William Dameron, THE LIE
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[0:40]I'm here today with William Bill, Billy, Willy, whatever, damron, the author of The Lie,
[0:47]a memoir of two marriages, catfishing, and coming out, which was so good.
[0:51]And we just showed me the hardcover, which is so beautiful.
[0:55]Welcome, welcome.
[0:56]Thank you.
[0:57]Thanks.
[0:58]I'm really thrilled to be here.
[0:59]Thank you for having me and for your love of books.
[1:00]Oh my gosh.
[1:01]It's wonderful.
[1:02]So a little more about you.
[1:03]William damron is the author of, as I said, The Lie, a memoir of two marriages, catfishing
[1:07]and coming out, which was chosen as the Amazon First Reads book pick for June 2019, which
[1:14]is really exciting.
[1:15]He is an award-winning blogger and essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times,
[1:19]the Boston Globe and HuffPost, among others.
[1:21]He's also published an essay in the book, Fashionably Late, Gay, Buy, and Transman who
[1:26]came out later in life.
[1:27]It's like a fantastic title.
[1:28]He is the IT director for a global economic consulting firm and currently splits his
[1:33]time between Boston and the southern coast of Maine, which is closer, they're closer
[1:37]than I thought.
[1:38]And now that I hear about your transgagile with his husband and their blended family of five
[1:42]kids.
[1:43]Good?
[1:44]Yes.
[1:45]Thank you.
[1:46]And I have to say for this new hardcover, you can't tell from looking.
[1:49]But the bottom is like a parchment-y type feeling in the top is this like smooth wax paper.
[1:54]Yeah.
[1:55]And two vellums.
[1:56]They'll all thank you.
[1:57]They'll all thank you.
[1:58]Yeah.
[1:59]So it's great, even just to hold it.
[2:01]So can you tell listeners what the lie is about and what inspired you to write it?
[2:06]Sure.
[2:07]About a few years ago, I received an email from a woman I had never met.
[2:11]The first line of the email said, your face is meant a lot to me.
[2:14]And now I've found out it's a lie.
[2:17]And she went on to describe how she had a four-year online relationship with this man who
[2:22]used my pictures to catfisher.
[2:25]And when I did a Google image search, I found out my face is synonymous with the search
[2:31]phrase, 40-year-old white man.
[2:34]They just got married somehow.
[2:36]And when I found that out, I also discovered it wasn't just her.
[2:40]There was catfish.
[2:41]It was countless women who had been catfished and they have contacted me over the years.
[2:47]In case someone doesn't know what catfishing is.
[2:49]Yes.
[2:50]So catfishing is when somebody pretends to be somebody they're not on the internet.
[2:55]And they'll use somebody else's picture to sort of lure people into an online relationship.
[3:01]A lot of people think it's just for money.
[3:03]But it's really an emotional thing.
[3:05]Somebody is uncomfortable with who they are so they become somebody else.
[3:10]So it was like the universe was calling me out.
[3:13]Because a decade prior, I had pretended to be somebody I was not to my wife, to my daughters,
[3:19]and to myself, I was a gay man in a straight marriage.
[3:23]So that experience caused me to take a look at what we do when we sort of put on these
[3:30]false identities and become someone we're not.
[3:33]It forced me to take a look not just at my actions, but how my actions affected everybody
[3:38]else.
[3:39]And so it's a book about what we do with all of that sort of pain and lost hope when our
[3:45]supposed truths are amassed for lies.
[3:48]And how did it become a book?
[3:50]How did you, what made you write it?
[3:52]You had all these amazing, you know, compelling experiences.
[3:56]So I began writing.
[3:57]I didn't start writing until I came out because nothing sounded authentic.
[4:02]I always wanted to be a writer.
[4:04]But after I came out, I suddenly had all this energy and I started writing blog posts,
[4:08]personal blog posts about my life with my now husband, how wonderful it was.
[4:13]But I realized I needed to look back.
