Cassandra Jackson, THE WRECK: A Daughter's Memoir of Becoming a Mother
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zippy Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books.
[0:06]This 30-minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, 365 days
[0:12]a year for about 30 minutes.
[0:15]I am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction
[0:20]and memoir.
[0:21]Our books are already out now.
[0:23]You can check it out on zippybooks.com.
[0:26]And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag, where we have lots of wonderful essays and
[0:30]lifestyle features.
[0:31]That's at zippymag.com.
[0:32]We have classes.
[0:33]It's a B-Classist.com.
[0:36]And I recently opened a book store in LA called Zippy's Bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue at
[0:43]11th Street in San Monica.
[0:45]I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings.
[0:49]But this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018.
[0:54]And no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing.
[0:58]Enjoy.
[1:03]Cassandra Jackson is the author of the wreck, a daughter's memoir of becoming a mother.
[1:08]Cassandra is a professor of English at the College of New Jersey, where she teaches classes
[1:13]about African-American literature and visual culture.
[1:16]She is co-author of the Tony Morrison Book Club and has also published two books on race
[1:21]in US literature and art.
[1:23]And she has written about racial oppression in everyday life in HuffPost and the Washington
[1:27]Post.
[1:28]She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children.
[1:30]Welcome Cassandra.
[1:31]Thank you so much for coming.
[1:32]And moms don't have time to read books to discuss the wreck, a daughter's memoir of becoming
[1:37]a mother.
[1:38]Thank you for having me.
[1:39]I appreciate it so much.
[1:40]I really wanted to do this, though.
[1:42]Thank you.
[1:43]Oh, no.
[1:44]I'm really glad and your memoir was, oh my gosh.
[1:47]I mean, all the research that you did and going through all those, like the microfishes
[1:54]and the articles and reconstructing the whole thing.
[1:58]Oh, wait.
[1:59]Anyway, I shouldn't like jump right in.
[2:00]It was so moving and I honestly just, I can feel how like haunted you all about what
[2:06]happened because like I felt myself just like like over it and over it and over it.
[2:10]I don't know.
[2:11]It was really good.
[2:12]Thank you.
[2:13]And thank you for reading it in that close way where you can also like experience some
[2:18]of, you know, sort of what was hanging over me in that moment.
[2:22]I think that was one of the parts of the book that I word most about that that people
[2:26]would understand, but this wasn't, you know, sort of mundane research, you know, you
[2:32]worry that people don't understand like sort of how that part fits, you know, and especially
[2:38]as an academic, nobody cares about your research, right?
[2:40]So like, but that process, right, to me, it was like really central to the book because
[2:46]it was so central to understanding myself in a lot of ways.
[2:49]So.
[2:50]Well, let's back up for a minute and tell listeners about your memoir.
[2:55]And what it's really about and then when you decided that this is something that you had
[3:00]to do.
[3:01]Yeah.
[3:02]So when I think about sort of what this book is about, I really feel like it's about
[3:06]a collision between two moments in my life, right?
[3:08]So I'm, you know, 36 years old, I'm trying to get pregnant, I'm not having any success
[3:15]getting pregnant.
[3:16]And it forced me to think so much about legacy, but also experiencing that kind of quiet
[3:23]grief was incredibly familiar to me.
[3:26]And that it was a kind of grief that I had lived with throughout my childhood.
[3:31]And so that moment really took me back to my childhood and a loss that my father experienced
[3:38]before I was born, but that we lived with every day.
[3:43]So before I was born, my father, loss, his mother, his sister, his sister, and all his
[3:49]niece and his first wife in a car accident.
[3:54]And we, you know, did not talk about that accident.
[3:59]We didn't really talk about that part of his life when I asked questions about, you know,
[4:05]missing relatives, all he would ever say was the wreck.
[4:08]That was the explanation, the wreck, but I didn't have a clear understanding of what
[4:13]had happened, when it happened, where it happened.
[4:15]And yet so much of our lives were determined by that accident, right?
[4:22]I exist because of that accident.
[4:25]And also just, you know, it was just, it was something that I think my family was like
[4:29]constantly working very actively and sometimes unconsciously to repress, right?
[4:35]Everything was about, you know, this new life that they had built.
[4:39]So as I was trying to get pregnant, I found myself reflecting on this grief that has no
[4:45]sight for expression, you know, sort of what do you, especially with, you know, infertility,
[4:51]because it's not like there's some ritual around it, right?
[4:53]It's very much a kind of invisible loss that you're experiencing.
