Adrienne Miller, IN THE LAND OF MEN
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[2:17]Adrienne Miller is the author of the novel The Coast of Acron, and In the Land of Men,
[2:21]a memoir.
[2:22]She was the literary and fiction editor of Esquire from 1997 to 2006.
[2:27]She currently lives in New York with her husband and son.
[2:30]I'm here with Adrienne Miller, but I accidentally did not record this properly, so I'm asking
[2:35]her this question again, but if it doesn't stand as spontaneous, it's because I messed
[2:39]up my recording.
[2:40]So anyway, Adrienne, welcome for the second time.
[2:44]What?
[2:45]So great to be here for the second time.
[2:48]Could you please tell listeners what In the Land of Men is about?
[2:52]Or if you want, I could just tell them.
[2:54]Sure.
[2:55]No, you go.
[2:56]Okay.
[2:57]So let me put it to you in the flap copy, sort of way.
[3:00]It is my coming of age story in the male dominated literary world of the 90s.
[3:07]Two parallel stories, my becoming the first female literary editor of Esquire at the age
[3:13]of 25, and also my friendship slash professional relationship slash romantic relationship
[3:22]with one David Foster Wallace.
[3:24]That is the sort of the crude way of sort of putting it a writer is probably the worst
[3:30]person to talk to about how to explain and describe his or her work during the process.
[3:36]When I was writing this for three years, people would ask me what the book was about.
[3:39]I would sort of stamp her on ball and say, it's about my life and my 20s about working
[3:46]in magazines.
[3:47]I guess that's enough and sound very interesting, but the book is also I think about
[3:52]power.
[3:53]I'm very fascinated by the nature of time.
[3:57]It's I believe has to do with it's a workplace story.
[4:01]It also has to do with how to build a self, how to be a person in the world, and how to
[4:06]be a decent human being.
[4:08]And at the time that you got the job as literary fiction editor of Esquire, there was
[4:14]a lot of buzz about a separate from some probably very jealous people who wish they had
[4:19]gotten that plum assignment.
[4:21]Tell me about how it felt at the time when people were maybe not so welcoming for you
[4:28]in this new job having just been an assistant.
[4:30]I had all I had done in the world was be an idiot in a lab graduate from college in Ohio.
[4:36]And for three years, I was an editorial assistant at GQ in the literary department, okay.
[4:42]But still an assistant at the age of when I was 25, the job for long story short that
[4:48]the Esquire literary job opened up and I put myself up for it.
[4:53]I made a real pest of myself.
[4:56]I lobbied really hard for the job over a series of months.
[5:00]I put together presentations, there were phone calls, there were multiple interviews.
[5:05]And eventually, many months later, I was appointed the job to extremely prominent men
[5:12]had had this job, literary editor of Esquire in the mid-century Gordon Lisch, who was most
[5:17]famously Raymond Carver's editor and helped to sort of engineer that whole sort of minimalist
[5:23]carver-esque sort of style, reticent-medicine-carver style that was so influential to a generation
[5:31]of American writers.
[5:32]And Russ Tills, who had been there since 1957 and was in fact still at Esquire when
[5:39]I started in 1997 and somewhat reduced emeritus role, it was 50 years younger than
[5:44]Russ and also conspicuously female.
[5:48]And so, you know, first week on the job, I'm introducing myself, reintroducing myself
[5:53]to various literary world figures, making phone calls, say, hey, here I am, send me short
[5:59]stories.
[6:00]And, you know, I'll never forget one of the first conversations I had was this very prominent
[6:06]male literary agent who said to me, you don't have any authority to do this job.
[6:13]And he said, and he was very direct about it, it wasn't a sort of a backstabbing, sort
[6:19]of, you know, invisible Twitter, you know, insult.
[6:22]It was right to my face, you don't have the authority to do this job.
[6:26]It was direct at least.
[6:27]Yeah.
[6:28]I mean, you can say something next.
[6:30]And I couldn't totally disagree with it.
[6:32]Yeah.
[6:33]I mean, right?
[6:34]I mean, there's also no arrogance like the arrogance of youth, right?
[6:38]Right.
[6:39]So, you know, it's funny.
[6:40]I interviewed Emily Nimmons, who's now the editor of the Paris Review.
[6:44]And I said something to her, like, how did it feel to be, you know, plucked for this job?
[6:47]And she was like, I wasn't plucked.