[4:16]So I took an online writing class, got them writer's workshop here in New York.
[4:21]I started on December 12th, 2012, so it was 1, 2, 1, 2, just like little steps.
[4:27]And I started writing chapters and it took probably about five years to put that together.
[4:34]But it was important for me to get this story out because after so many years of telling
[4:39]lies, I really had to tell the truth.
[4:41]I said to you earlier when we were chatting, it felt like you sat down and wrote it all
[4:45]at once in not in a bad way in a way in that it flowed so seamlessly.
[4:50]One thing into the other, even though some of it was so long ago and some of it was much
[4:55]more recent, did you at the time keep a journal or how did you remember, how do you remember
[5:00]everything so clearly?
[5:01]Because it feels like when you're reading it that you're like right there and it was
[5:04]almost surprising to me when I found out it was a while ago.
[5:08]That's fantastic.
[5:09]You say that.
[5:10]Thank you.
[5:11]I actually have this really good recall and it freaks some of my friends out.
[5:15]I remember sitting at a dinner or a company dinner once and somebody was telling a story
[5:22]about how they moved to Mashby.
[5:25]And I recounted that whole story how her father decided they should do that and I realized
[5:31]everybody was looking at me like why do you know this but it's just a recall that I have.
[5:36]I remember conversations.
[5:37]I remember what somebody wore the way the weather was that day.
[5:42]So I think that's why it's all still in my head.
[5:44]The other thing is after I came out, I went to a therapist and he introduced me to
[5:51]a man named Hans who had gone through the same thing and we had an email correspondence
[5:56]because he was Jehovah's Witness.
[5:58]He came out.
[5:59]His firm was mostly Jehovah's Witnesses and they weren't allowed to speak to him because
[6:06]he was gay and so he had no one to talk to during the day.
[6:09]And I had nobody to talk to because I didn't feel like I could tell anybody else.
[6:14]And so we had probably six or seven emails a day every day for a hundred days.
[6:19]And so I have an email journal of that entire period.
[6:22]So I know exactly what day, what happened and conversations we had.
[6:27]Wow.
[6:28]So I can refer to those.
[6:29]And you just described your relationship with Hans so nicely in the book too.
[6:32]Like I feel like I could see the whole thing.
[6:36]And so you wrote an article in Modern Love in the New York Times called After 264 haircuts
[6:41]marriage ends, which becomes part of this book.
[6:45]It was excerpted what ordered and everything happened and had to that come about.
[6:48]It became, but the fifth most read essay of 2017.
[6:52]Yeah.
[6:53]It was, yeah, it was surprising and overwhelming and wonderful all in once because modern
[7:00]love has forever been one of my favorite columns.
[7:03]So I actually went on a writing retreat with this writing group in Vieques, Puerto Rico.
[7:11]And my manuscript was done at that point and everybody read it and said, okay, you're
[7:16]ready.
[7:17]Let's go ahead and publish it.
[7:18]I didn't think I was ready.
[7:19]I went home.
[7:20]I wrote maybe three or four query letters to agents.
[7:24]They were half-hearted.
[7:25]I didn't hear anything back.
[7:26]So I thought, all right, if this is meant to be, I'm going to take my best writing, which
[7:31]was the haircuts chapter.
[7:32]I'm going to whittle it down and I'm going to send it to Dan Jones within New York
[7:35]Times.
[7:36]I didn't hear anything for months and months and the thought, all right.
[7:41]It's not meant to be.
[7:43]And then he sent me a single email and said, I love your essay.
[7:46]I want to print it.
[7:47]I need to do it right away is your family okay with it, which is sort of similar to
[7:52]your response.
[7:53]It sounds like this just happened.
[7:54]He was of the feeling that this just happened to, though it was years in the past.
[7:59]He had had an essay that was falling apart for whatever reason and needed to fill that
[8:03]slot quickly.
[8:05]His assistant gave him a stack of 99 essays.
[8:09]Oh my gosh.
[8:10]He was on the bottom.
