Jessica Winter, THE FOURTH CHILD

2021-04-05  ·  25:15  ·  Jessica Winter  ·  Podcast Audio

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[0:01]Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
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[1:29]Jessica Winter is the author of the fourth child, a novel.
[1:33]She is also an editor at the New Yorker.
[1:35]Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Book Forum, The Believer, and many other publications.
[1:41]She lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with her family.
[1:44]Welcome, Jessica. Thank you so much for coming on Moms.
[1:47]Don't have time to read books to discuss the fourth child, a novel, your latest book.
[1:51]Thank you for having me. It's a good sense to be here.
[1:53]Yeah, it's my pleasure.
[1:55]So for listeners who aren't familiar yet with the fourth child, could you give a little synopsis and also talk about what inspired you to write it?
[2:03]Sure. I would say that the book is a love story about a mother and her two very different daughters, one of whom is her biological daughter and the other is adopted.
[2:12]The mother's name is Jane. She's devoutly Catholic.
[2:15]She falls pregnant in high school and she gets married and she has three kids in quick succession.
[2:20]And as her kids are entering their tween in teen years and becoming more and more independent, she starts to feel this restlessness.
[2:28]This is bringing us up to the early 1990s.
[2:31]And her restlessness drives her toward two pretty fateful decisions.
[2:35]One is that she adopts a child from Romania named Morela.
[2:39]And the other is that she becomes active in a local pro-life organization.
[2:43]The idea for the book came to me about six years ago.
[2:46]I just had my own, my first baby.
[2:49]And I was thinking a lot at that time about reproductive rights.
[2:52]And I was also thinking a lot about attachment and attachment theory.
[2:56]I was reading a lot of the writings of Donald Winacott.
[2:59]And in this strange way, these ideas that were kind of bouncing around in my head started expressing themselves through these characters.
[3:06]And I went from there.
[3:07]You had a lot. You had like full-on excerpts from some of the attachment.
[3:11]And I was supposed to be learning from this attachment paradigm that I like forget.
[3:16]What should I be taking away?
[3:18]Oh my gosh, I hope I didn't miss things up.
[3:21]You did not.
[3:22]Winacott was just an extraordinary thinker.
[3:26]He was a visionary really.
[3:28]So much of what we understand about children and what we want to foster as parents now.
[3:33]So much of what we get from contemporary parenting experts actually comes from this person who was born in the late 19th century.
[3:40]The idea of validating a child's emotion so that they don't become codependent.
[3:45]That's when I caught the good enough mother.
[3:47]The idea of a transitional object.
[3:49]What else?
[3:50]Oh, the sacred importance of play that all of those ideas come from when I caught.
[3:55]And he's just, he's such a delightful writer.
[3:58]It's just really fun to read his stuff.
[4:00]He has a book called The Pigle.
[4:01]That's just this long description of a small child.
[4:04]And, but no, you did not screw anything.
[4:07]You didn't read Donald Winacott.
[4:09]And you can read him at any age.
[4:11]He's just wonderful.
[4:12]I did read like a bazillion parenting books at the time, which I remember doing jury duty when my twins were.
[4:18]I don't know.
[4:19]Not sleeping.
[4:20]Not that they do now.
[4:21]Well, actually one of them does.
[4:22]But I went to jury duty with like 10 parenting books on sleep.
[4:25]It was like, I was like a beauty of myself actually if I could like look back on that moment.
[4:29]And I all I did was like notes and, you know, course nothing worked.
[4:32]My daughter still never sleeps and she's 14, but almost 14.
[4:35]Anyway, we are all parodies of ourselves.
[4:38]It's like joke.
[4:39]It's all like a joke.
[4:41]Well, I found it so interesting in your book how you described even just the process of James how she includes religion and so much of her life and sort of the role of religion as it courses through and even like how it sort of ends up with what they think is this like missionary trip and she comes back of course like a child or how her other children had thought of it or how her husband had sort of presented it at the time.
[5:05]Sort of the way that religion is courses through the book and I was hoping you could just talk a little more about that.
[5:11]Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the book comes from my own thoughts and my own wrestling with Catholicism.
[5:17]I grew up in the Catholic church.
[5:19]And I think that I just had a lot to work through about how the church and how the idea of God was really important to me as a kid.
