Therese Anne Fowler, A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast,
[0:12]Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Please sign up for my newsletter at ziviowens.com
[0:17]for updates on podcast guests and lots of live events.
[0:21]Today's episode has been sponsored by GoodPods. It's an really amazing app where you can follow
[0:26]your smartest, funniest, most curious podcast junkie friends and other people you admire to see
[0:31]what podcasts are listening to, and it's all by episode. So I know I have my own podcast,
[0:37]but even I find myself overwhelmed by how many episodes there are of other podcasts and what I
[0:42]should listen to next. So GoodPods is still in beta, and they're looking for testers who will give
[0:47]them honest feedback. So you can go to GoodPods on the App Store or Google Play and check out
[0:53]which podcast your friends are listening to. And by the way, go on there and show them that you're
[0:57]listening to my podcast that would really be awesome. So anyway, GoodPods was founded by a friend I
[1:03]used to work with many moons ago in, I guess, 1999, which really ages me here. But anyway,
[1:11]JJ Ramberg and I used to work together at a big company called IdeaLab. If anybody heard of that,
[1:15]she was with the site called Cooking.com and I was with IdeaLab. And now she started GoodPods,
[1:20]among many other endeavors that she's done. And this she's done with her brother Brad Ramberg,
[1:24]who was also at IdeaLab with me. So it all comes full circle. So anyway, thank you to JJ and Brad
[1:30]and everybody. I GoodPods for sponsoring this episode and for making a new searchable, listening,
[1:37]tracking thing for podcasts, which is going to be super helpful in helping people find great
[1:43]podcasts. Hopefully like mine. Thank you. To be Sam Fowler is the New York Times best-selling author
[1:48]of novels Z, a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, and a well-behaved woman. Her most recent novel is A Good
[1:54]Neighborhood, raised in the Midwest to re-smoved to North Carolina where she currently lives.
[1:58]She holds a BA in sociology, cultural anthropology, and an MFA in creative writing from North
[2:04]Carolina State University. Thank you for coming on mom's and having to read books.
[2:09]So glad to join you. Can you please tell listeners what A Good Neighborhood is about?
[2:14]Yeah, so A Good Neighborhood is a contemporary suburban drama that is really about the conflict
[2:20]between these two families, one black and one white. And the conflict initially arises over
[2:26]the fate of this damaged historic oak tree in the black family's backyard, but it gets really
[2:32]complicated by this developing romance between the two families, teenagers, and these two situations
[2:38]lead to consequences that none of them could have foreseen. Or me as the reader, by the way. Well,
[2:44]good. Did not see that coming. You wrote an interesting explanation at the beginning of the book,
[2:51]and you said A Good Neighborhood is very different from the historical novels I'm known for,
[2:56]and to change course could be a career risk. Yet these characters and their intertwined
[3:00]fates the story of their conflicts and the fallout that ensues felt urgent to me to write this
[3:05]through right there story felt necessary, a kind of activism in our troubled and troubling times.
[3:11]So tell me more about this. Oh, well, as everybody in the book world is aware because of the
[3:17]controversy that surrounded the publication of American dirt, this is a fraught time for people who
[3:26]mainly white authors who are writing stories about people of color. And this is not news, right?
