Sue Miller, MONOGAMY
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[1:51]I interviewed Sumilar a while back and am releasing her episode today. Thanks to all of you who
[1:57]listened to my very personal heartfelt episode that I released this weekend about my family's losses.
[2:04]Thank you. I'm sorry. I've made so many of you cry, but thank you for all the direct
[2:07]outreach as a result of that episode. I just sort of had to get it out of my system.
[2:11]Anyway, Sumilar critically acclaimed and loved by readers, Sue has recognized internationally
[2:16]for her elegant and sharply realistic accounts of the contemporary family. Her books have been widely
[2:21]translated and published in 22 countries around the world. The Good Mother from 1986,
[2:26]the first of her 10 novels, was an immediate bestseller more than six months at the top of the
[2:30]New York Times charts. By the way, I totally remember my mother reading this when I was little.
[2:34]Subsequent novels include three book of the month main selections, Family Pictures,
[2:39]which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award while I was gone,
[2:43]which was an Oprah's book club selection, and the senator's wife. Her novel, The Arsenist,
[2:49]and her nonfiction book, The Story of My Father, came out recently, as did her latest book,
[2:54]which we talk about in our interview, which is called monogamy, which by the way, I keep leaving
[3:00]in front of Kyle just to give him nice reminders that it's so important, not that he needs them.
[3:06]Her numerous honors include a Guggenheim and a Radcliffe Institute fellowship. She's a committed
[3:10]advocate for the writer's engagement with society in large, having held a position on the board
[3:15]of Penn America Center. For four years, she was chair of Penn New England, an active branch
[3:19]that worked with writing programs in local high schools and ran classes in prisons. She is taught
[3:24]fiction at, among others, Amherst, Tufts, Boston University, Smith, and MIT. And by the way,
[3:30]we did this interview from her bathroom, and I even made sure that she took her shower gap
[3:35]and moved it out of the screen, so we were immediately bonded for this interview. Anyway, enjoy.
[3:42]Welcome, Sue. Thank you so much for coming on Momstone. I have time to read books.
[3:46]I'm completely and sympathy with the title, and I'm glad to be here.
[3:51]It's such a thrill for me because growing up, my mother had your books, and just the idea that
[3:57]it's like, come full circle, and I get to interview is just such a, I just get such a kick out of it.
[4:02]So, and just as a jeez.
[4:05]Your latest book, monogamy, was so great, and I'm so excited that we're going to do a book
[4:10]club about it, and I just fell into these characters' lives. Would you mind just telling
[4:15]listeners who might not know what it's about, a little about the book, and what made you,
[4:19]what inspired you to write it? Well, it is a character driven book, completely. I think,
[4:24]as most of my work is, I just am really interested in exploring human nature, human forables,
[4:30]and so forth. So, we have two main characters in this book, Graham, who's a bookseller,
[4:36]The Husband in this Quasar monogamous marriage, and a kind of brilliant, enthusiastic.
[4:42]He loves good food, and he's a little overweight, and he loves wine, and he loves his wife,
[4:47]and he loves books, and he needs to have people around him, and he needs to have people love
[4:52]him also, and he's married to Annie. They've been married to about 30 years, and she's a
[4:58]much more, she's a quieter personality. She's also much smaller than he has gone to a party once,
[5:04]years, earlier, Santa Claus, and one of his elves. She's a photographer, and she is at the moment
[5:12]the book begins. She's about to have a show for the first time in some years, and is full of anxiety
[5:18]about her career, which is basically been full of anxiety about most of her professional life,
[5:23]but she's particularly anxious down because it's been a while, so she had a solo show.
