Abraham Verghese, THE COVENANT OF WATER
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[1:03]Abraham Vergaze is the author of the Covenant of Water.
[1:07]He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and the author of many other books, including
[1:14]the NBCC award finalist, my own country, the New York Times notable book, The Tennis Partner,
[1:20]which we talked about, and the novel Cutting for Stone, which we also talked about, which
[1:24]spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than 1.5 million
[1:29]copies in the US alone.
[1:31]He was translated into more than 20 languages and is being adapted for film by anonymous
[1:35]content.
[1:36]Vergaze was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2016, has received five honorary
[1:42]degrees, and is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy
[1:47]of Arts and Sciences.
[1:48]He lives in practices medicine in Stanford, California, where he is the Linda Armier and
[1:53]Joan F. Lane Provost Steel Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at
[1:58]the Stanford University School of Medicine.
[2:01]Enjoy.
[2:02]Welcome, Abraham.
[2:03]Thank you so much for coming on Mom's Don't Have Time to Read books to discuss the
[2:07]Covenant of Water.
[2:08]I'm so excited to be with you.
[2:09]Thank you for asking me.
[2:11]I have to tell you, Cutting for Stone, this must, you must get this all the time.
[2:15]So this is probably boring to hear, but it was one of my favorite books.
[2:17]I read it, I cherished it, I took notes in the back so I could like have it with me all
[2:22]the time.
[2:23]I just loved it.
[2:24]So thank you.
[2:26]That's really meaningful to me.
[2:27]I don't, I don't get tired of hearing that.
[2:29]And of course your latest book is also amazing and I have all these quotes that I have
[2:34]from it that I just like love.
[2:36]But maybe you could start by telling listeners a little about why you decided to write
[2:41]this book and your family relation to it and inspiration and all of that.
[2:46]Yeah, I was looking for a setting for my new novel and we're sort of inspired by something
[2:52]that had happened some years ago, my, my mother, when she was in her 70s, was asked
[2:58]by my niece who was then five and who grew up in America.
[3:03]How much she, what was it like when you were a little girl and my mother was so taken
[3:08]with that question having, you know, lived in India, Africa and then in Florida at the
[3:14]time that she began to write by hand this, you know, sort of long account with illustrations
[3:21]of what her childhood was like.
[3:23]And it was, it was funny, it was compelling, it was also very familiar, you know, old
[3:29]anecdotes of eccentric family members and on, in reading it, I just had the realization
[3:35]that this is where I should set the next novel.
[3:38]I hesitated a little bit because I wasn't born in Kerala, I was born in Africa, grew
[3:45]up there, but I didn't know Kerala well because we would go there every holiday and later
[3:51]in medical school, I would, I was there a lot with my grandparents.
[3:54]So that was my only hesitation, but then, you know, with the help of mom who passed away
[4:00]when she was 94, which she was actively engaged with my writing of the book till the, till
[4:06]the very end.
[4:07]Oh, I'm sorry for your loss.
[4:10]Where did the idea of the sort of family curse come from?
[4:15]You know, I think there's a lot at stake with families with arranged marriages being so
[4:21]common.
[4:22]I mean, this is a small and similar community that I talk about.
[4:26]It's a Christian community who date their Christianity back to 52 A.D. when St. Thomas
[4:33]the apostle landed in that community and really in all communities and in there where arranged
[4:38]marriages are common, it doesn't take much to date a bridegroom or bride, usually more
[4:45]the bride in the groom to taint their prospects.
[4:48]And so I think that was there in the back of my mind, you know, these rumors people have
[4:53]about this family, that family.
[4:56]And that's where it's sort of began.
[4:58]I've been struggling with hearing loss and so I think I was very attuned to a condition
[5:05]that affected hearing and balance and so God knows, I mean, it's not like I know the
[5:11]whole story.
[5:12]I wish I did.
[5:13]It's sort of emerges organically and something seems promising and you push along until
[5:20]you realize it's been a waste of time and then you backtrack and you started.
[5:25]As you know from writing your own, no, I mean, we can't even compare our types of novels,
[5:32]but thank you for that.
[5:34]In this particular arranged marriage in your book, it's between a girl of 12 and a 40
[5:39]year old, which I know in history books and whatever you read that and you're like, oh,
[5:43]there used to be a big age gap, but the way you brought that to life and the thinking
[5:47]about just how young this 12 year old girl is and having to go and leave her home and
[5:52]deal with a whole new family and you just really brought that age gap to life and the
[5:57]fear and all of it, even despite what ends up coming next.