[6:49]Like, I worked hard to get this job in the same way as what you're saying, even in a male-dominated,
[6:54]traditionally, you know, older male-headed job, like, she worked and worked and got it.
[7:00]Just like, you worked and worked like you earned it.
[7:02]You didn't just, it didn't just fall in your lap.
[7:04]No, there was no one, nobody told me that I should go for the job.
[7:08]Yet at the same time, nobody told me that I shouldn't.
[7:10]I mean, I just thought, I'm just going to go for this thing.
[7:13]Yeah, I love that.
[7:14]Yeah, so cool.
[7:15]I mean, that's how all the great things happen.
[7:16]It's like, so this was, this book was a lot about your whole experience in the magazine
[7:21]world at the time and so much of what happened to you along the way.
[7:24]But I was wondering, why did you write this now?
[7:26]Like, you stopped working in 2006 as the fiction editor of Esquire.
[7:30]Why did you turn back to this now?
[7:32]You've already written a novel.
[7:33]What happened?
[7:34]What inspired you to write it now?
[7:35]I think that true meeting can only come with time.
[7:38]I mean, that's one of the answers, right?
[7:40]And when you sort of 20 years later, look back on your youth and your sort of formative
[7:44]years and your 20s, like, you know, what did this mean?
[7:48]And why was I miserable?
[7:50]Let me really start taking this apart and processing this.
[7:53]I had a really hard time when David Foster Wallace died.
[7:56]He tragically committed suicide in 2008.
[7:59]And I became very angry.
[8:02]And it was very shut down.
[8:04]It was very hard for me to talk about.
[8:05]And you had had a relationship with him.
[8:07]I had it.
[8:08]Yes, I had it.
[8:09]We'd been friends.
[8:11]We had had work together.
[8:12]I edited four of his stories at Esquire.
[8:15]And we had a romantic relationship.
[8:17]And it was, it was a very difficult time in my life.
[8:22]And a couple years ago, like three years ago, I started, I had this compulsion to start
[8:28]writing down what I remembered of early conversations with him, the safe conversations
[8:36]before we met that were purely focused on our editorial relationship.
[8:42]And the first story of his I edited for Esquire was called Adult World.
[8:46]This was in 1998, a very long, dense, difficult story.
[8:51]And, you know, we became sort of phone friends for several months before we actually met.
[8:56]And these conversations were fun and fascinating and kind of inappropriate, but extremely
[9:02]memorable.
[9:03]And so I sat down and I sort of put myself into sort of self-hypnotized sort of state and
[9:10]typed out, typed out what I recalled from these conversations.
[9:14]And the book sort of then started from there.
[9:16]Did you consider only making it about that relationship or did this, like I'm always curious
[9:21]how form follows story in books, how it becomes what it is?
[9:26]Like, he started almost like as a therapy exercise.
[9:29]I did.
[9:30]And I thought that maybe it would be a short sort of biographical treatment.
[9:35]And maybe I wouldn't even get into, for instance, the romantic part of our relationship.
[9:40]I just sort of, for a year, just sort of wrote through it and wanted to see where it
[9:44]would go.
[9:45]I thought maybe it's a magazine piece.
[9:48]Maybe I won't even publish it at all.
[9:50]But then I sort of understood that these were two parallel stories, my career and my relationship
[9:57]with him were sort of, were the same.
[10:00]And in fact, had sort of the same sort of ending,
[10:03]which was that contraction of the magazine industry,
[10:06]I was at S-wire for almost nine years.
[10:10]By the time I finally left,
[10:12]I was barely able to get any fiction through
[10:15]the last story of David's that I worked on with him,
[10:19]was killed by the magazine.
[10:21]And I never, and you know,
[10:23]I mean, we exchanged some letters after that,
[10:27]but essentially that also sort of ended our relationship.
[10:31]The magazine was dying and the relationship then was over.
[10:35]Also.
[10:36]I found myself wondering about your predisposition almost
[10:40]and ending up in the relationship you had
[10:43]with David Russell Wallace to begin with, right?
[10:45]Like what attracts us to certain men,
[10:47]what gets us into these relationships
[10:49]because it was, you know, you detail it so well in the book,
[10:53]but you had to sort of respond to him all the time
[10:56]and his changing moods and his,
[10:58]it was like following, I'm not saying this well,
[11:00]but you had to go along with his mental illness essentially,
[11:04]which in, however, it manifested itself.