[5:28]And you sort of get at the beginning of the book, a kind of flavor of their life together,
[5:32]and the way they exchange, and each other, I move around between their brains, essentially,
[5:39]and third person, and sort of enter them and explain them a little bit, or have them explain
[5:43]themselves. And then quite early on in the book, it gives nothing away, really, or maybe a little,
[5:49]Ram dies in the night of a heart attack, so that Annie wakes up, and he's dead in the bed next to her,
[5:56]and she's sort of numbed and shocked, and then as she must, he begins to call other people who
[6:04]might do whom this will really matter, and that includes the other main characters in the book,
[6:09]so they get introduced actually by being at the end of these phone calls. And the first person
[6:15]is her daughter with Graham, Sarah, who's in her early 20s, and who's in San Francisco,
[6:20]and they have a reasonable relationship, but it's a little strained, and if Sarah loves her,
[6:25]has loved her dad, enormously, just he kind of rescued her through a tough childhood and
[6:30]adolescence, and has a lot more difficulty with this quite reserved, and as she sees it unknowable,
[6:35]mother, and then as she calls, actually, the next person is Graham's first wife, Frida,
[6:42]who has been, by his wish, just very much a part of their marriage, partly because they
[6:46]had a child together, who is Annie's stepson, and is very much, of course, in Graham's life,
[6:53]so she's just a member of the marriage in a certain way, Frida, and then she,
[6:58]Frida, turns your with her analogy, calls her son, and Graham, her, and Graham's son,
[7:03]because he's in New York, and basically the book sort of moves around among these characters
[7:10]and their grief, and what his death means to them, and then how they connect to each other
[7:17]after the death, and what sort of happens between and among them after the death,
[7:22]and there's a lot that happens, and there's also, Graham's not out of the picture in a certain
[7:26]way, because his relationship to them and their memories of him and things that happened with him
[7:32]and so forth take up a lot of energy as the book moves along too, so that's this kind of basic
[7:38]way it's set up, I guess you would say, and the people we care about, or I care about it,
[7:43]and hope I make you care about along. I cared about them so much from the very beginning,
[7:49]and I actually, you spent so much time orienting us to Annie and Graham that when he died,
[7:57]like I was very sad about that as opposed to having it happen on the first page before you get
[8:00]to know him, like I felt like it really got us into their marriage and the bookstore and his
[8:06]character and what he was like and them sitting drinking wine, and like I actually, I knew
[8:10]that's what the book was about, but I kind of like forgot to like once I was in it and then it
[8:15]happened and I was like, anyway, lots of loss, so well done. Yeah, I was so good. I couldn't help
[8:24]but think like this must have happened. Like you couldn't, you couldn't have made all this up,
[8:29]have you gone through something or a loss like this? Like the, it just seems so vivid to me this
[8:34]whole singing. How did you, like how did you come up with this? Did you lose somebody really
[8:40]close to you? I know about your father from your memoir, but tell me a little more. And then I had
[8:45]a friend a long, long time ago, but I was remembering his, his wife died in her sleep and he really told
[8:52]me about that how just incredibly strange it was to wake up and have her dead. But I think,
[8:59]I think my father's death informed me a lot too. I was with him as he died essentially over a long
[9:05]period, I'm 10 days or so. And so that's it probably. But you know, I've never had anyone that I
[9:13]was in love with that, especially not even. Sorry, there's nothing to do a little bit. No, it's okay.
[9:23]And then I noticed you gave both Annie and Frida mothers, I think mothers who both were battling
[9:30]all timers as well in the book. So that was one of the common bonds that they had perhaps with
[9:35]your experience with all timers yourself or you wanted to just put that in or what was that about
[9:40]what made you put that? Well, I had, yeah, it was in part that, but I was thinking that there
[9:45]needed to be ways in which they became friends and resisted it very much at the beginning,
[9:50]sort of thinking that it was sort of too, sort of modern and kind of silly. She thought of it
[9:56]really and a little embarrassing almost to be too well.
[10:00]this person as a friend who was once married to Graham and had a 10% free to have less trouble
[10:05]because he'd sort of lived with Graham through the whole era of the 60s and 70s when, you know,
[10:11]all the rules about how marriages were supposed to work were sort of deliberately broken at
[10:15]least by people in Cambridge, Massachusetts as far as I could tell. But they needed to have ways
[10:21]to slowly become very close friends, actually, which they do. And so I just gave them that,
[10:27]that they both, because I actually, one of my father was ill. It was so comforting to me to talk
[10:32]to my husband then. And just to sort of talk about what was so funny that it happened that day,
[10:37]his crazy world that I was part of and had to kind of agree to call along with. And then, of
[10:43]course, awful things too. And that sort of, I think, is who says that it seems to her to be the nature
[10:49]of this disease, that it's amazingly funny and amazingly awful at the same time. And that's
[10:54]what they shared with each other, actually. And then just over the years, you know,
[10:58]they're always together at Hall of Fame, so freedom's just always there because Lucas is there,
[11:03]her son. And it would be, since they all live in the same neighborhood it would be
[11:08]strange not to have her there. And Graham very much wants her there. He's continued to have a really
[11:13]warm relationship with her regrets when he did to their marriage. And that's right.
