Kyo Maclear, UNEARTHING: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets
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[1:03]Kio Macleer is the author of Unearthing, A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets.
[1:09]She was born in London, England and moved to Toronto at the age of four.
[1:12]Her most recent book, Birds Art Life was published in seven territories and became a Canadian
[1:17]number one bestseller.
[1:18]She received a PhD from York University in the environmental humanities.
[1:22]Her short fiction essays and art criticism have been published in Orion Magazine, Asia Art
[1:26]Pacific, Litub, Brick the Millions the Guardian, Shampala Sun, the Globe and Male Toronto
[1:31]among other publications.
[1:33]She is also a children's author, editor and teacher.
[1:35]Welcome, Kio.
[1:36]Thank you so much for coming on Moms.
[1:37]Don't have time to read books to discuss your absolutely beautiful memoir that made me cry
[1:43]called Unearthing, A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets.
[1:46]This is really, really great.
[1:48]What does it mean?
[1:49]So nice to be here.
[1:51]Can you tell listeners a bit about what your book is about, how you structured it, the
[1:57]way that you did, which was so interesting, just all the interesting things and then we
[2:01]can dive deep into different parts.
[2:04]Absolutely.
[2:05]So it's kind of a hybrid memoir.
[2:07]I've heard it described as a kind of detective story, a family memoir, a personal botanical
[2:13]history.
[2:14]But essentially the story follows a journey that happened.
[2:17]It began in 2019 when I did a DNA test and discovered that my father who had died just
[2:23]three months previously wasn't biologically related to me.
[2:27]And we were really close.
[2:28]So this was a bit of a shocker.
[2:29]And I actually had no suspicions whatsoever.
[2:32]I was doing the test for entirely different reasons.
[2:35]And so the book really traces the journey of what happened.
[2:38]I mean, I enlisted strangers to help me kind of uncover what happened piece by piece.
[2:43]And part of what's kind of odd about the story is that it really is a mystery that could
[2:47]have been cracked by someone I see almost every day, namely my mother.
[2:51]And I don't think that's a big spoiler.
[2:53]And she's a really kind of dynamic, charged, electrical kind of character in my life.
[2:58]And she's somebody who's kind of both fascinated and vexed me my entire life.
[3:02]So it kind of follows that journey.
[3:04]And it takes place over the course of a year or so and it's structured around the seasons.
[3:09]And it's actually structured around what are called small seasons in Japanese.
[3:14]So I really wanted to tell the story against kind of shifting kind of a world that was kind
[3:20]of constantly changing, you know, in some ways to kind of evoke this sense that the climate
[3:25]was kind of dramatically different during that period of time when I was on our thing,
[3:29]the story.
[3:30]But also to kind of get a sense of the kind of landscape as a protagonist.
[3:34]One of the things I realized was that I kind of overlooked my mother in the kind of story
[3:38]of my life that she wasn't like the big protagonist.
[3:41]And so I was really interested in other things that we kind of underestimate in the world.
[3:45]So amazing.
[3:46]I mean, in your search at the beginning, which starts off for your father, it then
[3:51]sort of delves deep into investigating all these things about your mom and her life and memories
[3:57]and what does memory mean?
[3:58]And then, you know, I don't think I can delete this, but I think it's a spoiler to talk
[4:03]about her dementia.
[4:04]Is that okay to discuss part of the story?
[4:07]Yeah.
[4:08]So even as you write through that and deal with her memory fragments and it's like we
[4:13]are with you trying to figure out what she is telling the truth, whatever that is about
[4:18]and what is fiction, what is lie, like, and then you are left to discover alongside her
[4:23]what you believe and what you don't and sort of found family.
[4:28]And I don't know.
[4:29]It was really beautiful and very original.
[4:31]Tell me a little bit about the style because one thing that you do throughout the book
[4:37]is you have like a sentence that gets repeated at the beginning of many sections.
