Allison Larkin, THE PEOPLE WE KEEP
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[2:03]Alison Larkin is the author of The People We Keep.
[2:06]She's the internationally best-selling author of The Novels Stay.
[2:10]Why can't I be you?
[2:12]Swimming for sunlight and now the people we keep.
[2:14]Her short fiction has been published in the Somerset Review and Slice and Nonfiction.
[2:19]In the anthologies, I'm not the biggest bitch in this relationship and author in progress.
[2:23]She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband Jeremy and their dog.
[2:27]I recently recommended Ali's book The People We Keep and my roundup for Katie Kirk media about books about music.
[2:35]So check that out too.
[2:36]Welcome, Alison or Ali or whatever you want to call you Larkin.
[2:43]Thank you for having us on a time to read books.
[2:46]Thank you so much, Vivi.
[2:48]It's really great to get to talk with you.
[2:50]I have to say, this is one of my favorite covers The People We Keep.
[2:53]I like, hold this up as an example of one of my favorites all the time.
[2:57]Aren't you so happy with it?
[2:59]I'm so happy with it.
[3:00]Gallery did the most incredible job.
[3:02]I mean, even the goldmine.
[3:05]But the design is just so perfect and they worked so hard to get it right.
[3:10]And just constantly grateful for people listening.
[3:14]I won't even try to do this justice, but it's kind of like a half of a sunshine with like these big sun beams of all different colors with actual gold lines.
[3:23]I don't know, it's just the coolest.
[3:24]Not that you're supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I just need to say it sometimes when we cover certain music.
[3:28]And ironically, I actually listened to this book as opposed to reading it.
[3:31]Although I have the book here, but I spent like lots of time on walks listening and doing the housework listening and all this stuff.
[3:38]And like, trying to like hide under my bed. I was like, I'll just take a little nap and listen at the same time. But then that didn't work. So I had to pause it.
[3:44]But anyway, it was so great because it almost sounded like you're like, I felt like I was inside of some videos has had the whole time, which was amazing.
[3:54]So thank you.
[3:56]And you had a Julia Wayland.
[3:58]What's that?
[3:59]You heard Julia Wayland.
[4:00]It was just so amazing. And it was just a joy to have her narrate this book. We have a long history. So it was just really special to get her to do this.
[4:10]Awesome. Would you mind telling listeners a little more about what your book is about?
[4:14]Sure. The people we give is about April saw wiki. She's 16 years old. She's living in a dead end town outside of Buffalo, New York in a motorless motor home that her dad won in a poker game.
[4:26]And she steal the car and goes to an open mic night to play a couple songs she wrote.
[4:33]And it's the first moment where she realizes her life could be bigger than everything that she came from.
[4:38]And after a pretty bad fight with her dad, she steals another car and hits the road and then the book kind of follows her adventures for about three years.
[4:48]She tries to figure out where she belongs.
[4:50]I am keeping you very far away from my car is all I have to say.
[4:54]I'm interest now with my research.
[4:56]Right.
[4:57]I've never learned this in that.
[4:59]I think I can feel all this research.
[5:03]Yeah, I think I could do it if I had the right year car. Like it couldn't be a new car. It had to be an old car.
[5:10]But yeah, I probably shouldn't admit that.
[5:13]I'm in the clear.
[5:14]Yeah.
[5:15]Yeah.
[5:16]You know, one thing that there were a lot of things I found really interesting about your book.
[5:19]But one was this, you know, I come, my parents are divorced and I'm divorced.
[5:23]And you wrote about it so interestingly when her father remarried.
[5:27]So she has a right a half brother. I always get this wrong.
[5:30]A half brother, like the kid you call him with her stepmother.
[5:34]And how she feels often completely ignored and displaced by this child.
[5:39]And there's some funny line you said.
[5:41]So they like, you know, he might have to sneeze or something and they would both have to stand there and watch.
[5:45]Yeah.
[5:46]Like that like everything a new child does like stops the presses and yet her life, even though she's so much older and has this amazing talent, which goes completely unrecognized.
[5:57]It's just like an afterthought.
[5:59]Yeah. Yeah.
[6:00]Her dad was really all in on his new life and didn't really have time for.
[6:04]I think he just wanted to be a person who hadn't made mistakes yet.
[6:08]And he made so many with her and so she was a witness to that and he kind of couldn't manage her.
[6:14]Like he couldn't handle it.
[6:16]That's a lovely way to say it.