[4:57]And so what this book was really about is sort of what that grief took me to in terms
[5:05]of the other kinds of grief that I had experienced in different parts of my life.
[5:10]And so, yeah, this was my story, but it was also about having to kind of reflect on the
[5:15]past in a way that was really kind of painful and I was asking my dad to engage in that
[5:20]was really hard as well asking him to reflect on that moment to tell me about that moment.
[5:26]My gosh.
[5:27]Well, let's talk about the infertility piece first because when I read it, like, as you
[5:34]laid it out, it seemed like you were swept away and like you were so not treated like
[5:41]a person by the medical establishment and all these little things, even, even just them
[5:48]not waiting for these, you know, the cysts or whatever to, you know, give them their time
[5:55]or just everything was like, here's what we're doing, you know, there is never a moment
[5:59]where they were like, honey, I think you might be suffering from infertility and here's
[6:04]what we're going to do.
[6:05]It was like, instead, they were like, this is what we're trying and this and you've got
[6:09]to get this.
[6:10]Like I felt like you wrote so well about just being like totally knocked off your feet
[6:14]and being like, wait, what, like, what's going on?
[6:17]Yeah.
[6:18]Yeah.
[6:19]And if you add to that the fact that you're taking drugs that are making you process
[6:23]and think differently, like I'd be sitting there with people talking at me and thinking,
[6:28]wow, I smell strange because, you know, these drugs are transforming your body in
[6:34]ways that are unimaginable to you.
[6:38]Like I just remember realizing, you know, feeling so swept up in it but also in reflection
[6:44]realizing that I was incapable of, you know, sort of fully participating in that process
[6:54]and no one was asking me to, right?
[6:57]And so, you know, as you said, there was no moment where anybody said, like, you know,
[7:02]let's sit down and talk about it.
[7:03]I think you're suffering from infertility.
[7:05]Let's talk about, you know, your options, your choices in this moment.
[7:09]It was sort of, this is what you need to be doing.
[7:12]These are the drugs that you need to be taking and no one really discussed any sort of
[7:16]alternatives with me in a way that would have been helpful.
[7:22]And I felt like my body, you know, was separate from me sometimes in these moments in
[7:28]the way that, you know, some people describe when they're talking about abuse.
[7:34]Like I felt like there was some disassociation that was necessary.
[7:38]And I, in many ways, I had already learned how to do that in women's health care even
[7:43]from the time I was a teenager.
[7:44]Those early experiences of going, you know, to a gynecologist where, you know, you
[7:50]endure these often, you know, incredibly invasive procedures.
[7:54]And it's just a given that you're just going to lay there and do it because it's good
[7:57]for you without any real, you know, conversation about, you know, why you're experiencing
[8:05]these, this discomfort.
[8:07]And is your discomfort different from someone else's discomfort?
[8:11]There's a moment in the book where I'm talking about this particular doctor because
[8:15]she's ordered a procedure that was very painful.
[8:18]And I come back to her and I say, this was really painful.
[8:22]And she kept repeating what I was saying back and editing out the word pain, you know,
[8:26]she kept saying, oh, well, what your, you know, some people experience discomfort.
[8:30]And I'm saying, no, no, no, I was screaming on a table in it, you know, experiencing
[8:37]a kind of pain that made me feel out of body.
[8:41]And she keeps saying, yeah, some people experience some discomfort, you know, it was a way
[8:47]in which I felt like I was, you know, being treated very much as, you know, this
[8:55]objectified body that no one was living in at the time.
[8:59]Yeah.
[9:00]Wow.
[9:01]Even now they're the coding that you're like, I'm allergic to coding and they're like,
[9:04]no, you probably aren't anymore.
[9:06]And yet next thing you know, you're like, Bob and it's like crazy.
[9:08]I'm like, this poor like nobody is listening to you, you know, yeah, at that particular
[9:14]one with that, my sensitivity to that particular drug has, I've actually had multiple
[9:18]doctors tell me, no, no, you can take it, you just need to eat more, you can take it,
[9:23]you just need like, at this point, you know, after you project all vomited half dozen
[9:28]times, you can't take that drug.
[9:30]Yeah.
[9:31]And I even had a doctor tell me, I needed to take that off of my record very recently.
[9:35]You should just take that off of your record because something could happen and you could
[9:38]really need, you know, and people won't understand like, you really, it says so much
[9:43]so I think about like the way in which healthcare works, you know, I grew up with a mom
[9:48]who like, she worshiped doctors, you know, you go in, you do what they say, I can remember
[9:54]hearing her on the phone talking about doctors later on and you know, doctor someone
[9:58]so sad.