[11:17]And I was so neat how you had this stepmothers get to know, or maybe not the stepmothers,
[11:22]but yeah, the some others get to know the other child by the other. But yeah, that they sort of,
[11:29]the children get along better with the stepmothers each exactly as his or her own reasons for having
[11:35]trouble with his or her own mother. And so they do this almost sort of trade throughout while when
[11:39]they're entering adolescence and then through adolescence, each of them is more helped by the other
[11:45]mother who's not really his or her own mother. So yeah. So how do you do it? Like how do you
[11:52]how did you invent characters, particularly Annie, but also Graham? And I guess every
[11:57]supporting cast member in this book, but that are just so incredibly real. I mean, I feel like you
[12:03]inhabited this character of Annie more. So then almost any other character I've read like in every
[12:09]little detail and how she does every little thing. Like how do you structure that? How do you
[12:15]how did you come up with her? How do you make sure to show the reader so much about her? It
[12:21]seems like magic to me. It sort of is. I mean, I in the sense that I really can't account for all
[12:27]of it, but I think that I love the the close third person. And that's the voice in fiction,
[12:34]but it gives you the most fluid access to a character. So that you can sort of sit a little bit
[12:39]away from the character in the third person and talk about what she's doing. And then you can step
[12:44]right forward into her brain and then sort of essentially speak in her voice and speak about
[12:52]her reactions and speak about what she's sort of saying to herself. So I think a lot of it is that
[12:57]the wonderful sort of fluidity of a third person narration. The other things I make an enormous
[13:04]number of notes before I start to write anything so that I can feel that I know the character
[13:11]quite well. It just notes, for instance, about what they hate, what they believe, what sort of
[13:17]books they like, or things like that. And I've always done that. I mean, I feel as though, I mean,
[13:22]just in very simple ways. I mean, I'm not writing. I'm not writing the book at that time. I'm just
[13:27]making notes to myself. And then as soon as I begin to write anything they say, it's sort of like
[13:35]you feel you know someone. Maybe if you're online dating or something, you think of this person
[13:39]as sort of interesting. And then they speak and you think, oh my god, no, or that's how I mean,
[13:43]I've never told it actually. Or you think, oh, this is such an interesting voice. And I think
[13:49]as soon as I begin actually having them speak to someone that just sort of does it for me at
[13:54]sort of at the end of the voice. And that makes me comfortable with everything that helps
[13:59]if I haven't, if I feel it's right. So I love doing it. I mean, that's one of the main sort of impulses
[14:06]for me in writing fiction is to make what I hope are believable characters. And that my sense is
[14:13]that that's when you get most deeply engaged in fiction is when you actually sort of think these
[14:18]people are real. I mean, you know, they're not, you know, they're fictional. But that's what I want
[14:23]to get you very close to the ladies in any way. No, it's like you're like, when you're in a movie
[14:28]theater and you know, you're sobbing and two hours before you didn't know who that character even
[14:33]was. And now you're completely emotionally invested. It's a longer version here. More immersive
[14:40]almost. So what part of this book was the first germ of the idea for you? Was it Annie? Was it
[14:45]one of the, was it Annie and Graham? Was it the thought of a loss? Was it dying in the sleep? Like,
[14:50]which part of it was like, oh, I think I'm going to write about blah, blah, blah.
[14:55]Well, it was actually had to do with my father's death. And then the aftermath of that. And
[15:00]after he died, I was just sort of swept by grief. It just would not release me for a couple of
[15:05]years. And so I just, and I actually, you know, I'm fine therapy. I tried this and that. I was on
[15:10]antidepressants for a while. But I decided I would write a book about him also about Alzheimer's
[15:16]disease. At that time, the stuff you could read about Alzheimer's disease was either sort of
[15:21]sappy. You know, you've got to get a hobby and you have to be with friends. And it just wasn't
[15:27]useful to me. And then the other thing you could read was incredibly technical stuff. And I felt
[15:33]I wanted to write a book addressed to the reader, telling her or him something about my father,
[15:40]and also talking about some degree about the kind of moral ethical issues I felt were raised by
[15:46]my sort of being the one with him. But I felt also as I was doing this book about him that I
[15:52]sort of uncovered new information. And I talked to friends of his. And my sense of him really
[15:58]changed over the course of writing the book. And I felt very kind of connected to him in a way
[16:04]in a new and different way. And that made me feel different myself in my relation to him. And
[16:10]so I wanted to explore that feeling of contact and change after death with someone. And then this
[16:18]case really, you know, falling out of love with someone and then falling back in with someone
[16:23]long after he's dead in any case. But I wanted to make it, that was the sort of feeling I had
[16:30]about that great mystery of death. And the way we want to change over time that we want
[16:35]feels about the dead person. So I started with that and then thought, okay, it will be Annie.