[11:06]And you had a quote, it's came earlier in the book,
[11:08]but you said, I became used to thinking of myself
[11:11]as a vaguely illegitimate presence
[11:13]in the life of someone important to me.
[11:14]And I became accustomed to providing protection
[11:17]to brilliant narcissistic, charismatic, fiercely,
[11:20]ambitious men, men who never quite thought
[11:22]about extending the same protection to me,
[11:25]no, not quite.
[11:26]So I was wondering about your attraction
[11:29]to this narcissistic type,
[11:30]and if it was a theme throughout,
[11:32]or if you had a narcissistic parent, or, oh, I don't know,
[11:35]I thought I would just like delve right into your,
[11:37]sorry mom and dad.
[11:39]First of all, I mean, I think I should, you know,
[11:42]remind our listeners that this is a relationship
[11:44]that I would not have had now in my 40s.
[11:47]This is a relationship that I would not have had 10 years ago,
[11:50]even.
[11:51]I was in my 20s, and part of the goal of this book
[11:55]was for me to sort of recapture the mental state
[11:58]that I was in at that time.
[12:00]I've always been attracted to sort of big personalities.
[12:03]I like characters, and I'm pretty lenient with characters
[12:06]less out now in my 40s, probably in my 20s,
[12:09]but I mean, just, for instance, like, you know,
[12:13]all of the coronavirus news and election dysfunction,
[12:18]and all of the stuff that we're going through now,
[12:21]I found myself going down at Orson Wells' rabbit hole,
[12:24]speaking of big personalities,
[12:25]I've just, for the last couple of days,
[12:28]I've just thought, you know what?
[12:29]I'm just gonna watch some Orson Wells videos on.
[12:32]Why not?
[12:33]Why not?
[12:34]Because I'm just, and I just,
[12:35]the grandiosity, the hilarity, the brilliance,
[12:39]I'm amused and entertained by it.
[12:42]So this is kind of a personality type
[12:44]that I'm interested in, attracted to.
[12:47]I'm a writer.
[12:49]I also sort of, frankly, maybe,
[12:51]possibly mining, mining these types of people
[12:54]for material, for things I'm writing.
[12:57]You know, I have great tolerance and great interest
[13:00]in the big, bold personality.
[13:03]Male and female, by the way.
[13:04]I mean, it's hard.
[13:05]Sometimes these magnetic personalities,
[13:07]you just, it's hard.
[13:08]The right?
[13:09]Yeah, it's hard to stay away.
[13:10]It's hard to stay away, and also, like, you know,
[13:12]you don't also have to do a lot of work
[13:14]if you don't want to, you can just sort of sit back
[13:17]and be entertained.
[13:18]I'm not specifically talking about David,
[13:20]because there was a lot of work involved
[13:22]for me with David, but.
[13:23]So you asked a really interesting question in the book,
[13:25]which is, do you have to include what other people
[13:27]think about you and your own understanding of yourself?
[13:30]Tell me about that line.
[13:32]I spent a lot of time when I was younger,
[13:35]worrying about what other people thought of me.
[13:38]I didn't quite understand as you don't
[13:40]when you're young,
[13:41]the people actually aren't really thinking about you that much.
[13:43]And one of the great things about getting older
[13:45]is that you realize that actually no one is thinking about you.
[13:47]They're thinking about themselves.
[13:49]You know, Coravidal has this great quote,
[13:51]it doesn't matter, said in his very waspish way.
[13:54]It doesn't matter what other people think of you,
[13:57]what matters is only what you think of other people.
[13:59]Sort of, this is 20 years later,
[14:01]sort of where I am, sort of in my kind of, you know,
[14:04]processing of human relationships.
[14:07]Then I wish that I hadn't, for example,
[14:10]asked everyone's opinion before having made any decision.
[14:15]Now I sort of rely much more on my own conscience
[14:19]as the ultimate decision maker.
[14:22]And in the book, even you had some drafts
[14:25]of previously submitted fiction pieces to the magazine
[14:28]and they were like a million comments.
[14:29]And you're like, how many people does it take to make a decision
[14:31]or any or something?
[14:32]I feel like it's the same thing as like,
[14:34]you don't need this, you know,
[14:35]I have to rely on this collective decision making as much.
[14:37]Totally. Well, you know, interestingly,
[14:39]I was always very confident back to the arrogance of youth
[14:43]in my sort of literary judgment.