[6:19]Another moment that was just so special is when she's leaving town and she goes to her boyfriend test and just like cuddles under his blankets and imagine a life if she were just to stay there.
[6:31]And she's like, I could have this life.
[6:33]I could, you know, keep working at the diner or doing whatever I'm doing and this would be it.
[6:38]She's like, but I can't.
[6:39]And then she has, she like extracts herself from the covers and goes and cries.
[6:43]It was so moving.
[6:45]Oh, thank you.
[6:46]Thank you.
[6:47]I really appreciate that.
[6:48]I actually wrote the middle of the book before I wrote the beginning of the book.
[6:54]And so I had written a scene that's related to that one.
[6:59]I never know how many spoilers to give and all of this, but the sweater scene I had already written later on in the book.
[7:05]And so I had a purpose for that moment, which was kind of interesting.
[7:09]And it was for me as a writer had this moment where like all of a sudden this thing that I'd written that I didn't quite understand yet added up with that moment.
[7:16]And it was just so exciting.
[7:19]Like, of course, that's where it came from.
[7:22]Of course, that's what's happening.
[7:24]And I feel like April kind of kind of had her own book in mind.
[7:29]That's so cool.
[7:30]I just had to figure it out.
[7:32]Well, did you do anything?
[7:35]Because in the audiobook, for instance, the lyrics of her songs, which are original songs were just said,
[7:42]did you think about having somebody maybe record those songs and make them into songs?
[7:46]I thought of it. A friend wrote a little bit of music for one of the songs.
[7:50]Actually, one of the songs she sings.
[7:53]She's writing in a hotel room like in the whole actual sweater situation actually is a song that I wrote in my 20s.
[8:01]And I gave it to her because it was like fitting.
[8:03]I played a little bit of guitar in my 20s.
[8:05]And the open mic scene in the beginning is I did not steal a car to get there.
[8:10]It was a different place. It wasn't there.
[8:13]But I did not really knowing what I was doing.
[8:16]Take my guitar and go to an open mic.
[8:18]But ended up being with kind of a big deal open mic that I hadn't realized.
[8:22]And got up and played my little songs.
[8:24]So I sort of played with that in that scene, even though it's not about me.
[8:29]And then I gave April one of my songs.
[8:32]If you dig around on my Instagram, you can find a video of me playing it.
[8:35]But April is a better musician than I am.
[8:38]So give her credit.
[8:41]She actually plays for a living. And I just kind of mess around.
[8:44]I did go on your Instagram, but I didn't.
[8:46]I must not have dug for far enough.
[8:50]But maybe later.
[8:52]So this is your fourth novel, right?
[8:55]Yeah, I was.
[8:56]And they seem to be this seems to be the most like the character.
[9:01]I didn't read the other one.
[9:02]So I'm just making this up.
[9:03]But it seems like this is the more like rough and tumble situation.
[9:08]Then like this is a little more gritty and in it than the other ones,
[9:13]which are sort of lighter in tone.
[9:15]And I was wondering about if that's even true about that trajectory.
[9:20]I was sort of how you pick what you're going to write your novels about.
[9:24]Yeah.
[9:25]I mean, you're correct about that.
[9:27]You guessed correctly.
[9:28]So I actually started writing this book in 2006 before I had finished say, which was my first novel.
[9:35]And it's been a journey because it is so much prettier than, you know,
[9:40]my romantic comedy novel about a woman who accidentally orders a German shepherd off the internet from Slovakia.
[9:46]You know, like there were serious things in my books before that.
[9:50]I was kind of playing with the romantic comedy form and trying to really ground it.
[9:53]And, you know, in the serious emotions that you have as a 20 something,
[9:58]trying to find your way in the way.
[10:00]but this book just kind of came out of nowhere.
[10:04]I was writing pages of stay for a writing exercise
[10:07]and listening to music and April just showed up in my head.
[10:11]And she's just the way she is.
[10:13]She's gritty, you know, she's very much a product
[10:17]of her environment and then her desires and survival.
[10:21]And so my journey with this book has been trying to find
[10:24]the right people to understand what I was trying to do
[10:27]because everyone kept taking me in the context
[10:29]of my first book in the my second book.
[10:31]And my third book and I kept writing those books
[10:34]and I'm very proud of them and I love them.
[10:36]But this is a different side to my storytelling.
[10:40]And it just had to be the way it was.
[10:43]Like April felt inevitable.
[10:44]And any time I tried to write, you know,
[10:47]at one point there was kind of a rom-com version of this book
[10:50]because I'd gotten advice to kind of make it fit.
