Emma Grey and Laura Tremaine at Zibby's Bookshop
[0:04]Welcome to mom's don't have time to be books with Zivi.
[0:07]I'm the host Zivi Owens, I am an author, my latest is blank, pub date March 1st
[0:12]and novel.
[0:13]I'm also a podcaster, obviously, a publisher, a bookstore owner, and so much more.
[0:19]If you love books, you're in the right place.
[0:21]In fact, we call it the Ziviverse, or really, the LA Times called it the Ziviverse,
[0:26]and we're going with it.
[0:27]Go to Zivi Owens.com to learn more, and follow me on Instagram at Zivi Owens.
[0:33]The following was an event that we held at Zivi's bookshop, which was so amazing.
[0:38]You have to hear it.
[0:39]It's between Emma Gray and Laura Tremaine, and while this is available on YouTube, the
[0:44]audio is just so wonderful, and you all really need to hear it.
[0:47]So we're releasing it as a podcast.
[0:49]Emma Gray is the author of The Last Love Note.
[0:52]It's also a Zivi book, and was a book of the month club pick, and the target book club
[0:57]pick for December.
[0:58]Emma is an acclaimed Australian journalist and young adult fiction writer as well.
[1:02]Her writing has appeared in The Age, Canvera Times, and Harold Sunt.
[1:05]She lives in Canvera, Australia, with her family.
[1:08]Laura Tremaine is the author of The Life Council, Ten Friends, Every Woman Needs, and Share
[1:14]Your Stuff, I'll Go First.
[1:16]Laura grew up in small town, Oklahoma, and moved to Los Angeles, sight unseen when she
[1:21]was 22 years old.
[1:22]She worked in film and television production for many years at MTV, VH1 Fox, and Paramount
[1:27]Pictures before pursuing writing full-time.
[1:29]Laura has been sharing her life online since 2010.
[1:32]She writes about friendship, anxiety, motherhood, and marriage.
[1:34]Her blog posts and podcast episodes resonate with women looking for ways to connect
[1:39]more deeply with others as they transform from one era of life into another.
[1:43]Laura lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Jeff, and their two children.
[1:47]Welcome, everyone, tonight to this very special occasion where we're celebrating The Last
[1:52]Love Note by Emma.
[1:53]Congratulations so much.
[1:55]Thank you so much.
[1:56]You have so much for coming.
[1:57]Yeah, this is just amazing to watch your success around this book, and I'm so
[2:02]happy for you.
[2:04]As a reader, I always want to start and hear from authors of like where they started
[2:12]their writing life.
[2:13]I feel like whatever kind of reader you are, everyone sort of dreams of writing a book,
[2:18]but then as we get into adulthood, you either realize that that's a dream to be pursued
[2:22]or not, or if that's something that is real, and you've made it so real.
[2:28]So I just love to hear a little background of like being a, you know, was this a dream?
[2:33]Have you been a lifelong reader writer like all of that?
[2:36]Definitely.
[2:37]It was Anne of Green Gables that tipped me over into this.
[2:41]I remember being 14 and it was the Christmas holidays, which of course in Australia is the
[2:46]long summer holiday.
[2:48]I'm about to fly home actually tonight after this into 40 degrees Celsius, which is a
[2:53]heat wave.
[2:54]I really don't want to go home, so if we forget ourselves, it runs over, don't worry.
[2:59]I'm going to sleep on the floor here.
[3:01]But I was 14 and our aunties introduced my sister and I to Anne of Green Gables, the miniseries,
[3:09]and I remember watching this and immediately falling in love with Gilbert, of course, but
[3:14]at the same time, I fell in love with Anne as a writer and this concept that she had this
[3:20]burning desire to write.
[3:21]And I thought, so why?
[3:23]And I hadn't ever really realised that before.
[3:26]I was never, I mean, I used to get good marks in English at school, but I wasn't that
[3:31]standout English student that the teachers would have looked at and said, that's the
[3:35]one that's going to go on and be doing a talk in Zibi's bookshop in 2023.