[4:43]And then you switch the sentence up to a different sentence, usually parts about you're
[4:48]being a daughter and your relationship to your mother, but you do it in such a poetic way
[4:53]in the repetition.
[4:55]Just tell me more about that.
[4:57]It probably has a name of a literary device that I don't know what it is or something, but
[5:01]a really good question.
[5:03]So I mean, I write books for children, so I'm really interested in the idea of refrain
[5:08]repetition and how that can kind of create this mesmerism for the reader.
[5:12]I think part of it was just I was repeating the sentence because I was kind of finding,
[5:17]trying to find a re-establish a pattern to my life and kind of finding grounding again.
[5:21]And so in some ways it became almost like a mantra, like kind of repeating, I am the daughter
[5:26]of this parent.
[5:27]I am the daughter of this parent and they were changing.
[5:30]And so my relationship as a daughter, my whole kind of view of daughterhood was changing
[5:34]thing.
[5:35]Kind of a shifting sense, feeling because both my parents at different stages develop dementia.
[5:38]I mean, so much of this book is about memory.
[5:41]And I think we're kind of under the misapprehension that when we uncover stories, that
[5:45]they kind of arise, you know, like almost like an archaeological day, the memories come up
[5:49]intact and all we have to do is kind of brush them off.
[5:52]And then like they're there.
[5:53]But what I discovered, and I kind of know this intuitively is that our memories are always
[5:57]shifting anyway at the best of times and then you can't hear person who you're relying
[6:02]on to tell you a story who's in the stages of dementia, early stages of dementia, then
[6:07]like there's, you know, there's no ground literally like everything's constantly changing
[6:12]and there's, you know, every time I'd have a version of the story, my mother would kind
[6:16]of rewrite it or kind of reject the version she'd said.
[6:19]And so it became really a lot about storytelling in some ways and the kind of impossibility
[6:24]of it.
[6:25]It's crazy.
[6:26]My dad, my brother and I recently, there was an almost accident we were in.
[6:31]And all three of us like have totally different memories of it, including like who was driving
[6:36]the car.
[6:37]I'm like, how is this possible and what does this mean about the actual moment?
[6:40]Like if none of us remember it and it did happen, but then just floated away, you know,
[6:44]like what is the truth?
[6:45]So to speak, nothing, this is an important thing the way your family history is.
[6:49]But just these moments as we all age and forget and you know, what does it mean within
[6:55]the family when you have situations that everybody has a different view on, including
[7:00]yourself at different times of the day.
[7:02]And even at one point you put in like, are you aware now that like your interpretation
[7:08]of events is like being incorporated into somebody else's memory about them and folded
[7:12]in like that, which is also so interesting.
[7:15]No, I mean, that story told about the car accident.
[7:17]I mean, I'm sorry that happened, but I think about that all the time, like I storytellers,
[7:22]I think we get tied to this idea of accuracy and that that kind of worrying about accuracy
[7:28]is the kind of only kind of accountability for a story, kind of short changes or storytelling
[7:33]sometimes.
[7:34]I realize that there's another kind of fidelity, which is kind of maybe an emotional truth.
[7:38]And so I tried to make that compass for the story.
[7:41]And so actually there's a, I think there's a shift in the book, like in the beginning,
[7:44]I'm very much the reporter's daughter.
[7:45]My dad was a war reporter.
[7:46]Yes.
[7:47]And so I come to know and I'm feeling really unsettled and I think if I ask everyone questions,
[7:52]if I go at this from every angle, then maybe I can make sense of this thing.
[7:56]It feels kind of senseless in some ways.
[7:59]Oh, I really do that.
[8:00]Like I go in with this like complete like fervor for the truth.
[8:04]And I'm like really interrogative when it comes to my mother to the point where she's just
[8:08]shutting down.
[8:09]And then there's a point where she gets the diagnosis of dementia and suddenly all her shifting
[8:13]memories are kind of cast in this new light.
[8:15]And I think at that point, the story kind of loosens.