[3:32]This didn't just start with American dirt. It's something that has been ongoing. And because
[3:37]that's the case, and because I knew I was taking on the possible subject of appropriation was I
[3:45]going to be held to a different standard than say a person of color writing this story. And
[3:51]I want to stress that I think that the standards are correct that people of color are in most
[3:57]cases right to be sensitive about the way that white authors have been in some cases
[4:03]appropriating their stories or just badly writing these stories and getting more attention than
[4:08]those people of color get for their books. All of that being the sort of the pool that we're
[4:14]swimming in right now made it so that I felt like I needed to address this head-on in my author's note
[4:20]to help readers know that I'm mindful of those problems. I take them seriously. And I wanted to
[4:26]make sure that I did what followed this advice that I got from Zany Smith, which was to write about
[4:33]whatever you want to write about, but just make sure you do your homework. So that's what that
[4:38]note is about. Said was that like a frantic, I better write a note before this question. No,
[4:44]not at all because I didn't really expect there to be any particular controversy. We can
[4:50]know the timing of American dirt coming to close to the timing of a good neighborhood's release
[4:55]makes this a front and center issue. Rather, the note was just me, like I said, being mindful of
[5:02]this being the situation and wanting to just address it in case people did have questions about
[5:09]what I had done and why I had done it. Most of the people who raise issues of appropriation
[5:15]are not telling white authors you can't write about these things. I think that message kind of
[5:21]comes later in the piling on the sort of terrible, vitriolic culture of Twitter and people who don't
[5:29]actually engage with the issues, but just want to kind of get into the fight. But people who
[5:34]actually are thoughtful about these matters recognize that anybody ought to be able to write
[5:40]anything. It's just that you need to make sure that you don't do it badly. So when Zady Smith said
[5:46]make sure to do your homework, how did you do your homework for this fact? I did a lot of
[5:52]research into, well, let's back up for a second and just say, there are five characters in this
[5:58]story whose points of view I take and two of those characters are African-American. And so
[6:05]one of the things that I knew I needed to make sure I did was not to just presume that I could
[6:11]represent those voices authentically just because I grew up in a very diverse community, for example,
[6:18]or like I had a black boyfriend when I was in fifth grade, does that make me an authority? No,
[6:23]it does not. I was writing about my own culture in this novel, but because I haven't been a
[6:29]black person, I needed to find out what it's like to be black in America today. So I watched lots
[6:36]of personal accounts. I read lots of personal accounts. I made sure that I wasn't just reading
[6:42]summaries of what some expert thought that it was like, but actual accounts from the people
[6:47]who live these lives in America today. And then do what every novel has to do, and that is just
[6:53]to represent every character authentically and not to create stereotypes. You know, just look
[7:01]out for the land lines that white authors have found themselves stepping on in the past and
[7:07]try very hard to not make those for myself. And then ultimately to have sensitivity readers
[7:14]make sure that I hadn't still screwed up inadvertently. One of the things that was so interesting
[7:19]to me about the situation with American dirt was when I read the book, which was very early
[7:24]before publication, I did not see the problems, right? And you read it. Yeah, I didn't see the
[7:30]problems either. Right. And it's because we're not Mexican or Mexican-American. We can't see,
[7:36]we can't know what we don't know. But I think we have to respect the opinions of people who do know
[7:42]and get those opinions early if we can. So we don't end up with a book that causes, you know,
[7:48]this complete utter, I think, outsized controversy. Great. Well, I think the note was great,
[7:55]and I'm a really long answer to you. You do write from a lot of different characters,
[8:02]perspectives, but you also adopt this universal weave from the people in the neighborhood,
[8:07]which I found to be really interesting and a different convention than I've seen in other
[8:11]books. So tell me about that decision. Right. So that's the collective first person from
[8:16]the writer standpoint. That's a storytelling choice that is not made very often because it
[8:22]doesn't really suit stories generally. But in this case, I was really interested in the fact that
[8:28]this was going to be a cautionary tale. And usually we choose between two points of view, right?