[10:00]You know, and even my parents would be, when my father became ill later in life,
[10:04]my parents would be very proud of the fact that I could go in and talk to the doctor
[10:08]in a way that made it seem as the me and the doctor were like equals.
[10:12]And it was really, that was like meaningful to them.
[10:15]Like, oh, we have this educated daughter who can talk to the doctor.
[10:18]And quite honestly, like, you know, I think that I imbibed a lot of that.
[10:24]And it's not that I didn't know the ways in which, you know, medicine has treated women
[10:31]the way in which it's treated people of color.
[10:34]Like, it's not that I didn't understand that, hey, there's a, you know, power differential here.
[10:40]But I think I had imbibed this idea that I could control that, right?
[10:45]That if I presented myself in a certain way, that if I made myself look like a person
[10:50]with insurance, if I made myself seem like somebody who's educated enough to do, like,
[10:55]understand what they were talking about, that somehow this would skip over me.
[11:01]And, you know, I mean, that's why it's called systemic, right?
[11:06]Like, if these things are systemic, it's built into this system.
[11:09]It doesn't skip over anybody.
[11:11]And if it does, it's by accident, that's a fluke, right?
[11:15]You don't talk your way out of systemic racism, so it doesn't work that way.
[11:20]Anyway, awful.
[11:24]You tied it really well with, you know, the present and the past and all of that pain.
[11:31]And as you're, like, going through your excruciating pain-filled current moment,
[11:37]you hear kind of the, you know, the screeching brakes or whatever of what's going on
[11:42]back in the past, like those screens echoing through that as well.
[11:46]And even the way that you wrote about it slowly, like, here's what happened.
[11:53]But then how you took us through, as if we were living through it.
[11:56]Like, and then here's what happened on day one.
[11:58]And here's what happened on day two.
[11:59]And then moment took me aside and told me this and you have to remember this.
[12:03]And it's like, it's like everything kept unfolding.
[12:06]It wasn't just the totality of casualties was this, right?
[12:10]It's like we were there in the hospital with you.
[12:13]And with not even you, you weren't there, but with your family
[12:16]and how you reconstructed that.
[12:18]And even how your aunt didn't even remember it.
[12:20]I mean, all this stuff, I found absolutely fascinating and horrifying.
[12:24]But like, you know, like they say as a car, you know, rubber-necking,
[12:28]it's like the book is like one big rubber-necking delay.
[12:31]You know?
[12:32]Yeah, I feel like that was so important to me
[12:35]that what happened around the accident unfolds in that way,
[12:38]because that's how I experienced it.
[12:41]I learned about it really like a piece at a time.
[12:44]And it took forever for me to even begin to recreate a chronology
[12:48]of what happened.
[12:49]Because, you know, in my mind, and remember, this is like a child taking this
[12:55]in when you first hear about the accident in my mind, you know, there's an accident
[12:59]poof everyone dies, right?
[13:01]And then, and I don't even know who everyone is, right?
[13:05]I could never keep straight who was who existed, you know, in that moment,
[13:08]because it's 12 years before I'm born.
[13:11]But as I was sort of learning about it, like one of the early conversations with my father
[13:17]and he tells me with his mother died 10 days later, right?
[13:21]He keeps saying, well, mama said, mama said, I'm like,
[13:23]well, how does she say anything, right?
[13:24]And he said, oh, she lived for 10 days.
[13:26]And I think that that's when I understood this as a fuller kind of narrative of what happened.
[13:37]That this wasn't something instant.
[13:42]And it was so important for me to frame it that way, because when you think of it as something
[13:48]instant, it's something that doesn't happen in time.
[13:53]And, you know, it's just something that that kind of exists without the sort of context.
[14:01]And the context was everything with this accident, right?
[14:05]Because it happens in 1960 and that's critical, right?
[14:09]Because it's still segregated healthcare, right?
[14:12]And I think that one of the things that it was most shocking to me in my own research
[14:22]was, frankly, how little I know, right?
[14:25]I'm supposed to be a professor who, you know, focuses on the history of race in the United States.
[14:31]And I don't think I understood what segregation meant in healthcare on a day-to-day basis, right?
[14:44]Like, if you're in an accident, who comes together, right?
[14:49]You know, you got to wait on the color ambulance, right?
[14:51]Not every ambulance service is going to service black people.
