Laura Lippman, MY LIFE AS A VILLAINESS
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[2:07]Laura Lippman, the best-selling crime novelist, has now come out with a book of essays called My Life as a Villainess, which it's just a fantastic book.
[2:15]Laura was a reporter for 20 years, including 12 years at the Baltimore Sun.
[2:20]She began writing novels while working full-time and published seven books about accidental P.I. tests Moynihan before leaving daily journalism in 2001.
[2:29]Her work has been awarded the Edgar, the Anthony, the Agatha, the Sheamus, the Nero Wolf, Gumshoe, and Barry Awards, and she's also been nominated for many other prizes in the crime fiction fields.
[2:40]She was the first ever recipient of the Mayors Prize for literary excellence, and the first genre writer recognizes author of the year by the Maryland Library Association.
[2:49]A graduate of Northwestern University's Medile School of Journalism, Ms. Lippman returned to Baltimore in 1989.
[2:57]It has lived there ever since.
[2:59]Welcome Laura. Thank you so much for coming on momstone of 10 to read books.
[3:02]Thanks for having me. I'm really honored.
[3:05]Well, I was just starting to tell you, I really loved your book.
[3:08]I love essay collections, and I couldn't wait to read it, and I was just appointed because originally it was supposed to come out in May, right?
[3:15]And then it was pushed back.
[3:17]And so I was like, well, wait to read it till it's closer, and it was just sitting there.
[3:21]So anyway, I'm thrilled it came out. It's so good. Anyway, My Life as a Villainess, can you tell listeners what this collection of essays is essentially about?
[3:29]And what encouraged you to write it after being such a successful crime novelist for Silicon?
[3:34]I really kind of backed into this. There wasn't a plan.
[3:38]I wasn't looking at writing an essay book.
[3:41]What I wanted to do, it sounds so mercenary, I'm kind of embarrassed.
[3:46]Writing personal essays has become to the marketing plan for an analyst.
[3:50]And when you have an analyst coming out, they say, can you write about this? Can you write about that?
[3:54]And about two years ago, I said, okay, I want to think about this differently.
[4:00]I don't want to write essays about crime fiction because I'm already reaching those readers, I hope.
[4:06]I hope I'm reading crime readers, and if I'm not, things are really screwed up.
[4:10]And I thought, how do I get myself out in front of people who think they don't read crime fiction?
[4:16]Because I think there are a lot of readers who would love certain crime novels
[4:20]if they just understood how wide and broad the genre was and how there really is something for everyone.
[4:28]For even the most literary reader, there are crime novels that would appeal to them.
[4:34]You just sort of thought, if I could get my voice in front of people, people who liked my voice, my thing,
[4:40]well, I'll try whatever else.
[4:42]So I was just looking at sort of trying to gain the system in a sense.
[4:46]And I began by placing, not so much personal essays,
[4:52]but I remember one of the first things I wrote was a piece of how much I loved the work of me, Kenney,
[4:58]who wrote my sister, I mean stories, and I thought it was a little bit forgotten and unappreciated.
[5:03]And I wrote that for a column in New York Times.
[5:05]I then asked my good friend, Taffy Burdess Rachner, to help me plan a travel story.
[5:11]And in New York Times about my excessive devotion to Southwest Airlines.
[5:15]See that?
[5:16]See stepping and, you know, glamour.com asked me to write about how I felt trying to explain voice to my then eight-year-old daughter, things like that.
[5:28]And at one point, I was up to sort of been late in 2018.
[5:34]I was up late at night.
[5:35]My husband was aware of this.
[5:37]I had a couple of classes aligned.
[5:39]And I saw that there was a section on the long-range site, which, you know, both curates and commissions, long pieces.
[5:47]About aging.
[5:48]And I thought, I have a story about aging that I've never read.
[5:51]And it's about being the oldest mom always.
[5:55]I was 51 when my daughter was born.
[5:58]I just, I have no contenders.
[6:01]I remember there was a mom in my neighborhood who said, I used to be the oldest mom before you shut up.
[6:06]She's 10 years younger than I am.
[6:08]And I pitched this to Sarah Botten at long range.
[6:12]And it took me four months to write it.
[6:17]But then when I did it, kind of changed everything.