[14:44]I mean, that was never sort of,
[14:46]I never sort of questioned that.
[14:47]But in terms of my ability to actually live my life
[14:51]in my 20s, your drama and your 20s becomes everyone's drama,
[14:55]right? I mean, and we're all like that in a world,
[14:57]just sort of in it, sort of together.
[14:59]And then we sort of become our own islands
[15:01]and our 40s.
[15:02]I feel like you have to.
[15:04]You have to keep your island afloat, you know,
[15:06]with all my kids and work and I don't know.
[15:08]Yeah.
[15:09]It's like you don't even have a choice, for sure.
[15:10]You had this one little comment in the book
[15:13]where you said you realized you love reading plays
[15:15]and you had considered writing one.
[15:17]And I was just, and I know you've written a novel
[15:19]and I was wondering if you ever went back to that.
[15:20]It was sort of a throwaway line,
[15:22]but I don't know.
[15:22]Have you thought about going back to writing plays
[15:24]or what else have you thought about writing?
[15:26]So I became totally obsessed with plays
[15:29]because I was at the age of 12, 13 obsessed
[15:33]with a movie on the dais,
[15:34]which was written by the great British playwright,
[15:37]Peter Schaefer.
[15:38]He wrote the play and then also wrote
[15:40]this screenplay for the movie.
[15:42]And I had my father take me to the Akron Public Library,
[15:46]Akron, Ohio every Saturday, so I could re-plays.
[15:50]My Peter Schaefer, I discovered Harold Pinter,
[15:54]Tom Stopper didn't understand, of course,
[15:55]the word, Tom Stopper wrote,
[15:57]but then I sort of,
[15:59]and then I got really interested in Tennessee Williams
[16:01]and Eugene O'Neill, I love plays.
[16:04]I still love reading them.
[16:05]One of my favorite writers today is Annie Baker,
[16:09]who is just, I think, I think maybe she's my favorite
[16:12]writer, going the flick, Antipides and John,
[16:15]which is like so amazing,
[16:17]I'll read and see anything she puts on.
[16:20]But what is human life other than dialogue, right?
[16:24]And I found also sort of through writing and writing this book
[16:28]that I have a pretty precise memory of the delivered phrase.
[16:33]I could not believe how much you remembered in this book.
[16:35]I was like, how on earth did you remember all this?
[16:38]It turns out, and by the way, a real stickler for this,
[16:41]I sort of made a rule with myself not to put quotes
[16:45]around a line of dialogue unless I remembered it.
[16:48]Exactly.
[16:49]And I'm just fascinated by the way people speak
[16:53]by people's speech patterns, by their acoustic profiles.
[16:57]And I would like to write a play, actually, in a screen play.
[17:00]I just, if things have gone differently for me in my life,
[17:04]if I would have been probably a kid,
[17:07]I was an Ernie theater kid.
[17:09]I probably would have been one of these kids
[17:10]who sent a letter to Hal Prince,
[17:12]you know, the great theater director,
[17:16]who then sent an articulate passionate letter
[17:19]to Hal Prince who take you under his wing
[17:21]and you work for him for like 40 years.
[17:23]That probably would have been me if I knew how things worked
[17:26]or if I knew sort of what to, you know,
[17:28]how to make my way in the world when I was a teenager.
[17:31]But I love it.
[17:32]I'm a Broadway baby.
[17:33]I just, I love plays.
[17:35]It's, I can't get it off.
[17:37]I had someone on the podcast recently
[17:39]and I was like, your book should be a play.
[17:41]So maybe I'll put you in touch with her.
[17:42]Please write her play.
[17:43]Yeah, I would love that.
[17:44]There we go.
[17:46]I would work over.
[17:48]You had another quote I just wanted to throw at.
[17:50]You said that Granger who was your editor at Esquire said,
[17:54]never underestimate how unprepared most people are.
[17:57]Yeah, that was great.
[17:58]Yeah.
[17:59]Just talk to me about that.
[18:00]So he hired me out of college.
[18:02]He was a friend of a friend.
[18:04]How do most things in this world happen?
[18:06]Because you know somebody,
[18:07]I got the job as an editorial assistant at GQ
[18:10]because a professor of mine,
[18:12]knew someone who knew Granger who was an editor at GQ.
[18:17]You know, I had no sparkling CV at the age of 22.
[18:21]I had, you know, an internship in New York.
[18:24]That was it.