[8:18]And I realize that this kind of desire on my part for this accurate retelling isn't going
[8:23]to happen.
[8:24]So maybe I can approach different way and it really changed at that point for me.
[8:28]Like it really felt like a kind of loosening also in my relationship with my mom in some
[8:33]ways.
[8:34]Oh, my gosh.
[8:35]When I got to the end and you included, those were her drawings, right?
[8:38]They hers are yours.
[8:39]Oh, actually.
[8:40]But I, you know, at some point, I really want to do something with her drawings.
[8:43]They're amazing.
[8:44]I have boxes of that because I thought what you were saying, I mean, it's equally beautiful
[8:48]that they're yours.
[8:49]I thought that when you compared it to the viral video of the dancer in the wheelchair
[8:55]with dementia, that, you know, we still have access to all these things that we can't
[9:00]explain why or how and it just comes out.
[9:03]And then after you kind of ended it with, I had like tears in my head and then I was going
[9:07]through all the pictures.
[9:09]I was like, oh, my gosh, maybe these are the moms and maybe you saved your moms and put
[9:12]them in there.
[9:13]But anyway, either way, it's beautiful.
[9:14]There's a new high months for sure.
[9:16]You know, those were line-up cuts.
[9:18]So I mean, I don't know.
[9:19]Like I had so much, I had all this access energy and this kind of, I was anticipating
[9:25]finding out more.
[9:26]I was kind of, I had a search angel helping me try to figure out my lines.
[9:31]And every day, like I had this kind of adrenaline and I didn't know where to put it.
[9:35]So I started doing this garden, which I talk about in the book, but I also started carving.
[9:39]Like literally, I didn't realize it at the time, but it was like this kind of inner
[9:42]thing of images through line-up cut and just like carving and carving and it was really kind
[9:45]of just still myself in some way.
[9:48]And so that's what's in the book, these kind of carvings that I did.
[9:51]Interesting.
[9:53]You also talk about your sons throughout the book and you take us in motherhood, but only
[10:00]sort of I want to say gently sort of like on the periphery right it's not about your relationship
[10:04]or even your feelings of being a mom but it's it's as you unearth all these things about your
[10:09]family you'll bring them in as sort of supporting characters like and then I told my sons and then
[10:13]I ran off to my sons again you know and then you know this son and you give us little pieces of
[10:18]what they're like like little bits of their sleep patterns or like this one's like this and
[10:23]I'm curious how you thought about sort of the role of your sons in this book yeah that's it well
[10:29]I mean they're very much they play that role in my life I mean they would definitely like a
[10:33]counterpoint they're really funny and they're really musical and I mean I guess totally
[10:38]for the story they kind of added a certain dynamic which I really liked like the kind of
[10:42]note of levity and and also I mean part of the story is not just about like what we inherit
[10:47]is about what we carry forward so I felt like my sons were really important in the book
[10:50]because in some ways I'm telling the story for them I mean whether or not they read it is another matter
[10:55]but just I feel like in some ways when we're telling family stories we're kind of
[10:58]of unspooling things into the future and what I really wanted to do with this story was kind of
[11:03]untangle all these kind of lies and secrecy and secrets and like all the shame that it kind of
[11:09]been in the family and kind of and like kind of opacity or like just kind of cloudiness and all
[11:15]this kind of clogged communication channels in the family and kind of unspool that in a way where
[11:21]my kids wouldn't have to deal with that anymore like I felt like it was carried through generations
[11:26]my family and I wanted to kind of make them present in the book but I was kind of careful
[11:30]because I do feel like I don't want to put them in a book that kind of jeopardizes their privacy in
[11:35]any way so they're kind of little touches here and there yeah I love that you also have this
[11:42]even more than you expected perhaps the role of Judaism and where that fits in with love and Judaism
[11:48]and culture and tell me a little bit about that and how you kind of integrated all that
[11:54]even now yeah good question I think that's ever evolving but like I mean we have a kind of
[11:59]secular Jewish home because my partner's Jewish and my kids were both they had a name that's fun
[12:04]like everything so we've had all the high holidays and stuff so as you discover more and more
