Katherine May, ENCHANTMENT: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age
[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]Mr. Nve is the author of Enchantment, Awakening Wonder in an anxious age.
[1:08]Catherine is an internationally bestselling author and podcaster living in Whittestable
[1:13]UK.
[1:14]Her hybrid memoir, Wintering the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, became a New York
[1:19]Times, Sunday Times, and dare-speakable bestseller, and was adapted as BBC Radio's
[1:25]BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week, and was shortlisted for the porch light and Barnes
[1:30]and Noble Book of the Year.
[1:32]I also interviewed Catherine about her book, Wintering, so you can go back and listen to
[1:35]our first episode.
[1:37]The electricity of every living thing, her memoir of a midlife autism diagnosis, was adapted
[1:42]as an audio drama by Audible.
[1:45]Catherine lives with her husband, son, two cats, and a dog.
[1:48]She loves walking, sea swimming, and pickling slightly unappealing things.
[1:52]Welcome, Catherine, thanks so much for coming back on Rob's End of Time to read books,
[1:56]to discuss Enchantment, Awakening Wonder in an anxious age.
[2:01]Oh, thanks for having me.
[2:02]I'm really glad to be back.
[2:03]Actually, this is perfect, because in Divi's Bookshop, we just started a new shelf.
[2:08]We had an opening in the Celebrate Who You Are section, and there were all these different
[2:12]identity categories, like, you know, Jewish, LGBTQ, and we had one left, and I was like,
[2:18]how about anxious?
[2:19]Because, like, that is how...
[2:20]Oh, yeah.
[2:21]That's how I identify.
[2:22]That's a whole identity.
[2:25]I know I'm not allowed to into via YouTube, but I'd love to know what it's like to have
[2:28]a book store.
[2:29]Does it feel really good?
[2:30]Oh, my gosh.
[2:31]It's the coolest thing ever.
[2:32]It's so fun.
[2:33]I like that.
[2:34]It's just to sit in there, and then people come over, and they're like, which books should
[2:37]I buy?
[2:38]And they show me a couple in a row, and I'm like, this is the most fun I've ever had.
[2:42]Somebody yesterday came over with four books.
[2:44]She's like, I can only buy two, and one of the books was a hundred years of solitude.
[2:48]I'm like, you have to read that.
[2:50]What are you talking about?
[2:51]I think it's every wrote is three, isn't it, just to have, like, basically, a house of books.
[2:56]Yes.
[2:57]And you get to roam through them and show them to people.
[2:59]I mean, that's just ideal.
[3:00]It is.
[3:01]It is amazing.
[3:02]I should have a residency where somebody gets to just sit there every day, like, an author
[3:07]and just come in and, like, hear the person to recommend books.
[3:09]I think I'll do.
[3:10]I think I have to figure out a way to start that.
[3:11]You can be our first fellow.
[3:13]You can be our first fellow.
[3:14]But you know what?
[3:16]We don't get emotional.
[3:17]We're just being there crying.
[3:18]We're really embarrassing.
[3:19]Well, actually, this is apropos of some of the things you write about in enchantment, which
[3:27]is that for a while, you were having trouble reading at all.
[3:31]And you brought this up in the beginning, and then it sort of courses through the book
[3:34]until it culminates in this beautiful chapter on your inability to read.
[3:38]So talk a little bit about that and what that experience is like, and are you over it at
[3:42]this point?
[3:43]Yeah.
[3:44]That felt like a dark confession when I was writing a book because I thought, God, can
[3:49]I actually say this to the literary people?
[3:52]What would they think of me?
[3:54]It does seem that that happened to a lot of people, like either during the pandemic or
[4:00]afterwards in the kind of aftermath, when the burnout began to set in.
[4:05]And I, yeah, I just found that I couldn't turn my attention to a book.
[4:10]It was just constantly glancing off.
[4:12]And at the same time, I'd lost that desire that I ordinarily feel towards pretty much
[4:18]any book.
[4:20]That sense that there were all these different things that I was desperate to read.
[4:26]And that had gone.
[4:27]And it felt like such a change to me and so empty and desolate.
[4:34]And I really had to take a step back and think very hard about how to reconnect with that
[4:42]desire rather than the habit because the habit had gone.
