Jan Eliasberg, HANNAH'S WAR
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[1:08]I'm here today with Jan alias Burke, who's the debut author of a literary spy thriller,
[1:14]Hannah's War. She is an award-winning screenwriter and director of film and television.
[1:18]She has written and directed dramatic pilots for CBS, NBC, and ABC.
[1:23]She was the first woman to direct Miami Vice and has directed episodes of Wise Guy,
[1:28]21 Jump Street, 13 Reasons Why, Parenthood, Blue Bloods, NCIS Los Angeles, and many others.
[1:35]Her debut feature film was past midnight, starring Paul Giamatti and the late Natasha Richardson.
[1:41]As a screenwriter, Jan has written films driven by strong female leads, including
[1:45]Fly Girls with Nicole Kidman and Cameron Diaz.
[1:48]Jan graduated from Wesleyan University and has two MFA's, one from the Yale School of Drama and
[1:55]one from Warren Wilson and Fiction, a native New Yorker, Jan currently lives in New York City.
[2:00]Welcome, Jan. Thanks for coming on Moms. Don't have time to read books.
[2:02]Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for writing Hannah's War, which was, oh my gosh,
[2:07]entertaining and exciting and all of it. Thank you. It was awesome.
[2:12]I loved writing it. I really did. It was one of the best experiences of my creative life.
[2:18]Wow. That's saying a lot because you've had quite a creative life.
[2:20]Yes. And it was very different and unexpected and I just loved it.
[2:26]Well, first of all, tell listeners what is Hannah's war about?
[2:29]So, Hannah's war started with a very, very tiny inspiration, but kind of an amazing story that I
[2:41]read in the New York Times on the headline on the day that we bombed Hiroshima.
[2:46]Red Truman vows reign of ruin, atomic bomb explodes. And in that issue of the New York Times,
[2:57]they basically had to explain the whole history of this project because it had all been developed
[3:03]in secret. And under the fold, I saw a paragraph that said, the key component that allowed the
[3:10]allies to develop the bomb was brought to us by a female non-arion physicist.
[3:19]And that was the Times' way of saying Jewish, which they couldn't say at the time.
[3:25]And I read that and I thought, well, how is it possible that I haven't heard this woman?
[3:32]Who is it? And she's clearly critical to this, to the atomic bomb.
[3:38]And yet, there was no name, nothing. It was just that sentence. And it sent me into basically
[3:46]ten years of research. Not to find her. Once I understood that there was this woman,
[3:55]I actually found her fairly easily, but she is one of these women who had done amazing things
[4:01]who had been erased from history. She had been working in Germany with a male partner,
[4:06]an arian partner. And she had been told by everybody she worked with as Hitler was rising in power
[4:15]that she would be protected and she would be fine because she was working at this high level of
[4:20]research. And it was fascinating to me because as they were just on the verge of splitting the
[4:28]atom, but they hadn't done it yet, Austria was annexed and she had to flee within six hours.
[4:35]And then I discovered that her partner, Otto Hahn, he couldn't work without her. And so he met
[4:44]with her in secret, in Sweden, where she fled. And they would plan experiments and he would go back
[4:51]to Germany and he would do them. And he couldn't understand the results of the experiment without
[4:58]her because that's how they worked together. He would do the chemical part and she would do
[5:04]the radiographic analysis and the mathematics and figure out what had actually happened.
[5:09]And so she was the one who figured out that they had split the atom, which was the key to all
[5:15]nuclear energy. Both good and bad, you know, to light up cities, to take us to the moon and to
[5:26]potentially destroy the world. So he published the papers about the experiment and because
[5:35]he lived in Germany, we can either be charitable or we can be really mean about him. If you're
[5:41]charitable, you say, well, he would have ruined his career if he had put her name on the papers
[5:47]because she was Jewish. And if you had a Jewish name on a paper, it was immediately discredited
[5:53]by the Germans. Or you can say he knew that if he left her off, that he would basically get
[6:04]credit for what had happened himself. And in the end, I think we have to end up sort of
[6:12]adopting that theory because he won the Nobel Prize for this very discovery and he did not
[6:19]mention her name. I mean, it doesn't sound charitable. No. And worse than that, she was sitting
[6:28]at the ceremony and I read in her diaries. She was waiting for him to give her some kind of
[6:35]acknowledgement because they were friends. I mean, they had worked together for 20 years.
