Francine Prose, THE VIXEN: A Novel
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[2:04]The financing pros is the author of The Vixen, a novel.
[2:07]Francine is the author of 21 Works the Fiction, including the highly acclaimed Mr. Monkey,
[2:12]the New York Times bestseller, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,
[2:17]a changed man, which won the date and literary peace prize, and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.
[2:23]Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised and frank, the book, The Life the Afterlife,
[2:28]and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic.
[2:32]The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright,
[2:36]a director's fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library.
[2:40]Pros is a former president of Penn America Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
[2:46]and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
[2:49]She is a distinguished writer and residence at Bard College.
[2:52]And this was part of my series at the Temple Emanuel Striker Center, Women on the Booth.
[2:57]Hi, Francine.
[2:58]Thank you so much.
[2:59]I'm fine. Thank you both.
[3:01]Of course.
[3:02]Well, Francine, congratulations on the Vixen, your latest novel.
[3:06]You have been such a prolific author as Marjorie said, and have done so much writing about reading and writing yourself,
[3:13]which I also would love to talk to you about today.
[3:15]But I was hoping we could start for those who are here today, but haven't read the Vixen yet.
[3:20]If you could talk a little bit about that, and honestly, it read so much like a memoir,
[3:25]I kept having to flip back.
[3:27]I was like, is she the one who was sitting there with her parents watching the TV?
[3:31]I was like, did I get it wrong?
[3:32]Except.
[3:33]There's some significant differences.
[3:36]So.
[3:37]Yeah, I was the one sitting there with my parents watching the TV.
[3:40]But my main, my narrator, main character is a man.
[3:44]I realized.
[3:45]I realized.
[3:46]Yeah.
[3:47]Well, the novel takes place.
[3:49]That first scene takes place in 1953 and June 1953.
[3:52]And my hero Simon Putnam just graduated from Harvard is back.
[3:57]Having, having failed to figure out a plan for his future is back with his parents in Coney Island,
[4:02]and they're watching the news reports of the, of the execution of Julius and
[4:06]F of Rosenberg, which takes place on that night of June 19th.
[4:10]And it's a strange scene because they're watching the reports on TV.
[4:13]And at the same time, all these 50s TV series are interrupting like.
[4:18]I love Lucy and the Aussie and Harriet Nelson, Joseph.
[4:22]And it's complicated because, because Simon's mother was a high school friend of Ethel Rosenberg.
[4:28]So the, so the event has a kind of personal resonance for the family in, in addition to its historical resonance.
[4:34]And then we fast forward about six months to September.
[4:37]And Simon has gotten a job through the hard work as mother and the offices of his uncle,
[4:43]who's this kind of sadistic public intellectual at a very old-fashioned white shoe.
[4:50]Excuse me, Waspi publishing firm.
[4:52]And his first job is to read the slash pile of just unsolicited submissions that have come in.
[4:57]And they were sort of fun to write, you know, just, just titles for novels that would never be published by anyone,
[5:03]anyone.
[5:04]And, and, and his first assignment, his first real assignment is to edit a novel, the first novel.
[5:11]And he's horrified, truly horrified to find out that it's his sleazy, lorid,
[5:18]bodice ripper based, loosely based, very loosely based on the Rosenberg case.
[5:23]So there's a character.
[5:25]The novel is called the Vixen, the Patriot, and the fanatic.
[5:29]And the Vixen in this case is, is Ethel, who's been renamed Esther Rosenstein, who's this, who's this Madahari happily award.
[5:39]We no longer use Nymphomaniac, who is just deducing everyone, Russian spies, American spies, American attorney generals, et cetera, et cetera.
[5:45]So it's a moral problem for Simon, because on the one hand, he wants to succeed in his new chosen profession.
[5:52]And he wants to be an editor at this fancy house.
[5:55]He wants to be accepted into the kind of glittering madman world of 50s publishing of three martini lunches and social status and so on.
[6:06]But he knows that it's wrong to publish this book or a book like this.
[6:10]And it's again a special problem for him because of his mother's relation with.
[6:15]And so much in the novel is Simon trying to work out his own conscience.
[6:22]Really, how he feels about success, how he feels about what he's been asked to do, how he feels about loyalty was to his family to the truth, what may be the truth.
[6:30]And then kind of mixed in with that is the whole question of a simulation because his family is.