[4:45]And I did realize that I think over time, my reading had become more about obligation
[4:52]quite often rather than passion.
[4:56]You know, and I think that happens to a lot of us in the industry that we get loads of
[4:59]proofs sent through and we want to help everyone and we want to keep up with our industry.
[5:04]But we forget to do the reading that is like soul-drenching.
[5:09]And also the reading that's just fun and I desperately needed to get back to that.
[5:15]It was nice to see because you don't often see in a book when someone's like, I'm on Twitter,
[5:21]on Instagram, now I'm on Twitter, now I'm checking the news, here I am back at Instagram.
[5:25]And you feel vindicated because you are actually reading this in a book.
[5:29]So for the reader, it's like, oh, well, I get that I've been there.
[5:34]But look, I've triumphed over that enough to just read the words that are on this page.
[5:38]It's like a very meta experience.
[5:41]It's a way of come to venting the reader.
[5:42]It's like you're reading the book that I couldn't manage to read myself.
[5:46]Exactly.
[5:47]Hopefully it makes people feel good.
[5:49]But, you know, we talked about this just for a second, but I really feel you're writing,
[5:54]I mean, not that I feel this, this is like fact, but your writing is just so incredibly
[5:59]beautiful and poetic and each sentence and each analogy, everything, everything is just
[6:05]so carefully thought out or it seems carefully thought out and it makes you think about
[6:11]things in a new way, even like the scorched pages of the burnout and just the way you
[6:16]write about that in such a, you know, sensory way, which also is interesting because you
[6:22]talk in the book about your late in life autism diagnosis and sort of overstimulation
[6:27]of senses and balancing all that and yet in the writing, it's so sensory.
[6:33]So I don't know, maybe that's, I don't know, maybe they're related.
[6:38]Yeah, I mean, that could be true.
[6:40]I mean, I think there's a, there's a kind of ledger for me, you know, anything that
[6:45]I give out, it takes off somewhere else and I, I know mine is very sensitive compared
[6:50]to other people and like maybe, well, I say maybe I know this for a fact that all the
[6:56]best part of me flows into my writing and it often does leave very little left for other
[7:01]things to be honest like that's, I've spent myself on the writing.
[7:08]But then you also say in the book, this, this very sad, this very sad part where you
[7:13]were younger and you threw out all your writing, which like my heart here, let me
[7:19]can I read this little section?
[7:20]Yeah, yeah, yeah, they were saying, you first you talk about how people found a cute
[7:24]when you said a poet A, the adults would say, raise their eyebrows.
[7:28]I knew they were laughing at me, but it was friendly enough.
[7:30]Everyone enjoys a little.
[7:32]And then people start laughing at you and then you said, I'd like to pretend that this
[7:43]is the point I decided to nurture my ambitions and secret, biting my time until I could
[7:47]burst forth into a kinder world where people understood me.
[7:51]Instead, I stopped writing.
[7:52]I took all my beautiful notebooks filled with turquoise ink poems.
[7:56]Okay, I regret the turquoise now and bound them up with sticky tape wrapping it around
[8:00]like a spider and turning a fly.
[8:04]They were humiliating things and I wanted to make sure nobody else could read them.
[8:07]I kept them on my shelf like that for a while wondering if I'd be tempted to cut them
[8:11]open and take back my poems.
[8:13]I never did.
[8:15]After a while when my connection to them felt sufficiently severed, I threw them away, burying
[8:20]them deep in the kitchen bin underneath the greasy butter wrappers and vegetable peelings.
[8:26]I can still remember the relief I felt when the trash collectors came the following
[8:30]Monday and took them.
[8:31]They were iridruvably gone.
[8:33]I had pulled off the perfect murder, but they haunted me like revenants.
[8:38]Oh, it's just so good.
[8:41]Yeah, I mean, it's awful truth as well.
[8:47]I really thought I was done with writing and I really thought that I'd come to this very
[8:52]adult realization that writing was a silly thing to do.
[8:57]Because I wanted to ditch the humiliation, you know, in the way that lots of teenagers
[9:02]will, I don't know, maybe try and get rid of the evidence of their early crushes, you
[9:06]know, the early sort of embarrassing pop stars or something.