[5:28]And then it kind of left me and I had never really reckoned with that in an essay or in fiction or anywhere before I wrote this book.
[5:38]And I think that one of the things, one of the reasons I turned away from the church was what I interpreted to be its focus on suffering.
[5:49]I really think the Catholic church from the crosses and the stations of the cross and the sermons that I heard as a kid and the idea of reconciliation through confession.
[6:02]I made my first confession when I was seven.
[6:04]What was I confessing to?
[6:06]Yeah, I think I confess to something like I wasn't nice enough about sharing my crayons.
[6:11]I was really freaking out because I couldn't come up with anything to confess to the first time I did confession.
[6:17]And so this idea of suffering and penance and guilt that so suffuses the Catholic church, I think was was a big part of why I just didn't want any part of it anymore.
[6:30]And it was it was nice to finally find a way through fiction to kind of explore these ideas through people who are perhaps more interesting than me.
[6:40]And how to more interesting story than I did that that was it was a relief to find that and I'm really grateful for it.
[6:47]And so where have you ended up? How do you what's the role of religion in your life now?
[6:50]Not that this is any of my business and feel free not to answer but it doesn't have one.
[6:55]Okay, it doesn't have one and I wish it did. I really wish it did and maybe you know it's it's never too late but but right now I'm just coasting through as a as a free agent.
[7:05]And you're focused on reproductive rights both in the book and in a recent New York article and everything tell me a little more about how you feel about that or how you decided to approach it in fiction.
[7:17]Sure, I mean I I've always wanted I guess similarly to always wanting to write about the Catholic church I've always wanted to write about the spring of life, which were these massive anti abortion demonstrations that happened in my hometown of Buffalo in April of 1992.
[7:33]And it was a really big deal I was 15 so I was just a hair too young to participate in any way or really be deeply knowledgeable about it at the time.
[7:43]But it was a big deal for my hometown and it framed a lot of my thinking about where I grew up my own adolescence.
[7:51]Again, the Catholic church because the reason that these anti abortion protesters targeted Buffalo was because of its large Catholic population and reproductive rights itself.
[8:01]It was a real crystallizing event for me and for years I thought do I want to write an oral history of the spring of life do I want to write an essay is it a story.
[8:12]And I came to writing fiction very late I started writing my first novel in my mid thirties.
[8:18]And again, as with Catholicism it was just I don't want to say joy because these these issues are so difficult, but it was really bracing and kind of exciting to find a forum fiction for thinking through the spring of life in a way that might be.
[8:36]surprising or revelatory in a way that a newspaper article or something would not be.
[8:43]Wait so tell me about your trajectory and first of all, I do not think writing a novel in your thirties is very late.
[8:49]I mean, people who write them novels and they're 60s for the first time so I don't think that's late at all, but just store that away and do with it what you will.
[8:57]Well, how did you get into writing and how did you become like an executive editor at the New Yorker like tell me about your whole writing life and you know maybe start with college or wherever it starts.
[9:09]Sure, I mean if you'd ask me when I was a teenager what I wanted to be I would have said a doctor writer.
[9:15]A high school teacher gave me the book down from Troy then memoir by Richard Seltzer he was a surgeon he died a few years ago.
[9:22]And that had a big influence on me probably a bad influence because Seltzer had this big ponderous kind of sentimental style that I now find kind of unbearable.
[9:31]But his career sort of it sort of provided an accessible role model and it turned out as I discovered in college I just wasn't a good enough student to do the doctor part.
[9:42]I've never thought of myself as a particularly creative person I think I was attracted to criticism and reporting and journalism and editing because to my eye in each of those disciplines the primary material is already there for you right like if you're writing a work of criticism.
[10:00]and you have the work of art.
[10:01]If you are reporting, the story is already there
[10:03]and you just have to tell it as truthfully
[10:06]and fairly as possible.
[10:07]If you are an editor, the writer does all the hard work
[10:09]and you just help them make a good piece even better.
[10:13]And so fiction was scary to me
[10:16]because it felt more like a blank page.
[10:18]It felt more purely generative.
[10:20]And so once I did find it,
[10:22]it was just thrilling to find a new way to write.
[10:25]But backing up, I always wanted,
[10:28]I think I was always like a magazine person
[10:30]or I guess a website person,
[10:32]but websites weren't around when I was a kid.
