Michael Frank, ONE HUNDRED SATURDAYS: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World
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[1:26]You will not want to miss it go to zivi Owens dot com Michael Frank is the author of 100 Saturdays
[1:32]Stella Levy and the search for a lost world
[1:35]Michael's essays articles and short stories have appeared in the New York Times the Wall Street Journal the Atlantic
[1:40]Slate the Yale Review
[1:41]Selma Gandhi the TLS and tablet among other publications his fiction has been presented at symphony spaces
[1:48]Selected shorts a celebration of the short story and his travel writing has been collected in Italy the best travel writing from the New York Times
[1:55]He served as a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times book review for nearly 10 years a recipient of a 2020
[2:01]Guggenheim Fellowship he lives with his family in New York City and LaGoria Italy
[2:05]He is also the author of a novel called what is missing which actually my husband Kyle and his team at morning moon productions
[2:13]Option for film welcome Michael. Thank you so much for coming back on mom's don't have time to read books for the second time last time for
[2:20]What is missing and now for 100 Saturdays in search of a lost world
[2:25]Thank you for having me to be you're the best
[2:29]Actually the subtitles should be Stella Levy and the search for a lost world that was an earlier version that went out because I'm sorry
[2:35]I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's not your fault. It's publishing complexities
[2:38]But it is very much the story of Stella and the quest for this lost world of Jewish roads
[2:43]Very true although I'm reading it. I'm like what is missing a lost world
[2:48]You're on the hunt for something. I don't know. I am that's funny
[2:52]I didn't I'm of course it leave it to you to put that together
[2:55]Yes, and the next book will be about more lost lives and lost people in lost stories
[3:00]So yeah, maybe that's my destiny. I don't know. What is the next book? I know we're jumping ahead here
[3:04]Oh, you know, it's too early to say but it's about it
[3:07]You know, well, I'll tell you I spent seven years listening to Stella and just as an overview
[3:12]She's one of the probably the handful of people still live today who was born and grew up in the Jewish community of the island of roads
[3:20]Which was an Italian colonial possession from 1923 officially through World War two and she lived this
[3:27]Amazing life in this amazing place with a horrible centerpiece when the entire community
[3:33]was deported in July of 1944 to Auschwitz and I went to ask her a question one day at her apartment and
[3:40]Went back to the next week and then the next and then the next thing
[3:43]I knew almost without realizing it's six years and gone by and I'd listen to her tell me the story of her
[3:49]remarkable life and
[3:51]When I finished I thought why did I do this exactly because she's not my grandmother. I'm not from roads
[3:56]I'm not a Sephardic Jew and then it made me think oh, I need to do this a you know with some
[4:02]Similar acuity for some of the people in my own life and that that would be the the next next project
[4:08]Oh, but we're here today to talk about Stella. So we'll stay okay. We'll stay to Stella
[4:14]Yeah, I was I was waiting for some some giveaway title, but it's so Stella's experience
[4:21]I first of all I can't believe how well you were able to capture it and
[4:26]Really I felt like you transported me into that time and place which is what the most successful book books do right?
[4:34]It's they they pick you up and drop you into another
[4:37]completely different life and so not only do we
[4:41]Live through the horrors, but that's only a piece of it because first you
[4:46]Show us in great detail as she told you about her whole life and her siblings her father
[4:51]And you also threw weave in all of the
[4:54]Slow but steady
[4:56]Changes that are coming which for her
[5:00]She wasn't as aware that they were falling a pattern just like we are not aware when things happen to us
[5:06]Until after the fact and and she said several times
[5:09]You know, well, you're saying that from now Michael. All right, she can't exactly exactly
[5:14]Yeah, so the book in a little in a small way or maybe not a medium-sized way also seeks to show the
[5:20]Process of capturing somebody's story, you know, I like in Stella one point to a modern day. So here is that
[5:26]That's because of her very uncanny or maybe clever and sly way
[5:31]Believing me hanging from week to week and month to month in year to year and which resulted in this remarkable
[5:37]Relationship between the two of us as well
[5:40]But it's funny. I heard you say the word slow and I come to think about this book like
[5:45]The writing equivalent of a slow food, right?
