Jennifer Robson, THE GOWN
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[1:16]Today, I'm interviewing Jennifer Robson, who is the best-selling author of five novels set during and after the two world wars, including somewhere in France and good night from London.
[1:25]Her fifth novel, The Gown, a novel through a wedding came out December 31, 2018.
[1:30]The graduate of King's University College at Western University, Jennifer got her doctorate in British economic and social history from St. Anthony's College at the University of Oxford.
[1:39]A former editor, she currently lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband and children.
[1:43]Thank you so much for coming on Momstone Have Time to Read Books. I'm thrilled to be interviewing you today.
[1:48]Hi, Zibi.
[1:49]So, Jennifer, could you please tell us what the Gown is about?
[1:53]So, the Gown is about what happened to the people of Britain generally speaking after the end of the war, the Second World War.
[2:02]Where I started, I was really interested in finding out what happened the day after the E-Day, and because my previous book, Good Night for London, ends on the E-Day.
[2:14]And I wanted to know, when everyone woke up the next morning with a terrible hangover, of course, and had the messed up cleanup of just think of what a masterfaulger square was the next day.
[2:28]And kind of the dust cleared and people were able to think of what lay ahead and what were they imagining.
[2:34]And I think they were probably imagining that life would get better.
[2:38]That the bombs wouldn't be falling on the older, you know, they wouldn't be learning of their loved ones and service and killed or wounded.
[2:47]And that indeed stopped.
[2:49]But in every other respect, life continued on as it had done during the war.
[2:54]And many respects actually it got worse in terms of the daily hardships, the rationing, the shortages, the queuing up for things,
[3:02]and the lack of housing, everything was very, very difficult.
[3:07]And so I wanted to write a book about that period, but I also knew that would be a pretty grim book to read 400 pages of misery and well.
[3:17]And so I was looking for a counterpoint.
[3:19]And the counterpoint I found was in this great glittering event towards the end of 1947 when Princess Elizabeth, the heir to the throne, married this very, very dashing,
[3:31]enhanced a neon naval officer who is a distant cousin of hers, a filled mountain.
[3:36]And 72 years later, they're still married.
[3:39]And I wanted to set the book in the world as a royal wedding, but not from the point of view of the Queen herself or as she was then the princess.
[3:49]But from the people, the point of view of the people who are behind the scenes.
[3:54]Because I think we all love stories that are set behind the scenes or the upstairs downstairs aspect to the people in the aristocracy or in royal families.
[4:06]But who are the people that we never see who the servants who take care of them, the people whose work makes their lives unfold as if they're on oiled casters really.
[4:17]So I wanted to look at who the people were behind the scenes of the royal wedding.
[4:22]And of course, the one aspect of royal weddings that I think we all then and now get really obsessed over is the gown that the bride wears.
[4:31]And I knew that it had been designed by Norman Hartnell, but I didn't know anything about the women who actually made it.
[4:38]And when I started looking, that's when I discovered there was this whole kind of hidden anonymous world of the seamstresses and embroiderors that their stories had never been told.
[4:49]And that's where I knew I found my book.
[4:52]So my book is about two women who are fictitious in that I didn't want to appropriate the stories of real women who worked at Hartnell.
[5:01]And besides when I make people up, I can do anything I want to them.
[5:05]I have Ann Hughes who is a young British woman from a working class background who was a apprentice to the H14 to Norman Hartnell's embroidery studio.
[5:14]And who more than almost 15 years later is still working for Norman Hartnell and is risen to become one of the most senior embroiderors in the Atelier.
[5:24]And she becomes friends with a young expatriate French woman Miriam Dassa who is escaped the Holocaust.
[5:31]We know this very early on.
[5:33]And who's trying to make her way in post-war Britain.
[5:36]She has come to Britain because she no longer feels safe in France.
[5:40]Her entire family was murdered at Auschwitz and she's trying to make a new start.
[5:45]And Ann in her own ways also struggling because her entire family has been lost to her parents died before the war.
[5:52]Her brother was killed in the blitz and she really has no one left.
[5:56]And so they strike up a friendship.
[5:58]They end up living together sharing a very modest little councilhouse in Essex and traveling into London every day.
[6:05]And they are given the task of embroidering the princess's wedding gown.
[6:10]And it's as their stories unfold.
[6:13]We see the construction of the gown but also the development of their relationship.
[6:18]And how work on the gown affects their lives in a really profound way.