[8:33]We have first person point of view where we're hearing directly from the character,
[8:37]or we have third person point of view where it's like the author voice telling the story
[8:42]through the character's point of view. And the collective first person lets me kind of have
[8:48]the best of both worlds. It gives this intimate look at the community because the we is the
[8:55]neighborhood telling the story. But it also lets me have that voice disappear and just share what
[9:02]the characters experiences are. And it goes way back to the beginning of the, really, the history
[9:09]storytelling, which was an oral event, right? Originally. And then like classic literature where
[9:15]we have Shakespeare, for example, having a narrator introduce to the audience the story that they're
[9:21]about to see performed on the stage. And so it just felt like the right choice. And I didn't know if
[9:26]I could pull it off because I'd never done it before. But I guess I guess it worked. It worked for
[9:31]me. I thought it was neat. It's nice when things were a little bit different. I don't know. I read a
[9:36]a lot of books and it's nice to have something different. No, it's just nice when something's
[9:40]a little different. I mean, as long as it's done well, it's nice. It's like somebody's thought
[9:44]through something a little differently. I don't know. So one part of the book that I found particularly
[9:48]interesting was that Julia, the mom had children by two different dads and in very, very different
[9:55]stages of her life. Right. I know that we always say with kids like, well, I'm a different mom to
[10:00]And my five-year-old, then I was to my almost 13-year-old.
[10:02]I'm like, a totally different person.
[10:03]And that's true.
[10:04]But this really is like, she was like a different person.
[10:07]She had a different-
[10:08]Really is, yeah.
[10:09]The natural situation and a different lifestyle,
[10:11]a different relationship with the guy,
[10:14]everything in her life is different.
[10:16]And ultimately, the step parent relationship
[10:19]and all of that becomes a very central piece of the plot.
[10:22]Tell me about your decision to do that.
[10:24]And then it made me wonder, like,
[10:26]do you have any step children of your own?
[10:29]Like, are you close to any families who have,
[10:32]like, the half-brother, half-sister relationship
[10:34]is sort of under-explored.
[10:35]So that was a long question.
[10:36]That was true, it's true.
[10:38]I don't have any half-siblings,
[10:41]but I did have a whole bunch of step siblings
[10:44]when I was growing up.
[10:45]And, well, Julia and I have some things in common.
[10:49]Fortunately, not the teenage unmarried pregnant
[10:52]for her life.
[10:54]But I got married really young, and I had kids young.
[10:58]And then, what do we mean by young?
[11:00]Like, how young?
[11:01]Oh, God, I was 18.
[11:02]Really?
[11:03]When I got married, yes, right out of high school.
[11:06]Oh, my gosh.
[11:07]Okay.
[11:07]Bad, bad decision.
[11:09]And not a shotgun wedding.
[11:11]You know, it was not, it was not one of those situations.
[11:14]I was just determined and stubborn
[11:17]and thought I knew what I was doing.
[11:19]So I got married young.
[11:20]I had my kids when I was in my mid-20s,
[11:22]and then I was divorced when I was 30.
[11:25]And it was really a hand-to-mouth life.
[11:28]A lot of that time, like, even growing up,
[11:30]I came from a blue collar family.
[11:33]We did not have much in life.
[11:35]And I was sort of always striving.
[11:38]And so that helped me a lot with Julia's character.
[11:42]This, you know, young woman who was not educated
[11:45]and who had a child quite young
[11:48]and who just wanted to do better and be better.
[11:52]Not just for herself, but for this daughter
[11:55]that she had when she was just 19 years old.
[11:57]So that helped me really get into the space of Julia's head.
[12:02]And then the whole having a step-parent thing
[12:05]was something that I personally had plenty of experience with.
[12:08]And a lot of bad experience,
[12:10]although not exactly what Jennifer has in the story,
[12:14]but there is an aspect of my life
[12:16]where a person in my life behaved that way toward me,
[12:20]fortunately wasn't my step-dad.
[12:21]And we don't want to give too much away about any of that
[12:25]for the book.
[12:26]But all of these things inform the story
[12:29]and informed Julia.
[12:31]And this parenthood situation
[12:34]where Jennifer was born when she was a struggling single mom
[12:37]and then Lily was born 10 years later
[12:40]when she has married well and lives this much more comfortable
[12:44]life was something that I thought a lot about
[12:47]because of the guilt that mothers sort of have built into them
[12:50]anyway.
[12:52]And then to think about what the younger child has
[12:56]versus what the older child had to deal with,
[12:59]I just felt really emotionally heavy, right?