[5:48]It's like a slow book because it was slow to for me to come to understand that it was a book
[5:53]Then it was a slow book to research. It was a slow story to listen to and it was so slow book to write too
[6:00]I don't think it's slow to read because it's not that long and it's broken into a hundred chapters one for each Saturday
[6:06]A sort of reconstitution of what our experience was
[6:09]But I think to honor the life of a human being who's nearly a hundred years old and who was born in a world that was so far away from ours
[6:17]And it's so definitively ended in July of 1944
[6:21]No, no, no one from almost no one from the judity as the neighborhood they grew up in went back to live there after the war
[6:28]Which is just a mind-boggling thing to wrap your mind around, you know that you've had this incredible life
[6:33]I sometimes describe it as like the malibu of Greece because they weren't beach bums these kids and well, yes
[6:39]They grew up in a fairly religious
[6:41]Ambience that was more for the parents and the grandparents
[6:45]They were close to their traditions, but they were seduced away from them by the arrival of the Italians who brought music and food and
[6:52]Movies and Freud and proves all these things I describe in the book and romance and friendship and wider
[7:00]Ways to imagine your future like going to university in Europe and having a professional life even maybe which no women in the judity
[7:07]it did of course and
[7:10]just the leaps and the intensity and of change as you point out and of
[7:16]the span of time that she
[7:18]Saw into and lived as a young woman is not something you can just
[7:23]Gather in a net and quickly understand so I think in a way it turned out retrospectively to be appropriate
[7:28]To have spent this much time of my life listening to her and trying to capture her experience
[7:34]Well, it's like a living history. I mean exactly
[7:38]Yeah, and one thing I've noticed it's funny that the book is just starting to be read by people
[7:42]But it seems to appeal to a lot of younger people which I'm surprising to me when the protagonist so called it's gonna be a hundred years old next May
[7:50]But I think people are seeing in it
[7:53]something they wish they had done or
[7:55]Something they wish they could do or something they feel they should do which is
[7:59]Capture the story of the people around us the people around them who are older
[8:03]And at the end of their lives reports too late something
[8:06]I only partially personally was able to do with my grandmothers who died when I was 10 and 14
[8:11]I was alert to things, but you know, I didn't ask basic questions like where did you go to school and
[8:16]What did you eat for dinner and who you're who are your friends?
[8:20]and it's like the micro details
[8:22]I think that end up accruing into the faceted portrait that I hope I was able to tell it Stella
[8:28]Well, I bet they're also interested so much of the book happened when she was young
[8:33]Right, I mean it was her story even when she was going through the camps and her story of perseverance and being with her sister
[8:40]And how the two of them kind of banded together today to make it through life both during and after and
[8:47]It's a it's a young person's tail really. I mean if this was a movie this would you would need a star who was
[8:53]Like no more than 22 right 20 that that would only be in the first year of the multi-year
[8:58]TV series actually is a me because I think okay, I think it's I think it's when I think of I really do think of
[9:03]Stell it in a certain way as a variation on the Eleanor Ferrante how when you know that she's a young woman
[9:11]You know
[9:12]both of and in opposition to the world she was born and grew up in
[9:16]That's always fascinating because the women with the expectations of women were not very high
[9:20]You know, they were starting their two cells at 10 and they were married by a matchmaker by 16 as her older sisters except for the intellectual and rebel
[9:29]Or but here it comes Stella with a very different attitude and openness of curiosity and ambitiousness
[9:35]No interest in embroidery whatsoever or cooking or any of the things that were expected of her and so
[9:41]It's an interesting window. I think in because the choices that she made or the things she refused to do
[9:48]Show you what the traditional world and possibilities were but then there's Stella trying to figure out her own path and
[9:55]You know, it's impossible to disentangle or say
[10:00]why one person survived the camp experience
[10:03]and the other not and Stella has a good deal
[10:05]to say about this.
[10:06]Harder me wants to say that it has something to do with
[10:09]the way she was wired as a human being, being courageous.
[10:13]But it's not just that having pluck, you know,
[10:16]not listening to the rules all the time,
[10:18]yet knowing when to listen to the rules.
[10:21]But all of those kinds of speculations,
[10:22]I think are meaningless.
[10:23]So she often points out, you know,
[10:25]she could have been all of those things
[10:27]and then simply not succeeded.
[10:29]And she succeeded because she was lucky, basically.
[10:32]I mean, I feel like her closest call
[10:33]is when she was in the infirmary for whatever that was called,
[10:37]not dysentery, but whatever that she got from going out
[10:40]of, yeah, from being out in the rain.