[3:39]You know, I went to the local news agent and bought a notebook and pen because of course
[3:46]I'm 50, so this was very much pre having any kind of device to write on.
[3:52]And I just started writing a novel that day and it was terrible, but I didn't care because
[4:01]I just had this whole world in my head that I wanted to get out on this page and I had
[4:04]pages and pages of this awful novel.
[4:08]And I think I've still got it somewhere buried in my garage.
[4:11]And so from then on, I just, I used to write diaries all the time, I've matured into
[4:18]my diary becoming a public diary on Facebook, really.
[4:21]I feel for my friends, but they get everything, every little development.
[4:26]But I can't even walking around the streets.
[4:29]I'll be thinking, how could I describe what I'm seeing?
[4:33]How will I tell people later?
[4:34]How will I write about this?
[4:36]It's just all the time.
[4:38]And so when my husband passed away in 2016, it was really one of my earliest thoughts
[4:45]was, I'm going to have to get through this in words.
[4:48]It's the only way through this for me.
[4:51]And I really don't understand what's going on until I've written about it.
[4:55]And I think a lot of writers feel that way.
[4:58]And I don't know how I could have got through the last few years if I hadn't been able
[5:02]to process it all in words.
[5:04]And that started off with very detailed Facebook posts where I would, on the day of something
[5:10]horrible happening in my loss, you know, I'd go to the bank and have an awful interaction
[5:15]with the bank manager who wouldn't speak to me because they needed to speak to the person
[5:19]who's account I was trying to close.
[5:21]That kind of horrible thing that happens when you're grieving.
[5:25]And I would then write about that, that day.
[5:28]And so when it came to writing this book, I almost had all these real life roar in
[5:34]the moment, little scenarios that I've written already that I could mine for content for
[5:40]the book, which I think is how it comes across as quite a raw retelling of grief and
[5:47]loss.
[5:48]And real.
[5:49]Yeah.
[5:50]It felt very real.
[5:51]But just came out last week, I know, but as we do this conversation, I'm kind of thinking
[5:54]about spoilers, not spoilers.
[5:56]Has anyone here finished it yet?
[5:58]Anyone?
[5:59]Right.
[6:00]Okay.
[6:01]Oh.
[6:02]I mean, and then I have, of course, too.
[6:05]The book is about Kate, who I think is just one of the most adorable characters I've read
[6:10]in a while.
[6:11]Do you want to give, since people haven't finished, just give us sort of a brief overview
[6:15]as we talk more about the plot a little?
[6:17]Yeah.
[6:18]Kate is 40.
[6:20]And she was described in a podcast the other day as a hot mess.
[6:24]In fact, the question was, Kate's a bit of hot mess.
[6:27]Where did the inspiration for that character come from?
[6:31]And I immediately exited the podcast, went outside into a New York street and was almost
[6:36]run over by runaway hot dog truck in the street.
[6:39]And I thought, you know, you don't have to look too far to see where the chaos around
[6:42]her comes from.
[6:44]But she's lost her husband two years earlier.
[6:48]And the reason why we have these amazing people here from Alzheimer's, people need to
[6:53]say essay, but that's South Australia, LA is because this is the cause of her husband's
[7:02]death in the novel.
[7:04]And in my real life, my husband actually died from a heart attack.
[7:09]My mum passed away in June this year from dementia.
[7:13]So that's where the, the reality of that part of the story has been drawn from.
[7:18]And it's the story not only of Kate processing her husband's loss, but of her beginning
[7:24]to open her heart to someone new.
[7:27]This bit unfortunately is entirely fictional, but also aspirational.
[7:33]And so, so anyone single here in the evening, this evening, no, anyone who has, no.
[7:42]It was really lovely to be able to play with that storyline and imagine what that would
[7:46]be like.
[7:47]And I've got a lot of friends now who are young, widowed people who I've seen repartner
[7:52]and just been a joy to watch, watch them do that.