[16:40]She was the first character. It will be this womanhood and sort of I thought of some things.
[16:44]And then Graham arrived. And once he was on the scene, he made me immensely comfortable with
[16:49]everything else in the outlook because that's kind of guy he is. I was charmed by him. And I also
[16:56]wanted to present him as a complicated person. Someone who'd have to sort of think well, that was
[17:02]a nice, I think sort of, you know, he might even feel that he's awful. I mean, at some point he is awful.
[17:10]But he sort of recognizes in himself his terrible need in his. Anyway, I wanted to make him
[17:16]as complicated as possible while also trying to make you like someone very, very complicated.
[17:21]So that was the impulse, though really was to sort of have this, this whole thing after his death
[17:26]that goes on with Annie in particular. But it happens with other people too. A kind of shift
[17:31]each of feels. Each character about Graham's presence in her life or his life. And not always
[17:39]good. I mean, in some cases, sort of looking at everything a little more, a little more distance
[17:45]too. But it was just sort of, I described this before, but when I was taking psych classes in
[17:51]college and afterwards, we used to do these sociograms where you make a circle and you put all the
[17:56]people you're considering around the edge of the circle. And someone acts or something happens to one
[18:02]of the characters and you trace these radiating lines. What it means to this person and what it means
[18:07]to this person on the circle. And each of them reacts. And their reaction crosses the circle to
[18:13]this character and this character. And by the end, you just have this sort of web of connection and
[18:18]feeling and whatever else is going on anger or joy or, and that sort of was what I wanted to be
[18:25]doing was to just watch this circle of people. And they're all their connections with each other.
[18:31]The ones that kind of worked, the ones that didn't work and just look at how complicated it was,
[18:39]but try to make it easy for a reader to enter and look at too. It was a work, you know.
[18:44]Yeah. Was it hard? Tell me about what it was like writing this book. Where, can I have a visual?
[18:50]Like, where did you write it? Was it at home? Did you like to go to a library or where did you write it?
[18:54]And then because it's so immersive, like, did you ever have trouble sort of putting the work aside
[18:59]and going back to your real life? No. Okay. Good. That's good. I don't like that. And I wrote it
[19:06]over a long period of time. So I wrote it in many different places. But basically most of the time,
[19:12]I wrote it in my office, Orton. And then we have a little place in the country and I wrote it
[19:16]some there too. But I write it in the long hand, first draft. And so I can move around that,
[19:23]but I like it better is I can move around the house. One of the things I like about writing the
[19:27]that writing little books. And so that was the way I wrote it, essentially. And the places I
[19:33]wrote it in that there's a lot going on in my life and in my family's life right then. And so
[19:39]there were periods of time when I wasn't working at all. And even now my granddaughter lives in
[19:44]Germany. And she's young. She's proud. She's sort of also old. But she's young. And
[19:50]when she comes to stay, that I just drop everything essentially. And so she, a few, I guess,
[19:56]I think about four or five years ago she began to come and stay for the summer.
[20:00]So that was just a huge sort of open space in terms of not getting any work done and that sort of thing.
[20:07]But, you know, and I've never been incredibly disciplined about my work. I'm afraid.
[20:13]But so we took a very long time this book and probably I think benefited from that in some way or another.
[20:19]I think it sort of had these pauses where I could just stop and think about it and make a few little written notes in my notebook and so forth to think about for the next time I actually sat down.
[20:29]And then I just take all that stuff in and pull it out and then write over that for the next draft and just type it back in again.
[20:38]So I waste more paper, more trees have been consigned to death by me because of all the in and out that I actually physically do instead of just changing things on the computer and not, you know, having to use that much paper, which would be just much better to do my not.
[20:55]I forgive you on behalf of everyone because at the end of it, I mean, then you get these masterpieces. So there you go. I mean, it's worth it.
[21:04]Whatever everybody has their own process and everything.