[10:42]And night, yeah.
[10:42]And they sent her back to the barracks,
[10:44]but then everybody in the infirmary
[10:46]was sent to the gas chambers that did,
[10:48]I mean, that was-
[10:49]They sent her back exactly.
[10:51]But that was a part of the example
[10:52]because it was a Jewish Dutch, I think Dutch,
[10:56]or, yeah, Dutch or Belgian physician,
[10:58]a woman with glasses, I still remember her.
[11:01]We said this one can't stay here.
[11:03]So it's a collection of micro moments like that
[11:07]in which you could have just turned
[11:09]the other direction and that would have been
[11:10]the end of your life.
[11:11]And it's very problematic to try to understand,
[11:15]you know, what went on in that place.
[11:17]I think really all you could do is say,
[11:20]this is what happened to me, you know?
[11:23]And to be careful of, you know, conversations around
[11:26]nobility or morality, you know,
[11:30]I still said within the arc of a week,
[11:33]they became crooks themselves, they stole things,
[11:36]they traded things, they made enemies,
[11:39]they, you know, bonded strongly with some people
[11:41]and not with others.
[11:42]Yeah.
[11:43]You know, one thing, and I've read a lot of stories
[11:47]as most Jewish people have at some point,
[11:50]but I've read many Holocaust and non-Jewish people,
[11:52]but I happen to have read many takes on the Holocaust
[11:55]and survivor stories and all that.
[11:57]But this one was different and that Stella was so aware
[12:00]of how she almost left her body, right?
[12:03]She's saying the old Stella, it just wasn't there.
[12:07]Like at some point she just kind of put this curtain down
[12:10]and she operated and she existed and she got through each day.
[12:14]And I feel like that was exhibited so clearly
[12:16]when she said that while there she didn't cry, right?
[12:19]Nobody was weeping while they were there.
[12:21]They were like, almost, they were treated like animals,
[12:25]like not even human beings.
[12:26]And almost as a side effect, they're emotions also.
[12:31]Like to get through, they had to put on such an armor
[12:33]that it wasn't until afterwards that she and her sister
[12:36]and others could weep and sort of relief
[12:39]and that she could feel coming sort of back into her body
[12:42]once the Americans rescued, freed the camps.
[12:45]I mean, it was such a clear portrait of like what defense
[12:49]mechanisms you have to employ to get through
[12:52]the most just terrible parts of your life.
[12:55]That it's beautifully put.
[12:56]And it's what one person did, right?
[12:59]Everybody did something different, I think.
[13:01]But this is what Stella did and it's not like she was a choice.
[13:04]I think even one one writes it when I have to be careful
[13:07]about even the verb choice.
[13:08]It's not like she woke up and said,
[13:09]I'm going to choose to teach and just celebrate.
[13:12]She herself, I think, spent decades trying to figure it out
[13:15]because wouldn't you?
[13:16]I mean, I think I would.
[13:18]I don't know what else I think about it.
[13:19]For certain intervals of my life, it's like,
[13:21]well, how did that happen?
[13:23]How did I make those choices?
[13:24]How did I not give in, you know?
[13:28]Why did I have all these moments of luck in my best friend
[13:32]from next door, all kinds of examples in the book, didn't, you know?
[13:36]And I think this is the other thing about Stella
[13:38]a little bit that sets her story apart, although I think
[13:40]everyone who's lived that experience
[13:42]and tells her story has something to offer us probably,
[13:44]but she didn't want to be that person,
[13:48]as she puts it, you know, a storyteller of the show out.
[13:51]She didn't see herself as a victim.
[13:52]She didn't want to define her, her post-war life
[13:56]through this one year transformative, of course, though it was.
[14:01]And I think that's one of the reasons why,
[14:02]until she was in her early 90s,
[14:04]she didn't fully tell her story.
[14:06]And I find that fascinating and in a way admirable
[14:10]of her, that that's too much of a dozen.
[14:12]I just find it interesting.
[14:13]It was an interesting choice,
[14:15]but it made also for a kind of freshness in her storytelling.
[14:20]She'd never, you know, she had not that often told these stories.
[14:23]It's never true that it's not never,
[14:25]but I really, I at least had the feeling
[14:27]that I was hearing them for the first time,
[14:30]at least put together in this way.
[14:32]Yeah, it also made it much more interesting
[14:35]that it was told to you
[14:37]and that you are like the stand-in for us.