[9:09]I did that with my writing.
[9:10]I felt so ashamed of it and I felt like I'd carried on being a child for a little too
[9:16]long.
[9:17]I think that was that was the that captures it the best, I guess.
[9:21]But then of course, as I became an adult, I realized that all of my play lived there.
[9:26]was how I played and I'd lost play, I'd lost that, you know, that whole universe that
[9:32]I could step into to not just to rest, but to have that complex world woven around me.
[9:41]And I, and it was very hard to get it back then.
[9:44]It was very hard.
[9:46]I'm sorry.
[9:48]You even, you say later, you realize you said, but then if I wasn't a writer, what was
[9:55]that?
[9:56]It felt a lot like nothing.
[9:57]Oh, yeah.
[10:00]Well, and I was, you know, I was one of those people.
[10:02]I was the first generation of my family to go to university.
[10:06]And I didn't really understand what university was for.
[10:10]And so I'd never thought further than the actual degree course.
[10:14]You know, so when I left university, I literally didn't know what to do next.
[10:20]I had no desire towards anything except that I kept thinking,
[10:24]I'd like to write a book and I'll, no, we don't write books.
[10:28]That's not what you do. That's not, you know.
[10:29]And so I drifted around for ages and eventually I trained to be a teacher.
[10:36]And it was only when I finished my teacher training.
[10:39]I did like an on-the-job training where I was teaching while learning.
[10:44]But the person who assessed me said, OK, so what are you going to learn next?
[10:48]Because you're in the habit of it now.
[10:49]You've studied really hard for two years.
[10:52]What are you, what are you going to learn next?
[10:53]And that's what I took of writing course.
[10:56]Oh, my gosh.
[10:57]Oh, my gosh.
[10:58]Yeah, I remember some stuff just reading your beautiful words.
[11:00]But here was my last sentence I'll read.
[11:03]Writing kept coming back to me, punching its way out of whatever grave I dug it.
[11:08]It loomed insistent at my window.
[11:11]It rattled my door.
[11:12]I just couldn't kill it.
[11:13]There was no silver bullet, no stake, no incantation that would slay it.
[11:18]Writing had plans for me and my resistance was fetal.
[11:22]Oh, my God, I'm like obsessed.
[11:24]It may not surprise you that the first stuff I wrote was go stories.
[11:29]It's true.
[11:32]There is something very haunting about a lot of your senses.
[11:36]There we go.
[11:37]Yeah, yeah, but it's interesting, isn't it, because on one hand, that chapter is about
[11:45]what happens when you deny a calling.
[11:48]Yes.
[11:49]And it doesn't go well.
[11:51]Like, you can't deny a calling.
[11:53]It does come back for you because it, and maybe that's a way to test if it's true.
[11:57]But also, I think, oh, I don't have to say it, there's something in there about,
[12:04]though, maybe it wasn't so bad to burn all that stuff down in the first place, you know,
[12:08]like maybe that was okay.
[12:12]And I still burned down, loaded my writing.
[12:15]I still reject much more than I ever published.
[12:19]And I think that experience of getting rid of all my teenage writing taught me that it's
[12:25]okay, that there's always something else to come back, and that I actually can't stop
[12:29]it from coming back.
[12:30]So it's ultimately, it's given me a kind of trust in the abundance of creativity, I think.
[12:36]Oh, that's also beautiful.
[12:38]This is great.
[12:39]I'm just kind of like sitting here and listening to you all day.
[12:42]Oh, my gosh, have you ever done anything with the author Maggie Smith, the poet and
[12:48]author Maggie Smith?
[12:49]I feel like, have you had a conversation, because I want to like go back and listen to it.
[12:53]I feel like the two of you have similar ideas.
[12:56]Yeah, yeah.
[12:57]She was on my podcast about maybe two years ago now, time flies really fast, maybe one
[13:01]year.
[13:02]And of course, she's completely wonderful, but actually she's coming back onto my book club
[13:06]in June.
[13:07]So I had to get her back for her new memoir, which is incredible.
[13:11]So good.
[13:12]Oh my gosh.
[13:13]Yeah.
[13:14]Well, I need to, I need to, I'm going to go back and I'll put in the show notes of this.
