Jennifer Haigh, MERCY STREET: A Novel
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[0:41]Jennifer Hay gives the author of Mercy Street a novel.
[0:44]Jennifer is the author also of the highly acclaimed novels Mrs. Kimball, Baker Towers,
[0:49]The Condition, Faith, and Heat and Light, and a Book of Short Stories, News from Heaven.
[0:54]Her books have won the Pen Hemingway Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Pen
[0:58]New England Award in Fiction, and have been published in 18 languages.
[1:01]She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and won a Literature Award from the American
[1:05]Academy of Arts and Letters.
[1:07]Mercy Street came out in February of 2022 from Echo.
[1:11]Welcome, Jennifer.
[1:12]Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Mercy Street.
[1:16]You're novel.
[1:17]Thank you for having me, Zippy.
[1:18]I'm so excited about this.
[1:19]Okay.
[1:20]Okay.
[1:21]First of all, you've been getting so much coverage for this book.
[1:23]You must be so excited.
[1:24]It must be doing really well, and that's so awesome.
[1:27]Congratulations.
[1:28]Please tell us, nurse, what it's about, and then I want to know what inspired you to write
[1:31]this.
[1:32]Sure.
[1:33]Okay.
[1:34]So, Mercy Street is a novel that came out of my experience volunteering at a women's clinic.
[1:39]This is a book I never would have written otherwise.
[1:41]This was some years ago I started volunteering there.
[1:44]Not with any idea of writing about it.
[1:46]I just did it because I believed in the work they were doing.
[1:49]But that experience was so compelling, kind of life-changing in a way, and at a certain point
[1:55]I knew, okay, I'm going to have to write about this.
[1:58]And, you know, it's a hard subject to commit to because it's so polarizing.
[2:03]Like, there's, there is no greater third-rail topic, I think, in American life than abortion.
[2:10]And I'm very attuned to all the controversy about it because of where I grew up.
[2:15]So I grew up in a tiny little town, Western Pennsylvania at Northern Appalachia, and it's
[2:21]socially conservative, overwhelmingly Catholic.
[2:24]I went to 12 years of Catholic school.
[2:26]So, you know, I've been hearing about abortion my whole life.
[2:29]I knew abortion was evil before I understood how you get pregnant.
[2:34]So, so that was my baseline.
[2:36]That's why I was coming from.
[2:37]Like, I had never met anyone who was pro choice until I went to college.
[2:43]And so I'm very, very aware of all the prohibitions around this topic and all the, all the
[2:50]convictions people have, like strongly held convictions.
[2:53]So I knew in writing this story, there's a proportion of the readership that's going
[2:58]to be turned off instantly because, oh, I don't want to read about that.
[3:01]And I knew that going into it and, and I had to do it anyway.
[3:05]So, so this experience of volunteering, it was pretty intense.
[3:09]I was volunteering on a hotline at this clinic.
[3:12]So I am the other volunteers and we had a lot of training to do this.
[3:16]But we basically answered calls from women, a few men, but mostly women who had like
[3:22]contraception questions, like the book, just like how it starts.
[3:26]Yeah.
[3:27]Just like the book.
[3:28]So, so the main character in the book is a, is a professional counselor at this clinic.
[3:32]Not a volunteer.
[3:33]I was just a volunteer.
[3:34]But I got to know some of the people who were working at the clinic at that time and
[3:37]I found them fascinating.
[3:40]And, and I also thought a lot about what this told this takes on your life because it
[3:45]is a real pressure cooker environment to work in.
[3:48]Like you show up for your shift and there are always protesters outside.
[3:52]I mean, every single time I worked on the hotline, I would show up and you had to work
[3:57]your way through the gauntlet of protesters and some days there were a bunch of them.
[4:01]Some days there was just, you know, one, but there was always someone there in your face,
[4:07]you know, just for, in the case of my character, Claudia, just for showing up to work every
[4:12]day.
[4:13]She goes through this every single day.
[4:14]And it becomes routine for her, but it never really becomes normal.
[4:19]It can't.
[4:20]So a lot of the stories about that, it's about, you know, how the toll it takes on your
[4:25]life and the coping mechanisms you discover to get through your life in order to do this
[4:32]really difficult.
[4:33]I think really important work.
[4:35]So that's, that's where the book came from.
[4:38]And in fact, the first scene in the book is Claudia at work looking at the window, counting
[4:43]the protesters outside.
