Meghan O'Rourke, THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM: Reimagining Chronic Illness
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zivi Owens, the creator and host of the award-winning podcast that you're listening to right now.
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[0:58]Megan O'Rourke is the author of the Invisible Kingdom Reimagining Chronic Illness.
[1:02]She's also the author of The Long Goodbye and the Poetry Collections, Sun and Days Once and Half Life,
[1:07]the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and other awards she is the editor of the Yale Review.
[1:11]Her writing appears in the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and more.
[1:15]Welcome, Megan. Thank you so much for coming.
[1:17]On moms don't have time to read books to discuss the Invisible Kingdom and your work and your life and everything else.
[1:23]I am so excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
[1:26]Sure. Okay, so I'm sure most people listening are familiar with your best-selling book already, but just in case would you mind describing what it's about and how you decided to share all of this and do all the work on it and just all the good stuff.
[1:43]Yeah. So this book has been, I think, almost a decade in the writing.
[1:48]It's called the Invisible Kingdom Reimagining Chronic Illness, and it weaves my own story of getting mysteriously sick over really a quite a long time more than a decade, first subtly and then quite ill.
[2:01]With a kind of through line of reportage about how did we end up here where so many people who have these kinds of illnesses that I'm talking about, like autoimmune disease,
[2:15]my alga, my alga, my alga, my alga, my alga, my alga, my alga, my fatigue syndrome or ongoing effects of Lyme disease, et cetera, now long COVID.
[2:24]Why is it in this hyper-diagnostic age that we live in that it's so hard for patients like us to get diagnosis and treatment and to be heard and seen and witnessed.
[2:34]So that's the book. It's sort of this personal story and then this recorded story about what in the history of medicine brought us to this moment where as we live through what I call a silent epidemic of chronic illnesses of these sorts, none the less so many people and many of them women are having just extraordinary trouble getting diagnosed and treated and recognized.
[2:54]And what I show in the book is that that adds to their suffering and added to my suffering and it adds to suffering of many of the women I interviewed for the book and so forth.
[3:03]So what is the answer? What is causing the chronic pain? Why is there this uptick of it and why is it so hard to diagnose and then like what's your what was your main takeaway?
[3:18]So I think there's three fundamental problems. I hope it's just right. I think it's right.
[3:24]Let's start with this.
[3:28]So one is that modern medicine as we all know intuitively, but when you really dig in it's really there is built on measurement, the idea that we can measure everything that's wrong with the human body and replicability, which is to say the idea that like what happens.
[3:45]When a phone breaks in a certain way in me, it will break a certain way in you when influenza and infects me will infect you in a similar way, right.
[3:54]This is the building block of what's called the germ theory which comes along in the 19th century and turns medicine from this healing oriented art, which was really practiced book by female lay people lay healers and sort of an emerging class of doctors who.
[4:10]know we have all heard about bloodletting and these wild therapies, they would give people often very dramatic therapies because they didn't really know how to help.
[4:18]So the germ theory comes along and measurement comes along microscopes and X-rays and eventually the MRI and it gives medicine these incredible tools that have really led us to live longer and healthier lives.
[4:31]All based on this idea as this one researcher put it Robert Koch that basically a pathogen should behave roughly the same way and everyone.
[4:40]So what we're finding is that these diseases that I'm talking about are often the illness itself is shaped by your immune system and the immune system is a highly particular and highly individual phenomenon, right.
[4:54]It's sort of your own personal history of your record of encounters with pathogens and trauma and so forth and pollution and childbirth whatever it might be.
[5:05]So that measurement and replicability model doesn't work so well for autoimmune diseases because you and I could have the same autoimmune disease and it could manifest in really different ways.
[5:15]So autoimmune disease itself is this huge category so I think we've seen this all dramatically laid out before us in the pandemic where we see that everyone responds to COVID a little bit differently and some people are ending up sick for months even after a mild infection so that's just the first problem.
[5:33]Is easier to say and that's just that we women have been treated actually poorly by medicine for a long time women's testimony is still often dismissed in medical doctors offices there's this whole legacy of hysteria this tendency to see physical symptoms as signs of a.
[5:51]You know a secret psychiatric problem that can't speak right can speak itself and so it speaks in the body.