[6:37]And I guess his parents, although they're really nothing like my parents are the generation of my parents, which was much of it was about leaving their big working class Jewish families and becoming part of the assimilated American middle class, upper middle class.
[6:52]And he has to face the questions of what's lost and what's gained.
[6:56]And he's been in much more as lost and is again by this assimilation, which he's attempting at great personal cost for himself throughout the novel.
[7:05]And also that there are a number of sub plots as some dissatisfied we're disappointed out.
[7:11]He falls in love with every woman he meets one of them is the puditive author of the victim who's this kind of odd, fake creature living in what may or may not be a mental hospital in the Hudson Valley.
[7:25]So again, the novel just tracks his progress from a confused young post graduate mess to something much more spoiler stable that he is at the end.
[7:37]I thought it was so funny the way you had him trying to pursue the job or the graduate degree he wanted next and some like completely random.
[7:48]I can't even remember what it was.
[7:49]It was called law and mythology.
[7:51]It was folklore and mythology.
[7:52]But you know, I mean, one of the reasons I had such great sympathy for him was that I was a media of a literature major also at Harvard.
[8:00]And it just never occurred to me that this was not the most practical major if I ever want to make a living.
[8:06]I mean, once I realized that I didn't want to go into academia, there wasn't a lot I could do with where I studied what I learned.
[8:16]So again, although I mean, one of the things that made me happy writing the book was that, and I wasn't planning this in advance, but the way in which all the things that seem to me, even like kind of sidetracks,
[8:28]or details, it turned out to have some actual bearing on what was happening in the plot.
[8:34]So, so yes, his studies seemed a little goofy, let's say, but by the end you realize that there was that the same what do I want to say the same dark conspiracy underneath everything else was underneath that as well.
[8:48]I can't know. It wasn't just the folklore. It was the one that he wanted after. It was the job he wanted after that he couldn't get, well, anyway, whatever.
[8:56]I'm convinced I will find this, but never mind. It's not important, but it was really funny. Anyway, yes.
[9:01]And I also found it so interesting. I mean, the sort of intersection of when you're watching something that is so harrowing and gruesome and emotional.
[9:10]And then, you know, having to put it, the juxtaposition with the shows that their family was watching was one thing, but it's also a signal to, it's also sort of representative of how we bring in the news of all these horrible things into our life, right?
[9:27]Whether it's a show that interrupts us or if it's, you know, we're running around doing whatever and we open up the newspaper and there's some awful story of and you're like, oh, and then you just have to close the newspaper and go running off to, right.
[9:38]It's the integration of this horror into regular life. I find that it's fascinating.
[9:45]Yeah, no one have it still. I mean, for better or worse, that still happens the way, you know, some terrible terrible catastrophe will happen.
[9:53]And then you're not going to leave dinner burning on the stove while you watch it. So some other thing comes in.
[10:00]Yeah, no, a lot of that, I mean, that first scene, it wasn't until I figured out how to write that first scene that I realized I could write the novel.
[10:07]So, and that was because I made many, many attempts to write it before, but that first scene, I mean, one of the things that I wanted to happen there was that I wanted, I thought, well, this is sort of a way of signaling how much it's about families because because although it's kind of, you know, under the surface,
[10:26]that first scene, there are four families going there, the Rosenberg family, Ethel and Julius, and their children, their sons, the family in the novel, Simon and his parents, and then the, the, the, the, the, and Harriet Nelson family and Lucy and Desi, that family, so that this, this, just bizarre, comic tragic interplay of these four families is going on all the way through that scene.
[10:52]Not to mention, then you bring in the author's family, right, that is, you're from your perspective and then the reader's perspective, so it's like this criss-crossed dance of all of the things going on.
[11:02]So I read your essay and let have about the importance of clarity in writing and that writing has to be above all clear.
[11:10]And when I was reading how you wrote this book, that is absolutely the case and I was thinking like, as I was analyzing sort of individual sentences, you know, what did she leave out?
[11:20]Like what did she choose to keep in? How did she write this sentence? So tell me a little bit about the pros in the writing of this book and how you sort of bring that approach to everything you write.
[11:31]Well, for one thing, it probably went through 40 or 50 revisions easily.