[6:01]And I don't know, just it was a great way to start really putting ourselves in her shoes.
[6:07]Yeah, I think it also goes against most of our, it goes against the grain in the sense
[6:12]that, you know, we have this visceral reaction when we hear about something like that.
[6:17]But, you know, honestly, that was my grandmother and great grandmother's story in the sense
[6:22]that, you know, they were, they were married to this 12 year old or 13 year old boy,
[6:27]but they really just became children in the same household.
[6:30]I think one of my aunt was telling me when she was going over a photo album, she said,
[6:35]you know, this girl, she went to her mother-in-law when she was 13 or 12 and said to her
[6:41]mother-in-law, who she loved, you need to get rid of that boy.
[6:44]He's so irritated.
[6:45]And she was talking about her husband, the son of this lady, you know, there was a certain
[6:52]innocence, which would obviously end at a certain point.
[6:56]My great grandmother actually married very young, two widower who already had, I think,
[7:01]three or four kids and she went on to bear him six or seven children and they had the
[7:06]happiest marriage.
[7:07]I never knew her, but according to my mother, it was just, and so I liked that idea of working
[7:12]against the reader's presumption of, you know, how did us just, this is going to be.
[7:19]Wow.
[7:20]Well, one of the themes in the book is lost.
[7:23]I know you wrote it during pandemic times and working in the hospitals during that time.
[7:28]And oh my gosh, it's amazing that you did that and could even write after instead of just,
[7:34]I mean, just the whole thing is amazing, but you had a number of beautiful lines about loss,
[7:39]one of which was just keeping sort of their memory, keeping their memory alive.
[7:43]You had one quote and you said, I know she can see us.
[7:46]She says with conviction, she could tell him why, but he doesn't need explanations, just the truth.
[7:50]She watches over us and everything.
[7:52]She stays my hand when I want to add more salt.
[7:55]She reminds me when the rice boils over, it's just so nice, right?
[7:59]The way that we keep the, the department sort of in our day to day lives or it doesn't
[8:03]have to be some big ghost appearance, right?
[8:06]It could be these little moments.
[8:07]Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, for example, after my mother's death, you know, I was struck
[8:13]by the idea.
[8:14]I think I actually got it from reading it somewhere that, you know, even though my mother
[8:19]mother has gone, the web of her presence is all around us.
[8:23]Even when she was here, it's not as though I was with her every moment, but I was, you
[8:27]know, with these artifacts of her life.
[8:29]And so, you know, even by being around these artifacts, you still have that sense.
[8:34]Or when I was at the grave, I have a sense that, you know, mom's very much there.
[8:39]The web is there, you know, the central character may not physically be present, but the
[8:44]effect is very much around, you know.
[8:46]And I, I suppose I could, I might get criticism that there is a fair amount of death
[8:52]and loss in a, in a novel like this that takes place over three generations.
[8:56]But I would say that that's sort of inevitable.
[8:59]And I, I often feel that people, this is a very broad characterization, but I think people
[9:05]have a lot of denial about death and the fact that, you know, we are mortal beings, you
[9:10]know, life is a terminal condition as John Irving says in the world according to carp.
[9:15]And so I think perhaps I'm much more conscious and driven by that sense of urgency.
[9:23]So even though I write a lot about medicine, I think, I think of medicine as, you know,
[9:27]life plus plus life on steroids, you know, life most acutely observed, but it's still
[9:33]life that most people are going to encounter at some point, you know.
[9:37]I actually just had John Irving on this podcast, I'll have, you know, you also wrote,
[9:44]I went back and read part of the tennis partner.
[9:46]I'm a huge tennis fan and started reading that book and, you know, you referred alcoholism
[9:52]in the same way that it is a lifelong, not terminal, but it is a lifelong condition.
[9:57]It is something that has to be managed.
[10:00]daily and never really recovered from in the same sort of way and that there should not be
[10:05]guilt and shame associated or not shame perhaps guilt of actions but no shame of the disease.
[10:12]Yeah, that book was a profoundly moving book for me. Kinda to lose a friend to his problem was
[10:17]actually cocaine addiction. You know, physician and addiction is quite common in physician circles
[10:23]for many different reasons. But yeah, I mean, loss is...
[10:28]I'm sorry, I didn't mean alcoholism. I meant addiction. I meant addiction. I'm so sorry.