[10:54]And I felt like I betrayed her.
[10:56]Like I just didn't feel good about myself.
[10:58]And so I got to the point maybe like three years ago,
[11:01]two years ago, three years ago now, probably
[11:04]where I just decided that I was gonna kind of take all my toys
[11:07]and go home like I wasn't,
[11:10]I wasn't gonna write this book for anybody else.
[11:12]And if maybe someday my niece found it
[11:14]and was like, what was this book?
[11:16]Then I'd be okay with that just as long as it felt okay
[11:20]in my soul that I'd done a good job for April,
[11:24]which I know is such a weird thing to say.
[11:26]And that's when, you know, when I double down on what I needed
[11:28]to do, that's when I found, you know,
[11:31]Deborah Schneider, who's just the most amazing agent
[11:34]and Hannah Broton is my editor at Gallery.
[11:37]And she is, she's just a dream come true.
[11:40]I love working with her so much.
[11:41]And then everybody at Gallery has been so supportive
[11:44]and really understood what I was doing,
[11:46]I think because I was so clear.
[11:48]And wasn't willing to compromise.
[11:51]And so they got on board knowing that
[11:54]and helped me make the book my vision
[11:56]instead of trying to make it something else.
[11:58]I love that.
[11:59]That is so cool.
[12:00]I really love really thankful that Gallery puts out.
[12:03]I'm like, I shouldn't say that.
[12:05]I should say I love them all, all the publishers.
[12:07]I do, I, I appreciate, nevermind.
[12:09]But I, anyway, it's a great book.
[12:13]Thank you so much.
[12:15]I think the real thing is how much I just wanted
[12:18]to be on the ride with her.
[12:21]You know, like, I just loved her voice.
[12:24]And it didn't really matter what happened
[12:26]as long as I got to come along and see what happened next.
[12:29]And I think that's really the trick, right?
[12:31]To drawing in a reader is like, you have to,
[12:33]I think it's much better to, well, not to say better or worse.
[12:37]Oh, I'm really like digging all sorts of holes for myself.
[12:40]I find it a lot easier to get into a book
[12:43]when I like the character.
[12:45]And I know that's a, a bone of contention, right?
[12:47]That you don't have to write like a book characters,
[12:49]but especially in, in a novel like this,
[12:51]which is so intimate.
[12:53]And you're following one woman's journey.
[12:55]Like you've got to want to go on the journey with her.
[12:57]So I don't know.
[12:58]I just love how you created her voice.
[12:59]It sounded like so authentic.
[13:01]And it times really funny and just awesome.
[13:03]So thank you so much.
[13:04]It's an interesting thing with a likable character
[13:07]because a lot of people felt,
[13:09]it wasn't likable over the years.
[13:11]And that was kind of one of my struggles with her.
[13:13]I think, I think in, in a post, I mean, two worlds,
[13:16]we kind of stopped that a little bit.
[13:19]So I think maybe the world had to change a little bit
[13:21]for April to be widely considered a likable character
[13:25]to some extent.
[13:26]But I don't think, I never thought she wasn't a likable character.
[13:30]I think, you know, she's got this really strong beating heart.
[13:34]And, and she has a coat of ethics.
[13:36]And she's trying not to hurt people.
[13:39]And they think it's interesting what's,
[13:40]what's likable and what isn't like in my mind,
[13:43]she always was like in my mind,
[13:46]she's like my dearest friend.
[13:48]So I feel like you don't always like what your character
[13:51]is, what the character does, right?
[13:54]Like, I wouldn't necessarily be like,
[13:55]oh, I want to be best friends with somebody
[13:57]who steals cars and drops out of school, or like,
[13:59]Jeremy, like on paper, if you, like the actions
[14:05]aren't what makes you look,
[14:06]they're certainly not what make me like a character.
[14:08]So it's who the person is underneath.
[14:10]So I found that very likable, who she was,
[14:13]not necessarily what she did.
[14:16]Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
[14:18]I did too, as, you know, writing her,
[14:21]which is kind of an interesting thing.
[14:22]Like, I think that I spent 15 years with April,
[14:26]and she was always kind of my happy place to go back to,
[14:29]which sounds weird because she's gone through
[14:31]a whole bunch of stuff.
[14:32]You know, it's not necessarily always an easy journey
[14:36]she's been on, but just, you know, her heart's so good.
[14:39]And even when she's making bad choices,
[14:41]it's like she's trying her hardest in a very earnest way.
[14:44]and that has been really comforting to me to get to write.