[13:19]You two talking, yeah, there's something just so poetic and deeply soulful, like the
[13:25]two of you kind of get it against the world.
[13:28]You know, I don't know.
[13:29]The way you use words both of you in different ways, though, very, you know, different
[13:33]sentences or more sparse, you know, in your, but anyway, both.
[13:38]Yeah, yeah.
[13:39]Mine are much more baroque, I think than hers, but she just, she has this ability to capture
[13:43]the heart of something and to cut right through, it doesn't feel like she's an incredible
[13:48]writer.
[13:49]Amazing.
[13:50]Well, I was happy to see that by the end of enchantment, you were reading Braiding
[13:53]Sweetgrass.
[13:54]So I was like, well, this is good.
[13:55]Yeah.
[13:56]It's back to reading.
[13:58]I am, I am for sure back to reading actually and I do know what bought it back was finishing
[14:02]that book.
[14:03]It was like, yeah, I was, I was stuck in a place and as soon as I closed those edits
[14:12]and it took out, you know, you exhale when a book's finished because they're such a huge
[14:18]part of your psyche for the whole time that you're writing them and there's always this
[14:23]sense of, oh, maybe it's just me, but this sense of struggle with them.
[14:27]Not bad struggle, but you're, I feel like I wrestle them into place in lots of ways.
[14:33]And as soon as they're gone, I do a big exhale and in that exhale, the next thing that
[14:40]I wanted to know about came right into my head and I just started reading again, but it
[14:46]took longer for me to get back to fiction.
[14:48]I have to say, I still struggled with fiction until maybe six months ago when I like got,
[14:56]I just wanted to, I wanted that state of mind again, but yeah, it really, it really did
[15:03]feel like a huge block for me.
[15:05]I feel like sometimes when I'm having trouble getting into fiction, I switch gears and
[15:10]read something really funny.
[15:12]Like a really fun example.
[15:13]Exactly how it happened for me, yes, that was exactly it.
[15:16]Yeah, completely.
[15:17]I started asking people for funny novels because I, I think one of the things that I've noticed
[15:22]about fiction in the last few years is it does get ever more serious and there's a, there's
[15:28]a missing gap for a bigger group of comic novels and satire and, you know, that kind
[15:35]of, that kind of a levity that tells you so much about society that makes you laugh with
[15:41]it.
[15:42]I don't think we're publishing enough for those at the moment.
[15:44]And so I started asking round and I, yeah, I got to read a few and it just may be really
[15:51]happy.
[15:52]Well, I have to say, I might have to selfishly send you this book that I, this novel that
[15:56]I just wrote that's coming out next April because it is like funny social satire and
[16:00]all of that because I was like, I just want to write something that makes me laugh.
[16:04]And then I found this other book that I just finished, I don't know if you've read yet
[16:07]by Jane wrote and I don't know why we're talking about other books.
[16:10]I'm sorry, but why Jane wrote first book is Society of Shame.
[16:15]The Society of Shame.
[16:16]Have you read that?
[16:17]I haven't read it.
[16:18]No, I have no.
[16:19]Okay.
[16:20]It's coming out, I think next week, but by the time the stairs it'll be out.
[16:21]But literally I was crying laughing in the first chapter.
[16:25]I didn't even know it was supposed to be funny.
[16:26]I just like picked it up thinking it was whatever, another book.
[16:29]And then next thing, you know, like I was laughing so hard, I had to read it out loud to
[16:33]my husband.
[16:34]Oh, wow.
[16:35]Okay.
[16:36]I've written that down.
[16:37]And that's, I mean, I wonder if like part of the problem during pandemic lockdowns was that
[16:41]we lacked that recommendation, you know, that flow of, I love this, have you read it and
[16:46]pushing books into each other's hands and that the way that enthusiasm's contagious,
[16:51]like I do think that hit me really hard.
[16:53]And I found that across my whole cultural life that I just didn't care as much as I normally
[16:59]did.
[17:00]And it really affected me, I think.
[17:03]I feel like the pandemic was the ultimate in robbing pleasure, right?
[17:07]It took away the pleasure that we got from all the things, like, and like the perfect part
[17:13]of it is that it literally took away our sense of smell and taste, which is the biggest
[17:18]sense of pleasure ever.