[11:37]I mean, I knew about 14 at the beginning because I'd saved the drafts and then I stopped counting and I mean, I have them, you know, if I want you
[11:43]like a final computer because after a certain point, I start numbering the drafts just so I don't lose anything. So yeah, let's say 50 drafts.
[11:50]And what's the difference? I mean, cutting is a great pleasure. I mean, just it's like losing weight with no pain.
[11:58]I mean, it's like, yeah, the word counter. I love my work counter so much because I lost 50 words and I haven't noticed.
[12:05]So part of editing is just going through and seeing if you absolutely need everything that's there. If the reader can understand what's there without that.
[12:13]I mean, there's a little danger, which is that once you cut it, it stays in your mind. So it's never that is you may have cut something really essential that the reader can't need to understand, but you're still thinking it.
[12:24]So you have to go back and fix it. And then clarity, as you said, it's the most important thing when every line asking yourself just on the simplest level is anyone else but me going to understand what this means.
[12:38]I mean, that's what I tell my students. I mean, I teach at one class at Bard College and it's a literature class, but my students have to write a weekly 300 word paper.
[12:49]And it's very easy to teach them to write that way because you know it's not like we're waiting till the end. They hand me a 15 page disaster.
[12:58]But anyway, but often I just say to them, what do you mean, you know, because they feel that they have to translate it into this language in which papers are written or whatever, you know, blah, blah, blah.
[13:10]And as soon as they say, this is what I mean, it becomes, they just, then I say, well, I want to write that. And I think that on some level that process goes on all the way up and down people who have writing experience,
[13:23]you know, writing experience or veterans or beginners. I mean, that that that need to say will someone understand this.
[13:32]And you have written an entire book teaching people how to read as if you were a writer, like what you can get from books in order to write more efficiently more, you know, how to analyze a text.
[13:44]And I remember before I started this whole podcast thing, I was just just a huge reader, you know, I just love to read for fun.
[13:52]But I wasn't taking books apart. And I remember sitting like right here with this one author Charles Duhr going to college with and he was like, well, yeah, the first thing I do is, you know, figure it out. I flip through it and I do this and I go through the sections. I do this and I read it again.
[14:05]And then I unpack that and I was like, you do what?
[14:07]I do that. So tell me about your approach and why this is important.
[14:12]Well, I do it. I do it in a much more. I mean, I do it line by line. And what. And again, that's how I teach. I mean, we just go through it line by line and saying, say, okay, what kind of information are we getting here.
[14:26]What's underneath the subtext. What's what does the writer again, not feel necessary to tell us what is what are we getting without being told.
[14:35]And just to look at each word, each line, each punctuation mark really to see what effect it has on the reader and also I think one of the things you're doing when you're writing is that you know when you're reading as a writer.
[14:48]Is that you know how many alternate choices and how many possibilities have been discarded to produce what's on the page.
[14:56]So you can, in to it back to, for example, what would be the really bad way of writing this thing that's so good that I'm reading and that's not that hard to figure out.
[15:07]So very easy to figure out. So, and it helps you because you you helps you realize why the good choice rather than the bad choice might have been made.
[15:17]interesting. Well, let's go back to Simon in the vixen and how he approaches his job in publishing and the slash file.
[15:25]And he's questioning why some things are getting approved and some things are getting rejected and you know hiding things sort of under the bed that he wants to read and and all of that there is so much subjectivity in what gets accepted and what doesn't get accepted.
[15:41]What can we take away sort of from the publishing world, particularly people who perhaps are trying to get published or things like that from his era that he was publishing in.
[15:53]I mean this kind of reminded me of Joanna Raycuff's book about the letters from Davey Salinger and that person at the literature agency had to like read throughout the letters, but there you know the sort of time frame and how do you make sense of the submissions and who should really be the
[16:09]the person deciding what gets published. I don't know. This is sort of a bigger question, but.
[16:14]Well, in listing the books that he turns down or that have been turned down.
[16:19]I made sure to find books as I said that would never get published anywhere at any time. I mean you just look at the title and you go, I don't think so. So there's that, but also I think the most important thing to come out of any conversation like this is,
[16:34]that the last thing that the writer wants to think about is could this get published or who's going to get published this or how is, how is my audience exist in or non exist and going to greet this because it's the quickest way to stop yourself and not only that.
[16:52]It's the best way to deform what you're writing into some way that has finally nothing to do with you, but has only to do with some imagined readership that you might not have or might not ever have.