[13:02]But in a good way that I could identify with.
[13:05]And I hope a lot of readers can identify with.
[13:07]But not too many in the right ways.
[13:11]Can you just, now I'm really curious about your life?
[13:13]So you got married when you were 18,
[13:15]you had kids in your 20s.
[13:17]And now you've written all these amazing books.
[13:19]And by the way, I read Z,
[13:21]a novel of Delta Fitzgerald while I was nursing my third child.
[13:26]And it will forever be stuck in my brain
[13:29]because I had it propped up by the pump.
[13:32]And like it was like my go-to book for that whole period of time
[13:36]and it makes me think about just like the agony in the,
[13:39]oh my God.
[13:40]That was interesting.
[13:41]That was my association.
[13:42]That was my escape.
[13:43]If you were completely my escape
[13:44]and now here you are years later, but anyway.
[13:47]So how did you go from that to becoming
[13:51]like a best-selling novelist?
[13:53]Oh, well, it was easy.
[13:54]No, it was not easy.
[13:56]Oh, gosh, that's kind of a long entangled pathway.
[13:59]But when I got divorced at 30,
[14:01]I put myself back in college.
[14:03]I'd taken some classes when I was like 20 years old,
[14:07]but I didn't get very far with it.
[14:09]And I went back to school at 30 to finish my degree.
[14:13]I got a degree in sociology and cultural anthropology.
[14:17]And I really thought that that was gonna be my path.
[14:20]I thought that I would just spend these three and a half years
[14:25]in school like I had to pay for everything with scholarships.
[14:28]And I sold cars at Carmack's part-time.
[14:31]That was my job.
[14:33]And it was just this cobbling together of finances
[14:37]and schedules and everything.
[14:39]Just to get to a place where I would be able to
[14:42]just be a better provider myself.
[14:44]I didn't want to have to be like Julia and Mary
[14:46]into money in order to support my kids.
[14:49]So I was in my last semester of undergrad
[14:53]and I took this class.
[14:55]It was a lit class in which I was given the choice
[14:58]to either write a short story or do a 20-page research paper
[15:02]for the final project for that class.
[15:04]And this will sound like a brag.
[15:07]I guess this is a brag,
[15:08]but I was on track to graduate first in my class
[15:12]and I really, really did not want to screw that up.
[15:14]So I chose to write a short story,
[15:17]thinking this will be much easier
[15:19]and take a lot less time than doing the research paper.
[15:22]And it was just completely practical decision.
[15:25]But when I turned that story in the feedback I got
[15:28]from my professor who was himself a writer
[15:31]and jumped forward a second and 15 years later I married him.
[15:36]No, I seriously did 15 years later,
[15:40]but at that time he was just the professor
[15:42]who also was a writer and who told me
[15:45]that I had some promise as a fiction writer.
[15:48]And it was as if my very godfather had come and waved the wand
[15:54]over my head and said,
[15:55]if you want to be a writer, why don't you give it a try?
[15:58]And so I did, I just completely changed course
[16:01]and I started writing and instead of going to grad school
[16:04]for a PhD in sociology,
[16:06]I went to grad school for an MFA.
[16:09]But not, I wrote a bad novel first, right?
[16:11]That was in between those two paths.
[16:14]But you know, you fail forward, I guess is the path.
[16:18]And so every time I didn't get published
[16:21]made me just want to try harder and do better.
[16:25]And that's been sort of the path of my career.
[16:28]Try to do less bad each book until they have a success.
[16:33]Wow, you're, I think you're the first person who has said,
[16:36]I went into writing to give myself
[16:38]a state of financial security.
[16:41]Yeah, it's astonishing to me
[16:44]that it actually worked out that way.
[16:46]It didn't go quickly, you know,
[16:48]but my first published book paid well enough
[16:52]that I could keep writing.
[16:54]It's amazing.
[16:55]It was a miracle.
[16:56]And then you ended up marrying the guy, how did that happen?