[6:24]And it really changes the course of their lives.
[6:27]And then the scenes in 1947 are woven through the scenes from more or less the present day from 2016
[6:34]when a young woman called Heather Mackenzie, who's Canadian, I finally put a Canadian.
[6:40]And Heather has been, her grandmother has passed away.
[6:45]And her grandmother, she was very, very close with.
[6:48]But didn't really know a lot about in the way that, and I even think with my own grandparents,
[6:53]how much do I actually know of their lives before I was alive and was aware of them as people.
[6:59]And it's really a mystery.
[7:00]And I think that's true of our parents as well often.
[7:03]And so Heather knows very little about her grandmother.
[7:06]And it's very surprised when she's left a box of these exquisite embroideries,
[7:11]beautiful flowers that are embroidered with pearls and little, what looks like little diamond chips.
[7:17]And she's a journalist.
[7:18]So she starts investigating.
[7:20]And she realizes that these flowers are identical to the ones that decorate the queen's wedding gown.
[7:27]And so her interest is peaked.
[7:29]And that sends her to London in a search for answers about not only the embroideries but her grandmother.
[7:35]And so we say, I don't want to give too much away.
[7:38]But that's kind of the broadly speaking, the introduction, I guess I can give to the book.
[7:44]And what it is is my way of taking, you know, I consider myself a failed academic and that I trained to become a university professor but never taught.
[7:53]And so, but I still have this lurking desire to tell people about the social history, the material history that interests me.
[8:00]And so I sneak it into my books and then put a nice candy coating of, you know, royal wedding on top to make the social history a little more palatable, I suppose.
[8:11]I am not sure I can allow you to call yourself a failure in any context.
[8:15]So you're going to have to retract that part of what you just said.
[8:18]But I did a speaking engagement the other weekend.
[8:21]And one of the other people speaking there is an amazing historian called Cecil Foster.
[8:26]And he said I should really think of myself as a liberated academic and that I get to do all the fun stuff.
[8:32]And I still get to talk to people.
[8:34]I wouldn't say I have students as such, but I feel I get to do a little bit of teaching.
[8:38]But I've none of the committee work.
[8:40]I don't have that.
[8:41]There's a pressure to publish, but it's a good kind of pressure.
[8:45]I don't have to worry about losing tenure if I don't get a book out on time.
[8:49]So all of these things, you know, my life has turned out from where I'm standing as perfectly as it could have done.
[8:55]I have no regrets.
[8:56]I also think you are a history teacher.
[8:58]I mean, I learned a lot.
[9:00]I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know that much about what it was like in London after the war.
[9:04]And I didn't even know about the rations.
[9:06]And I feel like I actually read quite a bit about World War II, but not about the aftermath.
[9:10]So I learned a lot.
[9:11]I feel like by writing these books, you're absolutely teaching.
[9:14]I don't know why you're taking it.
[9:15]Well, and you know what?
[9:17]It's something I mean, I knew about it because that was my doctoral thesis was focused on the history of the period.
[9:23]But I think it's pretty typical that most people, including very well educated people, haven't learned a lot about post-war history.
[9:30]Because on the surface, it doesn't seem very interesting.
[9:33]And if you contrast it with what was happening in the United States at the same time,
[9:37]where life was very quickly becoming quite good in a generally speaking for the majority of people.
[9:44]In Britain and in continental Europe and anywhere that had been ravaged directly by the war,
[9:50]it was a long, long time before people were able to get off their knees and to stand tall again and really resume their lives.
[9:58]And we tend to go...
[10:00]Also over this period in popular history, you know,
[10:03]there are not a lot of movies that focus on this period.
[10:05]Not a ton of books, really, and I'm guilty of that
[10:09]with my previous book.
[10:10]I ended on BE Day and I didn't answer the question
[10:13]of what happened to my characters when they had to look
[10:16]around and ask what has this war done to our world?
[10:20]And it had left the world in a shambles.
[10:24]And not just materially speaking, but in the lives,
[10:27]the emotional lives of the people who had survived,
[10:30]the trauma was profound.
[10:33]And no one lived through that war without bearing this scars,
[10:37]the invisible scars of it for the rest of their lives.
[10:40]And that was something that I also wanted to talk about
[10:43]was what was it like to survive
[10:46]and to then have to pick up the pieces
[10:48]and get on with your life.
[10:50]And the answer is that it was a very bittersweet time
[10:54]for many, many people.