[18:25]I was an English major like everyone else.
[18:27]I was a woman's woman studies minor like everyone else.
[18:30]There was nothing really to distinguish me.
[18:32]But I studied before my interview back issues of GQ.
[18:38]I went to the library at school pre-internet,
[18:40]obviously mid 90s.
[18:42]And I studied like a chronic scholar back issues of GQ.
[18:48]Like for like 10 years.
[18:50]And I was able when I went to New York for my interviews
[18:53]actually able to talk about what I had read in GQ.
[18:57]The writers who wrote the pieces, I knew their names.
[19:00]I sort of stylistically was vaguely able to talk about them.
[19:03]And that's the only reason I got the job.
[19:06]And that's, and Granger said finally admitted years later
[19:10]that he had hired me because I was the only candidate
[19:13]for the job who'd bothered even to open the magazine.
[19:17]So I think that's an important part also of my story
[19:21]and really any sort of professional story
[19:24]be over prepared.
[19:25]So true.
[19:26]I took a writing class a while ago.
[19:27]I think it was by Susan Shapiro.
[19:29]And the teacher said, you can't pitch a magazine
[19:32]unless you've read at least a year's worth of issues.
[19:35]So the magazine, and I remember it was so long ago,
[19:37]I went to a library and I had to like get down
[19:40]all the magazines and the library and paw through them.
[19:43]And like who was advertising in this?
[19:45]Like who were they appealing to?
[19:46]Absolutely.
[19:47]What who else was writing?
[19:48]Like don't pitch a topic that's been pitched already.
[19:50]Like all these things.
[19:51]But it's so true.
[19:52]And it's something that in our rush to finish everything,
[19:55]I feel like sometimes it gets lost for sure.
[19:58]I mean, and it was always so.
[20:00]extraordinary to me, the number of short story submissions at Esquire and also GQ.
[20:05]I would receive with names of past literary editors from like 20 years ago.
[20:10]Clearly they're not even, I mean, hadn't even opened the magazine and looked at the
[20:13]masthead.
[20:14]I mean, rule number one.
[20:15]Yes.
[20:16]Yeah.
[20:17]Come on, come on guys.
[20:20]So after you went through the whole magazine phase of your life for you doing this, then
[20:25]what happened?
[20:27]What happened between when you left Esquire?
[20:29]Did you write the novel right then?
[20:31]And then how much time, like just what's a brief, if you're doing a quick timeline?
[20:36]It was like your life since then.
[20:38]What's been happening?
[20:39]Big event.
[20:40]I had a kid who's now eight.
[20:43]It turns out that having a kid is a huge time commitment.
[20:46]No one sort of warned me about this, but great, beautiful.
[20:49]I mean, I get weepy looking at pictures of him from a year ago, five years ago.
[20:53]He's so cute.
[20:54]I've seen him on Instagram.
[20:56]He's eight and he's just the joy and love of my life.
[20:59]And I taught creative writing at various places.
[21:03]I did publish a novel that FSG brought out and I've been working on another novel, sort
[21:07]of for, I mean, I'm just mortified to actually admit how long I've been working on this
[21:14]novel.
[21:15]I think it's almost done, but I mean, over a decade.
[21:17]So that's it.
[21:18]Wow.
[21:19]Yeah.
[21:20]What's that one about?
[21:21]Can you say?
[21:22]So there's barely a man in it.
[21:23]Okay.
[21:25]In the land of women.
[21:26]In the land of women.
[21:27]Exactly.
[21:28]And the men who appear in the male characters are not these sort of slightly toxified,
[21:32]sort of, you know, questionable figures.
[21:34]They're kind of, it's a different type of man.
[21:37]It has to do with us women in classical and the classical music world.
[21:41]No.
[21:42]Yeah.
[21:43]And you're a classical music fan.
[21:44]I'm a classical music fan and a very poor player of piano and violin.
[21:48]Both.
[21:49]What?
[21:50]Yeah.
[21:51]You can't be that bad.
[21:52]I mean, do you still play them?
[21:54]My son takes piano.
[21:55]Suzuki fourth year.
[21:57]Wow.
[21:58]Yeah.
[21:59]It's impressive.
[22:00]I tried that with my kids.
[22:01]Yes.
[22:02]There were a lot of, you know, temper tantrums dragging the kid, you know, interiors into
[22:08]his piano class, but we've got to have that.