[6:20]We got a huge response.
[6:23]Sarah asked me to write more pieces.
[6:25]The next piece I wrote was about body positivity.
[6:28]And at that point, my long time editor, I've worked with the same editor for my novels for my entire career.
[6:35]And we went to lunch with my agent and she said, do you think you have a book of S is in me?
[6:40]And I said that thing that you should never say it was how hard could it be?
[6:45]I'll never say that again.
[6:48]I did.
[6:49]It turned out, I mean, there were seven essays that had been published before in the book.
[6:55]One of which had been written and never been published.
[6:57]And that was the title essay in my life in the illness.
[7:00]I generated seven new essays over last summer, last fall.
[7:05]And that became this book.
[7:07]Wow.
[7:08]So how did it feel from shifting from creating worlds to revealing that inner workings of your own?
[7:16]It was really different.
[7:17]I never worried about exposure.
[7:19]If I'm writing about something already to talk about.
[7:22]I, you know, when I still have plenty of secrets I've talked to the stories I haven't told that I don't feel obliged to tell all.
[7:29]I don't think any writer is obliged to do that.
[7:32]I have taken to talking about this collection as I used an approach that I had learned about when I was a reporter
[7:42]where they're kind of two ways to go about investigative reporting.
[7:45]One is you get a great tip.
[7:47]Someone says, did you know?
[7:49]And you follow that.
[7:50]The other way you can develop stories is an investigative reporter,
[7:53]which I never was when I go into it.
[7:55]I found it interesting is you can pick a topic so big you're going to find something.
[8:00]So in this book, I just get topics that were so big.
[8:04]I knew I would have something to say about them.
[8:06]I seldom knew what that was when I sat down.
[8:09]And for the process of writing these essays,
[8:12]it would often take weeks to find out the starting.
[8:17]That was certainly true in the case of Game of Thrones.
[8:20]You know, the essay about being an old mom.
[8:22]Where does it start?
[8:23]It starts with the fact that my daughter was a week old,
[8:26]when people started asking if I was for grandmother.
[8:29]And how I dealt with that.
[8:30]And where did I go from there?
[8:32]You know, who would imagine that a piece about body positivity would begin with a story about
[8:38]meeting 15 years old and hiding in a corner of Walden books,
[8:42]reading that I was too embarrassed to buy because I thought they were big installations.
[8:47]I mean, what does that have to do with anything?
[8:49]And what's really interesting is then you find these things
[8:52]I'm a big collector of folk art.
[8:55]I've always loved folk art and outsider art.
[8:58]I just this morning celebrated my publication day by buying a piece of folk art by
[9:04]previous young.
[9:05]And folk art is about found opportunities.
[9:07]It's about found materials.
[9:09]And it's about allowing yourself as a writer to discover these potent,
[9:17]thematic motifs that run through your life.
[9:21]So I remember reading the book Reengage Summer.
[9:25]And I'm writing this about body positivity.
[9:28]And then I go back and I re-reengage Summer.
[9:31]And it's literally a novel that begins with a story about people over eating,
[9:36]gorging themselves on these reengaged poems.
[9:39]And so that as I wrote each essay, I was like mining these opportunities.
[9:44]You're like looking for these things that were always there.
[9:48]And I think this is a novelist.
[9:49]You'd be like, that's true on a nose.
[9:51]I can't use that.
[9:52]That's so obvious.
[9:54]But didn't real life be like, that's amazing.
[9:57]I love that.
[9:58]And I love...
[10:00]your thoughts on body positivity and basically how you've decided that it's okay to call yourself
[10:05]a knockout and I age and like you're just gonna own it. I just I was hoping I could just read this
[10:10]quick quote if I could find it. Let's see page 14 of them. You said what is new is that I have
[10:16]decided at the age of 60 that I am a goddamn knockout like Dorothy at the end of the film version
[10:21]of the Wizard of Oz. I had the power I saw it all along. I rubbed my thighs together, sorry,
[10:26]and resist and tell myself over and over that I am beautiful. And what do you know? Suddenly I am.