[4:45]It's Ash Wednesday.
[4:46]So it's the first day of length in Boston, the most Catholic city in America.
[4:51]And it's a big protest day, you know, and some of their priests there, there are monks
[4:56]there and some regular people too, but on that particular day, it's like all men, which
[5:00]is not unusual.
[5:02]And that's the first scene I wrote when I sat down to write this book.
[5:06]And it became the first scene in the book, which never happens.
[5:09]Like that's never happened.
[5:12]I have never just instinctively known where the story starts.
[5:18]This time I did.
[5:19]So that's, that's the first glimpse you've got to climb.
[5:21]Wait, I'm curious.
[5:23]So you went from Appalachia, never meeting anyone who was pro choice to working in the clinic.
[5:30]So what happened between those two things?
[5:33]Like what happened when you got to college and you met someone or did you have a feeling
[5:36]about it that like, had you read about it?
[5:39]Like, yeah, what happened?
[5:41]You know, I had read about it and I did have feelings about it, but it was not a subject
[5:44]that could be discussed where I grew up.
[5:47]And when I went to college, I met people who talked openly about this.
[5:51]And, you know, Kate McKleman, who was the founder of Mayrol, came to campus to speak.
[5:55]And that was astonishing to me that this courageous woman who had founded this organization
[6:01]and had been fighting, you know, for reproductive rights for years and years spoke openly
[6:07]about this.
[6:08]And there was a huge crowd of people there who felt the same way.
[6:10]And I felt the same way, but I had never been in a group of people who said this out loud.
[6:16]So I've been strongly pro choice.
[6:17]I mean, since forever, really, but it was a thing that I could only talk about after
[6:23]I'd gone away from my hometown.
[6:25]Where did you go to college by the way?
[6:27]I went to Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.
[6:29]It's a little school in the middle of the state.
[6:32]And it was a wonderful little school.
[6:33]I loved it.
[6:34]Oh, amazing.
[6:35]Okay.
[6:36]So you went to the near-al protest.
[6:38]And then so what was it like?
[6:40]Was it the same?
[6:41]I mean, one of the things in the book when the hotline starts and your main character
[6:46]gets surprised by all the times that people ask for advice, but the main thing becomes
[6:52]how much it costs, right?
[6:53]How much does it cost?
[6:54]And then often would just hang up after finding that out and saying like, oh, okay, well,
[6:59]I can't afford that.
[7:00]So I'm going to have a baby, which of course makes no sense because it's so much more expensive
[7:03]to have a baby.
[7:04]That child's been to have a $400 procedure, even though it's a lot upfront.
[7:08]Tell me about that.
[7:10]Well, you know, in a way, everything I ever write is about class.
[7:14]And that is has a lot to do with my background, the way I grew up.
[7:17]You know, in literary fiction, there are not a lot of stories about poor people.
[7:20]There are not a lot of stories about working class people.
[7:23]I grew up working class.
[7:24]So that's naturally a world I know and I'm comfortable with.
[7:28]You know, as writers, we write what we know.
[7:30]You know, we write what we have feelings about.
[7:32]So class comes into everything I write.
[7:35]And in Mercy Street, you really see the intersection of class and femaleness, like how poverty,
[7:42]particularly lands on women and how having an unplanned pregnancy is completely disastrous
[7:50]for some women and for other women.
[7:52]You know, there's a work around, there's a solution.
[7:55]So there's one of the things I loved about this clinic is that it was the most truly
[8:02]like conclusive, diverse space I'd ever encountered in the city.
[8:07]I want to talk about the cover of the book, which I'm going to hold up.
[8:09]Please, yes, full and I love it.
[8:12]I love it for many reasons.
[8:13]But one of the main reasons is that the cut out paper dolls on the cover,
[8:18]they actually work cut out of construction paper.
[8:21]They're not Photoshop.
[8:22]The Alison Saltzman, the designer, actually cut them out of paper.
[8:26]If you look at them closely, you can see their heads are a little pointy.
[8:29]Like when kids cut out of construction.
[8:31]What I love about this is that these outlines, they're outlines of women,
[8:36]they're women of all different colors.
[8:38]Of course, on the book, they're pink, blue, and purple.
[8:40]So it's not to be overly literal.
[8:42]But in fact, it reflects an important truth about this clinic.