[10:34]I remember when the Barnes and Noble opened up
[10:36]on transit road when I was 14.
[10:39]I would just spend hours in the magazine section
[10:42]like pouring through all the magazines.
[10:43]Like they had zines, like zines were big
[10:45]in the early 90s and they had all these obscure journals
[10:48]and I was fascinated by this whole world out there
[10:51]of people making these beautiful objects.
[10:54]And I didn't understand the production process.
[10:56]I didn't understand how did the writer know exactly
[11:00]to write that many words to fit on this page?
[11:03]That's amazing, which is obviously totally naive and silly,
[11:06]but I was always so intrigued.
[11:09]And so I think maybe I just came out of the box
[11:12]kind of factory assembled to make magazines
[11:15]and make websites.
[11:17]And so that's always what I did.
[11:19]I worked on newspapers in college.
[11:22]My first job out of college was at the village voice.
[11:26]and it just kind of went from there pretty organically.
[11:30]And what happened after that?
[11:31]I went, let's see, I went to London for a few years
[11:33]to go to grad school.
[11:35]I came back and I worked at O, the Oprah magazine.
[11:40]I ran the front of the book.
[11:42]And then I ran the back of the book at time.
[11:44]And then I went to sleep and then I went to the New Yorker.
[11:47]And I would love to, I think that young people just starting out
[11:51]they want to hear from the old folk
[11:52]that there was some master plan.
[11:54]And if you just map the template onto your own life,
[11:57]you can get to the magazine you've always
[12:00]most admired in the whole world.
[12:02]And oh my god, I can't believe I work at the New Yorker.
[12:04]But there is no master plan.
[12:06]You do one job and you do the best work that you can.
[12:11]And you make connections and friendships
[12:14]and that leads to something else and something else
[12:16]and something else.
[12:17]But there's no, I never had a map.
[12:19]Yeah, those don't exist.
[12:21]I feel like the people I knew starting out
[12:24]were like, I'm going to do this and this.
[12:25]Like those things end up not working out.
[12:27]And the people who I'm not sure.
[12:28]But I think I'm going to go this way
[12:30]and end up having these windy roads
[12:32]that take them interesting places.
[12:33]So yeah, I think even the question,
[12:35]like what do you want to be when you go up?
[12:37]It's like, forget it.
[12:38]Like I've won like 57 jobs.
[12:41]Who knows what?
[12:42]And what do you want to be this way?
[12:42]I just changed my job.
[12:43]Like, who knows?
[12:45]So what is it like?
[12:46]Just because I'm sure people would be interested in knowing
[12:49]because I'm interested in knowing like what
[12:50]is it like to be an editor at the New Yorker
[12:52]and have like all this amazing talent
[12:54]and then be able to work with from the writers
[12:56]and then also get to write for them yourself.
[12:59]Like what is it like?
[13:01]I mean, it's incredible.
[13:02]The vast majority of the work that I do
[13:04]is on the website, occasionally I'll do a print piece.
[13:06]And I know it's amazing.
[13:09]It's incredible.
[13:10]And the most amazing part of it,
[13:12]I think, is the young people at the New Yorker
[13:15]because they are just as smart and just as wise
[13:18]and their ideas are just as vibrant and exciting
[13:23]as like the old folk.
[13:25]I mean, that's the best part of it for me
[13:27]is working with the people who are the future of journalism
[13:32]who are so much smarter than I was at that age
[13:35]and probably smarter than I am now.
[13:37]That's what, I mean, especially in a pandemic,
[13:41]just working with that kind of talent
[13:43]is really helping me get through my days certainly.
[13:48]And it's just incredible to be surrounded
[13:50]by people who hold themselves to such high standards
[13:54]and who are so kind and helpful and collegial
[14:00]about holding themselves to those kinds of standards.
[14:03]It's not cutthroat.
[14:04]It's not, you know, people trying to outdo each other.
[14:08]It's people trying to outdo themselves together.
[14:11]And that's a wonderful thing.
[14:12]That is a wonderful thing.
[14:13]I loved your recent piece, by the way,
[14:15]and I have to find it here on, it was called
[14:18]Stealth Kids Movies for the Era of Quarantine.
[14:20]And I know this wasn't so recent, it was a year ago,
[14:22]but I, I think lived through all of the very long year ago.