[8:11]He turned it over, started from the bottom, and that was mine.
[8:15]No way.
[8:16]So timing and luck are so much in this business.
[8:20]So once that was published, 30 minutes after it was online, an agent contacted me and said,
[8:26]okay, so I hear you're writing a memoir, maybe I can help.
[8:29]And the wonderful thing is it was my dream agent.
[8:31]It's Christopher Schelling.
[8:33]He is a custom boroughs agent and husband.
[8:36]And I loved Augustine's book, Running with Scissors Draw.
[8:40]So it just felt like it was meant to be in that.
[8:43]So the book came first and I knew that essay, that chapter was for me the most important
[8:50]because it showed how hard it was to say goodbye and the love that I had for my family.
[8:56]And I needed to make sure that came through.
[8:59]It was beautiful.
[9:00]Thank you.
[9:01]So your ex-wife, and this is sort of a random question, but I have been curious about
[9:05]it.
[9:06]So maybe you could just spend like two seconds on it, but your ex-wife was adopted.
[9:09]And you go a lot into her story of life as well.
[9:12]You, in like just one paragraph or something, say, it was like an Oprah Winfrey moment
[9:16]which meant her birth family and now they're in touch and whatever.
[9:19]So could you give me a little more about that experience?
[9:22]Because after reading the book, you get really invested sort of in Catherine in her life
[9:26]and her like mental health struggles and all the rest of it.
[9:29]So I just, I know this might come out of order for people who don't know what I'm talking
[9:32]about.
[9:33]During the book, she finds out she goes on this quest.
[9:36]She is always known she's adopted and finds her birth family.
[9:39]I hope I'm not giving it away.
[9:41]No, no.
[9:42]I think that's a really important part of the book because I think the connection that
[9:46]Catherine and I had was sort of rooted in this feeling of being a little lost.
[9:52]What was our history?
[9:54]Who is our family?
[9:55]There was a missing puzzle piece and I knew what that felt like.
[10:00]She was adopted and she always wanted to know
[10:04]where she came from.
[10:05]She always wanted to know who her birth family was.
[10:08]And so from the moment we were married,
[10:10]we really started searching and earnest to try and bind
[10:14]her birth family.
[10:15]We actually went to the adoption agency
[10:18]and sat down across the table
[10:20]and the social workers sort of pulled out this folder
[10:22]and gave us a sanitized version of,
[10:25]you know, what her birth mother and her father
[10:28]were like physical characteristics,
[10:30]things they like to do.
[10:32]And then she left the folder on the table
[10:34]and she went to go answer the door.
[10:36]We were so young and naive then.
[10:38]We didn't know that this was here it is.
[10:40]Just take a look at it and open it.
[10:42]But we sat there staring at that folder for like five minutes.
[10:46]Like, do we pick it up?
[10:47]Do we not?
[10:48]And we didn't because we didn't know.
[10:50]And so she found a man who's called the searcher.
[10:55]And the searcher is some sort of shadow we figure
[10:58]who has information that other people don't.
[11:01]He was able to get Katherine's birth mother is a dress,
[11:06]phone number, age, all of the information matched up.
[11:11]So Katherine, I left her with a kid's went down to the park.
[11:15]Katherine got on the phone, caught her mother and said,
[11:18]I was born on this date at this place.
[11:22]And her birth mother said, oh my God,
[11:25]let me call you back.
[11:26]Because she had not told her then family
[11:29]that she had had this other child.
[11:32]She caught her back and she said,
[11:34]there's not a day I haven't thought about you.
[11:37]So she found this puzzle piece and they became
[11:40]like a real mother and daughter.
[11:42]And the thing is, she also had a birth sister
[11:45]which she always in her head thought that she had.
[11:48]Her birth sister didn't know she had this older sister.
[11:51]And they became best friends and their mannerisms
[11:54]in the way they look.
[11:55]It's so, they're so similar.