[17:04]I mean, believe me, if I was thinking that way at the very beginning, I would not. I mean, if I said to myself, who do I think is going to publish and read a comic novel about the Rosenberg execution.
[17:18]I'm like, no, that's for now. I'm not going there, but I knew, but there was something in me that that for whatever reason had to do it just had to write that book.
[17:28]So so can I think that that's more important. The question of what is it you feel that you have to do is much more important and the question is, will anyone ever like this?
[17:38]Maybe they won't. Maybe they will. You can't tell.
[17:41]I mean, if you like it, someone's going to like it. Maybe not everybody.
[17:45]That's what you hope, Zibi. That's what you really have at least one other person out there.
[17:49]Well, I, you know, I have to say, I feel that I've been incredibly fortunate because because I was really worried for all sorts of reasons before this book came out because of what it is because it is a common novel because of the subject matter and and I was really shocked by the good reviews to put it just simply.
[18:09]By people who seem to get what I was doing, who seem to understand what I was doing and didn't seem not to be horrified by it. So that was a real that was a I felt just a blessing and really extraordinary to me because you just never know.
[18:24]Well, I mean, I feel like you did a lot of the things that you're supposed to do to make a great novel.
[18:30]The character we're all kind of rooting for and yet kind of laugh at and you know, you know, the sort of underdog ish type guy and you just like want to see him succeed and you wrote it well and it has all this intrigue and you know, I I didn't.
[18:44]I mean, I know a little bit about the, I mean, this is embarrassing to admit what I admit what I knew and didn't know about the Rosenbergs and I don't know.
[18:51]It's like a little history is thrown in there. So you learn and I don't know. It's transports like a good novel shed.
[18:59]You're so welcome.
[19:01]Wait, tell tell me how can like how did you get started in this industry to begin with when did you know you were a writer when did you start writing and how did it.
[19:11]That was my, you know, my first novel came out in 1973. I think 74. I was very young. I was very, very young and actually my first novel was published by Athenaeum, which was pretty much exactly like the publishing company in the novel.
[19:26]I mean so much so that I worked out or I tried to remember back to the layout of the office.
[19:33]Oh, wow.
[19:34]And I just tracked my way around the office and and and that can off of the can off publishing family was the head of Athenaeum and he he had the office that I gave to Warren in my novel.
[19:46]So, you know, they core British hunting club, gentlemen's hunting club and I don't I don't I don't remember if he actually had pictures of hunting dogs on the wall.
[19:55]But that's kind of how I remember and it started simply I mean it started in a way that when I think.
[20:00]more rare now which was that I had taken a few writing classes at college and then I guess a year
[20:06]two years after I graduated. I gave it to a professor of my Monroe angle who'd be my writing teacher
[20:13]and he sent it to his editor at Athenaeum and he said I'm an unpublishedist. I mean you know because
[20:20]this was before publishing got so corporate and this was before you had to bring novels to
[20:26]marketing strategies and tell explain what the demographic readership was etc etc.
[20:32]And my editor, Harry Ford, who was a wonderful kind of legendary, they do published a lot of poets,
[20:38]he published a lot of poets of that generation. I mean W.S. Morrowind and Mark Strand and
[20:42]Don Justice. So you published a lot of poets and sales potential was not the first thing you're
[20:49]thinking of I think. So he really got it and then it kind of went along from there. So
[20:56]I was again lucky and lucky to have started off at a time I think very different from
[21:03]from the atmosphere we're in now. So I recently started my own publishing company. I don't know if
[21:08]you know it's called Zivi Books and I launched it in September. And so you know this is my sort
[21:13]of office. It is not there. No hunting friends. You know this is next to my daughters are in basically
[21:20]but I do have like this little team and we are it's all remote now and with today's world right we
[21:24]our slush file comes in electronically and we review it and you know it's so funny to see
[21:31]what has changed but I'm so interested in sort of where you where that started because
[21:36]a lot of things I'm posting today have evolved not necessarily for the better. It's just the way
[21:41]it's happened right like how do you go back to taking some of that personal touch of publishing
[21:46]in today's super super crowded market. So I'm interested in your character but also
[21:51]your experience you know I've been being in the industry for so long.