[12:10]things about your family life and everything and your own husband being Jewish and having sort of
[12:15]a search for meaning and spirituality as your mother is aging and saying you know all of that you
[12:24]have this piece of religion that's sort of floating in the ground or one of the roots essentially of
[12:32]the plants of life and I was just wondering how you think about that now that the book is sort of
[12:38]out there now that we all know like what happens towards the end just has it changed has your
[12:42]relationship with that faith in life changed at all or did it just do the same? Well in some ways
[12:48]it stayed the same I think that one of the things I love I've always loved about certain aspects of
[12:52]Judaism is the idea of welcoming this stranger so one thing that happened was because I was so uncertain
[12:58]when I got my DNA results was that I uploaded them to another site and then I did a second DNA test
[13:03]so as a result every day I get little pings in my inbox saying that I have a new DNA relative
[13:09]our new DNA match and I used to look at them every day and now I've stopped looking at them
[13:14]I respond to messages when I get them but so I might have another half subling I might have a first
[13:18]cousin and so I've kind of thought of it as a thought experiment like in the Jewish sense of welcoming
[13:23]this stranger like what if everybody out there was a you know a half subling or a cousin
[13:29]like how would we treat the world differently and I know the sounds kind of sappy and stuff
[13:33]but I think about you know for example and Passover welcoming Elijah or you know and
[13:38]Ushpizin I don't know if I'm pronouncing that properly but the idea that you have this kind of
[13:42]welcoming and inclusive sense of belonging and so I think that's what I really love about I mean
[13:47]the faith and the tradition the way I've seen it practiced and I really wanted this book to be about
[13:54]kind of open in a wider sense of kinship yeah so it really resonated with aspects of Judaism
[14:01]and this idea that it's kind of like you pitch a large tent and you invite strangers in and you have
[14:05]a house with like one wall that's open so people can come and visit I love that idea of kinship
[14:11]like I didn't want this to be a story about a DNA surprise that then became another story about
[14:16]how I found my true family and this is my bylaw I really didn't want to repeat that narrative
[14:22]oh it was funny because when I had read about I don't know a third of it I was like oh wait
[14:27]this is but this is not what's gonna be in the rest of this book
[14:30]really where's where are we going like what is what's gonna happen and it was so interesting I mean
[14:36]you even reflect on sort of what the meeting of family is I had dug your to a bunch of pages about
[14:41]even like the role of family and oh and then I wanted to ask you about maybe you don't want to
[14:47]talk about this because this comes later I'm trying not to give things away because I feel like
[14:50]I'm talking about this as if it's a novel usually with memor I'm just like here's what we're going to
[14:54]talk you know like let's just delve in but because it was so you know at times depressed I don't
[14:59]know I just don't want to go there necessarily but you do talk about your relationship
[15:03]with an unnamed but clearly we know who it is very famous person who ends up having a very
[15:10]intimate relationship with your mother and it was mind blowing actually that that whole thing even
[15:16]happened can you talk about that or should we just leave it for the reader to discover
[15:19]maybe we'll leave it for the reader to discover but I have to say I mean that person has been
[15:25]was important to me like just as a writer as an artist like I find her incredibly inspiring and
[15:30]one thing I really want to bring into the book as well was the idea of artistic ancestry
[15:34]yeah pick through a debt as a writer to all these people who came before me and in some ways
[15:39]those are my kin like I love my bookshelves is my bookkin and I find like a lot of readers
[15:44]feel that way too that they're like you know their books are they're like siblings are
[15:48]you remember so look in I like that looks so nice yeah that's beautiful the role obviously
[15:55]of nature and the world and roots and flower you know you start off by going through the
[16:01]morning ritual for your father by going to this greenhouse and sort of commuting with the
[16:07]plants if you will as you work your way through that terrible time and then as you write everything