[14:55]And if you're living in that context, right, where you were considered so inferior
[15:01]that everything needs to be separate for you, what happens when you get to a hospital?
[15:06]How can you trust that you will receive the best care available in that hospital?
[15:14]And I think that I had never, in my mind, they all died at the side of the accident.
[15:19]The idea that there was an aftermath was something that had completely escaped to me,
[15:26]because no one had ever really talked about what happened, right?
[15:31]It was always just the wreck died in the wreck.
[15:33]And it sounded like, you don't say this specifically.
[15:37]You're not like, I think the hospital covered something up.
[15:40]But the way that you write the story leads the reader to think, well,
[15:45]like, why did the mom pass away when she was fine for 10 days?
[15:50]And then overnight, like, dies, right?
[15:53]Like, what was that?
[15:54]Like, who's not catching something?
[15:56]Was there internal bleeding?
[15:57]Like, where did there no extra, you know, like, what was really going on?
[16:01]And what could be avoided?
[16:02]What could have been avoided?
[16:03]What losses could have been reversed?
[16:07]Yeah, and that will always, you know, sort of be on my mind.
[16:10]But it was certainly something I was thinking about throughout the book,
[16:13]because as I'm uncovering, you know, I'm looking at that certificate,
[16:17]that's I'm looking at these different materials.
[16:20]And I'm reading these newspaper articles that really demonstrate how embedded segregation is
[16:31]in this moment, right?
[16:32]Like, I can't find, you know, obituaries because you can't publish black people's obituaries
[16:39]in the same column as white people.
[16:41]So it's just crazy.
[16:42]Right, right.
[16:43]So that, you know, you get that you got to go to a section of the newspaper called
[16:47]news about Negroes, in order to find, you know, even find an obituary.
[16:52]And when you see that, yeah, it raises certain kinds of questions
[16:55]about how what could happen in a hospital with colored signs all over it.
[17:00]You know, what can happen in a hospital with a light's only waiting room?
[17:06]And I think oftentimes when we talk about segregation,
[17:09]we are so often fixated on things like water fountains, you know, because they do demonstrate
[17:15]something about the day to day.
[17:17]But I think that they oftentimes we miss the terror of that, right?
[17:23]Like, we miss the idea of walking into a hospital.
[17:27]And it's kind of a given that your life is not as important, right?
[17:32]And the as the lives of the people around you.
[17:35]And I think that yeah, it's hard for, I do find it hard to believe that in a situation
[17:42]where you're rushed to an emergency room in Alabama in 1960, that your care would be a priority
[17:50]as a Black person in that moment.
[17:52]So I do find it hard to believe.
[17:54]And I think that if they miss something that, you know, I think some of it was probably just
[17:59]kind of careless disregard, you know, in a way that because, you know,
[18:05]even the newspaper articles when they're listing the names of the victims, right?
[18:09]And although the white names have to be at the top and they have to say Mr. Admisses and
[18:13]the black names are just listed at the bottom, went and behind them, neglect, right?
[18:18]And so yeah, there would have been no consequences for making something, right?
[18:23]It would have been no real impact for not treating, you know, Black people in the same ways
[18:31]that they would have treated a white person in the hospital.
[18:34]Well, it makes it clear that there's all this talk about inherited trauma, right?
[18:40]And there is such a huge trauma that you have inherited.
[18:45]I mean, this is a, I mean, how does any family sort of, you know, pull themselves up right
[18:51]after something like this has happened, especially when it pervaded so many branches, right?
[18:56]Like so many pieces of history.
[18:59]And then here you come, like how do you make sense of it?
[19:03]Right, how do you integrate all this information?
[19:05]So how did writing the whole story and digging deep and finding out all these facts?
[19:10]Like how do you make sense of it all now?
[19:12]Like how do you think about it?
[19:15]Like is there a repackaging sort of like, you know, rewriting your own's or narrative after
[19:22]after changing some of the past that wasn't quite in order?
[19:25]That's a great question.
[19:26]And I feel like I have so many more tools that my disposal than my dad had at that time.
[19:34]And like, I don't know if my father could have done anything other than what he did, right?
[19:41]And I think that one of the things that he was trying to do in some ways is that he was trying
[19:44]to go on with his life, but he was also trying to, you know, reproduce, like to recreate an
[19:49]idea of family, and yet still being haunted by the past. And I too have been haunted and I'm not,
[19:58]I'm not sure if you so much-
[20:00]You have this moment where you've made sense of it, as I've had periods in which different
[20:10]moments include different kinds of healing given the ways in which it comes to me.