[16:59]Oh, gosh.
[17:00]That was after Z was published.
[17:03]And so let's see, that was 13 years after that semester
[17:07]that I'd taken his class.
[17:09]And I'd known him all throughout there.
[17:11]He actually taught in the MFA program that I took, right?
[17:15]So we've been friends for a long time.
[17:17]But we were not friends that way until after we
[17:22]reconnected in 2013.
[17:24]And it was really strange, but it was really great.
[17:26]Because suddenly we recognized we had this thing
[17:31]that we did not know was going on.
[17:34]It wasn't going on, but we sort of in retrospect said,
[17:37]oh, you know, we did always really like each other.
[17:39]It just was very different.
[17:43]And are you still married?
[17:44]Oh, yes, we're still married.
[17:45]OK, great.
[17:47]That's only been a few years.
[17:48]Well, you never know.
[17:49]I mean, you never know.
[17:50]No, you'd absolutely don't.
[17:52]Well, that's a great story.
[17:53]I love that.
[17:55]Yeah, we went way off track here.
[17:56]Yeah, I love this track.
[17:57]This is so fun.
[17:59]Well, tell me about how the process you've got your MFA
[18:04]when you sit down now to write your books.
[18:06]What is it like?
[18:07]And has it changed from your first book?
[18:09]Like, do you have a way you like to write to outline these stories?
[18:12]I know there's usually historical fiction,
[18:14]but just how to have what's your process like?
[18:17]I have to get really inspired by or excited about something
[18:22]first.
[18:22]So I have lots of ideas.
[18:24]And then I spent a lot of time with a writing journal
[18:27]just figuring out is this actually a worthy idea
[18:29]is this an idea that is just an idea and not a novel?
[18:34]I mean, some things have a great premise.
[18:36]But then when you try to work them out, you realize,
[18:38]like, no, that's at best an article.
[18:42]But once I've decided on what I'm going to do,
[18:44]if it's a historical novel or something
[18:47]that just takes a lot of research, then I'll spend,
[18:50]I don't know, as much time as I can stand digging
[18:52]into all of the depths of information about whether it's
[18:57]a Fitzgeralds or, you know, I wrote about the Vanderbilts
[19:00]in my most recent novel.
[19:02]And then I just sit down and I get to work.
[19:04]So a rightful time, which means that that's really all I do.
[19:09]And it's all I should be doing instead of being on Facebook
[19:11]for two hours in the morning.
[19:14]And I treat it like a job.
[19:16]And I just like have a word count goal.
[19:18]Usually, 1,500 or 2,000 words a day, and I just move forward.
[19:23]So I don't believe in writer's block.
[19:26]I just believe that writers are sometimes not prepared.
[19:29]So I just try to make sure I'm prepared to do the work.
[19:32]I love it.
[19:32]I love writing so much.
[19:34]But yeah, I usually have a kind of like burning
[19:39]need to tell this particular story.
[19:42]So you talked about reading Z that came about
[19:45]because I got angry about how badly misrepresented Zelda
[19:50]is or was.
[19:51]I hope not so much now that I've published that book.
[19:55]Certainly was before.
[19:57]And I just felt like dang it.
[19:58]I'm going to try to set the.
[20:00]record straight on this.
[20:01]So a good neighborhood kind of was born similarly
[20:05]because it started with this oak tree in my own backyard.
[20:10]So because the oak tree is such a big element in this novel,
[20:14]maybe that is apparent that I have a personal connection
[20:18]to that.
[20:18]I had real anxiety over this tree in my own backyard
[20:22]because next door to our house was this old house
[20:26]that had been torn down and a new house had been built
[20:29]and the driveway had been poured
[20:33]so that it went all the way down the property line
[20:36]and was totally like half the tree's roots
[20:40]had been covered by this garage and this driveway.
[20:44]And it didn't show, the problem didn't show immediately,
[20:46]but the kind of anxiety that Valerie comes to have
[20:49]in the novel, which is like, oh damn, my tree is maybe dying.