[14:49]Does she, do you ever feel like you project stuff
[14:52]in your own life and it gets sort of not that you include
[14:56]things from your life in the book,
[14:57]but let's say you're going through something really challenging
[15:00]that then she runs into something challenging
[15:02]that presents itself in a different way?
[15:04]Like, is this all just one big therapy exercise really?
[15:07]A little bit.
[15:07]Yeah, I think it's more of my past.
[15:10]So then like what I was going through while I was writing it
[15:13]to some extent, I feel like this book is not my life.
[15:17]Like I go in a house outside of New York City
[15:20]and I, you know, I'm not a traveling musician and all of that.
[15:24]But I feel like this book is kind of my life in allegory.
[15:27]I feel like I made sense of myself by writing it.
[15:32]And I can kind of point to things and say,
[15:35]oh, I know where that feeling came from.
[15:37]I can remember the time when I felt like this.
[15:39]Like I can remember the time when, you know,
[15:42]I felt this way about that person and then understand it yet.
[15:45]Or, you know, or just having,
[15:48]having people who kind of took me under their wing
[15:50]like Margot did or like Ethan,
[15:52]I definitely have people in my life
[15:54]that I feel that way about.
[15:56]And so I think that my brain, you know, it wasn't intentional,
[15:59]but I think my brain just kind of took everything
[16:02]I'd ever experienced and this is what it did.
[16:06]It's like the recipe made this.
[16:08]So there's a quote from a Chris Perik,
[16:11]a song at the beginning of the book that says,
[16:13]a someday, someday I'll offer up a song I was made to play.
[16:17]And this is a book I was made to write.
[16:19]Like this is it.
[16:20]Like this is everything in my life makes sense
[16:22]because I wrote about April.
[16:25]And I can decode it and actually one of my friends read it
[16:28]and then wanted to talk to me about it.
[16:29]And she was like,
[16:30]did you write this scene cause of this thing that happened to you?
[16:33]And I was like, oh my gosh, you're right.
[16:37]I hadn't thought of it.
[16:39]And she picked it out.
[16:40]So yeah.
[16:40]But none of it is true.
[16:42]No, no.
[16:43]I understand.
[16:44]Wow.
[16:45]You referred on your website to like the lost years
[16:49]and you have like undocumented time in five years.
[16:52]And like what happened then?
[16:55]What was that about?
[16:56]That was actually probably the time that influenced the book,
[16:59]the most.
[17:00]I went to Ithaca College as a theater major for two years.
[17:05]And then I got diagnosed with attention deficit disorder
[17:07]while it was there.
[17:08]And it just completely rocked my world.
[17:10]I was like, I didn't understand myself before that.
[17:14]I thought that I wasn't necessarily on that right before that.
[17:18]I'll have some I found out that like,
[17:20]oh, you just didn't fit in school.
[17:22]Like that's the thing.
[17:25]And so I dropped out of school
[17:27]and went to bartending school
[17:30]and worked at a biker bar and a little Italian restaurant
[17:33]and had some unstable housing situations
[17:37]and a really bad boyfriends.
[17:38]And you know, and just I think it was the worst time
[17:43]in my life except that I learned more
[17:45]than I ever could have learned otherwise.
[17:48]I got to be behind a bar with, you know,
[17:51]I was like 20, 20, 20 years old.
[17:54]And I got to be behind a bar with grownups
[17:56]and have them like share their feelings with me
[17:58]and be like the person they came in to see every day after work.
[18:02]And I learned so much about people in that time
[18:06]and then I had my boss at the Italian restaurant
[18:09]where I worked took really good care of me.
[18:12]And so I had these experiences and some of them
[18:15]were really good and some of them were really bad.
[18:17]But I saw a part of people I don't think I would have.
[18:20]If I just kept going through school
[18:23]and tried to find myself afterwards,
[18:25]I did end up going back to college eventually.
[18:28]I feel like anybody who wants to be a writer
[18:30]should just go be a bartender for a while.
[18:32]Yeah, yeah, I really think that it was that I have been
[18:35]a bartender, but it sounds like the best way
[18:38]to get the head start on character development
[18:40]and all of the rest.
[18:42]Yeah, you see so much of people that you just don't expect
[18:44]to see and end up caring about people
[18:47]that I think, you know, I had some people who taught me
[18:51]so much about life.
[18:53]And so many like optimistic people too,
[18:55]which I thought was really amazing for people who,
[18:58]you know, come and drink their dinners every night.
[19:00]There was a lot of optimism.