[10:33]The differences are not really great. I think addiction once it takes hold is a powerful disease
[10:38]and the disease in metaphor. I think it's quite applicable. I'm glad you like the tennis partner. I
[10:45]would have guessed that, you know, given your background, your husband says tennis would be a...
[10:51]You know, some readers appreciated the tennis. Others were more caught up with the story. So I always
[10:56]love it when someone appreciates it. The tennis has fixed it. Well, all of it. I mean, I have lost
[11:02]a friend. I've lost several friends over time and I had one really close friend in high school who
[11:09]had addiction problems and, you know, it's sadly a very relatable situation that you were in.
[11:16]And I'm so sorry for the loss, but wow, what a gripping story that was too. All of you are
[11:20]writing. So good. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. I know you have an MFA from Iowa,
[11:27]right, in addition to being a revered doctor. I wonder how many people have those two degrees.
[11:35]You should do a little survey if you don't already know. I can't imagine they're more than a
[11:38]handful. But pairing, too, is just so amazing. Tell me about what the combination, like kind of
[11:46]of what you took out of the MFA program. You still use or what you even thought of going through
[11:52]that or how you marry these two parts of the brain. You know, to be honest, I never set out to
[11:59]be a writer. I mean, to this day, I still think of myself as all physician. You know, I felt
[12:04]medicine was a wonderful calling and it's been a great adventure. So I never set out to write.
[12:10]I know this is somewhat disingenuous, but whenever people give me this physician and writer
[12:14]label, if I had to choose one, it would be all physician. And what happened is I was living through
[12:20]this extraordinary story in a small town in Tennessee. Well, after I had specialized in infectious
[12:26]diseases, when HIV, the supposed to be urban disease, I was seeing large numbers in this very small
[12:33]town. And it was the desire to tell that story, that, you know, fascinating paradigm, which no one had
[12:41]described, which was simply that gay men had left their homes years before because they were gay
[12:49]quietly, part of the great exodus. And then they were coming back decades later because they had
[12:54]HIV and their partners had died. And so even though I wrote a scientific paper describing this
[13:02]migration, it never captured the grief of the families, the tragic voyage or my own grief that,
[13:09]you know, taking care of these young men in those days when there wasn't much in the wave treatment,
[13:14]and they were my age. And so I wanted to tell that story and I decided to apply to Iowa.
[13:20]The only criteria then were two short stories and they took me and I went
[13:26]considered crazy by my colleague because I gave up a tenured position to my two young kids.
[13:31]But you know, I think it's sort of ironic because I came to medicine because of two books.
[13:37]One was the citadel by AJ Cronin. And then the other one was of human bondage by
[13:45]Summer said mom. So is ironic that books should bring me to medicine? And then at some point
[13:51]I should be writing books. But I think they come out of the same spirit and the same lens with which
[13:56]I go to work every day. You know, I don't think it's markedly different, like two parts of the brain.
[14:02]Is the spirit helping people? Is that the main through line?
[14:07]I'm not sure. Yeah, well, I mean, helping people, but more than that, it's like sort of a curiosity
[14:13]and an empathy for your fellow human beings. And then, you know, I'm an internist. So I'm really
[14:19]trained to observe and, you know, sometimes in an airport when I can see these people walking big.
[14:24]I can pick out every pathological gate known to man in that one mile walk as they come to your
[14:31]gate. And, you know, so you're taught to observe and you're taught to take these disparate facts,
[14:38]you know, and put them together, you know, and come up with a unifying story or diagnosis.
[14:45]So I think that that lens of, you know, empathy, interest, keen observation lends itself to
[14:53]to both crops. But I do find that I, I, to my surprise, work out things that have happened at work
[15:02]that I, I don't think I would have worked out except by writing about them. You know, the emotions,
[15:07]I mean, so I often say, and I don't know that this is original, but I, I write in order to
[15:14]understand what I'm thinking. There's just some other level of understanding, as you know, that
[15:20]comes when you actually sit and write as opposed to when I, you know, take a walk around the
[15:26]neighborhood and think about the book they're there. It's just fascinating to me. So I feel like
[15:31]the writing informs the medicine and vice versa. And I can't separate the two very clearly.