[10:55]Because even as their lives began slowly to improve,
[10:59]there's the memory of all that was lost
[11:02]and the people that they loved and who were killed,
[11:05]who suffered.
[11:06]And that's something that haunts my characters.
[11:09]And so I wouldn't say the gown is a sad book,
[11:12]it far from it, but I certainly encourage people
[11:15]to think about the cost of war and what it does to people
[11:19]and how it lingers long after, you know,
[11:22]the celebrations for victory are over.
[11:25]So your love of history, is it the stories?
[11:28]Or is it the, like,
[11:29]because you're obviously a great storyteller.
[11:32]So I'm just wondering, have you always been interested
[11:34]in writing, have you always been interested in history
[11:36]or is it just the combination of where great stories come from?
[11:39]That's a good question.
[11:40]I mean, for the longest time,
[11:43]I never considered writing fiction.
[11:45]I always assumed I would write nonfiction.
[11:48]I worked as an editor for many years,
[11:50]helping other people with their writing.
[11:52]And it was really only once I was at home
[11:54]with my little ones.
[11:56]And when I say little ones,
[11:57]it was a new board baby and a two-year-old.
[11:59]And I was casting about for something to do
[12:01]that I would find more intellectually stimulating,
[12:04]I guess, than watching Teletubbies and you know,
[12:08]going on long walks to try and get my children
[12:11]who refused to nap to settle down for a few hours.
[12:15]But I'd always, always, and I think this group,
[12:17]this came from growing up in a house
[12:19]where my father was a history professor
[12:20]and my mother, who was actually a lawyer
[12:23]later a judge, was also a history buff.
[12:25]And it was something that was very present.
[12:27]We talked about things like this at the dinner table
[12:30]and not in a precious way.
[12:31]My dad is one of these great anecdote tellers.
[12:35]And so not just anecdotes about his own life,
[12:38]but he can take historical events and describe in a way,
[12:41]is he would bring them to life in the way
[12:44]that the great tellers of narrative history do.
[12:47]And so I think the germ of the idea of writing fiction
[12:53]as a means of telling stories about our past
[12:56]was born when I was a child
[12:59]and probably really more when I was a teenager.
[13:03]And then, you know, I had years of university
[13:05]and years of making my way in the working world
[13:08]and that kind of got buried.
[13:10]It was only when I was at home with these little ones
[13:12]and feeling really, I hate to say it.
[13:14]I love being a mom, I still do,
[13:16]but it was boring at times, let's face it.
[13:18]There are long stretches of time
[13:20]with little ones that can be quite boring.
[13:22]And that's when I started feeling what the great writer
[13:27]and Lamont has talked about is the tug on the sleeve
[13:30]of your heart.
[13:31]And it was just this little tug, this little voice
[13:34]almost saying, I have an idea.
[13:37]I feel like I have an idea and I wanna write about it.
[13:39]And the idea was to tell the story
[13:43]of one woman's experience of the First World War,
[13:46]but from her point of view,
[13:48]not the point of view of a man, so many,
[13:51]and this is 10 years ago, so many of the books
[13:54]that I'd read about the First World War
[13:56]were uniquely from the male point of view.
[13:59]And they were interesting and some of the books
[14:02]that I cherish, they were really great monumental works
[14:05]of fiction, like, you know, the regeneration trilogy
[14:08]by Pat Barker, but I wanted to know what it was like
[14:11]to be a woman at that time.
[14:13]And the only way I was going to get an answer
[14:15]was to do the research and to tell the story myself.
[14:19]And so that's where my first book came from.
[14:21]And it took me, it was a long time
[14:23]before I could get it published,
[14:25]but once it was published into my absolute astonishment
[14:29]did well, that gave rise to the next book and the next book.
[14:32]And I keep finding these stories that come to me
[14:35]quite often out of the blue.
[14:37]They always begin more or less with the question,
[14:39]what if this happened?
[14:41]What if certain person, you know, found themselves
[14:45]in a certain situation, what would happen?
[14:47]And so, you know, with my previous book,
[14:49]and I from London, I just was really interested in the idea
[14:52]of what if a young woman were a journalist
[14:55]and she found herself caught up in the great story
[14:59]of the Second World War.
[15:01]And if she found herself living in London
[15:02]during the Blitz, what would that story look like?
[15:05]And with this book, with the gown,
[15:07]it's the question of what would it look like
[15:09]if I told the story of the people,
[15:13]the anonymous voiceless, to some degree, faceless people
[15:17]who have been largely forgotten by history.