[21:08]So how did you get to be a writer at the very beginning? Like if you go all the way back to the beginning of your career, what how did you get your start?
[21:17]I always wrote. I wrote as a little kid and I always invented stories. I can remember these little girls down the street a little bit younger than I went.
[21:25]We were just, you know, I must have been like in fifth or sixth grade and things must have been it.
[21:29]Second or third, they would wait for me to come from down the street to their house when we would proceed on to school together because they wanted me to continue this fairy tale essentially that I'd bring in with them.
[21:41]But then I really, I wrote a lot and all through my childhoods silly, you know, horrible things, but I actually won a scholastic fiction award in high school, which is a lot of very distinguished writers have won that dream.
[21:57]So I entered this world of real writers in a certain way, but I wrote a couple of novels after college, well one right away and then one that took a lot of time because I got married and I had a child and I got divorced and I was a single mom and working and so forth.
[22:15]But I never sort of thought of it as a career somehow. I just assumed I would always do it. I didn't much care about publishing at that point.
[22:25]And then at a certain point in my life and my mid to late 30s, I began to send out a few short stories that I read because it sort of occurred to me I got a few writing classes just to make myself finish things, which I really did.
[22:39]I just wrote that because of the circumstances of my life and I was sort of looking at the other writers and thinking behind actually a lot better than they are and actually my teacher encouraged me in that case and so I just began to send things around and they got taken.
[22:58]Almost everything I read from the first story I wrote, I mean they didn't get taken right away. I had to send them to six places or something started with places that would have paid me a little bit of money or a lot of money by my standards.
[23:13]And then when my son was a little bit older, when he was about 10, I really started a series of writing, a novel.
[23:19]So I had two unpublished novels that I had written before then and quite a few short stories and then thought that I would write something that might get published.
[23:27]And that was the first time I thought it. I was probably 38 or so, something like that and it did.
[23:35]It was a good mother which was my first book and it was it just changed my life in this sort of astonishing way that was really kind of shocking and discomputing.
[23:46]I mean I sort of thought I was in charge of my life and I knew what it would look like.
[23:52]The short stories that I published I was able to begin to teach writing here and there around the Boston area, which is a great area to be in for sort of part time work like that because there's a lot of writing programs and a lot of writing requirements and various colleges and there are a lot of colleges here too.
[24:08]But that's what I thought my life would be like. I would write and I'm going to teach and you know sort of go on living at the same sort of squeeze I pour and that was fine with me.
[24:19]There was nothing about that that I didn't like and then suddenly all of that changed and I did feel for a while really out of control.
[24:27]I mean that I was not in control of my life and sort of discomputed by it and that's a story.
[24:36]So once you had this major success did you find it hard to follow it up like did you feel pressured to perform on your next books or were there things in the works or how did it affect your writing this like huge success that you had?
[24:52]The main thing was I was determined not to do the same thing or even the same kind of book so my first book was narrated in the first person.
[25:02]And at the very center of it was a courtroom drama essentially we're in which my main character loses custody of a child, but I just stuck right with her and it was a very dramatic plot to say the least.
[25:16]And so I really decided deliberately that I wanted to do something very unlike that because I didn't want to be now that I had a publisher who was sort of waiting for I didn't want to be doing the same thing become the person who always wrote that.
[25:30]Although now the person who always writes about family and domestic life.
[25:36]So I ended up always writing that anyway, so the second book that I wrote my father was ill and dying during that period of time.
[25:44]So again I was sort of slow down, but it was about a whole family moved around from person to person in the family and it covered about 40 years of their life together.
[25:55]And a family with an autistic son and everyone's everyone's response to that person in the midst of the family is different and is complicated.
[26:05]And again it's like I said as the agreement on that book was essentially but all of these people whose lives were connected and there was much more to be really angry about for everybody or troubled about in that book really.
[26:18]Because I just wanted to announce you know I'm not doing anything you think I'm going to do.
[26:23]And I loved that book. I mean I love like them all but that was amongst my favorites I think I don't know which I haven't ever sort of organized this is my third favorite book.
[26:35]But anyway so I dealt with whatever pressure there might have been but just saying I'm not there's no pressure on me I'm doing what I want to do.
[26:44]There was a little pressure to do something very different that's true.
[26:48]But I wanted to do it I wasn't doing it because it was because it was different a little but not all the way.