[16:15]becomes you know completely interwoven with different analogies and moments and interactions with
[16:23]the natural world tell me a little bit about that and also even from a writing standpoint how
[16:28]how that became the major like you could have told the story and not had that element right
[16:35]but you combined two kind of different threads so just tell me about that yeah really great question
[16:40]well I mean one of the things that happened was that I mean there were two things there was an
[16:43]instinct to go to ground because everything felt like it was kind of turning and revolving and
[16:49]I really wanted to put my hands near and the other thing was that I'm not a fancy gardener like
[16:54]I'm a terrible gardener actually and I'm an notorious plant killer and so it was kind of
[16:59]counterintuitive in certain ways but I also knew that I needed to meet my mother on her own terms
[17:05]in a weird way and my mother was an avid gardener and she's so I mean she's still like there's a
[17:11]a lot of things that have gone with the dementia but she's incredibly she remembers how to take
[17:16]care plants and she remembers like what plant names are and and so I really wanted to kind of connect
[17:22]with her on a certain level because there's a kind of impasse where I was being the interrogator
[17:27]and she was kind of withholding or I thought she was withholding information that I wanted and it just
[17:33]became a different way of approaching each other and the garden became a meeting place and so
[17:38]it was more of a kind of figurative third space for us to kind of meet where it wasn't
[17:43]embattled we weren't in combat emotional combat like we you know I don't know if you know Vivian
[17:48]Gornick's book fierce attachments but we were very much that mother and daughter and so we were
[17:52]kind of caught in this narrative and so I felt like the garden was a kind of way of reconnecting
[17:57]with her and also thinking about cultural transmission because I lost my first language Japanese
[18:04]and I couldn't really try to relearn it didn't work and so the garden became another language for
[18:10]us so really it was kind of that desire to connect with her oh that's so beautiful you wrote
[18:15]also about sort of being in in this limbo of being part Japanese part not Japanese how you don't
[18:23]feel sort of accepted necessarily by either community not quite being enough for either space and
[18:30]how that limbo makes you feel can you talk a little bit about that as well yeah I actually kind of
[18:36]like that limbo I think it's like been for me a fertile space because I've I don't know I think
[18:40]there's a writer just position where you're kind of on the outside looking in and so you're kind
[18:45]of refusing the call to belong on other people's terms and it's also made me question like things
[18:52]like the genealogical imagination like the idea that this is who we are this is what's ours
[18:56]this is us and this them because I've always been kind of on the border I've never really
[19:01]trusted that idea and so I don't know I feel like I'm just at home with people who feel kind of
[19:07]you know in a middle space between things and I feel like I've had the advantage of being part of
[19:13]the place or a space where there was a constant conversation with myself fault lines like I
[19:18]talked about this in the book that my mother was treated very differently and kind of
[19:22]experienced certain wounds around racism that obviously my father didn't experience
[19:27]and so I saw that the world was really kind of bifurcated at times so that kind of brought that
[19:32]knowledge home you know like literally home it was great when you described how you saw your mother
[19:38]so differently in Japan like when she went back in her just command of the place I remember once
[19:43]I'm not I don't know why I keep talking about my own family but I feel like this book is one of
[19:46]those books that makes you sort of reflect on your own relationships and history and whatever
[19:50]I remember visiting my brother at college and he went to Penn and I had been to Philadelphia
[19:56]just like a handful of times but when I went to visit him like I was astounded that he
[20:00]knew so well how to drive me everywhere and he I'm like how like we were on the same day and
[20:05]like look at you go you're like you know exactly what you're doing with like complete authority in
[20:09]this area and I felt like you sitting like walking beside your mom and she just like those throughout
[20:14]and just it's like well where did this person come from you know where did this side spring from?