[15:20]What if I told the story of the women
[15:21]who made this very iconic gown?
[15:25]And in so doing, honored the work that they had done,
[15:29]because it wasn't mechanical, repetitive, mindless work,
[15:32]this embroidery.
[15:34]It is artistic work of the highest order.
[15:37]And I really do consider the people who do such work
[15:41]to be artists.
[15:42]And I don't think they're very rarely are they accepted as such.
[15:46]But they're not, you know, they're not doing,
[15:48]and certainly the case was true with the women
[15:51]in Hartnell's workrooms.
[15:53]This wasn't a case of them being given templates
[15:56]or blueprints effectively that told them exactly
[15:59]where to put every stitch.
[16:01]They were given sketches,
[16:02]and it was their job to interpret those sketches
[16:05]and to bring the embroidery, you know,
[16:08]Mr. Hartnell's ideas to life.
[16:10]And they did so in a way that required them
[16:12]to have artistic sensibilities.
[16:15]And, you know, I feel they should have been honored
[16:18]at the time, they should have been recognized.
[16:21]And they weren't for a number of reasons
[16:22]that involve not only just issues
[16:24]about kind of class divisions,
[16:27]but also this notion that there's difference
[16:29]between an artist and an artisan.
[16:31]And I think a lot of people who study material history
[16:35]or interested in it realize that that's a,
[16:37]if there's a line between them,
[16:39]it's a very, very fine and porous line.
[16:41]And it's just, it's an interesting back way
[16:44]into considering issues of misogyny,
[16:48]of, you know, the emotional toll,
[16:51]as I was saying before, of a long running conflict.
[16:54]And really the lack of any chance at that time
[16:58]for a person to talk through, you know, today.
[17:02]Well, you know, I certainly would think nothing
[17:04]if I went through a traumatic experience
[17:06]of going to a professional
[17:08]and undergoing some form of therapy
[17:10]to help me with my experiences.
[17:12]But very, very few people had access
[17:14]to that kind of help then.
[17:16]And to go through the rest of your life
[17:19]with these kind of burdens upon you is something
[17:23]I don't know if those of us who are live today
[17:28]full enough for the burdens carried by our parents
[17:32]and grandparents and great grandparents.
[17:34]So all of these are, these are ideas
[17:36]that are all squirrely-ground in my head
[17:38]whenever I'm writing these books.
[17:40]And the reason that my books to this date
[17:42]have all been said in the first and second world boards
[17:44]is because everything is heightened.
[17:47]My wonderful editor at HarperCollins, Tessa Woodward,
[17:51]one of her questions she always asks me is,
[17:53]what are the stakes?
[17:55]What's at stake?
[17:56]Because if nothing's at stake,
[17:58]then there's nothing to care about if you're a reader.
[18:02]And if everything is at stake,
[18:04]if a person's future and happiness and survival is at stake,
[18:09]then it gives us something to root for.
[18:12]And in periods of war, of course, everything is at stake.
[18:16]And so that's where I find these stories.
[18:19]But they're typically not stories about grand people
[18:24]or well-known people.
[18:25]They're about ordinary people.
[18:27]The way I'm an ordinary person.
[18:29]And I think most of us are really
[18:31]when it comes down to it.
[18:32]I feel like I need to call up the place
[18:34]where I got my wedding gown.
[18:35]And now go and try to find the people who made it.
[18:38]Well, that's the thing.
[18:39]And I remember I first had this kind of thought
[18:42]when I was watching, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge
[18:45]got married in 2011.
[18:47]And I got up at the crack of dawn.
[18:49]And I had all my girlfriends over.
[18:50]And we were wearing our fascinators
[18:53]and drinking champagne at four in the morning.
[18:57]And I'd baked scones.
[18:59]And we were having strawberries and cream.
[19:01]And it was just a delightful experience.
[19:03]I treasure that little tea party I had that morning.
[19:07]And I still remember when we saw Kate's gown.
[19:09]And I was blown away.
[19:10]And I still am.
[19:11]I think it's just a beautiful, beautiful, not just a gown,
[19:15]but a statement, a historic treasure,
[19:20]as it will be in the future.
[19:21]I remember a thing in they said it was Sarah Burton
[19:24]for Alexander McQueen, who designed it.
[19:27]And then I kept waiting to find out
[19:28]while you were the women who worked on it, who made it.