[11:58]So here was Katherine searching for this blood family
[12:03]when she was in this adoptive family.
[12:05]Someone, this family gave her up
[12:09]and she was looking for a family that would choose her
[12:11]and never give her up.
[12:13]And she found them again.
[12:15]And here I was with my blood family
[12:17]feeling so disconnected.
[12:19]And so I think it was those two stories
[12:22]really sort of meshed together in a way.
[12:24]I knew the truth.
[12:26]She didn't know the truth.
[12:27]And both of those things were crushing for us.
[12:31]But she continues to this day.
[12:32]They have a wonderful relationship with them.
[12:34]So what a story.
[12:36]Yeah.
[12:36]My gosh, one of many great stories.
[12:39]When you write about Katherine's brief hospitalization,
[12:42]you write insanity is the inability to distinguish fantasy
[12:45]from reality.
[12:46]Could I see the difference?
[12:47]I thought I could, but I honestly
[12:49]believed my secret thoughts and desires were disordered.
[12:52]And if acted upon, it would condemn me to hell
[12:54]and ruin all that we had built.
[12:56]Carrying that around.
[12:57]I mean, how, I mean, you describe it in the book.
[13:00]But tell me more about how it felt just
[13:02]feeling that sense of, just how did that feel for you?
[13:06]Yeah, I think as children, we sort of learn
[13:09]these absolutes, things that go into our heads
[13:13]without any sort of filter to process them.
[13:16]I don't know, like you learn about Santa Claus
[13:18]or the Easter Bunny or things like that.
[13:19]And you just accept it as this is fact.
[13:22]But you're a child and you don't know how to process that.
[13:25]I think even as you grow up, there's
[13:26]sort of this belief still in your head that, oh,
[13:29]maybe Santa Claus really does exist.
[13:31]You also learned the other things that, for me,
[13:35]my church, my family, everyone said being gay is disordered.
[13:40]It's not normal.
[13:41]It was classified as a mental disease.
[13:45]And all of that went into my head as an absolute.
[13:49]And that, if I acted on that, I would go to hell.
[13:52]That was just the belief.
[13:55]And I never questioned it.
[13:57]But as I got older, it sort of was always
[14:00]in the back of my head, sort of niggling at me.
[14:03]And there was this cognitive dissonance of, OK,
[14:06]I know this isn't true, but it's still in my head
[14:08]that this is true.
[14:10]And little by little, it begins to tear you down.
[14:12]it begins to just make you act out in ways
[14:16]that are so uncharacteristic.
[14:18]And it's so tiring to always hide yourself.
[14:24]You have to keep everything super organized in the closet
[14:26]because you're afraid somebody might find something.
[14:29]And eventually, you can't exist that way.
[14:32]It's a funny always here, the expression in the closet.
[14:34]But now you have a visual of what that closet is.
[14:37]It's like turns out it's for the container store.
[14:41]But anyway, I do have to say my husband is very much like that
[14:44]everything you have to imagine.
[14:47]In the scene in which your daughter is in your ex-wife,
[14:50]so you doubled with star radius at some point
[14:53]and really revamped your body.
[14:55]And that was a big sort of theme throughout the book.
[14:57]It was sort of your physical changes
[14:59]as your emotions started coming out.
[15:01]So you wrote about this scene like this.
[15:02]And I just have to read it, even though it's
[15:04]a little bit long because it was so beautiful.
[15:05]When I looked into the eyes of Olivia and Claire now,
[15:08]those are your daughters.
[15:09]Obviously, you know that.
[15:10]Those are his daughters.
[15:11]I felt something slipping away.
[15:13]My hands unwrapping from theirs.
[15:14]It drained me and dissipated in the crack beneath the front door
[15:17]like the vanishing sunlight.
[15:19]If this were a film playing out and the camera panned,
[15:21]you would see a family of forest standing silently by the front door
[15:24]with no sense of whether they were coming or going.