[7:56]So it's two love stories in one, which is, and they intertwine a lot too, because you can
[8:04]love two people at once.
[8:05]So they tell me.
[8:07]It is a book about grief, but it's also a book about hope.
[8:11]And I thought that they intermingled so well, because those emotions can sometimes
[8:16]intermingle and it's hard to articulate.
[8:18]And so reading it in a fictionalized version, it did feel like a beautiful way to capture
[8:24]it.
[8:25]Did you want to write it as a fiction as opposed to like a memoir or, you know, you said
[8:30]you're writing these things on Facebook that we're actually having to like just as a way
[8:34]to get some distance from it as a way to be, you know, because you're already a writer
[8:40]or I was in that process.
[8:42]I knew that I would write about grief.
[8:44]I could have gone one of three ways.
[8:46]I could have written a self-help book about what to do when you lose a partner in midlife.
[8:51]But there are already so many great books like that that I realised pretty early on.
[8:55]I didn't need to reinvent the wheel.
[8:57]I could have written a memoir and I take my hat off to those who do.
[9:02]We have Meghan, Reordant, Jarvis here, who was in the bookshop last night doing a talk
[9:06]about her new memoir, and it's called The End of the Hour, another zebed book.
[9:11]Anyway, so much easier to sell somebody else's book than you're on.
[9:17]And I am the only oversharer in my family.
[9:21]So that's why I had to fictionalise this story because I had to be careful about telling
[9:27]our own story to publicly feel like I could go a lot deeper into a fictional character's
[9:35]story than I could into my own for that reason.
[9:38]And also, I'm just a hopeless romantic.
[9:40]And I loved all those big 90s rom-coms and, you know, I still love them.
[9:45]I'll be watching them on the plane tonight when I can't sleep.
[9:48]And I couldn't resist.
[9:49]Yeah.
[9:50]I love that.
[9:51]There is so much about grief, like we said, but I really feel like, and this might be
[9:56]my own lens, but as I was reading it, I was like, oh, this is also a book about
[10:00]friendship. And that is part of the great love story. There's multiple love stories in this
[10:07]novel. But like that I came away from Kate, our main character has a wonderful best friend.
[10:14]She has a colleague, a boss, you know, friend who's been there through all these things that
[10:22]she has gone through. So I wondered if you could say a little bit more about like the friendships in
[10:26]our life because she wasn't surrounded by like hundreds of people or dozens of people.
[10:32]There's not a huge cast of characters as she's going through her grief. In fact, there's a loneliness
[10:37]element to it because she feels that she only has her best friend and a co-worker or two. Which
[10:42]I think sometimes when we're going through things we feel like that's not enough. Or we don't know
[10:47]how to show up for one another. Like I wondered if you could say something about the friendship piece
[10:51]because when I rate him up, I'm just like, yeah, that's what I was like really happy to get a notebook
[10:56]like we'll compare now before I start. No, I think friendship to me is incredibly important.
[11:02]And Kate has moved to another city, which is why she doesn't have a lot of friends when this happens
[11:08]that are around. In my case, I live in the city I was born in. So I was in fact surrounded
[11:14]and supported by an incredible community of friends. And I've tried to pay tribute to a lot of them
[11:19]in this book by threading little anecdotes through that they will see themselves in. Things like
[11:25]the friendship group that didn't know each other but all boyfriends on Facebook who got into a
[11:31]little huddle and organized for me to be out one night towards Christmas the first year after
[11:37]Jeff died. And I had a five-year-old son who still was expecting magic, you know. And all of the
[11:44]Christmas-y stuff. And I really was in the depths of despair at this time to quote Anne Greingable.
[11:50]And they got together and we drove in and our house had been covered in Christmas lights.