[14:39]Oh, that's interesting, yeah.
[14:41]I have a thought about it that way.
[14:42]I mean, you're the first podcast
[14:44]and the first interview I've done,
[14:45]and so excited about that and so on,
[14:47]except for some written things.
[14:48]And so yeah, you know, I hadn't thought about that
[14:51]that I as the listener am a stand-in for the reader.
[14:54]Yeah.
[14:55]And I'm very clear also that this is,
[14:58]someone else could come along
[14:59]and write another book about Stella.
[15:01]You know, this is me.
[15:02]I'm using what I am, what I've read,
[15:04]what I've lived, the way I'm wired, to listen to her.
[15:08]And that, of course, and then to write about her
[15:10]and don't forget all of our conversations were in Italian.
[15:13]So we're at several removes from what is on the page.
[15:17]To get there, there are different iterations of Stella.
[15:20]Let's call them, you know?
[15:21]And I think that's true of everyone thinks
[15:24]that's true is a fiction, but strangely,
[15:26]it's quite true of nonfiction as well
[15:28]that you, what is true in what you're offering?
[15:32]Yes, Stella's story is true,
[15:34]but it's very much seen through lots of layers of filters,
[15:37]which are inevitable in a book like this, you know?
[15:40]Yeah, but I think that only, it's a positive.
[15:44]I mean, this could have been,
[15:46]if this was just a story, if it was written,
[15:49]like you could have done it where you wrote in her voice
[15:52]as like almost a ghostwriter,
[15:53]or you could have made it like a biography,
[15:55]but made it about the relationship
[15:58]and the teasing out of information over time.
[16:00]And so, yeah.
[16:02]Right, because I'm not a historian,
[16:04]I'm not a biographer, I'm not interested in writing that.
[16:06]Those kinds of books, I am a writer who writes stories
[16:09]that come to me, however they come to me,
[16:11]whether they're my family stories in the first book
[16:13]or through imagination based on some experience,
[16:16]say in the novel, or this book that I'd even know was a book,
[16:20]you know?
[16:21]It was just simply I'm going about my daily life,
[16:23]so to speak, and suddenly there is this unavoidable story
[16:27]that I felt had to tell, you know?
[16:30]Yeah, it's strange.
[16:32]I was surprised hearing about Stella's lack,
[16:36]not lack of ability, that sounds digital as well,
[16:39]but her difficult time being a mother herself.
[16:43]It seemed like from the outside, at least,
[16:47]she was able to reintegrate into regular society,
[16:51]so that's great, she could figure out where to be
[16:54]and she tried LA and then went to New York
[16:56]and, you know, got into relationships.
[16:59]She ticked off the thing that made her seem like she was back in
[17:03]and I felt like this was a waving red flag,
[17:06]like what was not processed and all of that
[17:10]for when she had a son and ultimately sent him away,
[17:14]although, of course, I sent my kid to boarding school,
[17:16]doesn't mean I have deep-seated issues,
[17:17]but you know, it just seemed like a little more dramatic.
[17:19]Right, I mean, but see there you go,
[17:21]in a certain way, you take, you have a reason for look,
[17:24]or you have a piece of information
[17:26]that you can apply to that choice of hers,
[17:28]that, you know, you made the same choice, similar choice, right?
[17:31]So I just, I don't feel super comfortable speaking to her,
[17:35]mothering, I think that's been quite painful for her,
[17:37]but when I can tell a good relationship with her son today
[17:41]and, you know, they care for each other very deeply,
[17:44]but a lot of things came to her with difficulty, you know?
[17:47]And again, how much do you attribute to this experience?
[17:52]Everything, nothing, some, it's very, it's hard to know.
[17:55]She was formed, she was a formed young woman
[17:57]when she went to Auschwitz,
[17:58]but I also try to imagine, and honestly, I can't,
[18:02]I just can't, what it means to get off a train,
[18:05]and that's the end of your family.
[18:07]As you know, it's the end of your friends.
[18:09]It's nearly all of them.
[18:10]It's the end of your aunt's and uncles.
[18:12]It's the end of the entire world that you feel you owned,
[18:16]you know, owned in the deepest emotional sense.
[18:18]She has this phrase that, when the first thing she said to me,
[18:22]that she thought of Rhodes as she and the community,
[18:26]thought of Rhodes as their own little piece of the earth.