[14:26]Very long year ago.
[14:27]I just don't read this because it was so funny.
[14:29]I recently told my five-year-old that she could no longer
[14:31]watch her favorite Adam Sandler trilogy,
[14:34]which she discovered at an international flight
[14:36]when parental innovations were low
[14:37]because, as I put it, our hotel translation ran out.
[14:42]She accepted this response with stoic grace
[14:44]and utter faith in my trustworthiness.
[14:46]Now, though, we are entering our second week
[14:48]of quarantine with many more likely to come.
[14:50]And I suspect that boredom discovered
[14:52]in screen temptation will lower the bar
[14:54]in the manner of, say, an international flight
[14:56]the last 60 days.
[14:58]Remember when we thought quarantine would only last 60 days?
[15:01]Yes, if we were, I mean, where we ever were that young, exactly.
[15:05]So what ended up happening?
[15:07]How did, I mean, you list so many funny movies,
[15:09]and I have a six-year-old and a seven-year-old,
[15:11]and also a 20-year-old, but I'm deep into all these shows.
[15:14]So this was like, you know, music to my ears, this piece.
[15:18]Did you end up watching like any,
[15:20]what was the update on this after surviving a year of quarantine?
[15:24]They have continued to have forgotten
[15:26]Hotel Transylvania.
[15:28]I have not had a Hotel Transylvania request,
[15:30]which is a relief.
[15:31]Yep.
[15:32]I mean, it's kids TV and kids movies
[15:35]are just so much better than they were when I was a kid.
[15:40]So the job of, okay, just sit here for an hour
[15:44]while, you know, I clean the kitchen.
[15:47]It's just so much easier now to feel kind of good
[15:51]about whatever they're watching.
[15:53]They had a blue-y phase, right now they're into waffles
[15:57]and mokie, the Michelle Obama puppet show.
[15:59]No, we had nothing really into that, right?
[16:01]Right, right, right, yeah.
[16:02]Fucking mokie.
[16:03]What else?
[16:04]Yeah, I mean, they have phases where they'll just watch one show
[16:07]over and over and over again.
[16:08]And then one day, like a light switch flips.
[16:10]Yeah.
[16:11]And they want to, and sometimes I don't even know
[16:13]how they're learning about this stuff.
[16:14]I mean, the Netflix algorithm is a little bit diabolical
[16:17]because it automatically plays trailers for the next show.
[16:21]And I get super interested in the trailers
[16:22]because the trailer's really good.
[16:24]But yeah, I mean, I have, what I've decided is
[16:27]during the week, we have a no screens policy.
[16:31]I instituted this in June.
[16:33]No iPad, no TV, nothing during the week.
[16:36]And I have mixed feelings about this
[16:38]because it's nice, it's prescriptive.
[16:39]The kids know that they can have a binge on the weekend.
[16:42]But the problem is the kids have a binge on the weekend.
[16:44]And they just want to watch TV all weekend.
[16:47]So I don't know, I might fine tune it a little bit
[16:50]for right now, that's where we are.
[16:51]I have not done as good a job with that.
[16:53]We still have screens during the week.
[16:56]I don't know.
[16:57]I feel like my kids are now so into YouTube
[16:58]and like playing roblox and things like that.
[17:01]That I would rather they watch TV in the old days.
[17:05]I'm terrified of YouTube.
[17:06]Yeah, absolutely terrified of YouTube.
[17:08]It's really not.
[17:09]And does watch Subway, Subway is coming in and out
[17:12]of the station on YouTube.
[17:14]There's this whole community of subway watchers.
[17:17]And the videos are super wholesome.
[17:19]They're just, the commenters are like, good job with the sea
[17:23]train today.
[17:24]It's just very, it's almost like the most wholesome
[17:27]like Andy Warhol movie.
[17:28]Wow.
[17:29]It's like nothing happens, but he enjoys watching those.
[17:33]But I watch him like a hawk when he's watching YouTube
[17:36]because I'm just so afraid of what might pop up.
[17:38]Yeah, it's not good.
[17:41]And it's not like, it's not a way for me to like run off
[17:45]and take a shower or something because I'm like hovering
[17:47]over him, which I'm sure he loves it too.
[17:51]And how do you know?
[17:52]So I heard about this latest book originally
[17:54]a while ago from Remodelon.