[6:41]Nothing. The Nobel Prize committee was also quite misogynist because afterwards and we're getting
[6:47]way away away from the story of the book. But afterwards, about I think 60 scientists lobbied
[6:54]for her to get credit because they all knew that it really was more her discovery than his.
[7:00]And they just said, nope, nope, we've made our decision and that's that. So this woman became
[7:08]the inspiration for Hannah's war. In the sense that I immediately thought you have a woman who's
[7:17]experienced what it is to be working and thinking your finding truth, right? I mean, what is a great
[7:27]scientist? A great scientist is an artist. They're going to go wherever the experiment takes you.
[7:33]They need to know what's what's at the bottom of matter. You know, how is human energy composed?
[7:41]And yet she's sitting there and she's seeing that her science, which is so pure and beautiful,
[7:50]becomes militarized because the Nazis actually came in and they took over the research institute
[7:56]where she was working. And then I thought, if she's at Los Alamos, where you have the same thing,
[8:05]you have all of these scientists, but now it's right in the open. They've all been brought there by
[8:12]Oppenheimer and the United States military. And they're actually on a base, which looks like a
[8:20]concentration camp surrounded by barbed wire. And they are both trying to find out how to create
[8:27]a bomb. And at the same time, they're being spied on. The military is keeping their
[8:33]in barracks. They're being fed, you know, terrible food. And so somebody who's had that experience
[8:41]already in Germany of understanding what discrimination is and how science can become a weapon
[8:48]is in a very, very, very interesting position, sitting in Los Alamos and essentially seeing it all
[8:56]happen again. But supposedly for a good cause. So it was such a rich environment for the things that
[9:08]I care about. For moral gray areas, for, you know, people engaged in one of the most important
[9:18]discoveries of the 20th century that is going to change the world. And yet there's just,
[9:26]there's a shadow over it too because when I saw a wonderful documentary that interviewed a lot
[9:34]of the scientists that they were, they were quite old. And I think very few of them are still alive.
[9:40]But, but they all talked about what it was like when they actually tested the bomb. And one of
[9:47]them said something like, you know, I knew that the day had happened. And in my mind, I guess I knew
[10:00]that Hitler and the Germans didn't have the bomb.
[10:03]And everything I know about myself says
[10:06]that I should have turned around and walked out
[10:08]and never looked back.
[10:10]And I didn't because I had to know if it was gonna work.
[10:15]And that dilemma and that level of complexity
[10:20]and just it just floored me.
[10:23]And I felt like this is a world that I have to,
[10:26]that I have to explore.
[10:28]And I have to explore it in a way
[10:30]from a woman's point of view
[10:32]because I think it's a very male world.
[10:35]And she herself, the actual scientist, Lisa Meitner,
[10:40]had very, had a real moral compass
[10:44]that I think a lot of these men sort of lost
[10:50]in the process of their discoveries.
[10:53]So.
[10:54]Wow.
[10:55]So we can see why it's such a powerful story.
[10:59]I mean, that's like riveting just to listen to.
[11:01]Well, thank you.
[11:02]I mean, what ended up happening,
[11:04]I certainly didn't come on all of this, you know,
[11:06]in two seconds.
[11:08]I found her and then I started to realize,
[11:12]oh, well, if I'm going to start to tell her story,
[11:15]I have to understand the history of the bomb
[11:19]and the physics that created it.
[11:22]And then I dove into that research.
[11:24]And as I discovered more and more,
[11:26]it's like the story took on layers.
[11:29]And instead of being a linear, straightforward story,
[11:33]it became this just like kind of like the bomb itself.
[11:38]You know, this tiny explosive core.
[11:40]And then all of these layers that,
[11:43]that, you know, that were sort of put on the outside.
[11:47]But still explodes in the end.
[11:49]I mean, it's a pretty explosive story, I think.