[17:20]You know, I mean, I remember like trying to shove a cookie in my mouth when I had lost
[17:24]my sense of taste and I was like, do I still eat it?
[17:26]I'm not getting any pleasure, but maybe my brain knows somewhere that it tastes good.
[17:32]And that was, I don't think we're still talking enough about the losses that we experienced
[17:37]there.
[17:38]But I think in addition to all of that, we then got into a situation where we felt guilty
[17:42]for taking or receiving pleasure, because we were so conscious about how much other people
[17:48]were suffering.
[17:49]And that made it hard too.
[17:51]That was another layer on that, that kind of great big block that I felt for sure.
[17:56]Yeah, totally.
[17:58]My goodness.
[17:59]In enchantment.
[18:00]And by the way, I wanted there to be in this cover, and I looked at it very closely.
[18:04]You can imagine me just like studying a cover, a moron over here, but I really wanted,
[18:09]I wanted to find like peels of your grandmother's orange sort of, it didn't in the design.
[18:17]I don't think they're there, but maybe there's like a configuration of the little stars
[18:21]somewhere that you can see it, because Lauren who designed it is very smart.
[18:25]So it wouldn't surprise me.
[18:27]Well, if I was designing the cover, no, I'm kidding.
[18:30]It's a gorgeous cover.
[18:32]But I feel like that's also such a lovely metaphor, not, I don't even know of metaphors
[18:36]right where, but when you talk about how her orange feeling was sort of your own meditation
[18:41]and how that would stop and be the only ritual in a day and just like the orange
[18:45]feels falling and all of that and how you referenced that was really beautiful as well.
[18:51]Oh, thank you.
[18:52]That was just a lovely moment to write.
[18:55]And I, you know, some things feel like you've just really got to express them.
[18:59]And I was, you know, I was a little worried that it might seem insignificant or doubty
[19:04]somehow, but there was a magic to that moment for me that seems to transmit.
[19:10]That's what's amazed me about the reception of it.
[19:12]seems to really transmit to other people when they read it.
[19:16]And I posted a video a couple of weeks ago on Instagram of me peeling an orange.
[19:21]Oh my gosh.
[19:22]And so many people in the comments are beautiful, but so many people remember their grandmother
[19:28]doing the same.
[19:30]And there's something about that generation and how they appreciated things that seemed
[19:34]so ordinary to us, but they obviously had a different meaning if you'd lived through the
[19:39]war, for example, if you play and rationing and you hadn't been able to have things like
[19:43]oranges for a very long time and then you get them back and they're actually quite magical
[19:48]little things in that sense.
[19:50]Yeah.
[19:51]But you wonder like who's the first person who was like, I think I'll take this off and
[19:55]see what's under here.
[19:57]Yes.
[19:58]Humans.
[20:00]put that hands into everything that I do.
[20:03]Well, I must say I have to admit, I did not scroll back into your Instagram.
[20:09]I'm sorry.
[20:10]I only read the book, but now I have to go back and check out that video.
[20:15]But I feel like my grandmother didn't do that.
[20:17]But I feel like my vision of her is her sitting at her kitchen table every afternoon,
[20:23]like scrolling through the TV guide back in the day.
[20:26]She would be like sitting there flipping through to figure out what we're going to watch that night.
[20:33]Do you know what my grandmother had this beautiful habit and then nearly made it into the book, but didn't quite, which was that if you went on holiday,
[20:41]he would, did you used to get a C-fact like the text service on TV?
[20:46]I don't know if you even got this.
[20:48]It was like the internet before the internet, but you pressed a button and you got text information.
[20:52]No.
[20:53]Right. Okay. So this is a very British reference and you'll probably end up cutting this close to a screen.
[20:57]I'm not cutting anything.
[20:59]I'm going to have to explain it really carefully.
[21:01]It was called C-facts or teletext.
[21:04]And you just pushed a button on your TV and you would get like that you could see the news.
[21:08]You could select the page.
[21:09]You could see the news.
[21:10]You could see the weather.
[21:11]You could see the sports results.
[21:13]It was all the kinds of things that grandads liked.