[5:58]And also making that even more complicated we didn't do much research on women's health until pretty recently so even through the 1990s a lot of medical experiments were conducted just on biologically male animals.
[6:13]And so I'm not the women metabolized and process medications really differently and disease affects us, you know heart disease is different than us than it is a month, man.
[6:21]It's so crazy.
[6:22]And thanks to do that.
[6:24]Right.
[6:25]And you're like it's science science.
[6:26]We're just looking at you know and so I'm a big believer in science but the point I need is like science is incomplete it's a process it's done by human so we need that science to start you know getting more of us.
[6:36]The third problem is that these is the is that very individuality of these diseases so that there's so many possible factors for how we can get disease and I think these diseases often come about as the response to what one researcher I talked to called successive hits.
[6:53]So it's harder to see the origin of that right like maybe you get the flu and something starts to go wrong and then your mother dies and then that stress kind of further.
[7:04]So it's really hard to nail down the beginning so that makes us really uncomfortable we start to psychologist diseases right.
[7:12]And I think one thing that COVID has done though is shown a really clear starting point for these diseases which is we know that long COVID is connected to COVID right.
[7:25]I'll see that there's a real problem and that that might be true for flu there might be long flu there might be long Epstein bar virus yeah that was a very long answer but we got there.
[7:36]Okay, so in addition to all this analysis and science and medicine and all of the things you've uncovered you were so generous in sharing your own experience which you know as sort of a memoir.
[7:49]I hate to say junky your addict is the negative connotations yeah lover memoir lover you know I always find myself in every report reported type story sort of you know sucking out like a magnet all the personal bits and pieces.
[8:03]So would you mind sharing with listeners a little more about your own story, particularly how it's like affected your relationships and all of the other stuff.
[8:12]Yeah, so I had a story that turns out to be sadly common you know which is to say that I began getting sick in my early 20 I think like right after I graduated from college we spent a week at the Connecticut shore.
[8:26]A few weeks after that I started getting you know head like a little summer flu and then I started having all these strange neurological problems I was working as an assistant at a toilet assistant at the New York where I'd gotten a job so excited.
[8:37]I was trying to start my life as an adult which was both terrifying and thrilling.
[8:42]And like on day three I was walking to work and I started getting these strange electric shocks all over my body it felt like someone was taking very fine needles and actually sticking them in my skin kind of like a scene out of the crucible or something right.
[8:57]And so severe I had to stop and rub my arms legs and you know at that point really started on a quest to find answers I went to doctors but my doctors were like we can't find anything wrong with you you had one test it looked like loop is but then we repeated it it didn't look like loop is any more so.
[9:15]decade of really internalizing the idea that perhaps it was stress that was causing my symptoms right my my doctors would say things like you've got a high power job maybe your anxious it was a little anxious right.
[9:28]You know, this is probably you're just pushing yourself too hard to sleep more reasonable advice.
[9:33]I didn't get to the bottom of the problem so I kind of coped for a long time and this is the part that I think many people can relate to where you slowly realize that not everyone else is just exhausted at the end of the day right.
[9:48]I was like we are now, but you know it's like I should have been able to get through the day without going past me anyway and then my mom died of cancer.
[10:00]just something I wrote about in the long goodbye.
[10:02]And I was really close to her.
[10:04]I think I was 32 when she died.
[10:06]And I was so devastated.
[10:07]And I'd been taking care of her.
[10:09]So I was quite run down, sorry.
[10:11]And no, right?
[10:12]And I got a virus.
[10:14]And the day after she died, ended up in urgent care
[10:17]and like went downhill, went off a cliff,
[10:20]which was really resonant and complicated
[10:21]to think about, right?
[10:22]That it's like clearly there's something was going on,
[10:24]but also this huge emotional stressor definitely
[10:28]that was a triggering point for me.
[10:30]And I never really got back.
[10:32]And I got so severe that I ended up pretty much bed
[10:34]written at one point, sort of faking it, right?
[10:37]Like I'm a very, I don't know.
[10:38]I'm just kind of optimistic energetic person.
[10:41]And so I just couldn't really admit it to my friends
[10:44]and family.
[10:45]I mean, my family knew, my friends knew a little bit.