[11:52]And have you always been interested
[11:53]in this period of time or was it just this woman
[11:56]that made you delve deep?
[11:58]I have you always been a story in it.
[12:01]Well, I had as a writer, director.
[12:03]I had actually written a story
[12:06]about the Women Air Service pilots in World War II.
[12:10]And so I had been a part of researching that time period
[12:15]before from a very different perspective.
[12:17]I'm much more sort of heroic story, you know,
[12:21]with fewer gray areas for sure,
[12:23]although there was sexism and misogyny and all of that.
[12:27]But I think that I've always been interested in what I call
[12:32]the tears in the fabric of society.
[12:36]Where are things broken?
[12:38]Where are things jagged?
[12:41]You know, is it race?
[12:44]Is it, you know, this unhealed story of, you know,
[12:50]of slavery or in this case, I mean, there were two issues.
[12:54]There was sort of the disappeared woman.
[12:58]But also, I don't really think we've ever reckoned
[13:03]with the bomb.
[13:04]I mean, we created it and then sort of put it away
[13:08]and said, God, we hope we never have to use it again.
[13:11]But every time there's a political flare up, you know,
[13:14]suddenly the bomb is there with us again.
[13:18]And it's like Iran and Iran.
[13:20]I mean, it keeps, it keeps coming up.
[13:24]And then there was one other thing that really
[13:25]interested me, which was, and it was personal
[13:29]about World War II, my father fought in the war.
[13:32]And he was a naval officer.
[13:34]I mean, he didn't, you know, his, his big war story
[13:38]was that he threw up 13 times on the boat to Hawaii.
[13:42]So, you know, but he changed his name.
[13:45]And I always wondered why.
[13:48]And I talked to him and he said that, in fact,
[13:52]when he got out of the war, he had a very hard time
[13:57]getting a job.
[13:58]And he talked about all of the professions
[14:01]that were closed to him, that were closed to Jews,
[14:05]banking, the high echelons of the law, advertising.
[14:11]And so I thought, I hadn't really thought about antisemitism
[14:15]as a present thing until I heard those stories from my dad.
[14:22]And I thought, wow, you know, that's, that's serious.
[14:27]And so it made me think about sort of that too
[14:32]as kind of an unsolved tear in our fabric.
[14:37]What did he change his name from?
[14:39]And too, well, it's kind of funny actually
[14:41]because his last name was Eliasburg, right?
[14:45]And he begged his father to change the last name.
[14:49]And his father was one of the founding members
[14:51]of Mount Sinai Hospital, which is a Jewish hospital.
[14:54]And his father was like, no, you know, I'm proud of our name.
[14:59]We're, you know, and his whole, you know, medical career
[15:03]was built on the fact that he had founded this wonderful Jewish
[15:07]hospital, he founded it because the other hospitals
[15:11]didn't take Jews.
[15:12]I'm on the board there, by the way.
[15:13]Oh, well.
[15:14]There we go.
[15:15]So there is actually, I think they still give it out.
[15:18]There's a prize in his name.
[15:19]He was the head of anesthesiology.
[15:21]And he never lost a patient.
[15:25]So he was very proud of being Jewish.
[15:28]And so what my father did was he ended up changing his, his first name.
[15:33]He was named Joshua Abraham, Eliasburg.
[15:36]And he changed Joshua Abraham to J.
[15:39]Hmm.
[15:40]Did that help?
[15:41]Not really.
[15:43]I said dad, you know, you're still Eliasburg.
[15:47]And like, it's not, you're not hiding anything from anybody.
[15:51]But it was his, it wasn't the name change in my mind that was
[15:56]significant.
[15:56]It was the desire to be other than who he was.
[16:01]I've went job to the end of getting, he was the vice president
[16:03]of research for CBS television in the end.
[16:06]And he was just fine.
[16:09]I wasn't crying any tears.
[16:12]But it was still an interesting period.
[16:14]And what I ended up discovering in the course of this research was that
[16:19]there was, there's a really good case to be made that antisemitism started in
[16:24]America and Hitler actually appropriated it from us.