[21:15]And if, and you could also see all the flights landing in Gatwick.
[21:20]And so if you, if we went on holiday, Granddad would sit with the page open on the, on the, on the information about when flights are landed and wait till the information turned to landed when you're playing being in flight.
[21:33]So when you got home here today, I watched you land on the teletext.
[21:37]Oh, it was lovely.
[21:40]It was so lovely because he was a former airman.
[21:42]So I think you were still thinking a lot about planes.
[21:45]Oh, I love that.
[21:46]That is so sweet.
[21:49]Look, Granddad.
[21:51]He would have a feel down with her.
[21:53]Yeah.
[21:54]With all the aviation apps now.
[21:56]Oh, I can't imagine honestly.
[21:58]He would be insane with the whole thing.
[22:00]It would be so exciting.
[22:02]Yes.
[22:03]I guess my grandmother would be sitting there on the guide page and cable, you know, scrolling down.
[22:10]What are you working on now?
[22:12]Are you writing anything new?
[22:13]I'm just beginning to think about it. Like I, I, I really, I need the previous book to come out because I, there's a big thing for me is having conversations around the books, actually.
[22:24]And hearing how people perceive them and what meaning they make, make out of them, it all feels like a big exchange to me.
[22:32]And so I couldn't get anywhere until the first few people had started talking to me about the book.
[22:37]But I do, I do have the seeds of an idea that I'm just beginning to draw up.
[22:42]But I'm also working on an audio book about the midwinter period.
[22:47]So I'm going back to winter, first of all.
[22:49]So that will be not this winter, but the next that that's coming out.
[22:52]So I'm, I'm still deep into winter, but this is like maybe a little bit of a mix between winter and in chomp.
[22:58]Interesting.
[23:00]Maybe one day we'll get to summer.
[23:02]We can always go.
[23:03]I doubt it.
[23:04]I'm on keen on summer.
[23:07]I don't know.
[23:10]Where's your favorite place to write?
[23:14]Like where do you, do you like go into some little nook in your home or I don't know.
[23:19]Tell me about that.
[23:20]Yeah.
[23:21]I'm, I'm a very fidgety writer and I like to write in lots of different places.
[23:26]And I, I think the place I write needs to fall is at my desk because I, it feels like work to me.
[23:30]for writing at my desk.
[23:32]So I, I write on the kitchen table.
[23:34]I write on the sofa.
[23:35]I write in bed.
[23:36]I write in cafes.
[23:38]I write in our little local co-working space, which is, I actually quite enjoy.
[23:42]Even though it's a bit noisy that fact.
[23:44]Some hope sometimes helps to block out your conscious mind a bit.
[23:48]I think.
[23:49]But yeah.
[23:50]I'm very itinerant actually.
[23:51]And I, I don't have.
[23:53]very many, sort of, soldiery teams.
[23:56]But I do write that first thing in the morning.
[23:59]That's the one thing that's consistent to me that quite often if I'm trying to really get some progress made.
[24:05]I'll get up at four, 30 and I'll have a lot done by seven.
[24:09]Wow.
[24:11]I love him.
[24:12]I hear that.
[24:13]I don't know.
[24:14]That's amazing.
[24:15]Wonderful.
[24:16]I'm just not a night person.
[24:17]I mean, I, I hear loads of people that write very late and I can't imagine ever doing that.
[24:22]That's like the so far away from what I understand.
[24:26]But yeah, I'm definitely, definitely a morning person.
[24:29]Yeah.
[24:30]At night, I'm all about like intake, not output.
[24:33]I'm more about sleeping.
[24:35]Yeah.
[24:36]I read a lot at night.
[24:38]And I watch things and I read things.
[24:41]And that's it.
[24:42]But I can barely write a sense.
[24:44]Although I write emails into all through the night.
[24:47]But in terms of anything with anything.
[24:49]But then he has to it.
[24:50]You know, I don't.
[24:51]Oh, yeah.
[24:52]I mean, I certainly couldn't make any sense.
[24:54]But I'm, I'm done for after eight o'clock.
[24:56]You can't get any sense out of me at all.
[24:58]Love to that point.
[24:59]I'm just over as a person.
[25:00]And then.
[25:01]Sure.