[15:27]Pulling farther back a set of upset kitchen chairs
[15:29]lying on their backs and then drifting above the house,
[15:32]the gnarled branches of leafless trees
[15:33]hovering over a roof where chattering squirrels
[15:36]pranced and mocked a barking dog.
[15:38]Just beyond this house were other similar homes
[15:40]where warm yellow lights began to eliminate windows.
[15:43]And the headlights of cars cast yellow triangles
[15:45]and the dark driveways.
[15:47]Behind the doors of those houses,
[15:49]you might hear the muffled cries of excited children
[15:51]running toward the front door, holding out their hands
[15:53]and shouting, daddy's home.
[15:55]Oh, that was so beautiful.
[15:57]Tell me more about that scene.
[15:59]And by showing it in that way,
[16:01]you're really kind of suggesting who knows
[16:03]what's going on in all the other homes, right?
[16:05]Exactly.
[16:06]That chapter, that was sort of the second time
[16:09]that I used that technique of sort of pulling back the camera
[16:14]and looking at life from a different angle
[16:17]because I wanted the reader to be able to see it that way.
[16:19]The first time I was on top of a slide with my daughter Olivia
[16:24]and she was young four years old
[16:26]and she wanted to go down this slide
[16:28]and she was afraid to do it.
[16:29]And I said, no, I'll go with you.
[16:31]So we climbed up to the top of the slide
[16:33]and we could sort of see the playground from her bird's eye view.
[16:36]And then the second time I used this technique
[16:39]where my ex-wife and my daughters have discovered
[16:44]the bag of syringes and these steroids I was taking.
[16:48]And I used that technique there
[16:50]because for me, it was kind of an out of body experience
[16:54]and that's what it felt like was like this scene
[16:58]was a memory before it even played out.
[17:01]Sometimes things affect us that way.
[17:04]And so the slide and this discovery of these steroids
[17:08]were sort of the same thing.
[17:09]We were up at the top.
[17:10]We were in this beautiful home,
[17:12]in this beautiful neighborhood,
[17:14]all the things that we always wanted.
[17:16]And here I was with Sophie on top of this slide
[17:19]and it was inevitable that we were going to slide down
[17:23]and there might be ruination at the end of that slide.
[17:27]And so Sophie said, Daddy, please don't let go.
[17:30]It was a good on the slide, but somebody waxed it
[17:33]and I couldn't hold on to her and you have to decide,
[17:36]are you gonna hold on to your child
[17:37]and possibly crush her or do you let go?
[17:41]And this is what was happening,
[17:43]but we never know what's happening in people's homes.
[17:46]We just see these beautiful exterior
[17:48]and you let go, Sophie.
[17:49]And I let go, I had to let go.
[17:51]And she tumbled and here again, this other time,
[17:55]I was in a way letting go
[17:57]because my daughters discovered this terrible secret
[18:00]that I was holding.
[18:02]And I knew sort of in that instant
[18:04]that eventually I was gonna have to let go of them
[18:07]to sort of rescue myself
[18:10]because otherwise I would crush them.
[18:13]But things happen in other people's homes
[18:15]that we're unaware of and who knows what was playing out
[18:18]in all the other houses in our neighborhood at that time.
[18:21]Wow, that was really beautiful.
[18:23]So when your ex-wife Catherine confronts you about being gay,
[18:26]she says, she finally says, okay, are you gay?
[18:29]And you come out to her by simply admitting,
[18:32]I don't want to be.
[18:33]Tell me about that moment in the car.
[18:35]Yeah, it seems like such a simple statement.
[18:38]It was something that took me, I mean,
[18:42]Catherine was the first person that I came out to.
[18:46]I tried to come out to my mother decades previous
[18:50]and there's a chapter about that.
[18:54]But there was this heaviness that was over us
[18:56]since that previous chapter.
[18:58]And I think we both sort of knew what was going on
[19:01]with our marriage.
[19:03]And I used an analogy, it was like Jen guy.
