and me or you and him?
[17:48]I hate that one.
[17:50]Are you talking about the loved book ends, by the way?
[17:52]That was so nice.
[17:53]I know my gosh.
[17:54]Can you even know that I was so touched, thank you.
[17:56]Thank you so much.
[17:57]You talk about that issue, that what am I going to do
[18:00]with my life impostered syndrome?
[18:02]And we really bonded over that fear of disappointing
[18:07]others and disappointing ourselves.
[18:10]And of wasting the enormous privileges we've been given,
[18:15]going to Yale.
[18:16]Oh my goodness.
[18:17]I mean, how incredible is that?
[18:19]And yet that fear that what is this opportunity
[18:22]that so many people would do anything for,
[18:25]what if we wasted it?
[18:26]What if, and I think it's natural for young people to feel that,
[18:31]but it's also a feeling that can come back at 20, 30, 40, 50.
[18:36]Yep.
[18:37]When we meet up at 60, this is not a spoiler.
[18:39]This is just a description.
[18:41]We actually are just so darn glad to be breathing,
[18:45]to be friends and to have marvelous people in our lives
[18:49]that I look back on that kid who was so worried about what
[18:53]he was going to do with his life and Maxie does the same.
[18:55]And we're like, we're still here.
[18:59]And that's enough, that's great.
[19:01]Whenever anyone asks me one of those questions all the time,
[19:03]like, what do you wish you'd told your younger self
[19:06]or whatever?
[19:06]I always say like, this will all make sense later.
[19:09]And it's one thing to say like,
[19:11]oh, I didn't know what I wanted to do before too.
[19:12]But then when you read your book and you go through it,
[19:16]it's like, you don't see the end.
[19:18]Like, you know it cause I, you know who's book you're reading.
[19:21]But like, it wouldn't be obvious.
[19:23]And there are all these twists and turns
[19:25]and who knows why life goes the way it does.
[19:27]But it's just all these decisions.
[19:29]And they're all leading you somewhere,
[19:31]even if they don't make any sense.
[19:33]Yeah.
[19:34]Like your trip to Hong Kong.
[19:35]It's like, what?
[19:36]And then it really wanted to put it all out there,
[19:41]that the story of a 40 year friendship
[19:44]has a lot of twists and turns in it.
[19:46]It's going to.
[19:47]And it is very deeply informed by the people we lost
[19:50]along the way.
[19:51]Yes, friends of mine to AIDS, friends of mine
[19:54]to accidents, friends who died in other terrible ways,
[19:58]friends of maxies in the military.
[20:00]who were killed in action. And so my mom, I write about again, my mother's death from
[20:05]pancreatic cancer, which I wrote about in the end of your life book club. And we lost one of
[20:10]the members of our secret society who was very dear to us and extraordinary person. So I hope
[20:18]the book really is imbued with a sense of gratitude. And again, I hope that it will
[20:26]help other people who are by definition still here. Because if you're reading book, you're still
[20:32]here. Look at their lives, maybe through up through a similar lens if they are lucky enough to do so.
[20:39]One of the things as you know, I also write about in the book is we both dealt with various illnesses.
[20:45]Yes. But we're still here. And then help each other through it. And part of the
[20:51]the way that Maxi helped me get through things is he never lets me take myself too seriously.
[20:56]That was a particularly moving and poignant piece of the whole story. Oh my gosh.
[21:02]When you sat down with Sunny and he said, this is really the story that you wanted to write,
[21:06]now that you've written it. What did you learn about yourself as you did it? What do you think?
[21:11]What was really driving it? Why did you want to write the story so much? Like when you got to
[21:15]the end, was there a moment when you were like, oh, I had to work through blah, blah, blah,
[21:21]you know, because I needed to remember blah, blah, blah, or like was there anything like that
[21:25]at the end? There were a couple of real revelations. One was this overarching theme,
[21:32]which is, as I mentioned when we started talking, wow, I knew Maxi was prejudiced against me,
[21:39]but I was way more prejudiced against him. And I really wanted to examine the way that I made
[21:47]snap judgments about people. I decided whether they could or couldn't be a friend based on
[21:54]something as silly as the fact that they were a sports hero. And assumptions I made over the course
[22:00]of our friendship, Maxi would later, as you know, from the book, share with me a journal that he kept
[22:08]where he chronicled the year we met. I know everything that happened to him, I was obviously a
[22:14]small part of it, but there it was. And it was so fascinating. He shared it with me. And I learned
[22:21]that things that I remembered, he remembered too and had a totally different view of. And I had
[22:30]gotten those wrong as well. So it really, I started in the epigraph with several quotes, but one
[22:38]is from Amor Tolls from a gentleman in Moscow, which is a book I dearly love, where he talks about
[22:45]you really don't know a person until you've seen them in every different kind of situation.
