Lois Lowry, THE WINDEBY PUZZLE: History and Story
[0:02]Hi, I'm Zivi Owens, the creator and host of the award-winning podcast that you're listening to right now.
[0:07]Thank you so much.
[0:08]Called moms don't have time to read books.
[0:10]It is a daily podcast, 365 days a year, and each day we talk to an author about all of the things related to their career,
[0:18]their book, their life, and more in 30 minutes or less because who has time?
[0:22]I am now an author myself, although I wasn't when I started this podcast, and you can get my new memoir,
[0:29]bookends, a memoir of love, loss, and literature, wherever books are sold starting July 1st,
[0:35]and my children's book, Princess Charming.
[0:37]You can learn more about me at Zivi Owens.com, but really you're here to learn more about the authors,
[0:42]and that is what we're going to do.
[0:44]Also, be sure to check out all the other podcasts in the zcast podcast network.
[0:49]You can learn more at zcastnetwork.com and definitely check out those shows as well.
[0:58]Lois Lowry is the author of The Wind of the Puzzle, History, and Story.
[1:03]Lois Lowry has been awarded the Newberry Medal twice, first for number the stars, and then for the
[1:09]giver. The author of more than 40 books for children and young adults, including the New York Times
[1:14]bestselling giver quartet and the popular Anastasia Cropnik series, which I read like all the time
[1:20]as a child, she has received countless honors among them the Boston Globe Horn Book Award,
[1:25]the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award, the California Young Reader Medal, and the Mark Twain Award.
[1:30]She writes, my books have varied in content and style, yet it seems that all of them deal
[1:34]essentially with the same general thing, the importance of human connections.
[1:38]She lives in Maine and in the winter sometimes flees to Florida for a bit of sun.
[1:42]Welcome, Lois. Thank you so much for coming on mom's Don't Have Time to Read books.
[1:45]To discuss your latest book, The Wind of Be Puzzle.
[1:48]Okay, thank you. This is my first opportunity, actually, to talk about
[1:54]that book. Oh, I'm honored. I am also honored that you're coming on this podcast. I've
[2:00]been reading your books my entire life. I was like, do you think there's any way she'd say yes?
[2:04]So anyway, I am just over the moon excited. And this new book is so interesting. I learned so much,
[2:11]particularly the way you analyze and thought about how to recreate someone's life and all the
[2:17]research you must have done to, or did you make it all up? Anyway, why don't you tell, why don't
[2:21]you tell readers what The Wind of Be Puzzle is about? Okay. I first have to explain that timing
[2:29]is all. This was 2020. Spring of 2020, we all remember that was the beginning of the pandemic
[2:38]when things started to fall apart. And my husband went off in an ambulance to the hospital,
[2:44]and I couldn't visit him, of course, and he was gone for 86 days. Oh, I was home alone.
[2:51]I'm an introvert. Anyway, most writers are so being home alone is not a hardship for me,
[2:57]but I'm spending all my time reading. I'm just remembering I was also, we all panicked in those early
[3:04]days. I was also having groceries delivered to my house from Whole Foods. This is more than you need
[3:11]to know. No, I love it. I love all the things. Yeah, I'm I. And one day I didn't realize that the
[3:17]groceries had been delivered and were on my front porch, and I let the dog out. And the dog went
[3:23]through the grocery bags and we moved a roast chicken, which he then buried under my
[3:29]Robert Dendrons. Okay, that's neither here nor there. The way my life was at that time, but in the course
[3:37]of of sitting around and reading everything I could get my hands on, which I always do anyway,
[3:42]I happened upon an article. I don't even remember where it was, and it might have been,
[3:47]you know, scrolling through my phone about this body that had been found in Northern Germany,
[3:53]and it had been found in 1952. So this wasn't new news. I don't recall why it was being written
[3:59]about at that time, but I looked at a picture of this body, which had been found in a peak
[4:05]bug. And of course, many such bodies have been found. I now know. I now know too. And the
[4:11]interesting thing is that they're not, although they've been there for a long time, they're not
[4:16]skeletons because of the chemical composition of the peat preserves them. And so their skin is intact
[4:22]and they have fingernails and facial expressions. And it's all kind of macabre, but I found it
[4:28]fascinating, particularly because this particular body had been deemed to be a 13-year-old girl.