[10:32]So great. And I really believe that and it had it changed my life when I was able to put those
[10:38]words on paper. One of the things I learned writing this essay collection is that if I'm writing
[10:45]about something, I have come to charge with on some level. I'm cool with it. I'm cool with
[10:51]I'm actually delighted with the body I have. I've made some own-colored piece, but I've certainly
[10:57]learned to talk about menopause, which I think is interesting is there's just I said to someone
[11:04]recently, the weird thing about menopause is there is too much that has been written about it. There's
[11:09]not enough that's written about it. And you know, woman after woman comes into this transition
[11:16]and there's this one great book that everybody reads, which is sort of like the omnibus,
[11:20]the Stanford book. And then there's some really good comic books, like,
[11:24]centered seeing those, not women in a Volvo, which is hilarious. But there's a lot of relevant
[11:30]information that says like, but by the time I write about menopause, it's like I'm cool with it.
[11:35]I'm cool with it. And just talking about it, because that was of all the topic in the book,
[11:41]I hated talking about menopause when it happened to me. And I did at first, it felt almost shameful.
[11:49]And it's like, my God, how many shame and used episodes do women have to go through in their lives
[11:55]about their body? So I kind of waste owning it, as people say. Certainly, yeah, every essay in the book
[12:01]was something I was working out in the first time. You know, friendships between writers,
[12:07]they can be friendships or they can be rivalries. And it was fascinating to me that I had this
[12:14]other writer who is my imaginary rival. But then I met her and she became one of my dearest,
[12:21]dearest friends. And in fact, Anne Hood is someone who taught me an awful lot about how to write
[12:26]personal essays just by the example of the brilliant personal essays she puts out in the world.
[12:30]I love how you reflect on friendships and you're so self-deprecating in this book,
[12:35]which is like really endearing, actually, about how you're just such a bad friend and like,
[12:39]you know, you don't blame anyone for like ditching you or ghosting you or whatever, because you deserve it.
[12:46]Yeah. And it's funny because some friends, of course, that's hard, you're not that bad at
[12:51]a friend. But too, like, there's so people who I would say that have been contiguous and not
[12:58]disavowing my purchase of that friend. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I wasn't the best friends to be.
[13:05]I'm still mixed up about that. If that's something, I know, I said I've worked these things out.
[13:09]In a friendship, I've worked out the fact that this is a place where I often fail.
[13:15]And I'm still working on it. I think the great lie about friendships is that it comes natural.
[13:20]Like we've got to do it. And once you have a friend, you should be friends for life and it would
[13:27]only end something catastrophic happen. But there was a huge betrayal for some really big falling
[13:34]out over values and major issues. And that's not my experience. Friends that I've lost,
[13:40]there's been no major falling out. What has happened is that I, again, and I sort of
[13:45]then myself a little bit, which is I think people take my inertia as a lack of interest.
[13:52]And it's like, no, I'm just kind of inert. But any time a friend turns to me, I'm there for them.
[13:57]But am I the person who always remembers to pick up the phone and check, hey, no, I'm not that person.
[14:02]But pack as long as I'm alive, I could maybe do it better. So there's that.
[14:07]And your trainer gave you like the best advice of all of like the friends who would bury a body for you
[14:13]or would help you bury a body. That's just so great. Because I was like writing this question,
[14:19]which of my friends would bury a body for me? I don't know. I feel like not that many.
[14:25]A lot of my friends would want to start, start short of the criminal conspiracy. And I mentioned
[14:30]Nancy, in particular in the essay that Nancy would not want to actually commit a crime with me.
[14:35]But she would do everything in her power to make sure that I had the best criminal
[14:40]representation. I feel like another really, really good friend I have is a crime writer,
[14:45]terrific novelist named Alethar Burke, who's a former prosecutor. And I know, I know that if I commit a
[14:52]crime, Alethar is not going to go well in on the criminal conspiracy, but she will get me
[14:58]the best criminal attorney to represent me. She will be advising me every step of the way about what
[15:05]to do in my criminal case. She's not going to actually cross the line into committing a crime.
[15:09]She's much too outstanding a citizen for that. But that's okay. You need that too.