[19:05]Each of us were sort of pulling up locks,
[19:08]but we both silently agreed not to pull out
[19:10]the one that would destroy our marriage.
[19:12]But there comes a point where you just have to ask that question.
[19:16]And I wasn't even able to say, I'm gay.
[19:19]I had to say the opposite of that.
[19:21]I don't want to be because from my entire life,
[19:24]I had tried so hard not to be.
[19:27]And I knew the answer would crush her.
[19:30]So I tried to be as honest as possible.
[19:33]And it seemed like an eternity between her asking
[19:36]and me answering.
[19:37]I just knew at that point when you love someone,
[19:40]you can't continue to lie to them.
[19:43]And so I had to give her the truth
[19:45]knowing that that would be the sledgehammer
[19:46]that would crush our marriage.
[19:49]But at the same time, when you tell the truth
[19:52]after lying for so many years,
[19:54]there's this lightness that you feel
[19:55]because you finally told someone.
[19:57]And there was such a strength.
[20:00]and draw a motion to tell the person who you love,
[20:04]who you've been with, that this is who you are,
[20:08]and this might need the end of us.
[20:10]Oh, well.
[20:12]Later in the book, people ask you, why did it take you so long?
[20:15]Like, why was it so hard?
[20:17]And you list many reasons.
[20:19]And you, I'm going to take out some of your curse words,
[20:21]just in case anybody's listening with their kids,
[20:23]which I doubt anyway at this point in this interview.
[20:25]But anyway, because my mother blanked me over every single day
[20:29]by saying being gay was disgusting
[20:31]and that I would never be happy
[20:32]because I thought being gay was disgusting.
[20:34]And if I was gay, I was disgusting
[20:36]because I thought I would go to hell
[20:37]because religion blanked me over
[20:40]by telling me my feelings were sinful
[20:42]because I was broken.
[20:43]This is sort of a continuation on the rest.
[20:46]Did all of those things building up
[20:48]is that what made it so hard to admit everything
[20:51]or the many reasons I'm sure I've been?
[20:54]Yeah, it was all of those reasons.
[20:56]And again, those were sort of all the absolutes
[20:59]that I had learned growing up
[21:01]and they were a part of me.
[21:02]And at that point, and I actually thought those things
[21:07]when Claire was going to bed and she asked me,
[21:09]are you going to tell your mother?
[21:11]And why did you wait so long?
[21:14]And that's when it hit me.
[21:15]All of these absolutes that I thought were truths were all lies.
[21:20]And when that hits you and you're looking at your daughter
[21:23]putting her to bed and you realize the pain
[21:26]that they're going to experience
[21:28]and that you've created, I think that's why somebody
[21:31]of the f-bombs made it into that statement.
[21:34]It was just I had to sort of let it out in my head
[21:38]that when we force someone to be somebody they're not,
[21:43]we're not just hurting that person.
[21:45]There's collateral damage
[21:46]and that collateral damage was Catherine in my daughters
[21:50]and all of those supposed truths and absolutes
[21:54]were just lies.
[21:55]And that's an important message in this book
[21:59]is just to learn what the truth is.
[22:02]Do you think that someone who's a teenager now,
[22:07]do you think things have changed enough
[22:08]that they could avoid this whole trajectory?
[22:11]Do you think it varies by what part of the country you're in?
[22:13]I know you grew up in the South.
[22:15]Do you think like what to someone who's sort of that age
[22:19]would they have to go through that?
[22:20]What do you think?
[22:21]It still happens.
[22:22]I know it still happens
[22:24]in certain parts of the country.
[22:25]Certainly it is still a special in the South.
[22:29]I, because of the different articles and essays I published,
[22:34]I hear from people who were going through this.
[22:37]I hear from teenagers and 20-year-olds
[22:40]who were still trying to figure out how to come out.
[22:44]I think it's lessened, which is great,
[22:47]but there is this entire generation like me
[22:50]who sort of made this promise back in the 70s and 80s
[22:54]that they were gonna get married to a woman
[22:57]or it's a woman who was gonna get married to a man.