[4:35]And those are my people. Those are the people I think about all the time, because I write
[4:41]primarily for that sort of person, a 13-year-old girl is my ideal audience often, and also in order
[4:48]to do that writing, I go back into being my 13-year-old self. So when I saw this body, the face of this
[4:57]child, I started wondering why she had died at that age, and there's no way to know, of course,
[5:04]there's no written history. But that's when I started doing the research. At the same time,
[5:10]I did this too quickly. I began to write a story about that girl. It had been determined by
[5:16]carbon dating that she was 2,000 years old. She'd been alive in the first century. So without
[5:23]doing enough research, I started writing a story. I googled older German names on my computer.
[5:30]I gave her a name, she didn't be real, and I gave her a life, and I was aiming toward,
[5:36]unfortunately, a death, because that's what the story was going to be about. Now, and why
[5:42]had this child died 2,000 years ago, drowned in a peacock. So I was writing that story. And going
[5:52]about it, as I always do, creating a character, creating a life, secondary characters,
[5:58]a setting, what was her home like, and now and then I would do research, what did people live in
[6:03]in the first century? And so I was able to create all that. And then, of course, as I went along,
[6:10]doing more research about that particular body, I discovered that a later scientist with better
[6:16]access to things like DNA and CAT scans, which hadn't been available when the girl was found.
[6:23]A later scientist used all those tools and announced, ta-da, it's not a girl, it's not 13,
[6:31]it's a 16 year old boy. So instead of throwing away an anger, all the stuff I'd written,
[6:38]I kept it and I wrote a second story about the 16 year old boy. And it's quite clear in the book
[6:45]that these are made up people, and it's just speculation. Now, what might a child's life, an adolescent's
[6:52]life, have been like at that time? And why would they have died in such a bizarre and horrible fashion?
[7:00]So that's what that what this about. And the original title, I thought of this when you held it up,
[7:07]the original title was what the scientists had called that body. They named all those bodies
[7:14]by the place in which they were found. And this one they called, and still do, the windaby child.
[7:20]And that's what I named the book. Often I don't name a book until after it's written,
[7:26]and then I pluck a phrase out or find something that seems just right. But this was called
[7:32]the windaby child. And then it was the editor who at some point suggested,
[7:38]rightly I guess, I don't guess, rightly I know. That teenagers will not pick up a book
[7:48]with child in the trade. And you didn't want to leave out a potential audience, simply because
[7:55]of what I had called the book. So they asked me to read me a letter. And I thought, you know,
[8:00]after a while you start thinking titles. And you think of too many of them, and you try to be a
[8:06]literature of an after a while, they all just seem terrible. But because there was an element of
[8:13]trying to put together pieces of puzzle in this book. And that's what I ended up calling it. But
[8:18]it's still, when you held it up and said the name, I saw the name because I've got the same advanced
[8:24]weird copy right here. It still doesn't feel like exactly the right title. But it was the best I could
[8:31]come up with. Well, we'll run with it. We'll make it perfect. The 16 year old boy is that the
[8:39]character who's the friend, right, that they went to the box instead of creating an entirely new
[8:45]16 year old boy, I used a boy who had been in the first that's right. Okay. And then told his story.
[8:52]Right. Yeah. I figured as much. And then what about well, first of all, the whole
[8:57]bio luminescence of the P bug. I did not know that is why people thought they were sort of seeing
[9:02]spirits. Which I thought was a nice little science factor. So thank you for Googling and teaching
[9:08]me a little something for the day. And also why when the girl was found was half her head shape,
[9:14]did you make that up or was there? Oh, okay. So I jumped over that part in the original
[9:20]finding of the body. She had long blonde hair, which is still visible on the body, but only on one
[9:27]side of her head. And the hair had been removed from the other side. And she was blindfolded
[9:32]with a piece of multicolored fabric. So I had to account for those two things. And so in doing the
[9:40]research, I discovered, I mean, there are there were many places I could find bits and pieces of
[9:47]information. But the best source actually was from a Roman historian, Tacitus, first century,
[9:54]who had traveled to northern Germany, which was not yet part of the Roman Empire, but he had
[10:00]about the Germanic tribes and how they live.