[15:14]And that's totally important part of the process. You also were really interestingly about
[15:20]your relationship and sort of the power dynamic in your marriage. You said, the man who would
[15:27]become my second husband desired a child. So I made a child happen. That's our dynamic. He writes
[15:33]checks, I make things happen. As noted, I have money of my own, but he out urns me by a factor of
[15:38]10 to 1. So this arrangement seems fair to me. So I just wanted to talk about that because in this
[15:42]whole sort of like feminist boom, I just wanted to address something that not that it's unfeminist,
[15:49]just I just wanted to like see what you thought about it. So again, if I'm writing about it,
[15:53]I'm someone who I've looked it out. And there was a time in which I would look at the proportion
[15:59]of child care that I did and the proportion that my spouse did, which by the way is very different
[16:03]now in the pandemic because from 2050 because he hasn't been working on a production. And it is
[16:11]in gratifying and amazing to know that he will do that when his job allows him to do it. It really
[16:20]has a job that is a kind of a time suck that you haven't seen it at close. You can't imagine it.
[16:28]I've tried to describe it in some people. People will be like, could he do this? Could he do that?
[16:32]He really could not. And there was a time when I was kind of obsessed with that, which I was very
[16:39]obsessed with the imbalance in the time of he gets to spend 12 to 16 hours a day on what he's creating
[16:49]and I don't have that same luxury. And then it really turned around on my hat. I don't think
[16:55]that's a luxury. I think that's a burden. And I think it's a particular burden of the patriarchy
[17:00]to create this idea that creation is best when we are almost a monk like in our existence.
[17:08]If we have families, we're ignoring them, or maybe we don't have families at all, or this whole
[17:13]kind of caso is the great artist, crummy man template. And what I had to come to realize was that
[17:21]first of all, patriarchy is enormously unfair to men who are cast into this idea that they're
[17:28]not benefiting from it. And they're really actually, I think, suffering for it. And then I began
[17:33]to ask myself, this is the way of it. I'm getting my work done. I'm getting it done. And these
[17:39]bits and pieces of time, you know, I have the hours that my daughters in school are used to.
[17:45]Now with distance learning, I've had to learn a different way to do it. I have enough time to
[17:52]do my work, bake the cookies from the bake sale, work out. I mean, you know, almost nothing
[17:59]gets between me and exercise. And I'm writing the books that I want to write. And I actually think
[18:05]there is good as I can make there. And whatever limitations I find in myself as a creative person,
[18:12]they're not connected to time. And there was, in the next week, this,
[18:16]Pete God, what if my books are better because of the life of living? What if the richness and
[18:22]fullness of my life informs my books and that they have a level to them that they wouldn't have
[18:31]if I were living among my existence? So yeah, it's, you know, it's true. It's on some level,
[18:37]it sounds not feminist. But on another level, I think that we were living a life in which
[18:43]we had unwittingly subscribed these patriarchal values. And it's still, you know,
[18:51]I still don't see how we could ever be 50, 50 in time when he's active on a production.
[18:56]I don't see that as being possible. But now that I know that he can step up and do 50, 50,
[19:03]it's really meaningful to me. And it's been one of those bizarre silver linings in the pandemic
[19:10]for my household. My household has had more together time in the past six months than we had
[19:15]in the previous five years. Well, I love what you just said also about, you know, maybe it's a
[19:20]lack of time makes things better. I feel like there's this huge myth that like if we could lock
[19:25]ourselves in a cabin, we would be writing, you know, the great American novel every single time.
[19:31]And look, I mean, you already have achieved that. And, you know, in the way that you do it. And
[19:36]I've talked to so many authors who feel the same way, people who wrote it in the back of
[19:40]like Wendy Walker books in the back of her minivan. And, you know, just this is like you fit it in
[19:46]when you can. And I feel like it's almost the difference between, you know, being a reporter sort of
[19:50]out and about and being like back in an office trying to describe something versus like being
[19:55]out and there and being a witness to it. So when I worked with a newspaper, the pew-
[20:00]with children in particular moms who were incredibly efficient about their work.
[20:04]They were just more efficient because they had no time to waste.
[20:08]They had to be out the door at a certain time and at school or daycare for pickup, and
[20:14]if they were late, there was a financial penalty.
[20:16]So they didn't waste time, and the rest didn't waste time.
[20:20]Because we didn't have that sort of damn excuse hanging over us and this is, and, you know,
[20:26]one of the funny strange odd, bizarre things about the pandemic is it sort of
[20:30]forced me to come full circle.