[20:55]And then at the same time that all that was going on
[20:58]was this, what we call the culture these days,
[21:03]kind of this toxic culture of this resurgence of white supremacy
[21:08]and sexism and environmental degradation,
[21:12]all these things that I thought were solved
[21:14]when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s
[21:17]seemed like all this progress was backsliding.
[21:21]And I just felt like I have things to say about this,
[21:24]what do I do with all this anxiety?
[21:27]So it wasn't like a conscious decision of,
[21:29]oh, I'll write a book about it.
[21:30]No, it was more like a character start making themselves
[21:34]known to you in your mind and then you start writing.
[21:40]And I have a lot of anxiety too over
[21:43]whether my publisher would be happy with the fact
[21:45]that I was not doing an historical novel again,
[21:49]but I just had to do it and see what happened.
[21:52]Wow.
[21:53]Has anything gripped you since then?
[21:54]Are you working on anything else?
[21:56]I am working on something else,
[21:57]but it's a little too fresh to talk about it publicly.
[22:02]Okay. So when we hang up,
[22:04]will you whisper to me?
[22:05]No, I'm kidding.
[22:06]It's okay.
[22:07]It's okay.
[22:08]Okay. Can you say, is it historical fiction or not?
[22:11]Oh, it is not historical fiction.
[22:13]Okay. All right.
[22:14]I won't ask you anymore.
[22:14]Hopefully I like to have any questions.
[22:16]I don't think I like with Michael.
[22:18]Is it a bad avoid?
[22:19]Is it a bad again?
[22:19]No, it's always a bad boy and a girl in the story.
[22:23]Yeah.
[22:24]Just curious, by the way,
[22:25]has your book been often yet?
[22:27]It seems like such a movie material.
[22:30]A good neighborhood is it's out with people,
[22:33]but no take her so far.
[22:34]All right.
[22:35]If you're listening, Hollywood people, you know.
[22:41]I have a terrific film agent,
[22:42]so I'm sure she's putting it
[22:44]until lots of people's hands have gotten.
[22:46]Well, it's very visual.
[22:48]Anyway, just to read it is so visual.
[22:50]It's like you. It's great.
[22:51]Thanks.
[22:51]Do you have any advice who aspiring authors?
[22:54]Oh, yeah.
[22:55]You know, find a job that, you know, you can count on.
[22:59]You should probably not leave that in the podcast.
[23:03]No, for real, the best advice that I think I could give anybody
[23:07]is, well, it's kind of two things.
[23:09]Don't try to be the best.
[23:11]Just try to be good enough and to persevere
[23:15]because the biggest difference between the successful author
[23:18]and the unsuccessful author is perseverance.
[23:21]That's my advice.
[23:22]That seems so easy, right, from my side of it.
[23:24]But when I look back on the career that I had so far,
[23:28]like honestly, just trying to write well enough
[23:33]to be published, that's a big deal all by itself.
[23:35]And then not giving up when the rejections come
[23:38]because the rejections always come.
[23:40]Okay.
[23:41]Even when you're well published,
[23:43]if you are changing publishers for some reason, for example,
[23:48]and you have to go back out on submission with your book,
[23:51]and you're going to get rejected.
[23:52]Every successful book I know of
[23:54]had lots of rejections, right?
[23:56]Did you read Water for Elephants?
[23:59]No, I'm embarrassed to say, I have it, but I have not read it.
[24:02]All right, we won't tell Sarah grew in that you haven't read it yet.
[24:05]Yeah, but most people know about what a success story that was.
[24:09]But a lot of people don't know that Sarah's original publisher
[24:12]rejected that novel.
[24:13]And that's why I'll go on when I'm ended up publishing it.
[24:16]Oh, interesting.
[24:17]Writers should be aware.
[24:19]Mitch Alphum told me when he was on my show
[24:21]that Tuesdays with Maurya got rejected like 80 times.