[10:47]I was still working one day a week.
[10:49]And I would go out and pretend I was okay.
[10:51]And then I would come back and collapse.
[10:53]And at that point, really started this quest
[10:56]and earnest and started getting answers
[10:58]that I had an autoimmune disease,
[11:00]then that I have some neurological issues,
[11:03]something called POTS, which a lot of people
[11:05]who COVID have, where you get quite dizzy.
[11:08]And then finally, Lyme disease
[11:10]that had gone undiagnosed for years,
[11:12]which I was the book recounts that I was very suspicious
[11:16]of that diagnosis and really unpacks
[11:18]that the complexity of getting a tick-borne diagnosis.
[11:22]But in my case, it seemed to really be an answer
[11:25]for the roller coaster I'd been on.
[11:28]And you know, a big part of that roller coaster
[11:30]was the alienation and loneliness of, you know,
[11:34]both trying to communicate this to my partner
[11:36]or my husband who really believed me,
[11:39]but couldn't understand, right?
[11:41]So there was a loneliness and a gulf there
[11:43]and a frustration, right?
[11:45]And then just feeling as someone in her 30s,
[11:47]like my friends were going out,
[11:48]they were having children, they were building families
[11:51]and I felt frozen in time.
[11:53]It was quite heartbreaking.
[11:54]I really wanted a family and we were trying to have a family
[11:58]and I remember thinking, oh my God,
[11:59]if I got pregnant, I might die, right?
[12:03]You know, I mean, I just,
[12:04]and it was like this unbidden fox.
[12:05]I was repressing so much.
[12:07]Anyway, so this quest though,
[12:10]and finally, the Lyme disease diagnosis meant
[12:13]that I really got the help I needed and got, you know,
[12:16]largely better and was able to have two beautiful children
[12:20]definitely exhausted me.
[12:22]And that sort of, the story,
[12:26]but what I wanted in this book was to be really careful
[12:29]about showing both the hopefulness
[12:32]that you really can recover to some degree
[12:36]from some of these conditions,
[12:37]but also not in an era where a lot of people still are sick
[12:41]for life, but I'm really trying to write
[12:43]about the chronic part of chronic illness,
[12:44]not reduce the story to a tidy, like,
[12:47]then I got better and everything was crazy.
[12:49]Like I still live with these conditions,
[12:51]it's still challenging.
[12:53]And so I try to write about,
[12:54]a lot of the book really is about the stories
[12:57]we tell ourselves about about illness too.
[13:00]Wow.
[13:01]Well, I feel like your story has obviously
[13:05]just totally hit a nerve, right?
[13:07]There's so many people out there
[13:10]who have the same thing.
[13:12]I mean, I can't even tell you how many books
[13:15]like I get pitched either for this podcast
[13:17]or for zippy books,
[13:18]or whatever about people living with chronic pain
[13:21]of some waste.
[13:22]And I'm very interested in it.
[13:23]I read them and, you know,
[13:25]but there's something just,
[13:27]I don't know, how do you attribute this?
[13:29]Like what is this about?
[13:31]Like why is now like,
[13:33]is it just that we're finally talking about it so much more
[13:36]or that it's just been repressed for so long
[13:38]or the validation is finally coming?
[13:41]Like what is it?
[13:42]Yeah.
[13:43]I think that we are both starting
[13:46]to see scientifically and culturally
[13:48]the reality of these diseases, right?
[13:51]That COVID has put that vividly before our eyes
[13:54]that we see that healthcare workers, marathoners,
[13:58]you know, a whole range of people who are in the prime
[14:02]of their lives and their 30s are getting a mild case
[14:04]and then ending up really sick.
[14:06]And I think it's hard for us to ignore that.
[14:08]So I think in a weird way,
[14:09]my book came out at a lucky moment, right?
[14:12]I think also part of what I'm trying to do
[14:15]in the book is the reason we write,
[14:18]the reason we read is to understand, right?
[14:20]To have frameworks, to be able to say,
[14:22]here's this murky thing.
[14:23]Oh, and here's a word for it.
[14:24]Here's a framework for it.