[8:46]It's that this is a situation women from all walks of life find themselves in.
[8:52]Like, you know, there was an incredible range of patients who came to this clinic.
[8:58]There were young teenage girls who were still in high school.
[9:01]That's kind of what you'd expect.
[9:03]Maybe it was what I expected when I started volunteering there.
[9:06]There are also professional women in their 40s.
[9:09]You know, there are military women.
[9:11]There are women of every background, every educational level, every race,
[9:16]every ethnicity, every language background.
[9:19]I mean, we had interpreters on the hotline because we regularly got calls
[9:23]from women whose English wasn't great.
[9:25]So this is something that if you have a female body,
[9:30]you are, you know, there's a decent chance you're going to find yourself in this situation.
[9:35]We know that one in four American women has an abortion at some point in their life.
[9:40]So it's so common that's higher than I would have thought.
[9:43]It's a lot.
[9:44]And that means that everybody knows someone who's had one.
[9:49]You know, it's such a taboo subject in a lot of communities that women
[9:53]might never, never speak about it.
[9:55]But in fact, everybody knows someone who had an abortion.
[9:59]It's that common.
[10:00]And yet it's a topic that we have such a hard time talking about and women don't feel safe talking about it.
[10:08]You know, there was a book a few years ago called Shout Your Abortion.
[10:14]It was a lot of women, mostly very young women talking about their experiences,
[10:18]which I think was a really great development.
[10:20]I'm really healthy.
[10:21]But I also understand that not all women can be that honest about it because depending on where and with whom you live,
[10:29]perception might not be very supportive and it might even be scary.
[10:33]You do not have to answer this in this probably way too private.
[10:36]Have you had an abortion?
[10:38]I would answer it if I had, I would say so.
[10:41]You know, I think it's important.
[10:43]It's important that people say it.
[10:45]I would say so.
[10:46]And no, I haven't.
[10:47]But, you know, it's not a speakable thing for so many women.
[10:51]One of the things that was so striking to me working on this hotline was how many women are living in domestic violence.
[10:58]situations.
[10:59]That was, I had never truly thought about that.
[11:02]When I thought of all the reasons why women have abortions,
[11:06]that wouldn't didn't enter my mind.
[11:09]And yet there was one day working on the hotline.
[11:11]And I could actually point to this as the moment at which I knew I was going to have to write this book.
[11:17]There was a woman who called and wanted to talk about her reasons for terminating.
[11:22]A lot of patients didn't feel any need to.
[11:24]They were very, you know, they made up their minds.
[11:27]They just really wanted to make the appointment and get on with their lives.
[11:30]But there's a proportion of women who do want to process it a little bit with a counselor.
[11:35]So this woman who called said to me, well, I can't be pregnant because if my ex finds out I'm pregnant.
[11:43]He's going to come to my house and shoot my kids.
[11:45]Oh my gosh.
[11:47]Yeah.
[11:48]And like, you know, this, it was so, it was such a mic drop moment.
[11:53]So I'm loving it actually.
[11:55]It appears in the book, Claudia has this experience in the book with a caller.
[11:59]It, you know, and Claudia thinks about this.
[12:02]She's talking about this with a, she's having lunch with her ex-husband and she's talking about this caller.
[12:07]And, you know, she says, I have no way of knowing whether this was true.
[12:10]Maybe she was just paranoid, who knows.
[12:13]But, you know, who is anybody else to make that judgment?
[12:17]She is, that woman is a better judge of whether or not she can go through with a pregnancy that any stranger answering the call on a hotline.
[12:25]And so this is why it's essential that women have to be allowed to make their own choices about this.
[12:31]No outsider can possibly know what's going on in a woman's life or the reasons that lead her to this decision.
[12:38]We cannot know.
[12:39]I read something. I think some novel about a woman who was pregnant in a domestic abuse situation and the husband like did something so awful to her stomach to make her lose the baby.
[12:52]Yeah.
[12:53]I mean, all these things.
[12:55]Always.
[12:56]You know, it's actually pregnant women are in much greater danger of being murdered by an intimate partner than women who are not pregnant.
[13:04]So, you know, pregnancy itself is a risk factor for having your boyfriend kill you.
[13:08]So, I mean, really, it happens.
[13:11]So, you know, we have to acknowledge that women's lives are complicated. Everybody's life is complicated and laws have to reflect that.