[23:00]And they were gonna stick with that promise
[23:02]and then little by little you build an entire life on that.
[23:06]And how can you then roll that back or destroy it?
[23:10]Can we test?
[23:11]Oh my gosh.
[23:12]But luckily, or I shouldn't say it's luck,
[23:14]but fortunately, you end up falling in love
[23:17]and starting this new relationship
[23:19]and you sort of detail your, the beginning of dating
[23:22]and all of that.
[23:22]And then now you've ended up in this beautiful relationship
[23:25]with Paul and you're married and the five kids
[23:29]like in all of you laying on the ground.
[23:30]I hope that's, I'm not, is that giving it away?
[23:32]I can't give you a shot, but it's so nice.
[23:35]I mean, I know it's like your life.
[23:36]Can I give away your life?
[23:37]You can go on Instagram and see that you're happy.
[23:40]But how great is that?
[23:41]I mean, I feel like this is such an inspiration,
[23:43]like this whole story of yours is like,
[23:45]it's never too late, really.
[23:47]Is it, you only have one life?
[23:48]That's right.
[23:49]Yeah, I was 43 when I came out
[23:51]and now with 55, my first book will be out.
[23:54]And so it's a testament that it's never too late.
[23:57]It is never too late to become your true self,
[23:59]to become your authentic self.
[24:02]And it took a lot of work to get there.
[24:05]And it was really important to end this book
[24:08]with a celebration because when you're in the closet
[24:12]you have these celebrations,
[24:14]but you never truly celebrate birthdays,
[24:17]anniversaries, weddings, they're all celebrations.
[24:22]But when you're in the closet,
[24:23]you're not celebrating those completely.
[24:26]And I think that's why the queer community,
[24:28]LGBTQ people take so much pride in celebrating June,
[24:34]as Pride Month is a time for celebration
[24:36]because we want to not only be accepted and tolerated,
[24:40]but celebrated because for our life we don't get to do that.
[24:43]And when you come out, you can have these celebrations.
[24:47]And it was like, you know, my world exploded,
[24:51]but then all the pieces came back together
[24:53]in a way that made sense.
[24:55]And with that scene with Paul and all of our kids
[25:00]were sort of laying on the dance floor,
[25:02]looking up at these paper lanterns
[25:05]that Paul hung up for our wedding.
[25:06]And they look like a constellation of planets.
[25:09]And that's the way it felt that we were.
[25:12]We were suddenly this constellation
[25:14]and this new universe that really worked.
[25:16]So, that's so nice.
[25:18]Thank you.
[25:19]Oh my gosh, what a story.
[25:21]Do you have any advice for people
[25:22]who are trying to write their own stories like this?
[25:25]Or people who may still be in the closet
[25:28]and they're not sure what to do?
[25:29]Yes, so there's a reason to do something.
[25:32]I wasn't going to ask the other one, but I'm like,
[25:34]no, but there's sort of,
[25:35]people are listening, maybe there are moms out there
[25:38]sending this to friends who they know.
[25:40]I don't know, who knows?
[25:41]You're sort of relating to those one person.
[25:44]So for anybody who's still in the closet,
[25:47]I want them to know it's never too late.
[25:49]It is really never too late.
[25:51]I have spoken to men and women in their 50s, 60s, 70s
[25:56]and they're going through this.
[25:58]And it's never too late to tell the truth.
[26:01]And I do believe that it's really important
[26:04]to tell the truth.
[26:05]Even if that means sort of hurting relationships
[26:10]because that person that you're with
[26:11]doesn't really know who you are anyway.
[26:14]And you deserve to give them that truth.
[26:16]If you truly love them, you deserve to give them that truth.
[26:19]And you deserve to tell yourself.
[26:22]The other thing for writers,
[26:23]and this is how it's connected is for writers,
[26:25]I would say write the thing that you think you cannot say.
[26:30]Because once you put that down on the paper,
[26:32]you gain power over the truth.