[18:28]Well, of course you would.
[18:29]You've lived there as a community for half a millennium, right?
[18:33]I mean, you've seen all kinds of different rulers come and go.
[18:37]And then just by the twist of the political dial, yeah.
[18:41]Yeah.
[18:42]And even she, you know, repeatedly said like,
[18:44]well, this doesn't make any sense.
[18:45]I mean, like, why would they take us across the world
[18:49]when they could have just killed us here?
[18:50]That's what they wanted to do.
[18:51]Why take 1,650 people and put them on boats and trains
[18:55]and go on like the longest recorded journey to extinction?
[18:59]When exactly.
[19:00]I mean, everyone, I heard one of the leading scholars
[19:03]of the show, the Holocaust, the Italy,
[19:05]say Rhodes was, is the example of the extreme absurdity
[19:09]of the entire thing because it made no sense strategically,
[19:13]economically, politically they were already losing the war.
[19:16]If they didn't admit it or no it,
[19:18]but the Allies were in nearly in Florence
[19:20]when they'd deport these people.
[19:22]And I just, I mean, there are many, many, many people
[19:26]have many ideas about why you build a machinery
[19:28]to that degree.
[19:29]It has to keep moving.
[19:30]You know, you're not willing to concede that you've lost.
[19:33]You, yeah, it's still has still points out.
[19:37]Just murder it, shoot us all in barriers on the land
[19:40]that we belong to, for goodness sake, you know.
[19:42]And because that would have been great, you know.
[19:44]Yeah, that would have been great.
[19:45]Well, that certainly happened enough in other places
[19:47]in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
[19:51]So what was it like for you going to Rhodes
[19:55]with all of this information?
[19:57]And like I've been trying to...
[20:00]And I put myself in your shoes of feeling all that history
[20:03]and knowing what happened and even still issues.
[20:06]Tell me about that.
[20:07]Yeah, well, the truth is that I went to roads in 2015
[20:10]when I had just begun talking to Stella.
[20:12]So unfortunately, I think, come later,
[20:15]and I had started to put together a plan just
[20:18]for the year of COVID to go back with her,
[20:20]which would have been the perfect way for me
[20:23]to ultimately metabolize this information.
[20:26]And for both of us to finish this project like that,
[20:29]and it didn't happen.
[20:31]But even so, it was a most fascinating experience
[20:35]because the duty of today,
[20:38]you look at it through one set of eyes,
[20:41]and you see stupid souvenir shops
[20:44]and t-shirt dealers and restaurants, right?
[20:46]And then you see it through another set of eyes,
[20:49]meaning the storytellers eyes,
[20:51]and you see all of that as an effect in a movie
[20:54]or a dream really disappearing.
[20:56]And through Stella's narration,
[20:58]and her memory is such many of which at that point,
[21:01]she'd begun to share with me,
[21:03]you saw that this is where the cobbler was,
[21:05]the tailor, this is where they sat in gossiped on the stairs.
[21:08]This is the oven, the communal oven.
[21:10]I mean, imagine being alive today
[21:12]and still having taken your dishes
[21:14]to bake in a communal oven.
[21:15]This is the Turkish bath.
[21:17]This was the synagogue.
[21:18]This is where I first was kissed.
[21:22]It was this strange bifurcated experience of being there
[21:26]and seeing the 2015 roads,
[21:29]but also being there and feeling and seeing, you know,
[21:32]1940, 1935, 1925 roads.
[21:36]And it was a haunting that experience, you know?
[21:40]And I just, I'm more haunted by the fact
[21:42]that I can't go back.
[21:44]But also, as I'm a stand in for the reader,
[21:48]I had to imagine it and capture it in language.
[21:51]And so I became Stella's listener,
[21:54]and that was my way of traveling to roads.
[21:56]Ultimately.
[21:57]One other thing that's so unique
[21:58]about the book are Myra Commons,
[22:00]beautiful illustrations sprinkled throughout.
[22:02]And the cover, yes, of course,
[22:04]but also these beautiful images that are sprinkled through.
[22:08]Why illustrate at all?
[22:10]So great question.
[22:11]I felt that, I mean, the obvious choice, of course,
[22:13]would be photographs.
[22:15]First, you'd have to ask, well,
[22:16]how are there photographs of this, you know,
[22:19]deported community and the answer to that is that,
[22:21]and how were there even photographs
[22:23]on which Myra could base some of these paintings,
[22:26]is that the older siblings had been leaving the island
[22:29]through the 20s and earlier.