[16:31]And I'll tell you why that sounds like a big thing.
[16:35]But Henry Ford, Ford Motor Company, published the protocols of
[16:41]the elders of Zion, which is a discredited book, but very, very, it's the
[16:46]basis of antisemitism, really.
[16:49]And Hitler credited Henry Ford by name in mind comp and said that he had
[16:56]really developed his whole philosophy as a result of Henry Ford's work.
[17:03]So there was a bond between the United States and Germany that also hasn't
[17:08]really been, hasn't seen the light of day, I think.
[17:12]And I investigate that in the book.
[17:14]Do you watch the TV show succession?
[17:16]I certainly do.
[17:17]Especially if it was the last night when they were talking about, when they
[17:20]were interviewing the anchor and they were like, have you read mind
[17:22]comp? And he's like, just a few times.
[17:24]Yes.
[17:25]Oh, yes.
[17:26]And he has the dog name.
[17:27]Yeah, dog and blondie like different spell.
[17:29]Different spelling.
[17:30]Yes.
[17:32]And I didn't need, he hadn't even owned it.
[17:34]Hitler's caught it.
[17:36]He said that.
[17:36]Yeah.
[17:37]Yeah.
[17:38]Yeah.
[17:38]I love that show.
[17:39]Yeah.
[17:40]In fact, my ringtone is the expression.
[17:42]Oh, my gosh.
[17:43]I love it.
[17:44]Yeah.
[17:45]But apparently in an obsession of that, it's losing sleep over that show at the
[17:48]moment.
[17:49]It's an amazing, amazing show.
[17:51]So speaking of shows as they relate to books, you have spent your whole
[17:55]career up till now in the TV and movie world.
[17:59]And this is your first book.
[18:00]Yes.
[18:01]Why not?
[18:02]Why write this as a book?
[18:04]And I know you've already adapted it to a screenplay.
[18:06]Yes.
[18:07]Why go to this step?
[18:08]Like, why take this step?
[18:09]Why take this step into publishing and not just write the screenplay?
[18:12]OK.
[18:12]So I hope you understand this.
[18:15]You're from New York, right?
[18:16]Yes.
[18:17]I'm from New York.
[18:18]If you grew up in New York in a sort of intellectual family to be a writer
[18:25]is to write a novel.
[18:26]I mean, that's it.
[18:27]You write the great American novel.
[18:28]That's the dream.
[18:30]And so I always had this idea that I would write a novel.
[18:35]But I got into acting in high school.
[18:40]I was very dramatic.
[18:43]I ended up directing, which it just made a lot of sense for my personality.
[18:49]It brought together a lot of the intellectual things that interested me and the
[18:54]visual things and, of course, working with actors.
[18:58]And that was a very organic evolution.
[19:01]And I ended up going to Yale Drama School.
[19:04]And, you know, I might have stayed in the theater.
[19:07]I think if I had, I went to England, I went to London.
[19:12]And I think if I had stayed there, I was offered a job there.
[19:16]But I was very, very young.
[19:18]And I just wasn't ready to live in London.
[19:20]I was too homesick.
[19:23]But I think that the vibrancy of the theater there would have been very satisfying
[19:29]to me.
[19:30]But I came back and I sort of realized that theater wasn't vital in the way that it was
[19:36]in England.
[19:37]This, remember, this is before Hamilton, this is long before Hamilton.
[19:42]So I thought, well, I should experiment with film.
[19:46]And I kind of fell in love with film.
[19:49]And I started directing and I think sexism had something to do with it because I wasn't,
[19:57]I was directing in the very kind of...
[20:00]like maybe the second wave of women.
[20:03]There were about 10 of us.
[20:05]And I had a wonderful career,
[20:07]but there were definite parameters.
[20:10]Like, I worked in television,
[20:13]but breaking through the film, impossible.
[20:16]I was offered, you know, to direct, like, kids films.
[20:20]You know, like, the Olsen twins or something.
[20:23]And I was interested in Brackton.
[20:26]You know, I was interested in really serious issues.
