Madelaine Lucas, THIRST FOR SALT
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[1:03]Madeline Lucas is the author of Thirst For Salt, An novel.
[1:06]She's also a senior editor of a noon, born in 1990.
[1:10]She was raised in Melbourne and Sydney as the daughter of a visual artist and a rock
[1:13]and roll musician.
[1:15]In 2015, she moved to New York to complete her MFA in fiction at Columbia University,
[1:19]where she now teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs.
[1:23]And I can't believe she was born in 1990, that seems like so recent.
[1:26]But anyway, her essays and interviews have appeared in publications such as The Paris
[1:30]to Read Daily, The Believer, Lit Hub, Catapult, The Lifted Brow, and Mean Gen, and
[1:35]her fiction has been awarded the Elizabeth Jolly Prize and the Overland Victoria University
[1:39]of Emerging Writers Prize.
[1:41]She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog, Pancho.
[1:44]Madeline recently did an event at Zippy's Bookshop, and you can see pictures of that
[1:47]on my Instagram at Zippy's Bookshop.
[1:50]By the way, if you want to go to other Zippy's Bookshop events, just go to zippy'sbookshop.com
[1:54]slash upcoming dash events.
[1:57]Welcome, Madeline.
[1:58]Thank you so much for coming on mom's no time to read books to discuss thirst for salt
[2:02]and novel.
[2:03]Thank you so much for having me.
[2:05]I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
[2:07]Oh, V2.
[2:08]Start off, please, by telling listener what thirst for salt is about.
[2:12]So first, for salt is the story of a formative love affair, a woman had when she was
[2:17]24 with a man 18 years, her senior, called Jude, and a small fictional Australian coastal town
[2:24]called Seyla's Beach.
[2:25]They meet when she's on holiday with her mother and feeling a drift after finishing university.
[2:30]And quickly, she finds herself pulled to the simple, seductive rhythms of this everyday
[2:35]life.
[2:36]As their relationship deepens, she believes that life with Jude at Seyla's Beach might
[2:41]offer her the stability she's been lacking after growing up as the daughter of two
[2:45]drifters, a loving but impulsive mother and an itinerant, largely absent father.
[2:50]But the arrival of Maeve, a woman from Jude's past threatens to rock then you found
[2:55]into the sea.
[2:56]Now looking back on their time together years later, as questions about family and home
[3:00]have gained new urgency, she has to reckon with the choices she made that year at Seyla's
[3:05]Beach and how they shaped what she imagines for her life in the future.
[3:09]Amazing.
[3:10]Thank you for that.
[3:11]I loved, by the way, how at first she was thinking 24 and 42 how the numbers were reversed
[3:17]of each other when she thought about Jude's age, how's that's the reader remember
[3:23]how well they are too so they put that.
[3:25]This book is so beautifully written, it's obviously so literary and you did things stylistically
[3:31]in here which sort of further cement that like the lack of quotation marks and even some
[3:36]of the typeset flourishes that you use.
[3:39]Like tell me about that packaging part of it and the form that you decided to take for
[3:44]the story.
[3:45]Yeah, so I was really excited that, you know, my publisher supported some of those slightly
[3:50]more unconventional choices.
[3:52]I think for me, what I really wanted to replicate on the page was the experience of really
[3:57]being inside someone's mind and their memories and so I guess I thought about it if there
[4:03]was to be quotation marks, I would sort of see one at the start of the novel and one
[4:07]at the end because in my mind, the narrator is kind of recounting or telling you the
[4:13]whole story, not necessarily spoken out loud, but I don't think of the dialogue I suppose
[4:18]as being a direct quotation more of her memory of things that was said.
[4:23]And I think stylistically, I just liked the way it looked as well, it's a little cleaner
[4:27]on the page and I know it can be a little alienating to some readers but then I remember
[4:32]Sally Rooney doesn't use quotation marks and she gets away with it so maybe I can too.
[4:40]And tell me, how did you come up with this character, Jude and their whole relationship
[4:45]and what was it that excited you about writing about this over time and also did you consider
[4:52]writing it not looking back from later but having it just happen and then fast forwarding
[4:58]at the end?
[4:59]Yeah.
[5:00]That was the suggestion that I got pretty early on when I was trying out early versions
[5:05]of this novel in workshop, it had a very different form back then.