[14:26]So I think the work I was really trying to do in my book,
[14:29]which I wasn't finding in some of the other books I read
[14:32]that I loved meant a lot to me,
[14:34]was to really create this framework
[14:36]where you could follow my story as someone who might be sick
[14:40]herself or as a caretaker, a father, a husband, a cousin.
[14:45]And it would offer a kind of explanation
[14:47]and also on a literary level, be like a detective story
[14:51]so that it's, and like a novel,
[14:54]it's showing you the complexity of life with illness.
[14:56]To be sick isn't just all doom and gloom.
[14:58]It's like you're still living your life.
[15:00]You still have hopes and ambitions and new laughs
[15:02]and you cry and you.
[15:03]So I think right now we are all hungry for that reminder
[15:09]because we've all in a way been living the life
[15:11]of a chronically ill person, right?
[15:13]In the pandemic, we've all been quarantined
[15:15]worrying and wondering.
[15:17]And so I think there's some of that
[15:18]that there's this huge problem.
[15:20]We've all been through a national trauma
[15:22]and we're kind of hopefully ready to look at the science
[15:25]and look at the reality of these stories and starts
[15:29]coming toward a future where maybe we have more tools
[15:32]to deal with them.
[15:33]Yeah, that was very helpful.
[15:35]Yeah, so these are more pessimistic,
[15:38]but today's let's do it.
[15:40]All right, good.
[15:41]I'm gonna get on your train.
[15:43]I'll like, you know, put my hands in your shoulders
[15:45]in the locomotion I've never and follow along.
[15:48]I like that.
[15:49]Can we talk about your life as a writer too?
[15:53]And also just like where did you grow up?
[15:56]Like what is your overall story?
[15:58]How did we head in to get here and everything?
[16:01]I grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
[16:03]My parents came to New York from New Jersey,
[16:07]suburban New Jersey.
[16:08]They were both from large Irish Catholic families.
[16:11]And my mom, I think, was the first daughter
[16:13]in her family to go to college.
[16:15]She went to Barnard.
[16:16]And she was like a lifelong reader, learner.
[16:20]She got an MA when we were in high school in science.
[16:23]She just loved to laugh through my love stories.
[16:25]She was not herself a writer,
[16:26]but she, when I was very young, gave me a journal
[16:29]and said, you should write down the interesting things
[16:31]that you see and hear.
[16:33]And her example was something like the girl
[16:36]with a Mohawk and purple hair on the corner
[16:38]because it was babies, right?
[16:41]I, by the way, dressed up as a girl with a Mohawk
[16:44]and purple hair for Halloween in the 80s.
[16:46]Yes.
[16:47]There you go.
[16:48]Right.
[16:49]I mean, I was just showing my kids pictures of Mohawks.
[16:54]Oh, I remember being terrified of Mohawks at that age.
[16:57]And they were so cool on how they want them.
[16:59]And anyway.
[17:00]So yeah, I went to a school called Scenians.
[17:03]My parents were teachers.
[17:05]And I was really encouraged in writing for my young age.
[17:08]Like I think I loved writing.
[17:09]I loved reading.
[17:10]I was shy.
[17:11]So I read all the time.
[17:12]And kind of really had a conversion moment
[17:14]when I was about 13 years old where I wrote a story.
[17:17]And I was like, this is what I want to do my whole life.
[17:20]Had no idea that that was actually possible, by the way.
[17:22]But like, knew that I had that feeling
[17:25]like somehow this act of expressing something
[17:29]through a literary lens, through a story,
[17:31]in this case, was what I wanted to do.
[17:33]So when I went to college, I took a bunch of writing classes
[17:36]and just kept writing sort of obsessively.
[17:39]And ended up working in magazines.
[17:40]I worked at the New Yorker as an assistant
[17:43]and then an editor for a long time.
[17:44]It's a fiction editor, a nonfiction editor.
[17:46]And I always tell people that that was
[17:48]like going to graduate school, because just the incredible
[17:52]writers and editors were there.
[17:54]And just, I mean, I felt like such an impostor.
[17:57]And I was like, letting me edit a drawer to sponsor a story.
[18:01]You're letting me edit, you know, you only just,
[18:05]but I learned so much.
[18:06]And the great thing about a magazine
[18:08]is you have the support of others
[18:09]and you learn from others, and you learn to collaborate.