[20:29]And so, as I was directing television
[20:32]and making a wonderful living
[20:35]and enjoying the creativity of it,
[20:38]there was a part of me that felt very unfulfilled.
[20:41]Because ultimately, it was somebody else's show.
[20:44]And it was what it was.
[20:45]Some were very good.
[20:47]And some, I would look at them and I would go,
[20:49]oh, I spent a month on that.
[20:53]Oh, my God.
[20:54]What a waste.
[20:56]I mean, that sounds so ing-
[20:58]I'm not ungrateful.
[21:00]I'm very grateful for my time as a television director.
[21:03]Very grateful.
[21:04]But I did feel like there was a large part of me,
[21:08]a large part of my creative life that was not being tapped.
[21:12]And so, I kept sort of dipping my toe in.
[21:16]So I applied to graduate school.
[21:18]I applied to get an MFA infection.
[21:21]And I thought, well, if I'm accepted,
[21:23]you know, then that'll mean maybe I'm a right,
[21:25]or I could write, and I was accepted.
[21:29]So I went to graduate school and I had wonderful teachers.
[21:34]And I started writing a different novel.
[21:38]And I had a lot of great support.
[21:40]And then I got out of graduate school.
[21:42]And, you know, I was offered all these television shows.
[21:46]And, but I really wanted to write.
[21:48]And so I sort of found this compromise.
[21:51]And I thought, okay, I'll write screenplays.
[21:53]Because then, I can write the screenplay.
[21:55]I can attach myself to direct.
[21:58]And then I'll get all of it, the whole thing.
[22:01]And so I did, I wrote screenplays.
[22:03]Some of them absolutely terrific.
[22:06]All of them with female leads.
[22:09]And not a one of them went to get made.
[22:13]Mostly, because they had female leads.
[22:17]And the story of the Women Air Service pilots, for example,
[22:21]had Cameron Diaz and Nicole Kidman attached to star.
[22:27]So if you have, they were the biggest stars in the world
[22:31]at that time.
[22:33]And I thought, if that can't get made,
[22:35]I'm just barking up the wrong tree.
[22:38]And that kind of pushed me toward the idea
[22:44]of writing something else.
[22:46]And I had to move back to New York to do it.
[22:50]Because as long as I was in LA and I kept getting job offers,
[22:54]I took them and it wasn't until I came to New York
[22:57]that I thought, maybe I can create the safe space
[23:01]and the quiet to actually do something that really is my own.
[23:07]It's a lot scarier to sit down and write an awful
[23:11]than it is to sit down and write a screenplay.
[23:15]I mean, screenplays are very hard.
[23:17]But once you've broken the story,
[23:20]once you've figured out basically what the arc of the story
[23:24]is it took me about three weeks or a month
[23:28]to write a first draft.
[23:30]Now, then you layer it to revision after revision after revision.
[23:33]It takes it to the first draft of Hannah's work.
[23:35]Seven months.
[23:37]I mean, which is very quick.
[23:39]It is.
[23:40]Actually, I mean, I know it's very quick.
[23:43]But that was partly because I knew the story so,
[23:45]so well by the time I said,
[23:47]I'm to write it because I had outlined it
[23:50]because I had so much research in my fingertips.
[23:53]And also because I think I had sort of gotten my chops
[23:58]from writing on deadline,
[24:01]write for a television show, you sit down
[24:03]and it's just got to be done sometimes over a weekend.
[24:07]So I had sort of done my Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours
[24:12]or whatever.
[24:13]But yeah, so that's how it happens.
[24:15]So how does it feel?
[24:17]Now you finally have your intellectual novel.
[24:20]You're here back in New York.
[24:23]You did it.
[24:24]What, how do you feel?
[24:24]I'm like, how can I say this without every cliche
[24:28]in the book?
[24:29]I mean, just cliche.
[24:29]I'm walking on water.
[24:31]I mean, I'm so elated.
[24:36]I, it's everything I wanted.
[24:37]It's everything I dreamed.
[24:39]I mean, so nice.
[24:41]When I sat down to write the book,
[24:43]I had to say to myself, if this doesn't sell,
[24:46]I'm going to be proud that I did it.