[20:32]I began by writing not all, but I had a full-time job.
[20:36]I'd get up at six in the morning, I'd do my writing, I'd go to work, and I would see
[20:40]no more stuff.
[20:41]Whatever happens now, I got my writing time then, and I would try to write 1,000 to 2,000
[20:46]a day.
[20:47]Well, how many pandemic my mid-March, my daughter has switched to learning from home, and
[20:55]I have a book too.
[20:56]It's actually late, and it's late because I wrote my life as a villainous, sort of
[21:01]put it to the side, but I'm good at that.
[21:03]And I started getting up at five in the morning and working through three to four hours.
[21:07]My daughter was sleeping in through live until eight at school, I changed her schedule.
[21:13]And so there I was full circle, and it still worked, it was still, and I actually still
[21:18]immensely satisfying at 8 o'clock in the morning to say, I got my work done, and maybe
[21:22]I have a chance to come back and do more work that's after we came on, how the learning
[21:27]is lining up, and what my daughter is interested, but it was not bad to know that that
[21:33]way of doing things was something I could go back to, and still feel very effective, and
[21:37]that's great.
[21:38]So no one can use time as an excuse anymore.
[21:41]Yeah, that goes back to Tilly Olsen.
[21:44]I mean, Tilly Olsen wrote about this in her famous book, which of course was flying out
[21:50]of my hand, me and Tilly, but yeah, she had a full-time job, she was commuting on
[21:54]the subway, she had kids, and it was like, you will find time to write, which is really
[21:59]what to do.
[22:00]And I think that was one of the things that should render a lot of people who went
[22:04]into the forced lockdown of the pandemic and said, well, now I have this luxury of time.
[22:11]That can really be a burden when you have all the time in the world.
[22:16]Where's the urgency?
[22:17]You just keep procrastinating.
[22:19]And I made that mistake as a young writer.
[22:20]I'd send her right all weekend.
[22:22]I can't write all weekend.
[22:23]I can write for about four hours' tops, not long out at four hours.
[22:29]And so I've learned to be my little streaky self of two, three hours, two hours, two
[22:35]hours, and eventually I get there.
[22:38]But look at how they build up.
[22:39]I mean, you have a huge, like, even library of production, you know, like a factory where
[22:46]if it's impressive.
[22:47]How do you stay on track normally?
[22:50]I know we're in pandemic mode, but like, to keep producing at your rate.
[22:55]What is the motivation, like, how do you stay, I know you're late now, but let's pretend
[23:00]you're not.
[23:01]Like, how do you stay on time and all that?
[23:03]How do you just keep doing it and making your books different and interesting and all the
[23:07]rest?
[23:08]Well, the first part is I have a very simple goal.
[23:10]My goal is to write a thousand once a day.
[23:12]Sounds like as a former recorder, that is a big weather story.
[23:16]That's like a weather story that you write.
[23:19]It's a thousand words a day if you've been a reporter as I have.
[23:22]It doesn't.
[23:23]It's not that intimidating.
[23:24]Some people would find that impossible.
[23:25]So it's a minimum.
[23:26]It's a quota.
[23:27]And that's in the early part where we're just sort of blamming through, just getting
[23:32]the words on the page, do something, do something, keep going forward.
[23:36]And then after that, I'll set goals for revision to be a chapter a day, it can be this
[23:40]week, pages a day.
[23:41]But I'll work through it.
[23:42]But I try to do, I do quite a bit of revision before my editor sees it.
[23:46]I certainly hope that she's seeing the third, if not fourth version of what I write.
[23:52]And so that takes anywhere from 10 to 16 months, that would be my range.
[23:58]Then the other part of the question was, how does one stay inspired, how does one do
[24:03]it differently?
[24:04]It's very important to me to do it differently.
[24:06]I really never want someone to read one of my novels and feel like it's an iteration
[24:12]of a novel that I've written before, because there's certainly some really successful crime
[24:18]novels where I felt that about their long-running series.
[24:21]And I was sad for that.
[24:23]So the way I handle that is I just turn my gaze inward and I'm saying, and I said, what's
[24:28]really interesting from right now?
[24:30]What am I really interested in?