[25:02]Maybe if we didn't wake up at four or 30, we'd be in better shape at night.
[25:06]That's it.
[25:07]I mean, you choose your end of the day.
[25:09]Ultimately, don't you mind is definitely the fourth year.
[25:12]But I can't do both.
[25:13]I some people can.
[25:14]I mean, my dad is extraordinary for that.
[25:17]he'll get up early and go to bed late.
[25:19]And do four hours sleep and feel really refreshed.
[25:22]And I am not that person.
[25:25]No.
[25:26]Is there anything that's come out of your.
[25:29]You know, I want to say fame.
[25:31]But I feel like you'll poo poo that.
[25:33]But you know, any of your.
[25:35]You're.
[25:36]The all the success that's come out of your your recent books,
[25:39]which are so personal and so intimate.
[25:41]And now so out there.
[25:43]And I was just wondering if.
[25:45]if it's shifted anything in you or.
[25:47]Anything's come out of it that you're surprised by or anything like that.
[25:51]Yeah.
[25:52]I'm surprised by the fame bit really.
[25:54]I mean, I'm not particularly well known in the UK still.
[25:58]And that's just how I care honestly.
[26:01]But I.
[26:02]Yeah.
[26:03]As you discern them like quite uncomfortable with the idea of being well known.
[26:07]It's not really what I'd seek out.
[26:09]And I love living a very quiet life.
[26:12]And I never really wanted people to stop me in the streets.
[26:16]Talk about my book.
[26:17]But nevertheless that now happens.
[26:19]And I.
[26:20]I got to a point in the pandemic.
[26:23]When I think.
[26:24]I was quite visible on the beach.
[26:26]And people were reading the book.
[26:28]And so many people stopped me in one day.
[26:31]But my husband took over and said I'm so sorry.
[26:34]She hates being spoken.
[26:36]She looks like she's intensely uncomfortable with this.
[26:38]And, you know, sort of backed me away.
[26:41]I couldn't say anything.
[26:43]I couldn't.
[26:44]I just didn't have any words left.
[26:47]So yeah, that it takes a little getting used to.
[26:50]And it takes a little getting used to learning how to deal with that with good grace.
[26:54]And not to run away from people or to dismiss what they're saying.
[26:59]You know, by going, oh, no, no, you don't feel like that about my book.
[27:02]Don't be silly.
[27:03]You know, yeah.
[27:05]And you have to learn how to take a compliment.
[27:08]And, and also you, you really have to learn your boundaries too.
[27:11]Because there's a lot of nink out there.
[27:14]And I'm not the right person to fulfill those needs.
[27:17]So yeah, the last three years have been a huge learning process for me in a huge adaptation.
[27:22]Without a doubt.
[27:24]I love this image of husband as handler.
[27:28]Well, I would, you know, I would just get to the stage where I was just kind of standing,
[27:32]like, hammering, looking like a rabbit in the headlights.
[27:34]And he'd be just like, okay, thanks very much.
[27:36]Catherine's delighted that you liked her book, but she's, she's really not great with people.
[27:41]Which is, I love it.
[27:44]Well, Catherine, thank you so much.
[27:47]Thanks for this really fun conversation.
[27:49]And yeah for your beautiful books and words.
[27:52]And I can't wait to read absolutely everything, right?
[27:54]Going forward.
[27:55]And now I'll go back and scroll your Instagram for a while and not read.
[28:01]Oh, no, thank you so much.
[28:02]It's been so great to talk to you.
[28:03]And just to really, yeah, fun conversation as always.
[28:06]Oh, thank you.
[28:08]All right.
[28:09]Well, take care.
[28:10]See you later.
[28:11]Have a good afternoon.
[28:12]I know you'll be doing loads of busy things now.
[28:14]So that's okay.
[28:15]And this was the time.
[28:17]Okay.
[28:18]Bye, Catherine.
[28:19]See you later.
[28:20]Bye.
[28:21]Bye.
[28:22]Thanks for listening to this episode of Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[28:25]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zuby Owens
[28:28]and at Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[28:30]Also sign up for my newsletter at zuby Owens.com and sign up for my virtual book club
[28:34]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[28:37]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing.
[28:41]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.