[18:12]And I think that was a really key stage for me as a writer,
[18:15]even though I wasn't writing a lot,
[18:17]because I realized that writing didn't just
[18:18]have to be lonely and perfect, right?
[18:21]I realized that a lot of these writers were
[18:23]handing in beautiful stories, but parts of them
[18:26]didn't totally work, or the jokes were
[18:28]to, you know, took too long to tell, or whatever.
[18:30]You know, and so it was this great education
[18:32]where it both taught me a lot about the craft of sentence
[18:35]writing.
[18:36]And also kind of got me out of any preciousness or fears,
[18:39]I think I had about, you know, trust me,
[18:43]there's still plenty of fears, but like, help me see
[18:45]that writing could be this process.
[18:47]It didn't have to be perfect on the first try, as well.
[18:49]And so yeah, I wrote poems during that time,
[18:53]and then published my first book of poems.
[18:55]And then went to Slate Magazine for a while
[18:57]where I created a culture section in 2002,
[19:00]a very different era.
[19:01]And the magazine was for quite curated
[19:04]smaller reading publishers, and actually really fun,
[19:06]and a wonderful education in how different mediums
[19:09]can lead to different kinds of writing, right?
[19:12]So that on the internet, you needed a kind of immediacy.
[19:14]You needed to speak through the screen
[19:16]to the reader in a way that in the book,
[19:19]you could be quieter and take your time, right?
[19:21]But we read as different people in different spaces.
[19:25]Yeah, and from there just sort of pivoted to writing.
[19:28]And I've been writing, ever since my mom died,
[19:30]and I think that was the moment where I,
[19:33]I've been writing about grief firstly,
[19:35]and I just brilliantly felt that it was a book.
[19:37]And since that moment, I've really been mostly writing.
[19:40]I've come to Yale in the past couple of years,
[19:42]which is where I went to college,
[19:44]to edit the Yale Review, which is a wonderful literary magazine
[19:47]that's been here for 200 years.
[19:49]And so I do that part time, and I write part time.
[19:52]And it's sort of the best of both worlds, right?
[19:54]Where I get to, the hard thing about writing
[19:56]is it's all about you, right?
[19:58]It's all in your head.
[19:59]It's all in your head.
[20:00]like, am I making this work? If you have a bad day, that's all you have to show for it, right?
[20:05]And what I've always loved about editing and magazines is that you can take the tools
[20:09]that you love as a writer, which are attention to sentence caring about character reading,
[20:14]and you can be a good reader for someone else, right? And you can help their work. And
[20:19]yeah, so it's, you know, instead of podcasting, that's what I
[20:23]I contribution. I had to yell too, by the way. But I love you.
[20:30]You were there at the same time. I'm putting a probably old in you. But anyway, very cool.
[20:34]Yeah. Amazing. So what are you investigating now? Like, what is your, what is your obsession?
[20:39]Right now I'm in the really noodly fun exploratory part where I probably
[20:44]shouldn't even say anything, but I'm such a transparent person. I just, you know, you're
[20:47]I talk about myself on my books, but I'm really interested in middle age, right now. You know,
[20:53]I'm really interested in, I don't know what it's like to be in this part of it. I think it's
[20:57]partly the pandemic too, but sort of feeling in time, you know, you're not beginning anymore.
[21:02]You're not at the end though. You've got quite a lot, hopefully, for you. But parts of your life
[21:07]are receding, right? And you have to bring them back. And I think part of it's about being a mom
[21:12]and figuring out what to translate to my children about my past. And part of it's that moment
[21:19]in time where you get a long view where you realize these things that are so intimately
[21:22]known to you will fade away. And how do you think about that? And the poet and me wants to
[21:28]reconstruct them all and hold on to them. And so I'm exploring all of that. And I think a little bit
[21:33]how the pandemic froze us in time. And now it's releasing us back. But oh my gosh, I can't wait to read
[21:39]that. I mean, exactly where my head is at these days. I literally like as every little thing
[21:47]changes, I'm 45. And so I just feel like this is the time where things have changed the most
[21:53]since I was like a kid. Jeremy, I'm like, oh, okay. So now I can't see. And I swear to God, I'm losing
[22:02]hearing in my right ear, but I'm not going to address it. And like, what is this wrinkle on my neck?