[20:20]Yeah like I mean that kind of touches on something that I realized which is that I
[20:25]new artist in Melbourne who was amazing and he would draw the same thing over and over again
[20:30]and he said the reason he did it was to get past his idea of the thing so he might draw a tree
[20:35]because he had an idea of what a tree was and what it looked like and that the longer he drew it
[20:38]the more it kind of fell apart it started to dissolve and his understanding of it changed and shifted
[20:44]and he said the intimacy was the ability to kind of not know something or not be certain about
[20:50]what something was and I think it's really hard to see the people in our family that we could
[20:54]think we know we assume that we have every angle on them and then something changes like you
[21:00]you know your your brother you know see him kind of in his element my mother in Japan like
[21:05]and suddenly you have a whole other angle on them and you realize that you know only a fraction
[21:09]of who they are or you see like a very limited kind of glimpse of that that person and it's like
[21:14]it's kind of amazing I mean it can be kind of I think for children when they see their parents
[21:19]and that way it can be a little bit unsettling but I kind of love that idea and I think it's why
[21:24]I realize that biography is kind of a doubtful enterprise because you can never nail people down
[21:29]like you can never get a fix on them they're always changing and the context will determine who they
[21:34]are as well so very true I just read this other memoir called the rye bread marriage which is totally
[21:40]different but at the end there's a line that stuck with me about how you know the only thing that's
[21:47]consistent you know after they're 39 years of marriage as they look on with to their like grown
[21:52]children is just how much everything is going to constantly be changing and I feel like that
[21:56]has such a good effects with how you view your family and everything is like that it's only a glimpse
[22:02]like it's like we're pausing the frame essentially is all we can that's all we can really do is
[22:06]pause and describe the frame and then we unpause and who knows exactly yeah I have writing students
[22:12]so I say it's like a moment of capture is like taking like a phrase frame yeah and well
[22:17]especially I mean obviously in fiction you can kind of put your characters away but
[22:21]in them are the characters are still evolving and changing and you know I think Maggie
[22:25]Nelson says that eventually you make a truce with time and you decide that you're going to
[22:30]hand your manuscript in but this story is so it actually also reminded me of Maggie Smith's
[22:35]latest book you can make this place beautiful did you read that I mean it's not similar but there's
[22:41]something in the poetry of books the style of writing I'm I'm wondering to about your path to
[22:50]publication and like what that was like you know sometimes in publishing there's an urge to like
[22:55]make things very clearly delineated right like is what is this about or where does this fall
[23:00]and did it on your this book is beautiful absolutely beautiful and includes so many different
[23:06]elements which is fabulous but so I'm just curious like what that whole thing what that was like
[23:11]and if you had written the whole book when you sold it and you're roll with your editor just like
[23:16]tell me about that whole yeah that's a good question I mean I did write the whole thing before I
[23:20]sold it and I worked I with an editor I worked with on my last book Kathy I'm building it
[23:25]Scribner who's just fantastic and was so supportive and just understands that I kind of write this
[23:31]hybrid form of memoir that kind of I mean it's funny because I don't I buy books all over the map
[23:37]and I have a friend who runs a book shop in Toronto who said that he'd like to have one category
[23:42]for books and he'd call it fluke and everything would fit in it because he finds it you know the idea
[23:47]of categories for books can be like kind of silo them in certain ways yeah I mean I guess this
[23:52]can be shelved and memoir can be shelved and I don't know there's probably like a category called
[23:56]personal growth or that I don't think of this book as having like that kind of grand epiphany that
[24:01]a lot of those books around personal growth have but I usually write the whole thing and then
[24:06]kind of figure out what it is afterwards I just find that I need to go kind of subterranean
[24:10]and kind of work quietly but the one thing that did happen with this publication is that
[24:16]all the kind of shrieking demons I had and my head that I kind of tamp down as I was writing
[24:20]came out and kind of danced on my brain stage when the book was like sent off to kind of be printed
[24:25]it was in that moment in the anxieties kind of arose and and they were really related to this idea