[26:54]Yeah.
[26:55]And how do you continue sort of reinventing what you want to say and do like what advice would you have to aspiring authors people who are starting out who want to have a career like yours for instance.
[27:10]I think I mean this would not be something I think you could deliberately do but I think it helped me a lot not to feel I was launching a career.
[27:19]But I was doing this thing I wanted to do which might or might not be the center of my life and that made it easier for me to just sort of please myself essentially with what I was doing.
[27:31]I think also to just go slowly as you can.
[27:34]I mean I had you know as I said I've written two novels before the good father and you know I said one around a little bit but instantly sort of didn't want to do that.
[27:44]And I think just to wait until you tell you feel really really certain of the book that you're sending out until you love it yourself.
[27:52]Just you know it's the very best you could do and not be so focused on I mean I was old for my book my first book came out when I was 46 my first novel and it's hard to say you know a
[28:08]I mean there's certainly our people who wrote every wonderful very young and so I'm not prescribing anything.
[28:15]But I feel I benefited by being a little bit more relaxed about things.
[28:20]The other thing is just to read and read and just be asking yourself all the time why do I feel this way about this character.
[28:27]So look at what's on the page that just practice in that way I think.
[28:33]Rob some people technically essentially do you have a type of book you like to read in general or a certain genre do you like to read what you write type of books or totally different or.
[28:44]Well I mean I yeah I like to read what I write but I also like a lot of other different kinds of books and but you know one of my favorite writers is Alice Monroe.
[28:55]She does her the form she writes in is completely different from I mentioned but she's utter brilliant and then the British writer Tessa Hadley who you know I think she's much more interested in sort of writing about adolescence I think and growing up although there's a lot of quite wonderful.
[29:11]I mean she's a wonderful writer I really love her work.
[29:15]I just kind of wait for his next book to come out.
[29:19]So this sort of very then I just read this really wonderful book by the unfortunately named Michael crummy.
[29:27]She changed it but he's a very established Canadian writer called The Innocence the Pearl and it's just as different as it could be it's sort of set in Nova Scotia with a few children who.
[29:40]whose parents both die and they sort of set up living alone in the in the 19th century I think it is or maybe the early 20th but I think the 19th.
[29:49]And it's just this sort of story of their their complete innocence of they're not knowing anything about anything.
[29:57]It's a very it's just an amazing.
[30:00]I can't recommend it highly enough.
[30:01]So that's sort of saying, and I like to read some nonfiction.
[30:05]Yeah, I'm pretty.
[30:07]I'm around a lot.
[30:09]And I think I'm more judgmental of books
[30:12]like my sort of domestic books that I sort of feel
[30:16]a more critical of that.
[30:17]And I think because it's more like the work
[30:20]that I do probably, and I think we should have done that
[30:23]better than you did.
[30:24]No, I'm happy.
[30:27]Well, you wouldn't want to see the novels
[30:28]that I have stashed in my drawer, then.
[30:31]Anyway, well, thank you so much.
[30:33]Thank you for coming on mom's no time to read books.
[30:35]Thank you for so many delightful moments
[30:39]reading monogamy over the last couple of weeks.
[30:41]And I'm excited for you to come to my book club
[30:44]and talk to everybody there.
[30:45]And now I want to go back.
[30:46]I have to read your memoir about your dad
[30:48]because it sounds like such a moving emotional experience
[30:53]in relationships.
[30:54]So anyway, hopefully by a book club,
[30:55]I will have read that too.
[30:57]Right.
[30:58]Well, I'm good to see you again.
[30:59]I'm very glad to have met you from my bathroom
[31:01]to your bedroom for work.
[31:02]Yeah, exactly.
[31:03]This is a very interesting universe.
[31:06]Thanks so much.
[31:07]Thanks, bye-bye.
[31:10]Thanks so much to firstbooks.org for sponsoring
[31:12]this Labor Day book blast.
[31:14]Please consider giving to firstbook.org
[31:17]to help their network of 475,000 educators
[31:21]serving children in need.
[31:22]Thanks for listening to this episode of mom's
[31:24]don't have time to read books.
[31:26]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[31:28]at Zippy Owens, and at moms don't have time to read books.
[31:31]Also sign up for my newsletter at zippyowans.com
[31:33]and sign up for my virtual book club
[31:35]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[31:37]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[31:40]for the Sound Editing.
[31:41]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[31:43]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.