[22:07]Oh, okay. Like, there's nothing really I'm going to be able to do. I'm just going to sit here and watch
[22:13]as like, I deteriorate. Like, how do we, like how do we make peace with that, right?
[22:18]Right. And like, basically, I'm sort of spiritually and I'm essentially, yeah, it's a tough
[22:24]field as well. I'm not going to lie. But I'm also like, why is everybody not talking about this all
[22:29]the time? Like, this is wild. This is like insanely wild. And like, I didn't feel like I got like
[22:36]the manual when I turned 40, maybe even more like 44. I, for me, it's like this year has been
[22:43]totally. I just turned 46. So we're all the same. Great of time. And yeah, it's like, right,
[22:50]kind of our, and looking at the first few years of your 40s, it's like the late 30s. And then you
[22:55]suddenly like things start to change. And right, there's no manual. And there's not a lot of
[22:59]discussion of it. So I'm always in my work in the places where we're all going through something
[23:04]grief, illness, aging. And we're not really talking about it, right? Because I think I want my
[23:10]books to be kind of that best friend. She's going to just tell you everything. If you needed a subject,
[23:16]I could be talking. Not that there is a lack of women in their mid 40s or 50s or whatever. But yes,
[23:25]I am like, I don't know. It's I'm glad you're doing that because I, yeah, I find myself drawn to like,
[23:31]oh, memoir midlife. Yes. What, what tell me? Because like, I am in my midlife. And what are these
[23:38]memoirs of like being much older? And often these memoirs are written by young people. Yes,
[23:42]not much about midlife, right? Because right, it's mid story. How do you tell the story, mid story?
[23:48]Well, I don't know. We're going to, I'm going to try this. Like, I feel like midlife was so,
[23:53]I feel like we, it needs a rebrand, you know, like, like I don't like middle age, like that,
[23:59]because it needs to be so much older. Right. And what do we call it? Let's give it a new name.
[24:06]Maybe you can do that from your platform, like a, you know, yeah, it's like middle of the stream,
[24:11]but I need something, we need something evocative. All right, I'm going to work on that.
[24:16]Like, because in some ways, it's really great. Like in some ways, like you come into your own,
[24:21]and it's like, you know, I love this age. You know, I really do. It's just middle is such a,
[24:28]yeah, you, you work on that. I'll work on it too.
[24:32]But I think that's right. And it's, I was at the Penn World Voices Festival, and there was a
[24:37]big party. And I was like, oh, man, at the age where I can go to the party if I want to,
[24:41]I know I'm going to party if I want to. Right. Where, where, when you're young, you feel you have to
[24:46]go to the party or. Yeah. Right. But there's this way in which you can really make decisions for
[24:51]yourself. And they feel much more your own. And yet, there's the challenge of like, what does this all
[24:57]mean? Where am I? Where am I on time? Yeah. So, or I can leave the party at 945 because I can't stay
[25:03]awake fast, 10 o'clock at a while. Okay. Ultimate exactly. So I went and I stayed for the
[25:08]exact amount of time I want to stay. And then I love, still liberating.
[25:14]Then if I went to the end of like, right at nine, and I was like, this is genius. Why
[25:18]doesn't everybody do this? I would so much rather have like a breakfast party, but you know,
[25:29]like my, I like start high and like the rest of the day, like lose my, anyway, that's just
[25:35]stuff. That's not mid, midlife, I guess. It's just me. Maybe exacerbated by that.
[25:41]I'm too, right. I think as, as working parents, right, you sort of feel at the end of the day,
[25:46]you're like, this is my time. You're going to bed. Now it's my time. With the success of your
[25:51]books and everything, has there been anything that's come of it in terms of people that you've
[25:56]met or something you were like, just totally unexpected that that has come even from this latest
[26:02]book, like people stories you weren't expecting or has there just been like a trend that you didn't
[26:07]see coming after this has come out? Yeah. Well, I have to say, I think on the most basic level,
[26:14]this book was really hard to write. And one reason it was hard to write is it's hard to tell the
[26:18]story of your own illness. It's a little bit like telling people your dreams, right?