[15:38]That's okay. I mean, it's working for you. You can keep it up. It seems to, you know, having that
[15:43]deep knowledge obviously informs the book, and particularly this one. You know, I think another
[15:48]theme of the book is love, all these different forms of love, right? Parent child and romantic
[15:55]love and all that. Can I, if I could read one more quote, you write, forgive me. He says, it hurts me
[15:59]to think that we may not have a life together, but it doesn't stop me loving you. He tastes tears
[16:03]on her lips. Tears that could be his too. She raises her head to look at what he has done,
[16:08]the canvas of herself. She shakes her head in amazement. She whispers, you've helped me find myself.
[16:13]Do you know? Well, thank you. Thank you for reading that passage. I love that.
[16:18]No, I think one of the things that really came home to me again in the COVID epidemic, as it had
[16:25]in the HIV epidemic. Because, you know, at the end of our lives or when our lives are
[16:31]from truly threatened, what is it that we treasure? I mean, it's really not so much our
[16:37]accomplishments and our possessions. It's the meaningful relationships we had in our lifetime.
[16:43]You know, and so love sort of bubbles to the surface or the absence of it
[16:48]when we're stressed like that. So, and I think that the thing that was very striking to me,
[16:53]here I was writing about a time period in the 1900s to 1970. And in the hospital observing,
[17:02]you know, this latter-day pandemic, but the emotions, the heartache, the way people find meaning
[17:11]and their loss, nothing had really changed. In fact, there was something about the lens of simplicity
[17:18]looking back at a much simpler time that allowed you to see much more clearly how
[17:24]how one dealt with it. And, you know, these are age-old problems and were, you know,
[17:29]none of us escapes them. So, you know, it was actually very interesting juxtaposition of, you know,
[17:36]not that I'd wish it on again, but COVID on the one hand and writing about, you know,
[17:42]leprosy and diphtheria and so on in the 1900s. I feel like it's also fed into
[17:50]when you said that someone, one of your characters, I don't want to give everything away,
[17:54]but it says this character has been dead for years and her body has now followed. Her soul has
[17:59]been dead for years and her body has now followed. So, there's something about, you know,
[18:03]going through loss and trying to get through life and what does it mean to live without love
[18:10]and all of these big questions.
[18:12]Quick question. I also think that, you know, to be much more aware of death is actually a way to
[18:18]live more fully. So, I mean, I don't embrace these losses because I'm sort of a pessimist,
[18:24]but it's more, you know, it just gives you a sense of being enormously grateful for each day,
[18:30]every day above ground is a fabulous victory. And, you know, I think that it doesn't sort of
[18:35]make me a morbid person far from it. I think it makes me much more, you know, engaged with every
[18:42]moment that I'm here.
[18:45]I feel the same way. I feel like every day I'm just funny against time. I'm like, what can I get
[18:49]stuff done today? Am I okay? I'm here. I'm okay. I can walk. I'm good. I mean, I shouldn't
[18:55]do that. I can walk. Even if I couldn't walk, it doesn't matter. Like, I'm healthy and my time
[19:00]is running out and I better make today worth it. So that's sort of how I feel like loss inspires me
[19:06]personally. But anyway, I love it. I love that you see the way you just raised that.
[19:10]I also think that novels, you know, which is what brings us together, are the only way I know
[19:16]to escape the sort of relentless progression of time. I mean, what other magic do we have in this
[19:22]row where you pick something up and you know, you go through three generations, many lifetimes
[19:29]and you put it down and it's just Tuesday. You know, that's what keeps you reading and keeps me
[19:36]reading. It's just that wonderful way we're escaping, but we're not just escaping. We're trying to
[19:42]sort of pick up fundamental truths and insights about our own lives, even though it's in a
[19:48]fictional world. I think Dorothy Allison and Camus at much the same thing. Fiction is the great
[19:54]lie that tells the truth about how the world lives. And it frustrates me that
[20:00]more of my colleagues, for example, don't read fiction, they tend to lean towards nonfiction, you know, I'm a serious kind of guy, I read nonfiction.
[20:09]I'd like to tell them, you know, a novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin is what ended slavery in this country in a sense. It really made the idea of slavery, you know, distasteful.
[20:22]I swept the country and a novel called the Citadel in England, which I referred to was this genesis of the National Health Service. So novels have the power to do more than we think, you know, they're not frivolous, they're terribly important.
[20:41]Now, also just to get out of your own experience, right? You don't have to travel, you can be in your kitchen and yet a place you'll never go in real life, understanding a culture you'll never be a part of and it allows for such greater empathy and it gets so important and it's different than nonfiction, right?