[5:09]I was thinking of it more as collected short stories rather than a novel structure and a
[5:14]few people suggested when they read the original draft, you know, why don't you just write
[5:18]the story about summer?
[5:20]But for me, the narrative distance was always super important to the telling of the story.
[5:25]I think as a writer and as a person, I'm just much more at home in the past tense.
[5:30]And you know, one of the reasons I think I write in the first place is because I don't
[5:34]really understand how I feel about something in the heat of the moment.
[5:37]It's only through looking back and through writing it that I feel like I can kind of untangle
[5:42]some of those feelings or emotions.
[5:44]And I also think that especially in terms of relationships, we don't really know necessarily
[5:49]how formative they're going to be until afterwards.
[5:52]And I really wanted to see what it would be like for this narrator to look back on that
[5:56]experience that she had when she was, you know, in her middle twenties, now being closer
[6:01]to Jude's age and how her perspective on that dynamic would have changed.
[6:05]And I also think that, you know, one of the feelings that I really wanted to create in
[6:09]the novel was this sense of longing, both for a person and for a place and a time in
[6:15]your life that's no longer accessible.
[6:17]And if it was told in the present tense, you wouldn't have that kind of distance.
[6:20]Hmm.
[6:21]I like it.
[6:23]Good choice then.
[6:24]Thank you.
[6:25]I don't even know what made me ask that.
[6:28]I love hearing about why people make all the choices that they do because there's always
[6:31]a reason.
[6:32]How involved were you in the cover and like because this cover is so perfect for this
[6:36]book.
[6:37]Thank you.
[6:38]I love the cover so much.
[6:40]It was Beth's title at Tim House that came up with the design.
[6:43]It took a couple of rounds for us to get there, but I'm so happy with how we ended up.
[6:47]And I think, you know, my editor said to me early on in the process, I don't think any
[6:52]author is ever ready to see their cover, no matter whether it's good or they're bad or
[6:57]they love it or they hate it or however they come to feel about it.
[7:00]And I think she's right because it's really the fast moment that you see your book as
[7:05]like a product that exists outside of your vision for it and a book cover has all sorts
[7:10]of different aims.
[7:12]But I'm so happy with where it ended up.
[7:14]And I love this idea of like a woman being alone in the water because that's such a big
[7:18]thing for novel too.
[7:19]Totally.
[7:20]Yes.
[7:21]It's amazing.
[7:22]What do we think about relationships that take place across big age gaps?
[7:26]I mean, this is something, you know, a modern trope that is used all the time, not all
[7:32]the time.
[7:34]And my grandfather's second wife was younger than my mom.
[7:38]So I'm, you know, there are lots of relationships across time.
[7:42]And what do you think some of the pitfalls or some of the, I don't know, what should
[7:47]we take away from their relationship about sort of big gaps?
[7:52]Yeah.
[7:53]I suppose one of the things I wanted to do in the novel is kind of resist coming out
[7:58]as for or against, or this is problematic or it's not problematic.
[8:02]And just kind of weighed into some of those complications that can happen when there's
[8:06]a gap between ages.
[8:08]And I think you're right.
[8:09]I think it is like a familiar trope or a cliche.
[8:12]And that's part of the reason I wanted to investigate it because I think, you know, cliche
[8:16]exists for a reason.
[8:18]These are the patterns that happen.
[8:20]But I felt like I could bring maybe a little bit more nuance to this relationship than
[8:24]I'd seen portrayed otherwise.
[8:26]I think particularly in pop culture, if we look at the age gap between a young woman
[8:31]and an older man, it's often told from his perspective, right?
[8:34]And it's his desire for her that drives the narrative.
[8:38]And so for me, I think the question of like, what is this young woman looking for in
[8:43]Jude in this older man?
[8:45]That was kind of more interesting to me.
[8:47]And yeah, I just wanted to show the ways that she can also have agency that she might
[8:51]also be teaching things to him or am I doing him of things that he's forgotten at that
[8:57]point in her life.
[8:58]So yeah, I think in a lot of ways I just kind of wanted to wait in and ask those questions
[9:02]rather than answer them.
[9:04]Wait in is a good, you know, analogy for this book, too.
[9:07]Yes, no pun intended.
[9:08]Yeah.
[9:09]Would you mind if I read a passage or two that I thought were like really beautiful?