[10:03]And I can remember thinking,
[10:04]hey, I took four years of Latin in high school.
[10:07]I thought I could read it in the original Latin.
[10:10]Why didn't even try?
[10:12]There were calculations.
[10:14]But in, it was in task lists that I discovered
[10:17]there were particular crimes for which the hair
[10:21]might be shaved.
[10:22]Browning in a peat box was the sentence given
[10:27]to women who were adulterous.
[10:30]So that was one possibility that this 13-year-old child
[10:34]had sneaked off into the woods with somebody's husband.
[10:37]But it didn't feel right for me.
[10:40]So I had to account for the hair and blindfold
[10:44]in other ways.
[10:46]Well, remaining true to what I had learned about the rituals
[10:52]and the religious ceremonies that the people
[10:54]did have at that time.
[10:56]Then, later, when it was deemed to be not a girl,
[11:00]but a boy, it was also announced that the hair
[11:05]had probably not been shaved as some kind of punishment,
[11:10]but that the peat cutters and grasping and digging up the body
[11:14]had torn the hair off of one side of the head.
[11:17]And that it was not actually the blindfold,
[11:20]that it was probably a piece of fabric
[11:23]that the boy had used to tie back his long hair.
[11:27]And in the burial or the digging up,
[11:29]it had simply been cooled down over his eyes.
[11:32]So there are all sorts of explanations.
[11:35]And we'll never know which of them,
[11:37]if any of them are true.
[11:39]Well, much more interesting to have a be a blindfold.
[11:41]I think that's it.
[11:43]In the book, you start out by basically telling the reader
[11:46]in part one when you call it history, exactly what you've
[11:49]said here.
[11:50]And you start it with an introduction
[11:52]where you discuss it.
[11:53]But you do have a portion in here
[11:55]when you talk about your own life.
[11:57]And how can I just read this little paragraph about you?
[12:01]You say we live our stories in various locations.
[12:03]Some of us perhaps end where we start
[12:05]without ever having explored other realms.
[12:07]Others find it hard to stay put.
[12:09]Me, I was born on a tropical island.
[12:12]I moved later to a big city than to a small town,
[12:15]than to another city in a different country,
[12:17]than to another and another and another.
[12:19]I had siblings along the way I was educated
[12:22]eventually I married and had four children.
[12:24]I lived in different kinds of houses.
[12:26]They'd won small ones, old ones, new ones.
[12:28]I had dogs and cats, several horses along the way.
[12:31]And once briefly, a pet raccoon,
[12:33]definitely want to ask you about that.
[12:34]A bicycle and another bicycle and cars and more cars
[12:37]and more.
[12:38]I went back again for more education.
[12:40]I chose a career.
[12:41]My children grew up, one died.
[12:44]I loved and I was loved.
[12:46]I grew old.
[12:47]Those facts are not particularly interesting.
[12:49]But when I embellish them with the details,
[12:51]it's around each fact.
[12:52]And what those details meant, how important they were,
[12:55]then the story is filled out and raises questions
[12:58]and takes on meaning.
[12:59]And the story gradually becomes me.
[13:01]Oh, and that could be set with different details, of course,
[13:05]for any human being.
[13:07]Yeah.
[13:08]Oh my gosh.
[13:09]What tropical island were you born on?
[13:11]Oh, I wish I could say something hugely odd
[13:16]or romantic like Easter Island.
[13:18]But actually, I was born in Honolulu.
[13:22]My father was a military officer.
[13:24]And he was stationed there at the time that I was born.
[13:27]And then World War II began.
[13:30]He went off to the war.