[26:23]Kind of had to be there, right? So it's sort of a craft perspective. I was really worried that
[26:28]and my illness was largely invisible. It was kind of full of ups and downs. It wasn't dramatic
[26:34]in a certain way. So I think there was this fundamental question that I had was like, would anyone
[26:40]connect to this book? Would it? And was it actually going to be evocative of other people's stories?
[26:45]So I do think the biggest kind of not necessarily surprised, but like reality that I was not sure about
[26:51]was that people are connecting to this book. They feel seen and heard in a way. That's what I hear a
[26:56]lot, which is really touching that, you know, they felt more seen and heard by the books than they
[27:00]had by anything they'd read, which was my my greatest hope for it. And then it's really good question.
[27:06]I think I am shocked by how many people are suffering and how hard it is for us to tell our
[27:14]stories. I think that's not a fun fact, but it has been galvanizing. And I do feel that people
[27:25]around people who are sick or suffer from pain are starting to listen with new ears. And we are
[27:30]on the verge of a national shift of some kind. More locally, there have just been some writers
[27:35]I met. The writer Chloe Cooper Jones was a beautiful book out called The Easy Easy. We've been on
[27:40]sort of parallel tour. I have her coming. Awesome. She's so wonderful. And I just feel like I have
[27:46]a new friend, right? So that's been one of the great gifts of of tour. And just meeting and hearing
[27:52]from readers. I love getting emails from readers. Yeah. I want to have perhaps a daytime party since
[27:58]we've already established too late at night. It's not good. And I want like everybody just to wear
[28:04]shirts and have all of their like have all these boxes like chronic pain, like check, you know,
[28:10]grieving a loved one. Check like just all these ways because when you look at people on the street,
[28:15]you just have no idea. And I just feel like everyone would be such a better person. And we would
[28:20]all be so much kinder to each other. All that stuff was on the outside versus hidden on the inside.
[28:27]I remember so vividly when I wrote the long goodbye. I think I wrote about this in the long
[28:31]goodbye, which was about my mother's staff. And it was written kind of in real time because I had
[28:36]this feeling that I was so inconsolable, you know, and very few of my friends, I was 32,
[28:42]few of my friends have lost somebody. And they didn't know what to say. And I felt like
[28:48]again, something was wrong with me, right? Like how this grief is so big. I felt like I had this
[28:53]naive idea that every day the grief would be like half as much as the day before. And it would
[28:57]just kind of go from big to small and be done, you know. Anyway, but I remember one day, so I wrote
[29:03]the book in real time to show that grief was much messier, etc. So one day a couple weeks up when I
[29:08]'m on bed, I just remember getting on the subway. It's like shove me in another person with root,
[29:12]you know, little what's wrong with you. I felt like bursting into tears. And I remember just
[29:17]wishing exactly what you said. We just have a way of showing when we're vulnerable so that,
[29:23]you know, and ever since then, I felt very different in public. Like when someone's really short
[29:28]or strange to me, I just think maybe they're maybe they just lost somebody, maybe they're
[29:32]sick, right? And it's but it's really hard, right? It's like it used to be in the olden days and
[29:38]people would like literally enshroud themselves and break. You know, treat them with respect and
[29:44]care. Yeah. It's supposed to like maybe I'll wear a black t-shirt and jump back on the subway or
[29:50]something. But anyway, I'm sorry, we've got a little late, but it's been really great talking to you.
[29:54]And I really would love to meet you in person. Yeah. And I want to send you my book. I feel like we've
[30:00]and confidence. I think I have your assistant's email. So why don't I give her my or she can give you my email. Okay. Okay. I'll, I'll, I'll, okay. Perfect.
[30:09]I'll send me your book. And when I'm, and let's, yeah, let's definitely get together. I'm sure we actually know a bunch of people from me. I like how much I bet. I didn't realize we're there at the same time. So
[30:17]Yeah. Yeah. I was probably a year or two in front of you. But yeah, I was 98. So yeah, right. All right. Well, it's so great to connect and
[30:27]Thanks for having me. Okay. My pleasure. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of moms. Don't have time to read books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at moms. Don't have time to read books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan fact textures sound for the sound editing. And thank you to morning moon productions for providing this fantastic intro and now trim music.