[22:51]The people really surprise you. And at the end of writing this book, I thought Maxi really surprised
[23:00]me and I really surprised myself. One other thing I want to mention because it's just funny
[23:06]is I also wanted to chronicle a friendship, totally platonic between a gay man and a straight man
[23:14]over 40 years. And when I first showed it to one of my dearest friends and first readers,
[23:22]she roared with laughter because she said you've actually written something very similar to what
[23:27]it's like to be a straight woman and have a friendship with a straight man that is entirely platonic.
[23:34]Interesting. And so I thought that was funny. I hadn't, I hadn't expected her to say that.
[23:39]Like when you were like, he's just as girl crazy as I am boy crazy. I get it.
[23:43]Yeah, exactly. That was Maxi's great revelation about it. I'm girl crazy. He's boy crazy.
[23:50]I get it. I got it. It was fun to revisit various incidents, funny incidents throughout our lives.
[23:57]But I also felt a responsibility to tell this story because it was a story 40 years in the making.
[24:04]That's awesome. So being an editor at McMillan and then having your book published by Kenoff,
[24:09]so for people who don't know too much about publishing houses, just different sides of the
[24:15]field or whatever you want to say. What was it like working with? And obviously you have for your
[24:20]other books, but a publisher that's not yours and then not being the editor of your own work
[24:25]when you're so used to editing other people's work. I love it. I love just giving up control.
[24:32]McMillan's a great publisher. Kenoff's a great publisher. And when I'm in writer mode,
[24:36]I'm just a writer. That's what I'm doing. I'm busy being a writer. Jordan Pavlin who took over the
[24:43]book has fabulous lists and impeccable taste. And so I was able to put myself in her superb hands.
[24:52]I love not wearing my editor hat. And in fact, when I'm reading books for pleasure, I don't
[24:57]edit them in my mind. I just read them. So I'm very able to go from one to the other. It's also
[25:06]fun to see how a book hits different people and what kind of life it takes on in the world.
[25:11]You've had that experience. Yes. Well, I'm excited for readers to start reading this and to hear
[25:18]what their response is and what you learn about them. And you, I don't know. It's going to be
[25:22]really fun. Thank you. And one thing I wanted to mention too, given the marvelous title of your
[25:26]podcast that's given birth to so many things that you have done is there's a lot of comedy in the
[25:33]book over the fact that Maxi not only has four kids, Maxi and Pam, but is running a school full of
[25:42]kids. And I was once quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying, my husband and I are the last
[25:48]gay men in America who do not want children. Yes, that was great. And I want to do what to do with
[25:54]small children. He is for and I can never remember their names. I know I was going to say that was
[25:59]a little terribly about that. And I adore his kids. They're awesome human beings. Each one different,
[26:05]each one extraordinary. So it's been really fun getting to know them too. But we're very different
[26:10]people. We're still so different. And that's what that makes our friendship. One of the things
[26:16]so fun. And so again, the thing, I hope people enjoy the book. I hope it causes them to celebrate
[26:22]their own friendships, usual and unusual. But I also really hope it gets them to look around and say,
[26:27]who could I be friends with and why shouldn't we be friends? Totally. I think this would be a good
[26:32]writing exercise for those aspiring writers out there who are debating what to write today
[26:37]that maybe they could try doing a short essay on a friend who's not a best friend,
[26:42]but someone that's had a lot of meaning in their lives for one reason or another and just
[26:46]try writing like a thousand words on that. I don't know. I'm just giving random people assignments.
[26:51]But there's someone out there who's going to do it. So if you do it, send it to me. Send it to
[26:55]Will and me and we'll take a look. Anyway, well, thank you so much. Thanks for the great book. I
[27:01]feel like it's just so nice. I feel like reading someone's memoir, especially yours. It's just like
[27:06]being able to, I don't know, this little peek into the soul. It's so nice. It just loved it.
[27:10]Thank you so much, Nivi. Thanks for having me on and thanks for all you're doing for
[27:14]readers and writers. Thank you. You too. Bye. Bye.
[27:21]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to
[27:25]follow me on Instagram at zibbowens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Also sign
[27:30]up for my newsletter at zibbowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors
[27:35]on zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact, texture sound for the sound
[27:40]editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and