[19:32]And we never really learned.
[19:35]The embroidery on the gown,
[19:36]there's quite a lot of embroidery on it,
[19:39]but because it's tone on tone,
[19:40]it's not as noticeable as the embroidery
[19:43]on the Queen's wedding dress.
[19:45]It was done by the women at the Royal School of Needlework.
[19:47]I know that, but beyond that,
[19:49]we don't know their names or faces or experiences.
[19:52]I think largely for reasons of privacy
[19:56]and that the kind of the gutter press in Britain
[19:58]would love nothing more.
[20:00]or then to get people's names so they can, you know,
[20:02]steal their cell phone numbers and all of that.
[20:06]And, you know, in the gown,
[20:08]there's one of the characters says,
[20:10]who's a journalist says,
[20:11]I'm not interested in details of the royal waistline.
[20:14]But there are a lot of people today who are, unfortunately.
[20:17]And I think that's why we don't hear the stories
[20:19]of these people because it's out of an abundance of caution
[20:23]to protect their private lives.
[20:25]But that doesn't mean I'm not curious.
[20:27]Right, totally.
[20:28]I'm so curious.
[20:29]And so when you have all these ideas floating around
[20:31]and you decide, okay, I'm gonna make a whole book about this.
[20:34]What do you do next?
[20:35]Do you make an outline or do you develop the characters
[20:38]or like what's your process like?
[20:40]And how long does it take for you to write these books?
[20:41]Oh, so typically the first,
[20:44]once I've had the idea of fall out of the sky
[20:46]and I often, I've described it as an anvil,
[20:49]just bopping me on the head.
[20:51]And my next step is to go to my editor.
[20:57]And quite often my literary agent as well
[21:00]because she just has such a great sense of,
[21:02]is this a good story?
[21:04]Is this something worth pursuing?
[21:06]She just, her sensibilities is the reader or wonderful.
[21:11]And so quite often we'll have an ongoing kind of discussion
[21:15]by email or conference call just as I talk out the idea
[21:19]that it's earliest stages.
[21:21]And quite often I'll present them with four or five ideas at once.
[21:24]And then we'll immediately it's clear
[21:26]which is the idea that's worth chasing.
[21:28]And then I will typically have a reasonably long period
[21:33]of just very intensive research
[21:35]where I vanish into the books and the online archives
[21:39]and dig, dig, dig into light.
[21:41]I know where the story,
[21:43]where I'm gonna find the story.
[21:45]And it's usually around that time
[21:47]that the characters start talking to me,
[21:49]which I know sounds a little boo, boo, boo.
[21:52]But it's true.
[21:53]And I know I'm not the only writer that experiences this
[21:57]where characters start presenting themselves.
[22:01]And along with the characters,
[22:03]it's the question of what is at stake for them?
[22:06]What is happening in their lives?
[22:08]What kind of tension is there in their stories?
[22:12]And really it all boils down to what do they want?
[22:15]What are they searching for?
[22:17]What do they hope for?
[22:19]And where a good story is found
[22:21]it's there's the disconnect between what they have
[22:25]and what they want or need.
[22:27]And it's in those spaces that I find the stories
[22:31]and which I know sounds a little bit still sounds very vague.
[22:34]But once I have the broadly speaking,
[22:37]the characters sketched out,
[22:38]I start building them up in the sense
[22:40]that I will fill out a modified-proofed questionnaire
[22:43]for each of my major characters,
[22:46]which for people who aren't familiar with it.
[22:48]It's if you look to the back page of Vanity Fair
[22:50]every month they have the Bruce questionnaire,
[22:53]which again is a kind of heavily,
[22:56]it's a very selective version of it
[22:59]in that the original questionnaire
[23:00]that Marcel Prouss devised,
[23:02]I think it was a parlor game really
[23:05]that has many, many questions in it.
[23:07]But along the lines of what is your greatest fear
[23:10]who do you most despise in the world?
[23:13]What do you treasure the most?
[23:14]Things like that.
[23:15]And if I can answer those questions,
[23:17]I have a pretty good sense of who each of my characters,
[23:21]who these people are to the depths of their being.
[23:27]And if I can't answer those questions,
[23:28]I have to keep thinking.
[23:30]And then again, roughly at the same time,
[23:32]I start building an outline.
[23:34]I have to work with an outline.
[23:35]I can't be one of these,
[23:37]the fly by the seat of your pants, writers.