[22:31]And so they took photographs with them
[22:32]as you would to remember homes.
[22:34]So that's why there are photographs.
[22:36]And they're quite amazing too, a number of them.
[22:39]But I felt, and this is all going back to some of you
[22:41]said earlier about my being a stand in for the reader.
[22:44]And as I say, that I'm at a certain remove from this story
[22:48]and had to reimagine it for myself,
[22:50]both first going, listening to it in one language
[22:53]and translating and writing it to another,
[22:54]but also having to find a way to tell stories,
[22:58]tell a story as a story and not just these conversations
[23:01]that we had over all these years.
[23:03]And so I thought that illustrations do a similar thing.
[23:06]They don't literal depictions of a reality,
[23:09]but they are the interpretation of, in this case,
[23:11]the painter, Myra, Kalman.
[23:13]And it just felt like a natural thing,
[23:16]a natural direction to go in.
[23:18]Myra also had heard about Stella's story
[23:21]and offered to paint them for us.
[23:23]And I thought, great.
[23:28]And this is one of the things that the paintings do
[23:30]that I think maybe the book doesn't entirely succeed in doing
[23:35]because how could it?
[23:37]Which is what I call that Malibu of the Eastern
[23:41]Aegean, there's very lush, aromatic, central place
[23:46]that still grew up a place of color and aromas
[23:49]and water and sunlight are in a way easier to depict
[23:55]when you can paint them, right?
[23:56]Then when you say, oh, the sea was blue
[23:58]and the flowers are pink and they smell good,
[24:00]or very well would do a little bit better than that,
[24:02]but there's something very immediate in myra's illustrations,
[24:05]I think, that help take us back and remind us that, wow,
[24:08]this was a kind of paradise, you know?
[24:12]All the more heartbreaking to have people
[24:15]take it away from it.
[24:16]So I'm going to go and do a Google image search after this.
[24:20]Sure.
[24:21]Well, I just did a little interview myself with Myra
[24:24]and I'm going to write a little piece,
[24:26]I'm just trying to figure out about it, how to do it.
[24:29]But I thought it would be interesting
[24:30]to show the photographs alongside that inspired her
[24:32]to show them alongside the finished paintings.
[24:35]You can see those sort of classic Myra liberties
[24:38]with more color, bigger bones, you know?
[24:40]It's juicier slices of cake, you know?
[24:44]Yeah.
[24:44]No, it's wonderful.
[24:46]Well, congratulations on 100 Saturdays
[24:50]for not only like immersing me as a reader
[24:53]in the experience and the community,
[24:56]but teaching some history quietly, subtly,
[25:00]along the way, a lot of different periods of sort of
[25:03]invasion or whatever, not invasion,
[25:05]but when you like ownership of the different territory
[25:09]and the history behind it and the war really,
[25:13]and this is how history gets passed down.
[25:17]It's your story is about one person.
[25:19]Exactly.
[25:20]It's, you know,
[25:21]Walter Benjamin has this wonderful quote
[25:24]in which he talks about the power of the oral tale
[25:27]and how it passes on tradition more powerfully
[25:30]than the written story in some degree.
[25:32]And when you think about it, it is like, you know,
[25:35]I tried to do in this book the,
[25:36]some rough equivalent of that sitting in the,
[25:39]around the campfire or sitting at the foot of your grandparents
[25:42]who were sitting out in the garden and listening
[25:45]as a child or a young person or an older person,
[25:48]but listening to the story of another human being's life,
[25:51]it's very powerful.
[25:53]And she said it kept her alive, which is so long.
[25:56]Yeah.
[25:57]I mean, it's just really, it's just gave me the chills.
[25:59]It's wonderful.
[26:01]Thank you, Zibi.
[26:01]Thank you for this wonderful conversation.
[26:03]You're the best.
[26:04]Thank you.
[26:04]All right.
[26:05]I'm Michael.
[26:06]Take care.
[26:07]Bye.
[26:08]Bye.
[26:09]Thanks for listening to this episode
[26:11]of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:13]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[26:16]and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[26:18]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com
[26:20]and sign up for my virtual book club
[26:22]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[26:25]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound
[26:27]for the Sound Editing.
[26:28]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[26:30]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.