[13:32]Now, here's, again, too much information,
[13:34]because you didn't ask me all of this.
[13:35]But my mother took her then two children.
[13:38]I had an older sister back to the little town
[13:41]where our grandparents lived.
[13:43]So I grew up in the best possible circumstances
[13:45]in my early life, elementary school,
[13:48]in a little college town in Pennsylvania.
[13:51]The place I still feel very fond of
[13:53]that I no longer have any relatives there.
[13:55]Then the war ends.
[13:58]Dad comes home briefly.
[14:00]I remember going with him, I was eight in the war
[14:02]and to the men's clothing store
[14:05]and that little town suffered him to buy some civilian clothes.
[14:10]But then he has to go back to Japan.
[14:12]And he's going to be there for who knows how long.
[14:15]And so after a while, we, my mother, sister.
[14:19]And by then a little brother, went to Japan.
[14:21]So I went through junior high.
[14:24]Junior high no longer exists.
[14:25]Now it's called middle school.
[14:27]I went through junior high in Tokyo.
[14:29]Then the Korean War began, 1950.
[14:33]I was 13 that summer.
[14:35]And dad had to stay.
[14:37]The casualties.
[14:38]My father was on the staff of the hospital in Tokyo.
[14:41]Casualties were coming in from Korea.
[14:43]But he was concerned about our being there.
[14:47]So he sent us back to the States.
[14:50]And we went back to that little town in Pennsylvania
[14:53]until he could return home.
[14:54]And when he did, then high school, New York City.
[15:00]So it was really the best of many possible worlds.
[15:04]From high school, I went to college to Brown and Rhode Island.
[15:10]Where did you go to high school in New York?
[15:11]I'm here now in New York City.
[15:13]OK, I went to Packer in Brooklyn.
[15:17]Of course, at that time, it was all girls.
[15:20]Now it's probably was much less expensive than it is.
[15:27]I'd love to Packer.
[15:28]And I still am in touch with friends from those days.
[15:31]I graduated from there in 1954, not many years ago.
[15:37]And I still have a very fun spot in my heart for packing.
[15:41]And for where I lived in New York,
[15:44]best possible piece of real estate.
[15:47]I lived on Governor's Island.
[15:49]Oh, wow.
[15:51]Now it's very rare.
[15:53]There's a park.
[15:54]I've been over there.
[15:55]And my house still standing is now in Artville.
[15:59]At least when I was there, that's what it is now.
[16:01]But people don't live there anymore.
[16:03]But in my day, a family's lived there.
[16:06]My little brother went to a little school
[16:09]on Governor's Island.
[16:10]He was in fourth grade.
[16:12]But I took most many kids went off to boarding still
[16:16]when they began high school.
[16:17]But some, like me, would take a boat and then a train
[16:20]and go to high school in New York City.
[16:24]Wow.
[16:25]So did all of the moving around in the different communities
[16:29]and cultures inspire you to write for this age?
[16:32]Or am I just making that up?
[16:34]Well, you're probably making it up.
[16:36]But I think I was always an introvert and introspector
[16:42]and painfully shy.
[16:43]So moving around, who have been very difficult for me,
[16:48]having, again, and again, being thrust into a new school
[16:52]new classroom, often in the beginning of the,
[16:55]not in the beginning of the year, middle of the year,
[16:57]everybody's already formed.
[16:58]They're little groups of friends.
[17:01]And I always had the fashions wrong.
[17:03]And I moved from one place to another.
[17:06]The fads would be different.
[17:08]But setting that aside, I think the fact
[17:10]that I was curious and introspective made me very,
[17:16]I'm trying to think of the word.
[17:17]I mean, Henry James allegedly once said a writer
[17:21]as someone on whom's nothing has lost.
[17:24]I can't think of the word.
[17:26]I noticed stuff.
[17:28]I was absolutely observant as the word I was trying to think of.
[17:33]And so I would be in a new situation,
[17:36]instead of being overwhelmed by, or as my older sister was,
[17:41]annoyed, oh, we have to move.
[17:44]She hated that.