[26:34]And that's what I had to do in this book.
[26:36]I had to write the thing I couldn't say.
[26:39]Because it's so much scarier in your head
[26:41]than it is on the page.
[26:43]Once it's on the page and you look at it
[26:45]and you're like, okay, I've got you.
[26:48]You're not a monster anymore.
[26:50]I can sort of tame you.
[26:52]So I would say for writers to do that
[26:54]and to never give up when people tell you
[26:58]your story's not compelling or your writing
[27:01]is nothing special.
[27:02]And I've heard those things before.
[27:05]Don't give up, that's your story.
[27:06]And nobody can tell it the way that you can.
[27:08]Beautiful.
[27:09]Have you seen these ads?
[27:10]This is so random.
[27:11]But I feel like they're for a reason
[27:13]about people who are coming out and calling their families
[27:15]and they're saying it's never too late to call back
[27:16]and tell someone they love you.
[27:18]I actually have not seen them.
[27:19]I guess we're going to turn this off
[27:20]and I'm going to play this for you
[27:21]and you're going to cry.
[27:22]I probably will.
[27:23]I cried watching anyway.
[27:25]It might not even be Verizon.
[27:26]I don't even know who it is.
[27:27]It's some phone company.
[27:28]And it's anyway, I'll have to, I'll show it to you next.
[27:30]Well, whatever free publicity perhaps for Verizon.
[27:33]If it's even that, what is coming next for you now
[27:36]is the last question.
[27:37]Are you going to write another, I mean, what's next?
[27:40]I know you have a big job anyway as in real life.
[27:43]Yeah, so I do.
[27:44]So I have my day job as an IT director
[27:47]with a wonderful firm.
[27:48]I have to say, my firm has been so supportive.
[27:51]My first actual book reading event was for my firm
[27:56]at a corporate retreat.
[27:57]They asked me to read today.
[27:58]So they're so negative.
[28:00]As my family has also been of this book,
[28:05]it's actually healed old wounds with my daughters.
[28:08]And with my mother, they have all come out
[28:11]and support of it.
[28:13]So I feel like I've already succeeded.
[28:16]So that's good.
[28:18]But the next step is the book actually comes out
[28:20]publicly July 1st.
[28:22]And I've got a list of places that I'm going to go and tour.
[28:26]I have an essay coming out in New York Times on June 14
[28:29]for Father's Day, which is wonderful.
[28:33]And next, I am going to write another book.
[28:36]I have decided to write, however, a novel that's based on
[28:40]true life.
[28:41]My aunt was a lesbian.
[28:43]Her uncle was gay.
[28:46]And his aunt was a lesbian.
[28:47]So we have this long queer line that goes through our family.
[28:50]And we have all these stories that I think
[28:53]are yearning to be told that just haven't been told.
[28:56]But my mother is so into Ancestry.com that she has found out
[29:01]everything about.
[29:02]And where they've been, what they've done, who they lived with.
[29:06]So I'm going to fictionalize that and create a novel
[29:09]between two wants and two and a half
[29:11]use and two different generations.
[29:13]Well, that's great.
[29:15]Thank you.
[29:15]Well, thank you so much for sharing your story with the world
[29:18]and for coming on mom's time to read books.
[29:20]Thank you so much.
[29:22]Thanks again to my sponsor, Mermaid PillowCo.
[29:27]Mermaid PillowCo.com slash zibi and her code zibi for 10% off.
[29:33]Thanks so much.
[29:34]Check out those really awesome giftable pillows and blankets.
[29:36]Thanks for listening to mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[29:39]You can follow me on Instagram at momstonehavetimetoreadbooks
[29:43]and at zibi Owens and my new podcast at Kids Do Have Time
[29:47]to Read.
[29:48]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound
[29:50]for the Sound Editing.
[29:52]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[29:53]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.
[29:56]Thanks for listening.
[29:57]You can always email me at zibiatzibi Owens.com.