[13:20]Wait. So, what happened with all the people you couldn't talk about abortion to and now you have the book out in growing up and your neighborhood, your family, had it everybody respond.
[13:28]Radio silence thus far.
[13:30]I don't know.
[13:31]Yeah. I mean, I've not been back there. The book's only been out a few weeks.
[13:34]So, I've not been back to Pennsylvania since it came out. Of course, you know, it's getting a lot of press. It's getting a lot of reviews.
[13:41]People are aware of it. Not everybody in my hometown is plugged into the New York Times book reviews. So, certainly, I've not say everybody knows about this.
[13:49]But, but the people who are readers who have been my loyal readers over six books, you know, they're certainly aware of this book and what it's about.
[13:57]And I've not heard. I've not heard any pushback at all. Yes. But it's early days. And also, because of COVID, I'm not doing a book tour as I normally would. I'm doing this. I'm sitting at my laptop in my house.
[14:11]Having conversations about my book. So, I'm not in the room meeting readers the way I would normally be when a book comes out.
[14:18]And where do you live? Like, where are you Boston?
[14:21]Oh, my goodness. Let's do that. I'm a true friend. Tell me the story of selling your first book.
[14:27]Okay. So, I was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop. I was in an MFA fiction writing program.
[14:33]And I finished writing this book called Mrs. Kimball at the end of my first year in the program. So, I still had another year in the program.
[14:39]But while I was there, I met my first agent. She had come out to Iowa City looking to sign new clients. That's one of the great things about the Iowa Writers Workshop agents do come there looking for clients.
[14:50]So, it's a lucky thing. And she was able to sell the book quite quickly during my second year as a student in the program. So, you know, it happened.
[15:01]It was astonishingly fast actually. And that book came out a year later, which is pretty typical. It's called Mrs. Kimball.
[15:09]And it's really, it's a story about how we become different people in different relationships.
[15:14]So, it's told from the point of view of the first wife, and then the second wife, and then the third wife of the same man.
[15:21]So, you, you see him through the eyes of these different wives. And you see how they are altered by being with this person.
[15:29]So, that was the first one. And yeah, it came out like I was February 2003.
[15:36]Do you remember, do you ever see Runaway Bride with Julia Roberts? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
[15:40]There's a scene at a diner where when she's always ordering the eggs and she orders whatever eggs the guy she's with at the time, orders.
[15:49]And then there's the scene at the end where she finally realizes like, wait, maybe I should figure out what kind of eggs I like instead of always ordering the ones he likes.
[15:57]I don't know, that scene has dated me forever because it's so easy when you're with someone to sort of morph. Right. Like, oh, yeah. Yeah.
[16:05]Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And I think that's in my nature. You know, I have a lot of flex in a relationship. And especially when I was younger.
[16:12]Oh, I would turn myself inside out for a guy. Yeah, it was just, I didn't even think about it. It was automatic.
[16:18]I remember when my mom started dating the man who's now my stepfather and has been for like 25 years or something crazy, 20 years.
[16:24]And he would come over and she'd be like, Oh, I love meatloaf. And I'm like, why are we having meatloaf? You don't like meatloaf. You've never eaten meatloaf before. Like who is this guy and what has he done to you? You know, but anyway, he's amazing.
[16:37]We still have never had meatloaf. I must have been a dating thing. So amazing. So what is your writing process like what's it like when you're in the middle of a novel and like where do you like to write and what do you have a little sticky notes or how do you do it?
[16:51]Well, it's really boring. I guess is the short answer. I sit in a loan a loan in a room day after day hours on end. It's the only way to do it. I write first thing in the morning.
[17:00]And this is really important to me. I write before I've had any conversations with people. I write before I've read the newspaper or listen to NPR.
[17:08]I don't want any language coming into my brain until I've done my work. I don't want to hear anybody else's voice.
[17:15]So I get up really early. I work for as long as I can stand it. And sometimes that's actually not very long, especially in the early days of a novel where I don't know very much yet.
[17:25]I can work for maybe an hour and a half and that's all I got. And I have to, you know, go home and wait for the bucket to fill up again.
[17:32]I don't like working at home. I have done it. It's certain periods kind of when I had to in early COVID I was doing it.
[17:40]But I do rent an office space and get up and go every morning. It's very helpful for me to have some separation between my writing and my real life.