[17:45]Well, I've loved it because it gave me new stuff
[17:47]to learn about, to think about, to wonder about.
[17:51]So it was a wonderful growing up experience for me.
[17:58]And when did you start writing?
[18:01]How did it relate to when you had kids and all that?
[18:04]I had always, from the time I learned to read,
[18:07]very young because my sister taught me when she started school.
[18:10]From the time I knew people wrote books,
[18:13]that's what I always wanted to do.
[18:15]And that's what I majored in at Brown.
[18:17]But it was the 1950s.
[18:20]I went to Brown when I had just turned 17 years old,
[18:24]majoring in English with a concentration on writing.
[18:28]They had a special writing major.
[18:31]It was an honors program.
[18:32]They let me in, and I loved that.
[18:35]But as I mentioned, it was the 50s.
[18:38]And I had a boyfriend when I got to Brown,
[18:41]who was two years older.
[18:42]So he graduated when I was a sophomore.
[18:46]And he wanted to get married.
[18:48]What did I know?
[18:49]I just dropped out of Brown and got married.
[18:52]I had four children in five years.
[18:55]Oh my gosh.
[18:57]Before I was 26, so my aspirations of being a writer
[19:02]really got put on hold.
[19:04]But when my youngest child then went to kindergarten,
[19:08]I went back to college.
[19:10]And I'm an undergraduate school.
[19:12]And began writing.
[19:15]It did not occur to me to write to kids,
[19:17]write for kids, surprising.
[19:20]That a house full of books that I read to my kids,
[19:23]but I saw myself as a writer for adults.
[19:26]I'm going to write the great American novel, of course.
[19:29]And so I must have had a lot more energy than than I do now,
[19:33]because I had these kids.
[19:36]And a house, a big house, dogs and cats,
[19:42]and actually horses for a while out in the pasture.
[19:46]And I also, I had two girls and two boys.
[19:50]I used to make the girls close.
[19:53]I would clean up the breakfast dishes
[19:55]and put the sewing machine on the kitchen table.
[19:57]And make clothes for the kids.
[20:00]At the same time, I was going to school, doing my own writing, my own papers, and in
[20:09]my spare time, and now I can't remember when I had any spare time, I used the same typewriter
[20:17]I had taken the brown when I was 17, and I was writing short stories, which I would send
[20:23]off to magazines, which sent me rejection slips, very often wonderful rejection slips,
[20:30]and there were more magazines than the published fiction than there are now, they're
[20:35]so few now.
[20:37]Anyway, finally, in 1975 perhaps, read book.
[20:44]Still exists, I think, read book, but I don't think it publishes fiction anymore, but
[20:48]they bought a story I had written, published it, and it was a story for adults, but it
[20:54]was seen through the eyes of a child, and a children's book editor wrote to me after
[21:01]having read that story, wrote to me in care of read book, which forwarded her letter,
[21:07]and said to you, Sam, like somebody who might be able to write for four young people, would
[21:12]you consider writing a book for, and it was a distinguished publisher.
[21:17]Well, it had not occurred to me to do that, but it was so rare to get an invitation
[21:22]from an editor.
[21:23]They didn't promise to publish anything, but still, they were interested, I wasn't
[21:29]going to have to just send it in cold and pop somebody ready.
[21:33]And then they did publish that first book in 1977, I was still on the side, while I was
[21:40]doing several things, forget the house, the horses, and the dogs, and the husband, and the
[21:45]kids.
[21:46]I was also studying photography in graduate school, I'm doing a lot of professional photography.
[21:53]So in my spare time, I was still writing for adults, but when that first book was published
[22:00]for what they call young adults, the response from kids was so gratifying, so touching.
[22:10]In those days, this was 1977, no email, nowadays I've got emails from all those kids,
[22:16]but in those days, it was handwritten letters, and sometimes it was, this is a class
[22:21]assignment, so he's writing me back by November 27th, but more often, it was, it was
[22:29]heartfelt kids who said, you know, this book changed my life, and so I began to view
[22:36]with more importance for the task of writing for young people.