[22:11]Having worked in such a male-dominated world, I feel like things are obviously very different
[22:16]today and people are much more aware of gender and lean in and all the rest of it.
[22:20]But if you were to give advice to somebody going into a more male-dominated field now, maybe
[22:25]like a hedge fund or I don't know, something, and having worked your way through this
[22:29]yourself, would you have any advice from your own experience?
[22:32]A spine of steel.
[22:34]Don't listen to what they say.
[22:36]Consult yourself as your, you know, as your favorite person and as the person whose advice
[22:43]you, the only person whose advice you rely on and expect that it's going to be difficult.
[22:49]I think that that's, that's really it.
[22:51]Do you have any advice to aspiring authors expect rejections?
[22:56]You know, I mean, it's funny, when I started at Esquire, there was a rejection letter
[23:00]waiting for me that passed editors had written from a submission by David Foster Wallace,
[23:07]a famous Wallace story called the depressed person.
[23:09]And it had been resoundingly rejected at Esquire and 10 different editors.
[23:15]There were a lot of editors who worked there at the time, waited on it.
[23:19]Half of the people loathed it and admired it, half half of the other editors just, just
[23:25]pretty much loathed it.
[23:26]And it was at the start of my Esquire career very instructive for me to see that this was
[23:33]two years after Infinite Just was published.
[23:36]This has become one of his most famous stories and maybe actually even a canonized story.
[23:40]I mean, this is a very taught, very famous story, you know, and it was rejected.
[23:45]It was resoundingly rejected at Esquire.
[23:48]And so I guess the point is that people don't really know the experts, even the experts
[23:54]don't even really know what they're doing.
[23:56]So that's a little depressing and it's true.
[23:59]It's like a crap shoot.
[24:00]No, it's true.
[24:01]It's like luck and perseverance, self-belief, you know, I mean, at Esquire, I was so
[24:09]both impressed by slash astonished by the regular submitters.
[24:13]I would get people who were just pretty much consistently rejected and they would just
[24:17]come right back, slugging away with another short story submission.
[24:22]I kind of love that.
[24:23]You know, you have to love the self-belief.
[24:26]It might actually be the most important quality and the most necessary quality in terms
[24:32]of success.
[24:33]Right.
[24:34]Yeah.
[24:35]Just one last question.
[24:36]When you evaluate what you like and what you don't like, right, you said you never
[24:42]question your sort of literary taste and like what you thought would be the good essay
[24:47]versus a bad short story.
[24:48]Yeah.
[24:49]So I like that.
[24:50]Is there anything that you particularly respond to or that you think makes a great short
[24:54]story?
[24:55]I guess a reader.
[24:56]An element of surprise, I guess, you know, I tend to read really for style too.
[25:01]I mean, I, you know, I love a voluptuous little reading experience.
[25:05]I love like, you know, a beautifully composed sentence.
[25:08]That's not enough, though, of course.
[25:10]I mean, it needs to, the stakes need to be high.
[25:14]And that's, and that's a very abstract thing to sort of talk about, right?
[25:17]And to sort of explain and describe.
[25:18]But it's not only that something needs to happen.
[25:21]It's just that it needs to sort of, you know, sort of wound you in a way.
[25:26]Well, that is a perfect ending because that's what happened to you in this book.
[25:31]They like your relationship and the suicide and all of it.
[25:34]It's like, and that's what made this book so good.
[25:36]So I think there's a happy, there's a,
[25:40]there's a sort of thank you.
[25:42]But I think I, I didn't mean to say it was an interesting book to me.
[25:47]That was when you showed yourself the most.
[25:49]Uh huh. And that's what I responded to the most.
[25:51]Really.
[25:52]I mean, I've read about David Festerwell as a suicide and plenty of other books.
[25:55]Yeah. But it was your response and your experience of it and leading up to it.
[26:01]And I don't know.
[26:02]I found that very unique and moving.
[26:06]It was the, yeah, I mean, the mask really had to come off sort of finally at the end.
[26:12]And, yeah.
[26:14]I mean, that wasn't the only, it was great book.
[26:16]I didn't mean to say that was really, I just, that, I responded the most to that particular part.
[26:20]But I thought it was, oh, thank you at the end.
[26:22]But anyway.
[26:23]Okay.
[26:24]Well, thanks for coming on.
[26:25]Thank you so much.
[26:26]Thank you.
[26:27]You've been listening to moms and have time to read books with Zibi Owens.
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