[24:48]That was the way I sort of, because I really,
[24:51]I thought, if I don't write this book,
[24:55]I will feel that I've let myself down.
[24:58]So to some extent, I felt like, OK, so if I write it,
[25:03]that's a win.
[25:05]That's a triumph.
[25:06]And going into it with that expectation was wonderful,
[25:10]because it wasn't at all about who's going to care,
[25:13]am I going to sell it?
[25:15]But it was really just about the process.
[25:19]And that's probably partly why I love the process so much,
[25:23]because it was very pure.
[25:26]And then not only did I sell it,
[25:29]but I sold it in a bidding war.
[25:31]And I sold it to Little Brown, which is a, you know,
[25:35]that's not self-publishing.
[25:37]That's like, that's like one of the best possible labels
[25:42]and this extraordinary editor, Judy Klein.
[25:45]And then I have to say, I just felt, I've been treated
[25:49]with such respect.
[25:51]Writers in Hollywood are not generally
[25:55]in television, they're treated better than in film.
[25:58]But, you know, I've been consulted about everything.
[26:03]And it's just such a great feeling.
[26:06]And it's, you know, kind of what I've been, yeah,
[26:09]what I envisioned all my life, what I hope for.
[26:12]So now that you've gotten to this state,
[26:14]what advice would you have for younger authors,
[26:17]or maybe going back to your younger self
[26:19]when you were just graduating?
[26:21]What advice would you have?
[26:22]That's a good question.
[26:23]Part of me thinks, go with your instincts.
[26:28]And the other part of me, the stronger advice, I think,
[26:33]is in order to write, you really do have to have something
[26:37]to write about that you really are passionate about.
[26:41]And that the experience you get on the way
[26:46]is worth every moment that you spend.
[26:49]So, for example, I could say, oh, well, you know,
[26:53]I wasted all this time, but I don't feel that way at all
[26:57]because I feel like every single thing I directed
[27:01]was sharpening my visual sets or those shows
[27:06]that I would watch and go, oh my god, why did I do that?
[27:12]Even though I got to sort of hear what bad dialogue sounds like.
[27:19]You know, shows where like the person comes in
[27:21]and they explain to another person what they already know.
[27:25]You know, because the writer can't figure out
[27:28]how to like hide the exposition.
[27:31]And so I figured out how to hide the exposition
[27:35]because I would hear that kind of dialogue.
[27:37]And I would think that's not the way people talk to each other.
[27:40]You know, you just don't come in and announce like what you've
[27:45]just discovered, you know, like so every single thing
[27:50]that I've done, I feel contributed to the book.
[27:55]And even in the sense that the cover, they, you know,
[27:58]they showed me a cover which was beautiful,
[28:03]but it was like every other historical fiction cover.
[28:06]It was a woman in silhouettes.
[28:09]I was going to see I can be walking away from the reader
[28:14]towards something, some kind of misty, I don't know.
[28:18]Is it Auschwitz?
[28:19]Is it a scientific laboratory?
[28:21]Is it Berlin?
[28:22]Is it Paris?
[28:24]And I looked at it and I thought, you know, this is wonderful.
[28:28]It certainly signals what the book is, the genre and everything.
[28:32]But this book is about a nuclear physicist.
[28:36]Like if people look at this cover,
[28:39]are they really going to be prepared for this woman who is,
[28:45]I mean, she's a wonderful heroine, but she's guarded
[28:49]and she's mysterious and she's really smart.
[28:53]And she's got a kind of almost a barbed sense of humor.
[28:58]And I thought, I don't know that this cover really sums up
[29:02]all the complexity of the book.
[29:05]And I was very hesitant because I went in my debut novelists,
[29:09]you know, but I talked to Judy and she said,
[29:13]oh, I'm totally open, you know, send me inspirations.
[29:18]So because I'm a director, I actually could do that.
[29:23]You know, I could find pictures, I could find other covers.
[29:27]I just put together a Pinterest board of all the inspirations
[29:31]and I sent them to Judy and she didn't say anything.
[29:35]She just passed them on to the designer.