[11:54]So they appear in here. And the other friend, the friend who co-wrote the musical, Sally Whitwell is a
[12:00]brilliant composer. Her way of helping was instantly to compose a piece of music that we played at
[12:05]Jeff's funeral. And I mean it goes so far beyond lasagnas and casseroles. There was a friend who was
[12:13]very good at administration and I'm hopeless at that. And you've got so many forms that you have
[12:19]to fill out. And so she just said, can I come and sit with you and help you fill out the forms
[12:24]at the bank and things like that? So I always say to people when somebody loses someone,
[12:30]your time will come and your skills will be needed. And if it's not in the first five weeks,
[12:35]it could be two years later or ten years later that you can step in and do your part.
[12:40]And you know, we're now nearly eight years later. And there are times when I still need help.
[12:47]I know I'm going to go home and my front lawn will be mowed because the neighbours will have done
[12:51]that. I don't even have to ask them. You know, it's extraordinary the way. It was almost overwhelming
[12:58]the way people were helping. And I sort of kept wondering how can I ever pay them back.
[13:03]And then I realised it's about paying it forward. And that just lifted all that pressure
[13:09]and made it much easier for me to accept the help. And I think that that's a skill in itself
[13:15]that a lot of us struggle with to say yes to help. And we just have to realise that we take it
[13:21]in turns. It's just a mutually beneficial ecosystem of help. And there are times when you're the
[13:27]helper. And then there are times when you're being helped. And if we could just accept that, I
[13:32]think life would be so much easier. You mentioned that Kate was sort of called a hot mess, which I
[13:39]get that characterisation. She's kind of clumsy, like, you know, crazy things happen to her,
[13:43]you know, that kind of energy. However, one of the things that I really liked about what is going
[13:48]on with Kate simultaneously with grief and the love story is she might be kind of a messy on the
[13:54]outside, but she's portrayed as incredibly competent at her job. She's very, very good at her job.
[14:01]And yet she also feels she might be in the wrong job. Yeah. Yeah. And so that sort of running
[14:08]alongside like having a career crisis and I didn't read it as a crisis, but like as a sort of
[14:13]questioning in my my true calling, am I using my gifts in the right way? Am I staying in this job
[14:17]because I want some stability in my widowhood, you know, for my family. I wondered about that piece
[14:24]if that was something that you were going through or if it was just something you thought would be
[14:28]a universal for a mid-life woman to be wrestling with. I think it's something a lot of us go through
[14:34]and it is a crossroads that we reach. And I think younger generations coming through have a much
[14:39]more flexible way of looking at their careers and they're thinking about having several different
[14:44]careers in their lifetimes. I did use to work in a role which didn't suit me and it was
[14:50]an administration. And I'm sure if my former bosses are listening to this, they could attest
[14:57]to this. And I would dream of writing and Kate also has a similar ambition. And part of what
[15:05]happens when someone dies is that you realize life is short and it occurs to you that we don't have
[15:12]the luxury of necessarily waiting another five years, 10 years before we do the thing that we want
[15:17]to do. I was talking to a reader in a Barnes & Noble in Minneapolis a couple of nights ago
[15:23]where it was freezing cold, absolutely freezing cold. I was soaking it in before I go home.
[15:28]And he has been writing for five or six years and he said, I know I'm not brilliant and we were
[15:34]talking about just doing it and dealing with a messy first draft and getting it out there and
[15:40]getting some feedback. And I think this idea that life is short is certainly something that hit
[15:46]me very hard when Jeff died, not just that life is short but it's incredibly precious. I remember
[15:54]and this is quite maybe difficult to hear but he passed away at home and I had a few moments
[16:03]with him. We had to have the police, the inspectors, of course the paramedics, everybody
[16:09]were sort of about to swarm our house and I had a few minutes just in the room with him after he
[16:14]died. And I became incredibly conscious of my own heartbeat and the oxygen going in and out of my
[16:24]lungs. That's not scientifically possible is it something else comes out of your lungs but you know
[16:29]what I mean? I was inhaling this breath of air and I actually realized I felt more alive in those
[16:37]few moments than I have ever felt in my life even though it was the worst moment of my life.