[19:02]And I think it made me a more compassionate person
[19:05]too to see that like people are trying their hardest.
[19:08]And we all have our vices and we all have our setbacks
[19:11]and you can still kind of let your kindness shine through
[19:15]and still try to connect.
[19:17]Well, honestly, you look like you're 20 years old now.
[19:19]So I can't even imagine how young you look to when you
[19:22]were bartending at age 20.
[19:23]You must have looked like you were like 12 years old.
[19:25]Did you get that a lot?
[19:26]You must have.
[19:27]I did.
[19:28]Yeah, I think so.
[19:29]I've somewhat always looked the same
[19:31]like I had an older face when I was younger
[19:33]and now I'm like 44 and I think I still have
[19:36]somewhat the same face.
[19:37]I see it, but other, like I see the age on me,
[19:40]but a lot of times people are like,
[19:41]you look exactly the same.
[19:44]Looks funny.
[19:44]I've been through everything though.
[19:46]Yeah.
[19:48]So after writing essentially your like Magnum Opus, right?
[19:52]This is the grand work and you fought for it and now it's here
[19:55]and it's amazing.
[19:57]Like how do you start again?
[19:59]Like do you want to start again?
[20:00]And are you like, that's good, now I'm done.
[20:03]Thankfully, I think, you know, partly because of my attention
[20:06]deficit disorder when my brain is just always kind of thinking
[20:09]of things and then going, what happens next?
[20:11]Like, what if, what if I, you know, I thought it was like 2018,
[20:16]but I actually remember writing, working on it at a writing
[20:20]retreat that I did in Africa with a couple other writers in 2013,
[20:24]I think I started writing this book that's kind of just
[20:27]been churning in my head.
[20:29]And because I'd had the experience of April and kind of
[20:32]knowing that I could go back to something, I started
[20:36]seeing other books as I go and just collecting ideas.
[20:40]And so I have this book that I had written a bunch of stuff
[20:44]about and then one weekend, I think that was in 2018.
[20:48]My husband went on a climbing trip and I put butcher
[20:50]paper up and down our hallways and just drew and wrote
[20:53]things with crayon like a crazy person.
[20:56]And I think that's going to be my next book is the crayon book
[21:00]because I just captured ideas and then I started putting it
[21:03]in the Scribner file and then every time I've had a thought
[21:05]about these characters.
[21:07]I have about 40,000 words just from that process.
[21:11]They're just not necessarily an order.
[21:12]But it's kind of the most painless way to write a book is to
[21:15]just kind of dive in when you have an idea because we
[21:19]stop ourselves so much.
[21:20]We're such completionists, you know, I mean, I had to get over
[21:23]that and be like, it's OK to just collect this and then go
[21:26]back to what you were doing.
[21:27]And I'm so thankful to pass me for doing that because I
[21:31]think this would be a really hard book to look at a blank page
[21:35]after.
[21:37]Yes.
[21:38]Well, yeah.
[21:39]I like that.
[21:40]I think it's easy to conceptualize it as procrastination when
[21:43]actually it's actually just productivity in a different way.
[21:46]Yeah.
[21:47]Sometimes you just have to clear the decks too.
[21:49]It's like a bad idea is just going to nag you then get it
[21:52]down and move on.
[21:54]So you're like a huge dog person too, right?
[21:57]Yes.
[21:57]I'm gathering.
[21:59]Do you see my dog?
[22:00]Can you even see her on the cast?
[22:01]Oh, my goodness.
[22:02]You just like him.
[22:03]Yeah.
[22:04]You can only see her little collar, but what was the essay that
[22:08]you wrote for the anthology about dogs?
[22:10]What was that about?
[22:11]It was about my dog Stella who passed away in the spring.
[22:16]Who when we first got her, she would not pee on a leash.
[22:19]And we didn't have a fence in yard yet.
[22:21]And so I spent a lot of time outside
[22:24]gliding in my backyard pretending I was
[22:26]being to try to get her to pee.
[22:29]And I still kind of looked back and was like, why'd you
[22:30]write an essay about that?
[22:33]Because I'm just kind of human.
[22:36]So I think it's called squatting with Stella by Starlight.
[22:40]And because I was just out at like two in the morning
[22:43]trying to get this dog to pee squatting in my backyard
[22:46]like trying to hope that that would trick her into thinking
[22:49]that like, this is where we go.
[22:53]So yeah, we just got another dog.
[22:55]I actually, my husband has a right now because she was really
[22:58]hyper.