[22:40]And I continued to do it, I continued doing other things as well, but gradually that became
[22:48]my primary focus, and also not surprising the 17-year-old girl who married the 19-year-old
[22:55]boy.
[22:56]No, I'm sorry, I was 19 when we got married, he was 21 by then, but those two children
[23:02]grew up and went in different directions, and so my marriage ended, and I had to make
[23:09]the living for the first time, with my degree in English, and so I read it, turned out
[23:16]that running books for kids was the way in which I could do that.
[23:21]That sounds mercenary, and I don't mean it that way, but it was the only skill I had
[23:25]to be honest.
[23:29]I also have four kids, two boys and two girls, I also got divorced, and I'm now remarried.
[23:34]I also got an essay published in Red Book, and I also used to be painfully painfully
[23:40]shy, and I'm still introverted.
[23:42]Anyway, I'm like, I'm like, I'm sorry, I can relate to some of your story very much, and
[23:49]that's wonderful, the validation that you got in the beginning, and do you just keep coming
[23:54]up with ideas?
[23:56]Like tell me about life now, and it was your husband, okay, when he came home after
[23:59]the 86 days.
[24:00]Oh, yes, he's in the other room right now.
[24:03]That's great.
[24:04]It took him a long time.
[24:05]He lost 30 pounds in those 86 days, he had to learn to walk again, but that was several
[24:12]years ago.
[24:13]Yeah, he's doing fun.
[24:15]We're both getting old, but that was enough for me to come, and now I forgot, and you
[24:20]had asked me something, and I forgot, you know, just are you continually inspired
[24:24]to keep doing it?
[24:26]Yeah, how do I come up with things?
[24:29]You know, I have written, well, I haven't counted lately, but I think 52 books, and
[24:35]some of them have fallen into the category of series.
[24:39]There was a very popular series about a character named Anastasia Kropner.
[24:43]I am well aware.
[24:46]And she was fun to do, but if you did nothing but that, I can only speak for myself.
[24:54]I would get cheated this after a while.
[24:57]So I'd like to go back and forth with different kinds of books.
[25:01]This particular new book is the first one I have done that reaches so far back in history,
[25:09]but I have done a couple of others that one was said in 19, well, the time of the flu
[25:15]epidemic.
[25:16]I've done two of this early, early, 19th century.
[25:20]I've done lighthearted books.
[25:24]The one that was published, the first year of the pandemic, so a book tour was canceled,
[25:29]was done in verse.
[25:32]I had not done that before.
[25:34]So I guess I keep myself interested by trying different things.
[25:40]And, you know, some have worked better than others, but it's exhilarating to set out
[25:45]on a new adventure each time.
[25:48]I wait until the something strikes me, the way this child's body caught my interest.
[25:55]You know, professors are writing often are guilty of saying rightly, do you know about
[26:00]that?
[26:01]But I think it's more intriguing to write what you don't know about, right, what you wonder
[26:04]about, right, that's too curious about, right, what you want to know about.
[26:09]So I don't yet, well, I do have another book finished, which is scheduled for publication
[26:15]in 2024.
[26:16]What I'll do after that, I have no idea.
[26:20]Something will come to me, some trigger will happen, and there will be an idea.
[26:26]And often, what form the first idea takes morphs into something else when I sit down
[26:32]to write it.
[26:33]And that's okay, too.
[26:35]What's the book that's coming out next year, fair 2024, rather?
[26:39]It's a realistic contemporary middle grade book, main character's 11-year-old girl, but
[26:44]it's about her friendship with the 89-year-old woman who lives next door, whom she can
[26:51]sit at her serviced friend.
[26:53]Ah, that's lovely.
[26:55]Can I ask what happened to your child who passed away?
[26:57]Oh, my son Gray, he was my second child, and girl boy, girl boy.
[27:02]And this is, you know, you ask a simple question, and it's okay, it's okay, I'll talk
[27:07]about that leads to the answer.
[27:09]But he went to college, majored in economics, can't really know what he wanted to do.