[24:33]When I wrote the novel that's coming out next year, I novel that by circumstance
[24:40]just forced to be set in 2019, I was conceiving of this something that would just sort
[24:44]of vaguely in the now, but that can't be anymore.
[24:48]I was really interested in how isolated I find a lot of modern people.
[24:54]And I was interested in particular in the concept of isolation in a place where there
[25:00]are lots of people, where you can actually see people like living in a high-rise apartment
[25:06]or even Baltimore, you're literally surrounded by people.
[25:10]You can see people coming and going and living their lives, but what if you are isolated
[25:15]and how does social media play into that?
[25:17]For me, social media is a boon against isolation, but if you disdain it, of course, it can't
[25:22]help you at all.
[25:23]So I was just interested in those ideas of isolation.
[25:28]I also had sort of a little challenge for myself as I wanted to write something that felt
[25:32]almost more heart-ting, even though I didn't cry in my mouth.
[25:36]And I would say to myself, okay, so this is a little bit misery in a high-rise, and so
[25:41]that's how that looks started.
[25:42]I've already started, it's really a future, I wouldn't talk about it yet, but I can
[25:49]feel the tangle of the next idea.
[25:52]It arrived early.
[25:53]I wasn't even looking for it because I still have to be happy at it, so I'm a big
[25:57]believer that you're having turned a book in, having done my revisions, let the well refill
[26:02]itself.
[26:03]Let's see what happens.
[26:04]And I was in a conversation, my husband, the other night, simply talking about the
[26:08]challenge of, well, the next book, the pre-Kensai Microphone Center, you know, what are
[26:13]the challenges that China rated book about the Timesbird right now?
[26:17]And if I don't do that, my coward, and I started talking about another part of our fairly
[26:23]recent history that I thought had some lessons for the time when we were there and now.
[26:29]All of a sudden, by the next morning, I had my notebook open, and I was jotting down
[26:34]ideas, like, why would she do that?
[26:37]What's the big secret?
[26:39]What would make this possible?
[26:40]And they're like, I think I've got it.
[26:43]That's great.
[26:44]Well, that's amazing.
[26:45]I mean, there you go.
[26:47]I just wanted to read one more thing from you before I leave you alone here about what
[26:52]it's like, well, here, I'm just going to read it and we'll talk about it.
[26:56]It has taken me more than 40 years, but the singular achievement of my life may be that
[27:01]if I am attacked by a serial killer on a deserted lover's lane, I almost certainly will
[27:06]have had dessert.
[27:07]Not cheesecake, because I don't like cheesecake, possibly some dark chocolate, preferably
[27:11]with Nazi caramel or a scoop of the Harka ice cream and outstanding Baltimore brand or one
[27:15]of my own homemade blondies from the Smitten Kitchen recipe, maybe a shout out of tequila,
[27:20]and an excellent DJ's teeth, maybe tequila and the blondie, but only if I want those
[27:26]things.
[27:27]So, I feel like this is just so classic.
[27:30]You have like, come into your own in every way and just like, you're in full-on like
[27:35]self-acceptance.
[27:36]This is what I love.
[27:37]This is who I am.
[27:38]It's totally inspiring and amazing because I feel like a lot of people, no matter what
[27:43]age they are, never get that.
[27:45]And I guess some people get there very early, but either way, it's an amazing example.
[27:49]It's so beautiful to get there early.
[27:51]It's the one thing I can't, you know, I can't judge myself and I wouldn't judge anyone
[27:55]else for it.
[27:56]When do you cross that line?
[27:57]What makes it possible as the mother of a daughter?
[28:00]It's so important to me that she loved herself.
[28:05]And but I also, I accept that that's a very personal thing.
[28:10]I mean, I can say and do a lot of the right things.
[28:13]I hope I am saying and doing them, but in the end it's going to come down to her decision
[28:19]to love herself.
[28:20]And what will make, you know, I'm trying to provide an environment in which that's possible.
[28:25]You know, it, earlier in our conversation, you mentioned where I said I just, I've just
[28:31]decided, sure, I'm beautiful.
[28:33]One of my long-time readers and someone I consider a friend, some of Australia, we've met
[28:38]at conferences, we've had drinks together.