[16:44]And I just realized how fragile life is and so I say to people now if they're feeling like they
[16:53]have this dream whether it's to write or or anything else just get on it. I mean we know from the
[16:59]pandemic that our opportunities can be cut overnight, we can be all suddenly locked down and can't
[17:06]even go anywhere. You know and people have been planning travel for years and thought we'll get
[17:11]round to it. We don't have the luxury so grab those opportunities. Yeah in the book Cam does not
[17:18]die of a heart attack that has been he dies of early onset Alzheimer's. We are graciously sponsored
[17:24]tonight by Alzheimer's LA. There are some heartbreaking moments on that part of their story that
[17:30]felt the hardest in the book for me to read as Cam starts to lose his memory of his loved ones
[17:38]and even some just some basic executive functioning and things. And I wondered if you know did you
[17:44]choose Alzheimer's you said your mother passed? Yeah. If that was informed by that experience of
[17:51]losing someone in a slower way. Well there were two reasons why I chose that. One was that I
[17:58]didn't want to tell exactly our story and the other was more of a structural writing choice which
[18:06]was to choose a longer way of dying to write about in this novel and that's the one I'm intimately
[18:14]aware of and that we've just watched and Mum actually had had was diagnosed 16 years ago which
[18:21]is incredibly long. Normally it's a lot well you could tell us you know normally it's a much shorter
[18:26]does it you know period of time and she just got worse and worse and worse and I mean we've all
[18:36]watched her firsthand and we've watched my dad who's 91 care for her in the most extraordinary
[18:44]way imaginable and I think this is sort of a love note both to Jeff and to my parents and so
[18:52]their relationship and the way that Kate cares for him is very much my dad caring for my mum.
[18:58]Yeah well it was beautiful. I've been avoiding the love story part talking about it because I
[19:03]don't want to give any spoilers away so there's a few love angles in the book like some
[19:10]I don't know maybe you read hearings so maybe like is this it is this not it and one of the things
[19:16]that Kate ends up saying or main character Kate ends up saying is there's one interest in the book
[19:23]that makes her feel beautiful or makes her feel sexier or whatever and then there's someone else
[19:29]that made her feel seen and not that those things have to be mutually exclusive by any means
[19:35]but like it was a a surface level of attraction I guess in a deeper level of attraction and that
[19:41]really spoke to me and the you know enduring relationship in this and I felt like that is what
[19:48]so many of us want I mean I want to feel sexy too don't get me wrong but you know you want to
[19:54]feel like she I think she felt seen and known and like what a deeper level of care
[20:00]commitment that that is. I yeah and I think for someone like Kate and someone like me and anyone
[20:05]else here who's who has experienced this or has lost a partner I don't think you could go to
[20:11]superficial anymore it's it's even in conversations with people who you're not romantically interested
[20:18]in there's just a depth that you have to have because you can't be bothered anymore with
[20:24]superficial stuff and and that's the same not just in row in relationships but in letting go
[20:30]of a whole lot of things are used to worry you and bother you and used to get you know annoyed by
[20:35]just let it go isn't time you don't have time for this anymore you've realized that
[20:40]life is short so I think probably the reason that I am still single is because
[20:46]A I had a great husband who I adored and now I've created these this character so you know I feel
[20:53]like I would have to hand a copy of this book to any potential part and I'm saying look if you
[20:57]can't live up to this I'm not interested. He is pretty dreamy y'all he is real dreamy I'll be honest yeah
[21:05]I can add it to him too yeah yeah okay so shall we signing books if you want to line up for that
[21:11]and of course by other books here at zebis bookstore we get to just behind me we get to do fun events
[21:19]like this year all the time so wonderful thank you thanks for listening to this episode of moms
[21:28]don't have time to read books don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at moms
[21:33]don't have time to read books also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my
[21:38]virtual book club and meet lots of authors on zoom every other week thanks so much to Steve
[21:43]and Ryan back texture sound for the sound editing and thank you to morning moon productions for
[21:48]providing this fantastic intro and out trim music