[20:16]So I guess what I mean by that is that I feel like there are ways in which I am always
[20:21]working through the significance of that past to this moment now.
[20:28]And I'm always planning for disaster, for example, like I've always planned for disaster,
[20:34]I'm like, oh, bombshell, dirty thing, it's not that.
[20:37]In my mind, I'm planning for it because you can't control it, right?
[20:41]This idea, right, that these, you know, devastating losses are part of our lives in ways
[20:50]that we don't necessarily have control over.
[20:53]And I've had to like temper that because, you know, my husband likes to talk about
[20:59]the fact that like, and I will point to a disaster and tell someone, really, you should
[21:04]be careful because.
[21:05]And then I'll go into this horrible story of someone being dismembered by something
[21:10]usually.
[21:11]And he will say, you do realize other people do not talk like this.
[21:15]I know that that's coming from a place of loss, right?
[21:20]And so I think that I don't know if I so much make sense of it as I give myself this space
[21:32]to process it, to let it come to me when it comes to me and to process that grief.
[21:38]You know, and I do think there is something to what my father did, which was really kind
[21:43]of a kind of recreation of family and moving on and taking real pleasure and delight
[21:48]in that.
[21:49]And I think that's something that I do as well.
[21:52]But yeah, it's very, it's always sort of in progress.
[21:56]I don't think, yeah, I don't think it's ever finite.
[21:59]But I know for me, one of the things that was really important was the knowing.
[22:04]Like I, and I know that some things could not be recreated, right?
[22:08]Like there are some things that remain unknown.
[22:10]But it was really important to me that I gathered the information and that it would
[22:19]be there for my children when they needed to know more.
[22:26]Because I so much of my life was so much about the secrecy of family secrets and the things
[22:34]that you don't talk about.
[22:36]And I wanted to create a space where I not could not only talk about it and process
[22:44]it out loud and and process it as a writer, but also to create a space for my children
[22:50]to be able to process it.
[22:51]Because I don't think it's a kind of loss that has like some sort of final end and
[22:58]like this is it is deeply embedded in who we are.
[23:01]Mm hmm.
[23:03]Tell me about the process of writing the book and when you fit that in with your mother
[23:11]in life and work and like when did you do all of this and how did you get it done?
[23:16]I feel like I should ask you the same question.
[23:19]Maybe that's why I'm asking you like advice, right?
[23:24]Yeah, when do we get it done?
[23:27]So with this book, I remember writing pieces of this and after I had my first child
[23:33]and she was nursing a lot, like not just a little bit like she was a kid who nursed
[23:41]all night it seemed like and I couldn't remember just being up at night and literally
[23:46]like feed the baby, put her down, write a little bit, feed the baby, put her down right
[23:51]a little bit.
[23:52]There wasn't a lot of sleep in there anyway and I figured, you know, I needed to write
[23:56]it down to like I there was something therapeutic about that process, I'm sure.
[24:01]But I felt so compelled to be writing about this.
[24:06]So there was that, but it took a long time.
[24:10]I had, you know, two children and you know, there were times in the process where I'm
[24:16]like, I don't know, I just didn't know if it was a book, you know, and I kept looking
[24:21]at it.
[24:23]Two stories is not one story, but I can't tell one story without the other story because
[24:28]they're still connected in these, you know, intimate ways for me.
[24:31]And so some of the writing took place in the wee hours and then in later years, even as
[24:37]my kids are getting even a little bit older, I would still get up at like four o'clock
[24:40]in the morning and really, really early.
[24:43]And I look back at that now and I'm like, how did I do that, you know, like you should
[24:48]just think like, well, that should have, you know, been tortured going without sleep.
[24:55]And I don't necessarily recommend writing that way, but I think that when you, you've got
[25:00]to be up before they're upright because like you've got to be up for there, up anyway.
[25:05]But yeah, it also took a long time to find the form.
[25:09]Yeah, I tried to read as many memoirs as I could that really like broke the rules because
[25:15]I didn't know how I could make these stories fit together in terms of the form.
[25:23]And I was obsessed with it because I do feel like form is like kind of the place where
[25:28]I feel most vulnerable as a writer.
[25:31]I guess the thing I worry about the most, the form like is this going to make sense to
[25:35]anybody with me.
[25:36]And it wasn't until I found the form that all of those pieces I've been writing for
[25:40]were so long started to fall into place or I would come nudge them into place and try
[25:46]to make, that make it work as a book.