[9:13]These, of course, I would love that.
[9:16]So one is how you describe somebody because, I don't know, I find I've tried to write
[9:21]fiction.
[9:22]I find it like impossible to describe something that I have in my head and like get it
[9:25]down on the page.
[9:26]And I felt like you did such a good job.
[9:27]And then just across the page you write about a description, which also was beautiful.
[9:31]So anyway, just two paragraphs.
[9:33]First you wrote, but how old exactly?
[9:35]I'd never been a good guesser of ages and I could no longer easily recall the way I saw
[9:39]him as a stranger.
[9:40]His face would become more familiar to me than my own fathers.
[9:43]The crease between his brows that reminded me of a cowboy in an old movie.
[9:48]Bump on the bridge of his nose where it might once have been broken.
[9:51]Though that day as he stood in front of me, wet hair wilting the collar of his shirt,
[9:55]patch of damp above his breast pocket, like an ink stain, I couldn't guess how.
[10:00]a drunken fall, a fistfight, some feet of athletics long ago.
[10:03]He was handsome, though not in the way I imagined
[10:05]he would have been when he was younger.
[10:07]Burned out, look around the eyes, deep set and slate that day,
[10:10]though I'd learned in time that they were changeable,
[10:12]like moods, like weather.
[10:15]No, that was so good.
[10:16]Thank you.
[10:17]Then just one more, one more passage about the beach.
[10:20]Bondi Beach was crowded with bodies,
[10:23]browning in the sun, tourists staying where the waves
[10:26]were waist high, never going out too deep,
[10:28]afraid of what might lurk beneath the dark and choppy water.
[10:31]Sand, hot, and grainy, and yellow,
[10:34]burned your feet to walk across it.
[10:36]It was not like sailors, where bush grew around the fringes
[10:39]of the shore, making it feel sheltered, secluded.
[10:42]Down south, the sand was soft and white as baker sugar,
[10:46]and you could scoop up handfuls of sea water,
[10:48]cool it in your cupped palms, and watch it run clear
[10:51]as it slipped through your fingers.
[10:53]Oh, so good.
[10:55]You read that so beautifully, thank you.
[10:58]Oh, it is so beautifully written.
[11:01]It's so evocative.
[11:02]I feel like every, the way you write, it's calming.
[11:07]There's something about the cadence of it
[11:09]that makes me feel calmer.
[11:13]And just you're slowly immersing us into your scenes
[11:18]and places, and just these little comparisons you draw,
[11:23]or the way you do it since suddenly really brings us
[11:27]there without like, you being too overt about it.
[11:30]I don't know, it's a skill.
[11:31]Thank you, it wasn't easy.
[11:34]It definitely took a lot of time and a lot of revision
[11:38]of trying to get that balance, right?
[11:40]Trying to allow the pros to kind of feel immersive,
[11:43]but also not dragging, or too indulgent,
[11:45]either with description.
[11:47]Yeah, something I was thinking about,
[11:48]a lot of the novel is, you know, the idea of desire,
[11:51]and I kind of wanted to capture this on one hand
[11:54]and be a sense of desire for like the life not lived,
[11:57]because I think that's so much of a part of who we are too,
[12:00]like the choices that we don't make in our lives,
[12:02]and they can be just as formative as the choices we do make.
[12:05]But then on the other hand,
[12:06]kind of wanting to snap into these moments
[12:09]that would feel really visceral and alive and present.
[12:11]And part of the way, I, you know,
[12:14]tried to do that was through the descriptions
[12:16]of the landscape to just try and bring the reader
[12:18]into those scenes and into that place.
[12:21]I love it.
[12:22]I would like to go there.
[12:24]He made it up.
[12:26]Well, it is based on a real town.
[12:28]A lot of say, was beach is drawn from the South Coast area
[12:31]of New South Wales, the Java Bay region,
[12:33]and it is that gorgeous.
[12:34]You know, the sand is white, the water is turquoise,
[12:37]and the best places do feel really secluded and private
[12:42]and empty.
[12:43]It's less and less that way now,
[12:44]which is partly why I gave the town a fictional name.
[12:47]It gave me a bit more flexibility.
[12:49]The specific feature had in mind,
[12:51]Times Beach is now a very kind of popular,
[12:54]wealthy tourist destination,
[12:56]and it's changed a lot from how I remember it
[12:58]from when I was a child.