[22:59]But we just got a rescue puppy named Roxie
[23:01]who is adorable and fun and fascinating.
[23:05]And is OK peeing on a leash, so I don't have to do that.
[23:09]I had a Bulldog a while ago, like 10 years ago.
[23:12]Like from a pet shop, it was not the smartest thing to do.
[23:16]But anyway, and she wouldn't walk out of the pet store.
[23:19]And I was like, oh, that's so cute.
[23:20]She doesn't like to walk.
[23:21]She never walked to step in her life.
[23:24]Not one.
[23:25]I had to get a scroller.
[23:26]I was like in my early 30s pushing a Bulldog in Australia,
[23:32]which was sounds cute, but it was really annoying.
[23:35]And she would only pee at the bottom of this garage
[23:39]where the cars came in and out between two avenues,
[23:42]like right on the great.
[23:43]So I would always have to like keep my ear
[23:45]for like a car of edges.
[23:48]And I'm like, I am going to get mowed down by a car
[23:51]before this dog will pee.
[23:52]And like, this is so not worth it.
[23:54]But like, I don't know what else to do.
[23:57]Anyway, that was amazing.
[23:59]They train us.
[24:01]Like, they really train us well.
[24:03]It was not good.
[24:04]But this is so nice, like amazing stuff.
[24:07]But it's like having a difficult child first,
[24:09]like then the next child is like a piece of cake.
[24:11]So I feel like I had my really difficult dog
[24:13]and then I have such an easy dog, so I appreciate every minute.
[24:17]That's wonderful.
[24:20]Anyway, okay.
[24:22]What advice would you have for aspiring authors?
[24:24]I think that you kind of have to get to a point
[24:28]of having faith in your work before you put it out
[24:33]into the world, like before you're trying to get professional
[24:37]feedback on it or professional support on it.
[24:40]I think I went into this business a little more malleable
[24:44]than I kind of wish that I had.
[24:46]And I think some of it, I don't know if it's possible.
[24:49]I think sometimes you look back at the journey
[24:51]and think like, oh, I wish I were different then.
[24:53]But I'm different now because of the journey
[24:56]that I went on.
[24:57]So how do you take that apart?
[24:59]But I think we sometimes look to the industry
[25:03]to tell us if we're doing it right or we're doing it OK.
[25:06]And I think that the thing I learned from this book
[25:09]was that I had the support of other writers and friends
[25:14]who understood my vision and kept nurturing
[25:17]and nudging me towards it and helping me not give up.
[25:20]And that made me go into this with more confidence
[25:24]and because of that confidence I found for the right people.
[25:27]Whereas other times in my career with this book,
[25:30]I was kind of questioning like, is this OK?
[25:32]Is this all right?
[25:33]What do you think of this?
[25:34]And I think that that made the journey a little longer.
[25:38]I'm not sorry for it because it was a gift
[25:41]to have 15 years of growing and being
[25:44]able to put that perspective into this character.
[25:46]But I just wish that I had, I just kind of want
[25:50]to go back to my old self and hug her and be like,
[25:52]you're good at this.
[25:53]You can do this.
[25:54]It's OK.
[25:55]And I think that if there's any way as a writer
[25:57]that you can find that strengthen yourself
[25:59]and just try to get your vision as clear as it possibly
[26:02]can be and then work on getting people
[26:05]to help you match your vision.
[26:08]I think that's probably the best advice I can give.
[26:11]Awesome.
[26:12]That and learn how to steal a car, just saying.
[26:13]Yeah, exactly.
[26:15]Exactly.
[26:15]I'm going to help.
[26:17]How these things will come in handy.
[26:18]Yeah.
[26:20]Exactly.
[26:21]Well, Ali, if I've earned the right,
[26:23]thank you for coming on.
[26:24]I'm so tenderied, thanks for the people we keep.
[26:27]Thank you so much.
[26:28]I'm like in a frame this wallpaper.
[26:30]Oh, thank you.
[26:30]I'll be over my house with us if it were available.
[26:35]Thank you, Vivius, so nice to talk with you.
[26:37]You too.
[26:37]Have a great day.
[26:38]Bye.
[26:39]Bye.
[26:40]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms.
[26:43]Don't have time to read books.
[26:44]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram, at Zibi Owens,
[26:47]and at Moms Don't have time to read books.
[26:49]Also, sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com
[26:52]and sign up for my virtual book club
[26:54]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[26:56]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound
[26:59]for the Sound Editing.
[27:00]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[27:02]for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.