[24:24]Well, there you go.
[24:24]Oh, and the help is another example of a novel
[24:27]that was widely rejected.
[24:28]Yeah, so we all have those stories.
[24:31]Z was rejected, actually.
[24:33]So can I ask you one more question,
[24:36]which is really random, but tell me about your nose ring
[24:40]because I don't often see that.
[24:42]When do you want to know about it?
[24:43]When did you get it?
[24:44]How long have you had it?
[24:46]I don't remember.
[24:47]Long time.
[24:48]Ten years?
[24:49]Ten years, maybe?
[24:50]Wait, you have to see something else, actually.
[24:53]This is people on the list.
[24:55]Oh, I guess.
[24:55]It was miss.
[24:56]So we are on Skype, by the way, for people listening.
[24:59]And I am now looking at the most incredible tattoo situation.
[25:04]This is a multi-color, extravagant,
[25:06]that's going up and down her arm.
[25:09]We have some sort of flower, heart, swirly,
[25:12]but no, no, heart shoulders, flowers.
[25:14]I felt like that's the sort of heart shape on the edges.
[25:18]OK, let's.
[25:19]OK, no, swirly, swirly, swirly.
[25:21]Yeah, swirly.
[25:23]People will be like, what is going on in this podcast?
[25:25]And I have a z on her neck, which is crazy.
[25:29]I'm a neck.
[25:30]That's it.
[25:30]That's the sum total of all of my ink.
[25:33]So yeah, I have a person who knows and I have tattoos.
[25:37]All right, things people would not have known about me
[25:40]until now.
[25:41]But you glad we turned the video for you now.
[25:45]Well, there you go.
[25:47]You never know what you learned when you turn on the camera.
[25:49]Go on podcasts, talk about tattoos.
[25:52]I think this is a good practice, actually.
[25:54]Yeah, maybe this should be your podcast.
[25:57]Tattoo artists, talks, or something.
[25:59]I'm fascinated by tattoos, and I haven't written about them
[26:02]at all yet.
[26:03]So maybe that's to come.
[26:05]Yes.
[26:05]Do you have any?
[26:06]I do not.
[26:08]I've been scared by the whole, like, I'm Jewish,
[26:11]and they won't bury you if you have a tattoo of the type of thing.
[26:13]Well, I understand that.
[26:14]My mom's side of the family, we are Jews on my mom's side,
[26:19]and my uncle hasn't tattooed, and he gets that a lot.
[26:23]And he just goes, like, yeah, whatever.
[26:25]Yeah, that's true.
[26:25]Not worried about it.
[26:26]Well, that's really, I mean, that's part of it.
[26:28]I just, I'm so indecisive.
[26:30]I feel like I would change my mind.
[26:31]And yes, we know I went to the girls.
[26:36]I don't know how old you are, but I got my first tattoo
[26:39]when I was 41.
[26:41]I think I'm 43.
[26:42]All right, well, so it's just about my time.
[26:45]I got a guy, I can tell you where to go.
[26:50]All right, okay, well, I'll call you if I need it.
[26:53]All right, well, thank you so much for coming on mom's
[26:55]and her time to read books.
[26:56]It's been a pleasure to be there.
[26:58]Thank you.
[26:58]Thank you.
[27:00]You've been listening to Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books
[27:02]with Zibi Owens.
[27:03]Please make sure to sign up for my newsletter
[27:05]at zibiowens.com to get more updates about episodes like these
[27:09]and also lots of live events.
[27:11]Thanks again to GoodPods for sponsoring this episode of Mom's Don't
[27:14]Have Time to Read Books.
[27:15]You can follow me on Instagram at mom's don't have time to read books.
[27:19]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[27:22]for the Sound Editing.
[27:23]And thank you to Morningland Productions
[27:25]for providing this fantastic intro and now trim music.
[27:28]Thanks for listening.
[27:29]You can always email me at zibiowens.com.