[25:49]But yeah, I'm an everyday writer or at least I try to be an everyday writer, right?
[25:55]And, but what I discovered is like with little heads, like, you know, talk about not being
[26:02]able to control anything like, and, you know, they get sick, like they get sick all the
[26:07]time.
[26:09]You know, and, you know, they have needs to be met that definitely make it hard sometimes
[26:17]to find the time to actually write.
[26:18]Yeah, it was tricky and it took way longer than I thought this book was going to take.
[26:22]I know everyone took that, but like it took way longer than I thought this book was going
[26:27]to take.
[26:28]And part of it was that I started this book at a time where I then subsequently had to
[26:32]do children after.
[26:34]So I had this conversation a long time ago with the poet Claudia Rankin and it really
[26:39]helped me deal with how long this book took.
[26:43]I was having dinner with her one night when she was visiting this area and I don't really
[26:53]know her, know her.
[26:54]I was just invited to this dinner and I asked her a similar kind of question about how
[26:59]did she get citizen done?
[27:03]And she talked about the time it took her between books and then she mentioned the age
[27:07]of her child and she said, you do notice that those are the same.
[27:12]Like it took her, she was like, my kid had to get old enough for me to get the space
[27:18]to actually do this, to finish this and I just thought, wow, that's so helpful because
[27:24]when you're talking to somebody, you're like, oh, the literary genius and they're telling
[27:27]you, oh, no, it's hard to write with children, things take longer with kids.
[27:31]It was so helpful to me because honestly, I think I actually felt like a little bit of shame
[27:35]about how long this book took me.
[27:37]Okay, how long did it really take?
[27:39]I think I worked on this book for 10 years.
[27:41]Okay.
[27:42]I think I worked on this book for 10 years because yeah, because it was, and that's not
[27:47]including when the book finally gets picked up and there were edits to do after that.
[27:52]So yeah, I want to say it was like, you know, a 10 year period of time.
[27:56]I got other books out during that time at this book, yeah, because I actually, yeah,
[28:04]I started this book right after I had published this, got a really book and then published
[28:08]a book with some friends in between logs, so working on this one and then yeah, it took
[28:14]from time.
[28:15]Well, it's not another deal.
[28:17]I know the deal, I know the deal, but I also feel like this book is so important for you
[28:26]and your family and true, like it's not like you're just crinking out a novel about a
[28:34]car crash even.
[28:35]Do you know what I mean?
[28:36]This is so, yeah, there's a lot of stuff there.
[28:39]So I feel like how great that you just got it, you did it though, and now it's done.
[28:44]Yeah.
[28:45]Yeah.
[28:46]And honestly, one of the reasons I couldn't finish it is it was in part because, you
[28:51]know, there's some of the stories of the people in it weren't finished it and the way that
[28:55]I needed to happen in order for me to really understand the meaning of their lives in
[28:59]a way.
[29:00]And I think, yeah, I think that was one of the things that was also making this book hard
[29:06]because I didn't have answers to all the questions that I was really posing in this book.
[29:13]And I was asking big questions about, you know, survival.
[29:17]It's a huge question about how people survive something like what my father survived.
[29:24]And I think that, yeah, it took real reflection and time and spending time with people.
[29:32]There were relatives in the book that I had never really had conversations with about this
[29:35]either because we'd all been taught and not talk about it.
[29:38]And I, you know, I was stumped when I mentioned, you mentioned earlier when I go and
[29:43]talk to my cousin who was in the accident and she tells me she was a member of it.
[29:49]It was stunning to me that it was as if, you know, the not talking in some ways for me
[29:58]it required out of the book.
[30:00]to break through that kind of silence.
[30:02]Wow. Well, look, you got it in. It's great.
[30:08]You know, you still kept everything else in the air enough that, you know, so I think it's wonderful.
[30:15]And I really do feel like a lot of it is about your search for control over all these things that
[30:21]were just just out of grasp. And so, hopefully, even though it took a while, the fact that you
[30:28]took it back makes you feel empowered going forward with all the other stuff, you know.
[30:34]It does. Yeah, it really, really does. Thank you so much. Thank you. You're awesome. I really
[30:39]appreciate you doing this. Thank you for inviting me. Thanks, Cassandra. Take care. Bye-bye.
[30:45]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't
[30:49]forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[30:54]Also, sign up for my newsletter at zebi Owens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet
[30:58]lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texturesound for
[31:03]the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and
[31:08]now trim music.