[12:59]I literally yesterday, Tracy Cox,
[13:01]who hosts one of our shows,
[13:03]and I used to host a show with her.
[13:05]Anyway, she posted a place that sounds a lot
[13:07]like what you were describing.
[13:09]She said where she was in the name.
[13:11]I literally wrote back and I was like,
[13:12]where are you?
[13:13]I'm getting on a plane.
[13:14]I have to be where you are.
[13:16]It is the most gorgeous place.
[13:18]So, you know, Australia is a little too far to hop.
[13:21]Yeah.
[13:21]I do have had them.
[13:23]It sounded just amazing.
[13:24]I really liked the depiction of what is your main character's name?
[13:28]I'm sorry, I always forget names.
[13:30]She is actually anonymous.
[13:32]So that's great.
[13:33]Good.
[13:34]Great, thank you for sparing me that.
[13:36]Well, I like the anonymous character's relationship
[13:39]with her mom and how like her de facto
[13:42]and the closeness to her mom
[13:44]and the things that they understand about each other
[13:47]and don't and all of that.
[13:48]Tell me about that relationship
[13:49]and how it was writing that and just all about that.
[13:53]Yeah, I'm so glad that came through
[13:55]because even though, you know,
[13:57]there is this kind of central love affair
[13:59]at the core of the novel,
[14:00]I really did want it to grapple with many different kinds
[14:03]of love and the narrator's relationship with her mother
[14:07]is one of the most important versions of that.
[14:10]And, you know, in a lot of ways,
[14:12]I think of the novel as being a kind of very specific
[14:15]kind of female coming of age story.
[14:18]And I think so much of coming of age as a young woman
[14:21]and the choices you make are really influenced
[14:23]by the choices you saw your mother make,
[14:26]whether you're trying to choose actively against them
[14:28]or you're trying to emulate them.
[14:31]I don't know, I just feel like it's always kind of
[14:33]in conversation with your mother and her life,
[14:35]especially when it comes to her relationships with men
[14:38]or, you know, her decision to have children
[14:42]and things like that.
[14:43]So yeah, I did in a lot of ways see the narrator's relationship
[14:47]with her mom in some ways be more central
[14:50]to her relationship with Jude.
[14:52]And part of that as well is that the narrator was raised
[14:56]until she was 12 as the only child of a single mother.
[14:59]And I think that also affects the dynamic.
[15:02]You end up taking on different roles for each other.
[15:05]And part of that is based on my experience too,
[15:07]growing up for many years, you know,
[15:09]as the daughter of a single mother
[15:11]and how you form a kind of special closeness, I think.
[15:15]And then you had a sibling or what happened then?
[15:18]Yes, two younger half brothers.
[15:20]Interesting.
[15:22]My narrator has one younger half brother.
[15:24]I couldn't quite manage to.
[15:25]I didn't have space for that many characters.
[15:29]I read in your bio, you have a rock and roll musician father.
[15:33]That's right.
[15:33]Yeah.
[15:34]And what was that like?
[15:35]Or were they divorced?
[15:36]Is that why you were thinking?
[15:37]How did a single mom work?
[15:38]Yeah, my parents like my narrator separated
[15:40]when I was very young and we moved around a lot
[15:43]when I was growing up.
[15:44]So a lot of this novel is not autobiographical at all,
[15:48]but there are elements drawn from my own childhood,
[15:50]especially what it was like to sort of grow up with creative
[15:53]somewhat transient parents.
[15:55]But my dad is great.
[15:56]He's actually, you know, the opposite
[15:59]of a cliche rock and roll dad.
[16:01]He was very hands on when I was growing up.
[16:04]He's an amazing cook.
[16:05]He cooks like an English grandmother.
[16:07]And I think growing up the way that I did definitely
[16:10]taught me that people are always full of, you know,
[16:12]more complexity than you would imagine.
[16:14]Wait, I've never heard anybody to be described
[16:17]as cooking like an English grandmother.
[16:19]What does that even mean?
[16:20]What does a English grandmother cook like?
[16:22]I'm like thinking porridge or something when you say that.
[16:24]You know, like Sunday, roasts,
[16:27]he breaks red, you know, upside down cakes.
[16:31]Kind of classic old school.
[16:32]Wow.
[16:33]Yeah.
[16:35]Very traditional.