[24:31]of disclosure and I think that probably anybody who's writing about family will relate to this but
[24:37]it's like how much do you tell how much do you withhold in my case I'd shared facts that like
[24:42]people wanted to keep hidden for a very long time and so I had to grapple with what that meant and
[24:47]also you know I didn't deal with a sense of swagger like I wasn't like oh I'm going to just blow
[24:51]the lid off this kind of box it was very much like I had a sense of there were things that I
[24:57]put in and things that I would keep out but I also push back there a few moments in the book you
[25:02]probably noticed where I was kind of pushing back when somebody was saying you thought you're
[25:05]not going to write about this right and you're like no of course not and I'm like oh no but I'm reading
[25:09]it right now. So I mean I did that again like I did that with a sense that there were certain things
[25:16]I didn't I thought that they needed to be on concealed and I didn't keep keeping them
[25:22]like kind of keeping the secret any longer I felt like they were hanging over from
[25:26]you know a generation before when maybe there were different codes around what was shameful you know
[25:32]and what was speakable and I felt like that changed. Even when you say that you know your father was a
[25:37]very private person like you and yet here we are knowing all every single thing you know you know
[25:43]but yeah I mean it's amazing so you had had a number one bestseller in Canada already when you
[25:50]to write this book I'm glad that the demons were gone when you sat down to write it but did you
[25:55]question where what your next project would be or did it just this all was happening in real life
[26:00]and you're like I have to just write about this. Well this was really happening in real life it
[26:04]was I couldn't look like the white elephant in the room I couldn't write about it I mean and
[26:08]in a writing is how I experience my experience in a weird way yeah kind of how I
[26:13]things and so I really felt like I was kind of metabolizing things and things were turning and
[26:18]I was writing I didn't know that it would all go into this book but I was writing the whole
[26:21]time and it actually really helped because I kind of figured out you know there is something to be
[26:26]said for writing but I also realized at a certain point there's a kind of decorum to craft
[26:31]so I'm also a little suspicious of that so when this story when I felt it was becoming too
[26:35]tidy and I was trying to tidy that for the reader I would feel kind of unsettled you know because
[26:40]I realized that I was I don't want to sell a lie you know there's that the beautiful opening for
[26:45]Casey layman's book like you know there's certain kind of conventions around memoir that kind
[26:50]of get imposed on a writer as I really wanted to kind of I didn't want my story to kind of get
[26:55]jammed into any convention where I felt like I was kind of sealing it up and making it see kind
[26:59]of more complete than it actually was so that was kind of I mean I that's maybe I'm not expressing
[27:05]it that well but that was kind of the struggle and right the writing amazing. Do you have any advice
[27:10]for aspiring authors? Well I guess my the thing that's helped me so much is to stay is to be a
[27:16]reader. To be a reader also to look to kind of adjacent art practices I really think I've learned
[27:22]as much about writing from reading books as I have from like dance and film I just gave a talk on
[27:28]comics last week like I've learned so much from like peanuts and Charles Schultz and like
[27:32]about how to create a narrative edge and like there's just so much you can learn from other
[27:36]practices. Twilight art's book on on dance is great in terms of persistence and habit there's a
[27:42]book with well-term rich in my colon dot she and film it's like a great book on editing so don't
[27:47]just kind of look in your don't just stay in your own lane kind of look at what other people are
[27:51]doing you know what that's so great well I'm so excited for your books to come out so great I can't
[27:57]wait to hear everybody reading it and talking about it I feel like I want to go talk to a lot of
[28:01]people about it now because there's so much to discuss but anyway congratulations and thank you
[28:08]for sharing so much about your your your your story and yourself with the world. Thank you so
[28:12]big pleasure. Okay all right we'll have a great day bye-bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of
[28:19]Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zibi Owens and at
[28:24]Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books also sign up for my newsletter at zibiowens.com and sign up for
[28:29]my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve
[28:33]and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for
[28:38]providing this fantastic intro and outro music.