[21:55]Well I think you know I think one of the great things that's happening is that so many of
[21:58]this model presses are coming back and succeeding because because large corporate culture
[22:05]has never been a great friend of art. I mean yes they funded etc but not us particularly
[22:12]in particular. So I'm very glad to see that becoming less of a deciding factor about what
[22:18]so what kind of books do you publish? We are publishing fiction in Memphis.
[22:23]Yeah it's okay nobody gets my name right it's fine. I should just change it to Libby because
[22:27]everybody calls me Libby. We're publishing fiction in memoir 12 books a year starting in January 2023
[22:32]so it's telling us like exciting how it's great. I'm so excited about it we're getting amazing
[22:39]submissions we've acquired I think 10 books at this point and yeah it's fun it's really fun
[22:44]but I'm trying to do everything a little bit differently because I want to do it the way I want
[22:49]to do it. I haven't worked in publishing again I want to do it like from an author and reader-centered
[22:53]model so anyway I don't want to detract from my conversation about yearbooks but I'm always looking
[22:58]for information and you know ways to do things better and make I don't know the books are going to
[23:03]be great it's just this marketing you know it's just so hard to break through anywhere. I mean
[23:07]nobody's even like watching TV it's just so hard I literally said to my child the other day
[23:12]it's like 14 I was like okay if I was going to even take an ad somewhere we're like I want
[23:16]everybody to see it where would it be and she's like what? Well you know I got my son my one of my
[23:22]son my younger son is a music producer and I got him to do a video for the victim which is out
[23:27]there it's on YouTube and so on which was so brilliant I mean it blew me away and it got put up on
[23:33]Instagram and something you know I don't know if it's sold any books but it made me so happy
[23:38]as it was out there and be that I could say to my grown kid hey make me you know I probably
[23:43]took him like 10 minutes or something but it's fantastic so I recommend looking for us.
[23:50]Yes okay so the answer is hire your son to make hire your kids yes for sure for all of our books.
[23:55]Uh good that answers that. Yeah that answers that so you mentioned you had been come you'd come
[24:02]back to this book over and over again through the years are there other books that have been
[24:07]sort of gnawing away at you or you have some of that some of it written in some of it not or
[24:11]things that you know are on your wish list to do. Yeah I mean I have I have a couple of things and
[24:18]and they're all just so larval you know that I that I can't I mean there's I I keep starting
[24:26]the first piece of memoir I remember you know not counting kids you know articles about it
[24:30]what to feed your kids for dinner I remember about something that happened to me in the seven days
[24:35]and I've been thinking about that and then there's fictional subjects that just keep
[24:40]floating around but don't exactly crystallize so you know I mean I'm interested in I'm interested
[24:46]in those people in the 19th century that took pictures of ghosts you know those spirit photographers so
[24:51]I've been thinking about that as well but but we'll see. Interesting and what about your own reading
[24:58]like what do you like to read and what do you what are some of your favorites or what are you reading now?
[25:02]I'm reading Joy Williams' new novel it's really Harrow it's fantastic I'm reading well it depends
[25:09]what hour of the day you asked me I mean in the middle of the night I like to read just really
[25:14]you know like PDJ MC because I can read that I can read mystery thrillers and forget who did it
[25:19]so I'm always going to be fresh so you know and sound the acronym but also because I'm teaching
[25:26]and it's a strange course it's called sympathy for the devil and it's about it's about how
[25:30]writers create sympathy for apparently unsympathetic characters so this week we're doing
[25:36]high-wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes and the week before last we did this extraordinary book called
[25:42]Into That Darkness by Gita Sereni it's nonfiction it's a book length interview with the
[25:46]Cominant of Treblinka which is you know I said okay you know let's just see if there's anyone
[25:51]who's beyond sympathy let's just see let's just push it as far as we can to see so so naturally
[25:58]he came to mind so it was rough and I felt sort of badly about putting my students through that
[26:03]but whatever there is all this debate about how you feel about a book with an unlikable
[26:10]oh you know it's madness if man I mean man and you don't so I was reading actually there's a
[26:18]New York review books it just published in Elizabeth Taylor novel Mrs. Paul Free at the Claremont I
[26:24]think and it starts with there's a great introduction by Michael Hoffman and he says that
[26:28]that the word relatable means that people are being narcissistic even when they were reading
[26:34]and and it reminds me my camera what the source but some young woman saying I don't really like