[16:36]He was raised by his English grandmother.
[16:38]So I think a lot of that trickle down.
[16:40]Got it.
[16:42]And what kind of musician are you musical too?
[16:45]Yeah, for most of my early 20s,
[16:48]before I started focusing on writing,
[16:50]I was in a band with my now husband.
[16:53]We played a lot in Sydney.
[16:54]And that was really my main focus.
[16:56]My dad is a punk rock musician.
[16:59]My music was very different.
[17:00]It was much more folk country singer songwriter.
[17:04]And I love playing music at such a big part of who I am.
[17:09]But I think that at a certain point in my mid 20s,
[17:13]when I was kind of having a similar reckoning
[17:15]to my narrator of how am I supposed to survive
[17:17]in the world outside for institutions of family or university.
[17:21]I realized that I wanted still a creative life,
[17:24]but maybe one was just a touch more stability
[17:27]than I had grown up with.
[17:28]And so my incredible solution to that was to go
[17:31]and get an anything creative writing,
[17:33]which now seems hilarious to me that that was my,
[17:35]you know, stable pathway.
[17:38]That's really funny.
[17:40]Yeah.
[17:41]I'd like stability.
[17:42]I think I'm going to be a writer.
[17:44]Yeah.
[17:44]I think it's a real testament to the way that I grew up
[17:47]that that seemed like the sense of the choice.
[17:49]Yeah.
[17:50]Interesting.
[17:51]That's awesome.
[17:52]You know, there are so many authors
[17:54]who have the music gene, you know,
[17:58]writing is such a creative act in and of itself.
[18:00]Right.
[18:01]It is art that writers create.
[18:02]It's just another form of it.
[18:04]So I've been finding lots of cross sections
[18:07]that are overlapped.
[18:09]I remember a long time ago my former mother-in-law said,
[18:12]well, you don't just write.
[18:13]You must do something else.
[18:14]It's creative.
[18:15]And I was like, no, I can't paint.
[18:16]I can't draw.
[18:17]And she's like, there must be something.
[18:18]And I was like, well, I love photography.
[18:20]And she's like, well, there you go.
[18:21]And like, there's usually something else
[18:24]when that part of your brain is that, you know?
[18:26]Yeah, I think so.
[18:27]I also think it's healthy to have like more than one passion
[18:32]just so you can kind of bounce between the two
[18:34]because, I mean, as you would know,
[18:36]inevitably, with writing, you have these moments of frustration
[18:40]of writer's love.
[18:41]And I think it can just be really helpful
[18:43]to have something else that you do that.
[18:45]It's creative, but you can kind of maybe just enjoy
[18:48]for pleasure a little bit more.
[18:50]It doesn't feel as much like work.
[18:52]Were you the singer and the band?
[18:53]Yes, ah, didn't have ever anything?
[18:57]We have a couple of things lurking online on Bandcamp,
[19:00]but this was kind of in the pre-spotify days.
[19:02]So there isn't too much of a internet trail, really.
[19:06]Okay. What was your band called?
[19:07]Devotional.
[19:08]Oh, that's good.
[19:11]Yeah, it was very kind of Mazzie Star-esque.
[19:13]Well.
[19:14]Yeah.
[19:17]So you got an MFA for some stability.
[19:20]Then you started writing and tell me what it was like,
[19:23]sort of working on this novel
[19:25]and then even selling the novel.
[19:26]Mm-hmm.
[19:27]Yeah, I feel really lucky that a lot of, you know,
[19:30]working through the novel was done
[19:31]while I was a student at Columbia
[19:33]or afterwards kind of doing this teaching fellowship.
[19:36]So I did have that sense of, you know, stability or structure
[19:40]and also felt like I had time to make what I wanted to make
[19:44]and which I think is a really, you know, rare gift.
[19:48]So I kind of started working on it in honest in 2018
[19:52]after writing these stories for a little while
[19:54]that I was thinking would be connected.
[19:56]And then it was about two years of just walking on it
[19:59]on my own before.
[20:00]right, signed with my agent. We did some more revisions six months later. We sent it out. It's such a slow
[20:06]process publishing a book, but it made me glad that I didn't rush because it takes so long anyway.
[20:11]So I think there's kind of no point in rushing the pot that really in a lot of ways is the most
[20:16]enjoyable when you're just alone with the project and it's just yours.