[17:48]One of the things nobody says about working at home is the corollary, which is you live at work.
[17:55]And I don't want to live at work. You know, I want to have a life and having a separate place to go and work is really helpful. Also, I don't have internet in this workspace.
[18:07]And that's crucial.
[18:09]I don't take a phone with me. I work on an old laptop. It was actually an old desktop computer and I've taken out the wireless card. So I couldn't get a signal even if there was one.
[18:20]And that is what makes it possible for me to write, you know, in this age where we are all accessible all the time. I don't know how people do it otherwise.
[18:32]You have to make yourself inaccessible while you're working so that whatever's going on in your head is more real than what's in front of you.
[18:39]So I look at these writers who, you know, can write in coffee shops and I think, wow, what kind of superhero are you because I couldn't possibly I would get so interested in what was happening around me.
[18:52]And you know, everything is easier than writing everything.
[18:57]My house has never been cleaner than when I went to write at home. You realize that suddenly I am going to move the kitchen floor because that's all much easier than writing and some days it's more appealing than writing.
[19:09]So I cleaned a lot when I was pretending to work at home.
[19:13]It's so funny. It's literally right before you. I did a podcast with these two anthology editors, including a web name Cheryl, Lulian 10, and she says she sits in the corner of a restaurant all day long all day because she needs to be around all the noise and all the stuff.
[19:28]And then like, you know, it's such a personal preference and everybody is so committed to theirs. It's interesting.
[19:35]Well, you know, when you're writing all those nothing works. So if something works, people want you will do it until you die.
[19:42]So you had one good writing day in a busy restaurant that we're very superstitious creatures writers, you know, and so you will just do that into perpetuity.
[19:52]It's it makes no sense. But when I started writing, I wrote everything long and I still do that a lot and I started writing.
[20:00]white legal paths. I don't know why. But I remember thinking if I had to work on
[20:05]yellow legal paths, it would be all over. I'd never be able to write again, which is really stupid,
[20:09]but we do fetishize, you know, any kind of talisman that works for us even once.
[20:16]That's so true. That's really funny. I love that.
[20:20]So what are you working on now? It's sort of early days, so I don't want to talk about it too much,
[20:26]but it is a story that I started writing when I was in Shanghai for some months,
[20:31]some years ago. I had gone to Shanghai on this fellowship, and I was there for a few months,
[20:39]and I had started writing Mercy Street. My plan was to work on Mercy Street while I was there,
[20:44]but it wasn't possible. It was my first time traveling in China, and it was so fascinating
[20:49]that I couldn't channel Boston to write Mercy Street. I couldn't think about anything else,
[20:56]but where I was. That was interestingly, that was the one time in my life I have been able
[21:02]to go out and write in public in a coffee shop, and it was because I don't understand the word
[21:06]of Chinese. It was kind of wonderful because I could be out among people, and it was fascinating,
[21:12]and I felt some community with the people around me, but I couldn't be distracted by
[21:17]the thing because I understood nothing. It was kind of a golden period in my writing life
[21:23]that brief window where I could feel like I was out in the world among people, and it was
[21:27]because I didn't understand the language. So I started writing this story while I was there. I thought
[21:32]it was only a story, and it turns out it's bigger than that, so that's, I think, the next thing,
[21:38]but got a long way to go. I won't jinx it. I won't say it. I won't say anything else.
[21:44]It is amazing what lengths you have to go to to be completely disconnected. I mean,
[21:50]the fact that you have to go rent another office space, like I'm just imagining you pulling out,
[21:54]like I don't even know how to pull that card out of my computer. I mean, all the things that you do
[21:58]to feel alone, or not distracted, I mean, it's really quite a poignant commentary on life today.