[23:40]I've tried it, it doesn't work
[23:42]because underpinning everything is the scaffolding
[23:46]of the history, the known history.
[23:48]So I already have, even before I start,
[23:50]more or less, there's an outline
[23:52]in the sense that over the given period
[23:55]where the book takes place,
[23:56]there are known events to which I have to conform.
[23:59]And then I build my book around those known events.
[24:01]So in a way, the history is the foundation
[24:05]and my books are built upon it.
[24:07]And it's, by the time I start writing
[24:09]in the sense of the creative writing
[24:11]that actually starts looking like a book,
[24:14]I will have been working on the book
[24:15]for something like six, eight months.
[24:18]And then probably about the same amount of time
[24:21]goes into writing it.
[24:23]And along the way, quite often I move away from the outline
[24:27]and have to have to not really start over
[24:30]but rethink what I'm trying to achieve.
[24:33]And the whole time I should add
[24:35]that I'm constantly going back to my editor
[24:37]for feedback and guidance.
[24:39]Because ultimately, she is going to,
[24:41]she has and she will work on many more books
[24:45]than I will ever write myself.
[24:48]So she knows so much more
[24:51]about the process of writing a book than I do.
[24:53]I've only written five books.
[24:55]She's worked on hundreds of books.
[24:57]She really knows her stuff.
[24:58]And I'm always surprised when people say,
[25:01]oh, they don't work closely with their editor
[25:03]or they don't have a close relationship with their editor
[25:06]because I think, well, then how do you do it?
[25:10]I really, I find her advice extraordinarily useful.
[25:15]And so it's in some ways the books are collaborative effort
[25:21]in that you can't sit in a closet
[25:23]and write a book and start to finish by yourself
[25:26]and hope to write a book that's as good as it could be.
[25:31]And so yeah, that roughly speaking, that's the very,
[25:35]and I know it sounds kind of, it's all over the place.
[25:38]And I wish I could say I have a scientific method
[25:40]for writing it.
[25:41]No, no, no.
[25:42]And every book of change is a little bit.
[25:44]And the book I'm working on now is still,
[25:48]I'm at the stage where I'm so excited about it.
[25:50]I can barely even breathe.
[25:52]And I can't even talk about it
[25:55]because I'm so worried the ideas are gonna vanish
[25:58]before I can extract them from my brain.
[26:01]And in some ways, that's almost the best part
[26:02]of the whole process.
[26:04]Do you have any parting advice to aspiring writers
[26:07]in a room instead of time?
[26:08]Oh, you know, it's the basic advice,
[26:11]which is put your bum in the chair and start writing.
[26:15]I see a lot of writers.
[26:17]And you know, I don't wanna say that I disagree with them.
[26:19]I just worry about how much time they have in a day,
[26:23]which is the same amount of time I have in a day.
[26:25]And we all have the same amount of time.
[26:28]And I think if you spend too much of it
[26:30]on social media talking about writing,
[26:33]discussing writing with other people,
[26:36]snapshotting your life and what you're doing,
[26:39]you're not actually writing a book.
[26:41]You're writing about writing a book,
[26:42]but you're not doing the work of writing a book.
[26:45]And it's very tempting.
[26:46]It's very easy to slide into that.
[26:48]And I have been guilty of it so many times.
[26:51]But ultimately, at the end of the day,
[26:53]the only way you're gonna write a book
[26:55]is by putting your bum in the chair
[26:57]or wherever you like to work and turning off everything
[27:01]and just listening to the words in your head
[27:04]and extracting them from your head
[27:07]and putting them down on paper or on the screen.
[27:10]And it's a pretty lonely job at those times.
[27:14]And the only consolation is that the characters
[27:17]you're creating are standing alongside you
[27:21]every step of the way.
[27:23]That's beautiful.
[27:24]Well, thank you so much for coming on Moms.
[27:26]Don't have time to read books.
[27:27]I really appreciate it.
[27:28]Well, it's a real honor to join you.
[27:30]Thank you so much for inviting me.
[27:31]Of course, thank you.
[27:33]All right, take care.
[27:34]Thanks, bye.
[27:35]Today's episode was sponsored by cereal box.
[27:38]S-E-R-I-E-L-B-O-X dot com cereal box.com
[27:42]delivering addictive book content in short listen
[27:44]or read installments.
[27:46]Thanks to Ryan and Steve at Texture Sound
[27:48]for the audio editing and mixing.
[27:50]Thanks for listening to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.