[21:01]And yeah, I think it's beautiful. I think it would be sad to have a life without reading fiction.
[21:06]I must say from a writer's point of view, having written both nonfiction and fiction as you have.
[21:12]You know, the one hand fiction is liberating because you can make anything up, you can get into anybody's head, you can characters can write from after their dead and so on.
[21:24]But you have to work so much harder to grab the reader's attention and, you know, and keep them on the page. Whereas I think what you have going for you when you write nonfiction is the reader knows this really happened and I think we have this inherent curiosity about something that really happened.
[21:41]And we have to work harder to suspend disbelief for something that puts made up even if it's profoundly true in another way.
[21:50]So I love that challenge. I actually think I prefer writing fiction. I think mining my own life from material after a while was hard.
[22:00]Well, I wound up revealing much more than I thought I would.
[22:04]But for the right reasons, the editor kept saying, you know, you can't have the camera so intensely on these characters real people.
[22:12]And then, you know, you've become a character when you you can't just sort of put your hand on the lens when it turns toward you. So I accepted that, but I found it.
[22:22]You know, difficult.
[22:24]But I'm comfortable with if the readers done me the honor of getting the book preferably buying it not.
[22:31]They weren't the right to learn these things about me. So it felt good in that sense. But it was hard for me.
[22:38]I understand that given people's initial reluctance perhaps to getting into things that are not true.
[22:45]Here you are coming out with a very long book.
[22:48]Did you think about the length or I mean, was that even a consideration? Did you consider chopping any sections or how do you feel about it?
[22:58]How do you feel about people making time for longer bucks or was it not an issue?
[23:03]Yeah, I mean, it wasn't an issue much for me, but I was very aware that certain readers would be would bulk a bit at the size of the book, you know, but I.
[23:14]And to be honest, it was a much longer book. We've made a lot of cuts and I wished it was I keep having this ambition to write a short report.
[23:25]Somehow, tend to, you know, to tell the whole story, it has to be extra pages.
[23:31]I found during COVID that I personally had an appetite for longer books.
[23:37]I almost got frustrated if something felt like a little, I'm used bush instead of the, you know, hardy meal that I was looking for, even if it was very good.
[23:47]So I guess I'm reflecting my bias and then I like the idea of a long novel.
[23:53]But you know, I understand completely that it's a little more challenging to get the reader into it, hopefully once they're in it.
[24:00]If you've done your job, hopefully they keep going.
[24:03]Yes. Well, there was no challenge at all getting into your book. You it was captivating from the start.
[24:10]I had the reader tell me by the, I'm sorry, which I thought was a great comment that they were, they were, they were so engrossed in the book that they look to see how many pages they had left.
[24:25]And we're disappointed that there were only a hundred something pages left.
[24:30]But to go on and that's exactly, that's a writer that's exactly what you want that they want us to go on, you know, and.
[24:38]Well, one of my favorite things when I'm reading is when I have to like cover my mouth or put my hand on my heart or like my body gets engaged, which it doesn't always right.
[24:49]There was one scene I don't want to give things away, but really sad scene with involving loss. And I was reading it and I was just my hand was over my mouth and then on my heart and that's how I know I'm really into it.
[25:04]You know, you know, when I was revising some of those scenes of, you know, tremendous loss and tragedy. I mean, I would weep every time.
[25:12]I couldn't help myself. I knew what was going to happen, but especially when I was reading it aloud and, you know, sort of thing that it would just, because these characters had become evidently quite real to me, you know, concrete people that I knew better than I knew.
[25:29]Some real people are on me.
[25:32]Wow.
[25:33]The funniest.
[25:34]This.
[25:35]Did you read the audio book yourself? I can't imagine. Did you know I did? Yeah.
[25:39]Oh my gosh.
[25:40]See, I was moved to do that because I enjoyed the reading of cutting first on that somebody else had done, but you know, there were minor cripples I had with the pronunciation of this and that, you know, to give you an example.
[25:56]The word Madras, which is a city now called Chennai, but a North Indian can see Madras in a somewhat contemptuous fashion without knowing it. They can say Madras, you know, it would.
[26:09]I don't know the analogy I could use.
[26:12]And to a South Indian, it would sound different. So there were like all these nuances that I was, I was picky about nobody else would ever have noticed.
[26:20]And this book, as you know, is full of a lot of different foreign sounding phrases and language even and so.