[22:07]It used to be a lot easier to get that feeling, and now you really have to, you have to want it,
[22:13]you know, you have to go to some extraordinary lengths. Yeah, yeah. I feel like the most I can do is
[22:19]close the male browser. That's it. I just like close out of the browser. I'm like,
[22:26]and then I'm still like anxious about what I'm missing. But anyway, so what advice do you have
[22:31]for aspiring authors? You need to read every day of your life, and you need to read the best
[22:37]things, the best things you can find. I really believe there's no such thing as a guilty pleasure
[22:42]if you're serious about your craft, because bad language gets into your head. I can no longer
[22:49]enjoy trash, which is terrible. I used to love trash. I can't read trash anymore,
[22:53]because it's kind of like sitting next to somebody who's coughing and sneezing on a crowded airplane,
[22:59]like bad languages contain just bad sentences or contagious. So you really do have to,
[23:04]you know, nourish yourself with the best writing you can find. It's like taking
[23:08]fragments. And I say this to my students all the time when I'm teaching, writing is part of
[23:12]reading. You can never stop reading, or rather reading is part of all I guess, both of the
[23:17]students are true, reading is part of writing and writing is part of reading. So it all begins
[23:21]with that. I mean, we all decided to become writers, because at some point, we fell in love with
[23:26]book. Okay, Jim. So what are some of your, either what you're reading now that's beautiful,
[23:32]or what you have read that you absolutely love? So the last thing I loved was this very
[23:39]short novel. I guess it's no Bella by Claire Keegan. I have trouble remembering the title of it.
[23:45]It's this small things like these. It's completely wonderful. It's set in Ireland in, I think,
[23:52]1985. And it really conjures that time and place in the language is just exquisite. So that's
[23:58]the last thing I loved, and I just finished reading that. But some of my go-to books, the books I
[24:03]go to all, you know, and have for years and years, the books that made me want to be a writer,
[24:07]were novels by William Faulkner and Tony Morrison. And I really think of them as companion writers.
[24:13]I think they're best read side by side. Most people don't know this, but Tony Morrison was a student
[24:18]of Faulkner and did her dissertation on Faulkner. And so she would, where she alive would be,
[24:23]I think not at all, surprised to hear that there are commonalities between her bodywork and hers
[24:29]and his, yeah, I, you know, they're writing in some ways about the same world though at different
[24:34]times. They both write this very rich language. They have a wonderful sense of place. They write
[24:40]great dialogue. And those are the books I go back to when I need something to remind me why I'm
[24:45]trying to do this. Yeah. And what and where do you teach? At the moment, I'm teaching creative writing
[24:50]in the MFA program at UMass Boston. I've been there. This is my second year there. I don't
[24:55]normally teach. I usually teach one semester after finishing a book. So it's like once every four
[25:01]years or something, I'll teach A semester. So this is the first time I have ever taught two
[25:05]years, two full years in a row, four semesters in a row. And enjoying it, I love it. But it's
[25:10]really bad for writing. It's really hard to do both at once, you know, because when I'm, when I'm
[25:16]writing, my first thoughts in the morning are of my own work. And even before I open my eyes,
[25:22]I'm lying in bed. I'm already writing. I'm already in it. When I'm teaching, my first thoughts
[25:27]are of my students' work. And, you know, it's terrible, but writing and teaching for me
[25:33]run off the same battery. And I just don't have enough juice to do both fully. So after this semester,
[25:40]I'm going to go back to just writing for a spell. And I'm looking forward to that.
[25:44]Wow. Amazing. Oh, those are lucky students. I feel like now I know what it's like to be
[25:50]a teacher at an MFA program after reading G&M. Of course, it's the plot. Did you read that book?
[25:55]A lot of people love that book, though. That's why I definitely have that on my list.
[25:59]But it's from the point of view of someone who teaches at a low-res program. And it's,
[26:04]anyway, now when people say they teach, I'm like, oh, yeah, sure. I know what that's all about.
[26:08]Because I read one novel, which of course is not true. Anyway, thank you. Thank you for chatting
[26:13]with me today. I'm sorry if my questions were too invasive. I'm kind of regretting if I asked you
[26:17]that maybe I shouldn't have. But anyway, it was delightful to meet you. And I hope I get to meet you
[26:21]in person. Oh, my pleasure, Zibi. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, take care. Bye-bye.
[26:26]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast.
[26:31]Moms don't have time to read books. If you like this podcast, you will love my new anthology
[26:36]called Moms Don't Have Time to Have Kids. Check it out, and you'll hear from 49 authors about
[26:41]all sorts of things moms don't have time to do. All the authors have been on this podcast.
[26:46]Also, check out my TikTok at with Zibi and Tracy. My other podcast, Sex Talk with Zibi and Tracy.
[26:52]Check out Moms Don't Have Time to Write on Medium. And of course, my new publishing company
[26:56]called Zibi Books. And now back to our daily author interview site and a quick hello from
[27:02]some of my kids. Hi, hello. Enjoy the show.