[26:40]reading books because I'm not in them I think that I think that there's some of that going on with
[26:46]relatability I've asked my students not to use because I keep saying to them it's not about you
[26:52]that's the point it's not about you know about you you don't have to see yourself you can see
[26:57]something about yourself that you never knew was there or that you recognize but you know I'm
[27:03]not Anna Coretta but there are things about everyone I know and people in general that I see
[27:09]whenever I read that novel yeah well I mean there's so many do you think about how many different
[27:14]parts of yourself there are of course you're going to find little it's in bits of pieces of them
[27:18]everywhere although I did just for how to give my kids books that say like their names on the cover
[27:24]you can like personalize books now from sites like wonderfully in pen wizard or whatever and so it
[27:28]could be like you know so and so you know instead of saying like a random character I'm trying
[27:35]not to say my kids names because I like to keep it private let's pretend their name my name is
[27:38]Jane like Jane goes to the market or whatever and then like this Jane's bedtime story so then they
[27:43]go in and you can make the character kind of look like you anyway I guess I'm raising narcissists
[27:47]basically my point here well that's different though I mean I think anything you can do to get
[27:52]kids to read is is fair and square I mean you know I'm fine with a book with arms that give
[27:57]kids a big hug to come out of it you know I mean because because the fact that we're competing
[28:04]with their screens it's it really feels very very hard so so anything that does that and and I keep
[28:11]getting reports from friends who tell me how their children are buried in books and they can't get
[28:17]their children's head out but this is not my experience neither of my sense were that big reader and
[28:22]my grandchildren it's hard there's the water the jury's still out but but except maybe for one
[28:29]they don't seem to be passionate readers I was funny one of my my 14-year-old granddaughter
[28:34]took a book home from school when I was scheduled read for her AP book and I said oh that book
[28:39]it's horrible and she said there's a blurb from you on the back cover room so I said I had to
[28:48]explain that I reviewed the book and they picked the one really nice thing I said out of the
[28:53]review and put on the cover and I had no control over there and so but I felt like some element
[28:58]of credibility hidden oh that's funny yeah that is so funny by the way this section you wrote
[29:04]about the jello box was so funny can I just read like that paragraph please just my favorite part
[29:09]of the book oh my god it's so funny you said the newscaster tells us yet again how the states case
[29:13]hinge on a torn box of jello that served as a signal between the spies the communist agent Harry
[29:18]gold had half the box as well as brother the other half gold handlers instructed him to say
[29:22]this comes from Julius the jagged fragments of the jello box fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces
[29:27]she should have stayed kosher mom says observant Jews don't eat jello cloven half smooth half the
[29:32]wrong half I forget what some rabbi ruled the jello is kosher says dad probably the jello people
[29:38]found a rabbi they could pay off was ethyl kosher I ask who cares there was no torn jello box my
[29:43]father says except in someone's head then you you kept on you you kept writing about it and
[29:52]you said strawberry jello is in roicones head my mother curses and yiddish I say did they
[29:58]specify strawberry is this a joke to you
[30:00]Simon.
[30:01]And you're right, Collins.
[30:03]Yeah.
[30:04]Right.
[30:05]I'm right.
[30:06]I'm right.
[30:07]Oh, it's just the evil Zellig that just keeps reappearing in this story.
[30:08]You know, he was the prosecutor in the in the Rosenberg case and then Donald Trump's mentor
[30:12]and McCarthy's boy.
[30:14]So he was he was around just wasn't there just to documentary or something about him.
[30:19]I feel like there's no one actually the woman who made it there been actually there were
[30:23]two documentaries about him that came out within the first few months and one of the women
[30:27]who made what seems to me the better one is the granddaughter of the Rosenbergs
[30:31]and Ivy near a call.
[30:33]So she made that documentary and then she made another one called what's it called?
[30:39]When is to an execution?
[30:41]I can't remember but it's wonderful and she I watched it a million times writing the
[30:45]books.
[30:46]So it's a and it's a documentary about her family in the case and and so forth and so forth.
[30:50]Oh, wow.
[30:51]Okay.
[30:52]Thanks for watching.
[30:53]Great to meet you.
[30:54]Thank you.
[30:56]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[31:00]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[31:04]Books.
[31:05]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and
[31:10]meet lots of authors on zoom every other week.
[31:12]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing and thank you
[31:17]to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.