[20:21]Nice. And did you start another project yet or are you done or where are you with more writing?
[20:28]Yeah, I have an idea for another novel, but I'm kind of just enjoying letting it pop late in the
[20:33]back of my mind right now. I really feel that so much of the writing is done when you're doing
[20:38]other things and it feels good to just start to be thinking about something new. I also love
[20:44]writing short fiction and I'm excited now. I'm kind of done with this novel and you know, I'm doing a
[20:49]lot of publicity stuff for it right now, but I'm looking forward to kind of playing with the short
[20:53]form again and returning to that after walking on, you know, something so long because so many
[20:58]years. Yeah, but you soon you'll be down to poetry. Yeah. Now we see why it's such an appealing
[21:05]floor. Yeah, it's like whittling it down slower and like I can accomplish this in an afternoon and
[21:11]then just publish it. There it is. Very rewarding. So what are some of the books that you love or
[21:18]have loved in the past or reading now? Yeah, it's such a great question and I feel like
[21:23]you know, inevitably like my mind because I don't have anyone asked me. I know I'm sorry.
[21:29]I always do that too, but I can tell you for sure some some favorites that I've returned to,
[21:34]you know, during the process of walking on dust assault. I loved the friend by secret newness.
[21:39]You know, we were talking about dogs just before this call got started. There's an important
[21:43]dog character that's the salt too. And I think it's such a beautiful book and even though it's
[21:48]its themes are quite heavy in terms of grief and suicide, I do find it really affirming and
[21:54]comforting to read because I think it it's a reminder that there's always something to be gained
[22:00]from love even if it inevitably risks. You know, there's a risk of loss. I also loved
[22:06]Marilyn Robinson's housekeeping. That was another big influence on first the salt, the way that
[22:11]she thinks about, you know, absence and transients and how that can shape the way someone inhabits
[22:17]a home. I also love this book called Territory of Light by You Hooked Tashima, which was a Japanese
[22:24]writer originally kind of publishing in the 70s, I think, but only recently translated into English.
[22:30]And it's such a beautiful book about a woman and her young daughter in the aftermath of a divorce
[22:35]and they're kind of very circumscribed day to day life in their apartment in Tokyo. And I actually
[22:40]read that in the pandemic and it was one of the few things that even though it was written for
[22:45]another time really connected with that experience of feeling really isolated in this like tiny little
[22:51]micro domestic walled and that really stayed with me as well. That's great. Who are some of your
[22:58]favorite singers, songwriters, bands, like what do you listen to when you're working when you're
[23:02]not working? Oh, that's such a great question. I think in a lot of ways I'm drawn to music that's
[23:08]similar to the books I read, like I love atmosphere, I love texture, confessional emotion,
[23:14]yep. You know, a lot of my favorites are kind of country folk musicians, so like, we've
[23:18]been to brilliant, stunning, mature, I mentioned Massey style before, again, very kind of
[23:23]immersive and textural. I feel like it's so clear, like the tone of your book. That's why I'm asking
[23:30]you more about the music piece too. Yeah, because it just feels so, I don't know, lyrical, I guess.
[23:37]Anyway, what advice would you give to aspiring authors?
[23:42]Yeah, I think kind of circling back to what I was saying before, I would just encourage aspiring
[23:48]writers to take the time that they need to make the thing that they want to make. One of the
[23:52]beautiful things about writing a novel is that, you know, you kind of live in this project for a
[23:57]long time. And I think, especially with a debut, one of the things that's so special about
[24:03]first novels is that they contain all of your growth during that period, both as a human and
[24:10]as a writer. And, you know, the rewards of publishing are really highly unpredictable.
[24:16]So I think that it's also just important to trust your own vision and try and remain focused on,
[24:24]you know, the story that is most important for you to tell, because I feel like there's no other
[24:27]reason to do it. Amazing. All right. Well, thank you so much, Madeline, and congratulations,
[24:35]and there's results. Thanks again for doing an event at Zibi's bookshop in Santa Monica.
[24:40]And I'm sorry, I wasn't there. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Hope our pencil crosses.
[24:45]Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for chatting with me. My pleasure. Thank you. All right. Take care.
[24:49]Bye. Bye-bye.
[24:52]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[24:55]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[25:00]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet
[25:05]lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for
[25:10]the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and