[17:55]How did you, how are you guys connected?
[17:58]How did I make Remodelon?
[17:59]We did a podcast together years ago.
[18:01]We did an episode of mom and dad or fighting together.
[18:06]And then I think he wrote for me.
[18:10]And his kids are slightly older than mine.
[18:13]And oh, I remember, I mean, one time I ran into him
[18:17]at the playground, we go to the same playground a lot.
[18:19]And it just kind of went from there.
[18:20]But I really admired his first book, which in pretty.
[18:24]And I think I wrote a very brief little squib about it
[18:27]when my first book came out.
[18:28]And I enjoyed watching his career.
[18:31]Yeah, it's a real treat to become friends as well.
[18:34]So tell me a little more about your process
[18:35]writing this book.
[18:37]What was it like?
[18:38]And even your last book as well.
[18:39]But my process for this one was that I really,
[18:42]I started researching it before I even
[18:45]realized I was writing it because I was doing all this reading
[18:48]on attachment theory and because I was doing all this reading
[18:51]on the spring of life.
[18:53]And yeah, one day I looked up and thought, oh,
[18:55]I think this is a book.
[18:57]So that was nice to kind of back into it.
[19:00]It didn't feel quite as high stakes to just sort of realize
[19:04]midstream that it was a book.
[19:07]And my process is pretty haphazard.
[19:10]I loved what Vandalovita said on one of your shows recently
[19:14]about how you have to do the work every single day
[19:18]because you never know what's going to happen.
[19:20]Like you have to hold that space and just wait
[19:23]for something to happen.
[19:24]I love that.
[19:25]I loved how it brought this idea of unpredictability
[19:28]and surprise and mystery to what can feel like real
[19:30]drudgery.
[19:31]It's like getting up at four in the morning
[19:33]and putting in your two hours or whatever it is.
[19:35]What I find works for me is the five hour block.
[19:39]There's something magic about the five hour block.
[19:42]So a lot of Saturdays, I would hand the kids over
[19:45]to a sitter and I would lock myself away
[19:48]and I would give myself the five hour block
[19:50]because it's short enough that you can't mess around too much.
[19:55]Like if you do steal over to YouTube
[19:57]or if you do start texting a friend.
[20:00]like it's like, oh, I don't know.
[20:01]Like this is kind of creeping up on me,
[20:03]but it's long enough that you can really lose yourself
[20:05]in the time.
[20:06]And so, you know, I had years and years of Saturdays,
[20:09]not every Saturday, you know,
[20:10]there's birthday parties and there's life to be lived.
[20:15]But a lot of Saturdays over a lot of years,
[20:17]I did the five hour block
[20:19]and just kept pushing the boulder up the hill.
[20:21]Wow, I love that.
[20:23]And then at one point, my friends,
[20:25]Jin and Louis, Jin Dilling and Louis, Salatown,
[20:28]they went away and they gave,
[20:29]they had this beautiful cabin upstate.
[20:32]And I went there for 10 days.
[20:34]And I just locked myself away.
[20:35]Do you know what Ishiguro says about the crash,
[20:38]about how he wrote the remains of the day in 30 days?
[20:40]And just he had no obligations to the outside world.
[20:43]His wife took care of everything.
[20:44]Like he didn't have to do anything.
[20:45]He didn't have to talk to anybody.
[20:47]He didn't have to make dinner or like wipe a counter.
[20:50]He just had 30 days to crash a first draft
[20:53]of the remains of the day.
[20:54]And I was trying to do that in 10 days in Jin and Louis,
[20:57]cabin had it go.
[21:00]It went well.
[21:00]I mean, the draft that came out of those 10 days
[21:04]was absolute garbage, but it existed.
[21:08]There was a draft.
[21:10]And just getting over that psychological hurdle
[21:13]was just an incredible feeling.
[21:15]Wow, that's amazing.
[21:17]And what are you gonna work on next?
[21:19]Do you have another novel in you?
[21:20]I have another novel in me.
[21:21]I don't know when I'm going to write it.
[21:23]I have the idea for it,
[21:25]but I have not been terribly productive
[21:27]or creative during the pandemic.
[21:29]So once things get back to normal,
[21:31]I'm hoping maybe I'll get my Saturday five hour block back.