[29:37]And then I opened, I was in FedEx and I opened a little email
[29:44]that was the new cover and I gasped out loud
[29:47]because it was everything that I had sent,
[29:50]but made personal by the designer.
[29:53]And the cover for people listening is the bottom half
[29:57]off to the side of a woman's face with bright red.
[30:00]lipstick and pearl earrings, pearl necklace, dark outfit.
[30:03]And then Jan's name and bright red to match the lipstick.
[30:07]And then what's probably supposed to be atoms floating everywhere.
[30:11]Well, you know, but I'm making that up.
[30:13]That's what I thought immediately that they were atoms.
[30:17]But they also are gold, and they actually flash in the light.
[30:22]And so there's a feeling, oh yeah, they do with that.
[30:27]There's a feeling of good stuff, and clint was one of my inspirations.
[30:32]Love it.
[30:33]And then there's a background that's sort of black and dark blue and a little bit green
[30:39]that always feels to me when I look at it like a chalkboard.
[30:43]And it's kind of distressed a little bit.
[30:47]And so it captures the mystery of the book in a way that makes me very, very happy.
[30:55]And it's sensuous too.
[30:57]You know, it's an alluring cover.
[30:59]It just sort of makes you want to go, ooh, ooh, so yeah, me too.
[31:07]So things like that.
[31:08]It's like, you know, if I hadn't done all of those, those lookbooks for films that
[31:13]I've directed, I wouldn't, I wouldn't know how to put together inspirations for a covered
[31:18]design.
[31:19]So I think that's my advice is every single thing that you do is part of the process,
[31:27]as long as you can keep the attitude that it is part of the process.
[31:32]And that it's taking you, it can take you where you want to go.
[31:37]Just have to be alive to when things align.
[31:40]Well, thank you so much for coming on.
[31:42]Well, I'm still going to have time to read books and for your great book.
[31:45]And then you can't wait to hear what happens in the next installment.
[31:49]I think you're working on a sequel.
[31:50]I am, actually.
[31:52]So that's going to be amazing.
[31:55]All right, I have a question for you.
[31:57]Oh, yeah.
[31:58]Having read the book, which character do you think that the sequel might follow?
[32:03]Oh my goodness.
[32:05]I don't know.
[32:06]I don't know.
[32:07]Who were you left with questions about?
[32:09]I mean, I feel like I have questions about everybody.
[32:11]Okay.
[32:12]What about the woman in the beginning who was dating the one who called everybody Jewish
[32:16]slaves?
[32:17]Oh, Ulricha.
[32:18]Okay.
[32:19]Okay.
[32:20]Yes, she appears in the sequel.
[32:21]Okay.
[32:22]She is not, she is not the star of the sequel, but she appears in it.
[32:25]And so does her, well, I shouldn't, this is a bit of a spoiler, but so the sequel is
[32:30]actually Hannah's cousin Sabine.
[32:32]Sabine.
[32:33]Sabine.
[32:34]I should have sent them.
[32:35]Obviously.
[32:36]Yes.
[32:37]Because she disappears probably a third of the way through the book.
[32:41]Yeah, I should have sent them.
[32:43]And she's a real, she's, she's like a fire cracker.
[32:46]She is really feisty and she is really, I mean, she is determined to challenge everything
[32:51]that she believes is unjust.
[32:54]And so I wanted to know what happens to her and she ends up having a very interesting
[33:02]journey.
[33:03]That's all.
[33:04]Yeah.
[33:05]All right.
[33:06]Well, thanks again.
[33:07]Thank you.
[33:08]You've been listening to Momstone have time to read books with Zibi Owens.
[33:11]Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com to get more updates about
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[33:19]Thanks to Lauren Passell and her innovative PR company, Tink, for sponsoring today's episode.
[33:24]Please check them out at tinkmedia.com.
[33:27]You can follow me on Instagram at momstonehavetimetoreadbooks.
[33:31]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texturesound for the Sound Editing.
[33:35]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and now
[33:38]trim music.
[33:39]Thanks for listening.
[33:40]Always email me at Zibi at Zibi Owens.com.