[27:13]his father, my ex-husband was a lawyer, he had no interest in law school.
[27:18]He was an adventurer and an athlete, and he wanted to fly, so he took the tests to enter
[27:27]the Air Force and became a fighter pilot in the Air Force.
[27:32]And sadly, that's how he died in a fighter plane.
[27:36]Oh, wow.
[27:37]However, he left me an enormous death.
[27:40]He had one child who was two years old when he died, and she's my only granddaughter, and
[27:47]she's so much like him, and she, of course, doesn't remember him.
[27:52]She lives in Germany, he had married a German woman.
[27:55]When he was stationed in Germany as a hotshot young lieutenant, he went to buy a Porsche,
[28:02]of course.
[28:03]Ah, here is this beautiful young woman who had majored in languages and business, and
[28:09]was the office manager of the Porsche Agency, and she took him out for a test drive, and
[28:17]he married her, and she and I are still very close.
[28:20]I talked to her by FaceTime last Saturday, so she still lives in Germany, and I until
[28:27]the pandemic, I went over there every year, and she would bring her daughter, I would come
[28:32]to Maine to sue me.
[28:34]Ah, that is so lovely.
[28:36]Wow, it took after your dad then.
[28:39]Is he the only military?
[28:41]My husband now, who was a doctor, spent his military time.
[28:46]Most men of a certain age have spent time in the military because they were required
[28:51]to.
[28:52]So Howard was a Navy doctor for a while, but he didn't make it a career, and my brother
[28:57]was a Navy doctor also.
[29:01]Wow, would you ever considered doing a memoir?
[29:04]I have done one of a sort, and it's called, look it back, but it is, I think that
[29:10]referred to it as a photographic memoir.
[29:13]My father was a fabulous photographer.
[29:17]It wasn't his profession, but we always had a dark room in our house, so I ended up with
[29:22]mountains of old photographs that are much better than the crummy black and white snapshots
[29:29]that most people had in the 40s, and I was going through them and reliving my life
[29:36]by looking at pictures, and I put them together in sequence, relating them to books I
[29:42]had written.
[29:43]It's hard to describe, but each photograph that was ultimately selected for the book was
[29:49]selected because it also had some relation to a book that I later wrote, and so all
[29:55]of that is put together.
[29:56]It's called, looking back.
[29:58]I will have to go get that one now.
[30:00]And we'll get that next.
[30:01]I heard the versions of it because they asked me to update it a few years ago.
[30:06]And I did.
[30:07]And so there's some added stuff at the end, but I'm just remembering the cover.
[30:10]The cover of the first version, published by Hoping this one, whatever year it was, has
[30:15]a picture of me at age four, but it's a very pretty picture of a little blonde girl
[30:20]with big blue eyes looking at the camera.
[30:24]And then when they read it, they used a different picture, which is actually, I think,
[30:28]a better cover.
[30:29]It's me and my sister, and we're probably six and nine.
[30:34]We're at the beach, we're wearing the ugliest bathing suits you have ever seen standing
[30:41]next to each other, scowling at the camera, and you can just see what both of them
[30:47]are thinking.
[30:48]Oh my gosh, well, I'm sorry, I didn't read that ahead of time, I would have, but I'll go
[30:54]back and read it now.
[30:55]This has been so lovely, thank you for sharing so much of yourself.
[30:59]All the TMI parts were my favorites, that's the best.
[31:02]Thanks for being so open and for all you've given the world and all of your writing and
[31:06]just for spending 30 minutes of it with me.
[31:08]So thanks.
[31:09]I've enjoyed it.
[31:10]It's like being in a friend's house and I'm sorry we didn't have a glass of wine or a cup
[31:15]of tea.
[31:16]That would have been lovely.
[31:17]I know.
[31:18]Next time.
[31:19]Okay.
[31:20]Thanks so much.
[31:21]Thank you.
[31:22]Bye bye.
[31:24]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[31:28]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebiowens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[31:32]Books.
[31:33]Also sign up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and
[31:37]meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[31:39]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing.
[31:44]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.