[21:34]But right now, I'm kind of idling.
[21:36]I must confess.
[21:37]And I feel sheepish about saying that out loud.
[21:40]But I also want other people to hear somebody saying this
[21:44]so that they feel okay if they're having the same
[21:47]kind of frustration than I am.
[21:48]I hear that over and over and over again.
[21:50]Oh, good.
[21:51]We're not alone in how you feel about it.
[21:53]And there is no pressure.
[21:55]I feel bad sometimes asking the question,
[21:57]like I'm putting people on the spot
[21:58]like you have to have something in the works already.
[22:01]And I don't mean it.
[22:01]It's just some people do have stuff.
[22:03]So I don't know.
[22:04]I just like to know, like even if it means,
[22:06]my next plan is to go to the park with my kids.
[22:09]Like, amazing.
[22:10]Great.
[22:10]I don't know.
[22:11]I just like to know what's next.
[22:12]What's on the list?
[22:13]That is the extent of my plans.
[22:14]That's great.
[22:15]This weekend, we've got a birthday party.
[22:17]And there's a new playground that just opened up
[22:19]in our neighborhood, like those are the extent of my plans.
[22:22]And that's okay.
[22:22]It's nice to just, it's prescriptive,
[22:25]which I think is a word I used earlier in this conversation.
[22:28]And it's focusing to just tell yourself,
[22:32]this part of my life has to go on hold for a little while.
[22:36]And now we're going to go to the Mr. Softie truck together.
[22:39]It's nice.
[22:40]But I do look forward to the day
[22:42]when it comes back, definitely.
[22:44]What advice would you have for aspiring authors?
[22:46]Oh, my goodness.
[22:47]I feel bad that I'm repeating myself,
[22:49]but I just holding the space,
[22:52]just holding the space, whether it's 45 minutes in the morning
[22:55]or two hours at night or five hours on Saturday,
[22:58]you just have to hold that space for yourself
[23:01]and give that gift to yourself.
[23:02]And it's okay if nothing comes of it.
[23:05]It's okay if you write 20 pages one week
[23:09]and a paragraph, another, but just hold the space
[23:12]for the possibility of what might happen like that.
[23:15]I think there's like two kinds of writer.
[23:18]I've found this kind of recently.
[23:21]There's two kinds of writers.
[23:22]They're the writers who really want to find an audience
[23:26]that they're not pandering to an audience
[23:30]or trying to manufacture something
[23:32]for a certain demographic of people,
[23:34]but they really want to publish something
[23:36]that enters into a conversation,
[23:38]a larger conversation in the world.
[23:40]And there's a second type of writer who you could tell them,
[23:44]this manuscript that you're working so hard on,
[23:47]it's just going to linger in a drawer
[23:49]for the rest of your life.
[23:50]And so you're not gonna get an agent,
[23:51]you're not gonna get an editor.
[23:53]This is going nowhere.
[23:54]And I would still do it.
[23:55]They would still do it to the best of their ability
[23:58]for themselves because they have to.
[24:00]And I think in the, I think those writers,
[24:03]that second group of writers has it easier
[24:06]than the first group because they don't want anything
[24:11]other than the work.
[24:12]And so I guess my other piece of advice
[24:13]is try to foster that part of yourself
[24:16]that is saying this is just for me
[24:18]and the work is its own reward.
[24:19]Of it.
[24:20]I have a really hard time with that.
[24:22]I do not follow my own advice,
[24:23]but if other people can do it, they should.
[24:26]Awesome.
[24:27]Well, Jessica, thank you.
[24:29]Thanks for coming on Mom's no time to read books.
[24:30]Thanks for this lovely conversation.
[24:32]And I'm going to go back to your article over here
[24:34]to get some more movie tips for the kids when I'm done.
[24:38]Thank you, Zibi.
[24:39]This was so much fun.
[24:40]Okay, all right.
[24:41]Thanks, Zibi.
[24:42]Bye.
[24:44]Thanks to tracked app for sponsoring today's episode.
[24:47]Thanks for listening to this episode
[24:49]of Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[24:51]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[24:54]and at Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[24:56]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com
[24:58]and sign up for my virtual book club
[25:00]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[25:03]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound
[25:05]for the Sound Editing.
[25:07]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[25:08]for providing this fantastic intro and now trim music.