[28:41]When we're on the rare occasion we are faced with face, we always try to find, you
[28:44]know, 15, 30 minutes for each other.
[28:47]She jumped on a Facebook thread about this, I say, and she mentioned that she'd had
[28:52]a photograph taken and she didn't like it.
[28:56]And her friends at work were saying, no, that's a terrible photo.
[28:59]You're beautiful.
[29:00]And she said, I thought, this is pretty great and amazing.
[29:06]She said, I'm not beautiful.
[29:07]And I don't need to be told that.
[29:09]I don't consider beauty to be an important metric for women.
[29:15]And so telling me, I'm beautiful when I know that I'm not, it's catchin' like that.
[29:19]So I like myself.
[29:21]I like how I look.
[29:23]You can have an unflattering photo and not consider yourself to be beautiful.
[29:28]And you can also decide that you don't consider being beautiful to be important.
[29:32]And I was like, wow, that truly lies.
[29:37]She's going down a level deeper on this, which is to say, not only am I going to reject
[29:42]conventional ideas about what beauty is, I'm going to reject beauty as being important.
[29:49]And I thought that was pretty great.
[29:52]And I was really, it was really proud to know her and be her friend and to know that
[29:57]she would share something like that at that time.
[30:00]Do you have any parting advice to aspiring authors?
[30:03]To my main advice to aspiring writers,
[30:06]it's what I tell my classes all the time.
[30:09]And I teach you them,
[30:10]a writer's workshop at Nathan Florida,
[30:12]every January, fingers crossed,
[30:14]will be able to meet again this year.
[30:16]At the end of the class,
[30:17]I always say in a look,
[30:18]whatever your ambition is,
[30:20]however grandiose it is,
[30:22]the more grandiose the matter,
[30:23]I want you to tell at least one other sentient human.
[30:27]If you have to get drunk to do it,
[30:28]go ahead and get drunk to do it.
[30:31]Tell someone what you want.
[30:33]And it can be whatever you want.
[30:35]It can be winning the Nobel Prize.
[30:38]It can be being in your time's bestseller.
[30:40]What the real dream is that it has to be your real dream.
[30:43]And I say please sit and sat loud,
[30:46]because if you can't admit to at least
[30:48]whatever person is for yourself,
[30:51]what you want to get out of this,
[30:52]I don't see how you're going to make it happen.
[30:54]So articulate your dreams,
[30:56]and I'm not, and don't make them a mistake,
[30:59]or would it just like,
[31:00]this is what I want.
[31:01]And then you've got a call to each one.
[31:03]There you go.
[31:04]I recently decided that I want to try to win an Emmy,
[31:07]even though I don't have a TV show.
[31:09]I'm like, you know what?
[31:12]There's a category out there for like interview show.
[31:14]And some people on YouTube are nominated this year.
[31:16]And I'm like, why not me?
[31:17]I don't know.
[31:18]Let's give it a try.
[31:19]So exactly.
[31:20]So anyway, as long as you're not afraid to fail publicly,
[31:23]which I apparently am not,
[31:25]then you might as well say it.
[31:27]So anyway,
[31:28]well, Laura, thank you so much.
[31:29]You're such an inspiration on a lot of different levels for me.
[31:32]And I am just so glad I got to enjoy your book
[31:35]and that I got to talk to you about your whole career
[31:38]and everything.
[31:38]So thank you for everything.
[31:39]Thank you.
[31:40]Love talking to you.
[31:41]I really am honored to be on the show.
[31:44]Thank you.
[31:44]All right.
[31:45]Have a great day.
[31:46]Bye.
[31:47]Bye.
[31:49]Thanks again to Jumpstart,
[31:51]whose campaign read for the record
[31:52]begins this fall.
[31:54]Go to read for the record.org
[31:56]to purchase Evelyn Delray as moving away,
[31:59]to help donate and support a classroom in need
[32:01]and help Jumpstart reach their goal
[32:03]of achieving early literacy for everyone.
[32:05]Thanks for listening to this episode
[32:06]of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[32:08]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[32:11]at Zebioans and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[32:13]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zebioans.com
[32:16]and sign up for my virtual book club
[32:18]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[32:20]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan
[32:22]for the next year's sound for the sound editing.
[32:24]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[32:26]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.