[26:27]I thought, well, let me give this a try and I auditioned for the role actually.
[26:32]And I told them, I don't want to do it unless you think I can do it better than anyone, not just the pronunciations, but you know, and I had to learn about that and learn how to perform the book.
[26:43]And you know, the last thing thing to me to be is that I thought I knew this book and I, but as I read it.
[26:51]I could see connections that I had made that I had never consciously tried to make, you know, the subconscious mind is this amazing thing.
[26:59]It was doing things that I hadn't quite realized. So it was such an experience to spend two weeks reading my own book.
[27:10]And I think that I should have seen before.
[27:12]Oh, that's wild. Are you working on a new book?
[27:14]Not yet. I'm tossing around a few ideas for one. I think the biggest question is geography, you know, where does my set listen?
[27:22]I've gotten some mileage from setting two books now. I mean, that's all I have to my credit is two novels in somewhat exotic places for most readers.
[27:34]But you know, I've lived a long time in America and I've been here in Silicon Valley for 15 years, Texas for 17 years.
[27:43]So I'm really looking to set a story in America, but I'm not sure what time period that will be.
[27:51]I find some time periods, particularly fascinating. Our present time period.
[27:57]So, so maybe I'm just, you know, to reluctant to just dive into the present craziness of our, of our life.
[28:06]But there's something neat about going back to some sepia tinged decades, you know.
[28:14]And you mentioned quickly, you're hearing loss and that it's genetic and, you know, family, what are you, how are you handling that?
[28:23]Well, I think I have, you know, the best hearing aids one can get and yet when you're in a crowded room or restaurant, you know, nothing beats the human ear for being able to discern this sound in front of you from all the others.
[28:38]So I'm just left marbling at the, you know, the complexity of the human ear. So I'm doing well.
[28:44]But just about this is the first year or year before where I realized that, you know, I can instead of being stressed by being in situations where I can't hear.
[28:55]I'm just coming out with it, like, you know, I just want to tell you really struggling to hear in this setting just so, you know, and announcing that sort of says, you know,
[29:06]let's be off the hook so to speak so.
[29:09]And frankly, I don't know if it's my imagination, but restaurants are getting no easier and no easier.
[29:15]The idea of a quiet dinner with your partners. Where do you go? You know, other than your own tiny room.
[29:21]So I did find a restaurant recently. We were out with friends in LA and we walked in and it was so quiet.
[29:28]I was like, this is so nice. Restaurants are usually so loud. And we were all looking around. We were the only people under, I don't know, maybe 80 years.
[29:36]But anyway, it was perfect. I loved it. And, you know, even if, even if you don't struggle with, you know, reduced hearing or whatever, be able to focus when you're distracted by all the sounds, right.
[29:49]That's why we do these podcasts in a quiet room. No distractions.
[29:53]That has made me very conscious of, you know, how precious that these senses are.
[30:00]during the year again, but you wonder about the old days
[30:03]where in the 1900s and a lot of deafness
[30:06]and people just, my grandfather was,
[30:08]I recall having to really almost shout for him
[30:11]to understand what I was saying.
[30:13]And none of this was available,
[30:15]but it's just getting better and better.
[30:16]So I'm grateful.
[30:18]Excellent.
[30:19]Hey, for him.
[30:20]Thank you.
[30:21]Thank you for this podcast.
[30:22]Thank you for researching me and knowing
[30:23]who, like, anything about me that was so flattering.
[30:26]And, you know, thank you for all the hours I've spent
[30:29]with your stories.
[30:30]It's really a blessing.
[30:33]I don't even know how else to say it.
[30:34]So thanks.
[30:35]It's an honor to be in.
[30:36]I'm hoping to visit your bookstore in Santa Monica.
[30:38]Oh, please do.
[30:39]Yes, that would be wonderful.
[30:41]Thank you for all you do for books
[30:43]and getting people to read the show.
[30:44]You admire that.
[30:46]Thank you.
[30:46]Thank you so much.
[30:48]All right.
[30:48]Take care.
[30:50]Bye.
[30:50]Thank you, guys.
[30:52]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time
[30:55]to Read Books.
[30:56]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[30:58]at ZB Owens, and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[31:01]Also sign up for my newsletter at zB Owens.com
[31:03]and sign up for my virtual book club
[31:05]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[31:08]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan.
[31:09]In fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[31:11]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[31:13]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.