Kylie Ladd, I'LL LEAVE YOU WITH THIS
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[1:03]Kylie Lad is the author of I'll Leave You With This.
[1:06]Kylie is a novelist, psychologist, and freelance writer.
[1:09]Her six novels have been published both in Australia and overseas with her fifth, the way
[1:13]back currently in development for film.
[1:15]She has also co-authored two nonfiction books and holds a PhD in neuropsychology.
[1:20]Kylie lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband, two children, and a Duxin named
[1:24]Taco.
[1:25]Welcome, Kylie.
[1:26]Thank you so much for coming on mom start home time to read books to discuss.
[1:29]I'll leave you with this, a novel.
[1:30]Oh, thank you so much for having me.
[1:32]It's lovely to be here.
[1:33]So we befriended each other on Instagram, I guess, a while back.
[1:37]And I was really moved by your story about your own brother.
[1:40]And then, of course, your novel was really beautiful.
[1:43]I love how you tell the story this time of a shooting of Daniel and how it affects the
[1:50]five siblings and the family and how you go through different points of view and how a
[1:54]loss can affect so many people.
[1:56]But then, of course, what happens with everybody's life independently.
[1:59]So anyway, it was really beautiful and immersive and sad and all the good things that
[2:04]a book brings.
[2:05]But maybe I should let you tell a little more about what your book's about and the inspiration
[2:10]behind it.
[2:11]Yeah, look, I think you've summed it up beautifully, but yes, it's really about four
[2:16]sisters who are not particularly close for a variety of reasons, but who do come together
[2:23]after the death of their only and much loved brother, Daniel, to track down the recipients
[2:29]of his organs after his death.
[2:31]Now, I always feel I have to insert the caveat at that point and say, that sounds gruesome
[2:36]and medical and technical, but I hope you'd agree that the book is quite light, in tone
[2:42]and even funny in places, even though that premise, as I said, does put a few people off,
[2:49]it's a story of life, obviously, of hope and of legacy.
[2:54]I guess legacy was one of the main words that was in my head while I was rotting
[2:58]it.
[2:59]Interesting.
[3:00]Well, you do have this dark sense of humor about death and everything in one scene.
[3:05]You have the sister's husband's aunt has passed away and the ashes are in the back seat
[3:11]of the car and you have this Daniel's old dog come in and eat his way through it, so there's
[3:15]ash all over the back of the car and she's like, oh my gosh, anyway.
[3:19]That was rather, yes, I really threw readers right in at the start there, didn't I,
[3:24]with the being of that death, I have to confess that was almost inspired by something
[3:29]that happened in my own family.
[3:31]My husband, yes, had been driving around with the ashes of his mother.
[3:35]It's not funny, but he didn't know what to do with them or where she would have wanted
[3:40]them spread and being a man, he'd just let them stay on the back seat until they fell
[3:45]below the back seat and one day we found the dog.
[3:48]Now the dog, our dog did not get to the ashes, but our dog was interested in the box
[3:52]and our son, they thought, oh my god, imagine what would have happened if Taka, our
[3:56]dash hand had actually got into that box and that came to me when I was starting the
[4:01]book.
[4:02]Oh, yeah.
[4:03]Oh, my god.
[4:04]I know.
[4:05]Again, I'm making this book sound so much that I've enjoyed some time.
[4:08]No, not at all.
[4:09]Yeah.
[4:10]No, I was trying to point out like, but it's because there's always like this piece
[4:13]of funny with all the darkest days, right?
[4:15]There's the humor in it.
[4:16]And I think it's the juxtaposition of those two things that enables me, we'll even get
[4:20]through it.
[4:21]Absolutely.
[4:22]A hundred percent that has to be laughter as well, doesn't they?
[4:24]And that's what life is as sentimental as it sounds, you know, life is about the balance
[4:29]isn't it?
[4:30]Yeah.
[4:31]Yeah.
[4:32]And tell me, you lost tragically your own brother, tell me about all of that and how this
[4:36]story comes from a personal place.
[4:37]Yeah, look, I did.
[4:39]And that was certainly one of the main, there were two main inspirations this book.
[4:44]And I'm just going to quickly talk about the other one and then move on to that.
[4:48]Yeah.
[4:49]The first was, and I haven't actually told you this, and I'm going to hold it up briefly.
[4:52]I don't know if you can see it, but the first was a newspaper article.
[4:56]Us I came across one day when I was between books actually, it says, Doctor's left
[5:01]mystified by an amazing slat of hand.
[5:04]And I mentioned it in the book, which you have read, but for people who haven't very
[5:09]played, it's about an Indian girl, a student, 18 years old, who lost both arms below
[5:14]the elbow, had to be amputated below the elbow in a bus crash.
[5:18]Doctors offered her a in the soy Sanskrit science fiction, but it's very true.
[5:22]This, this only happened in 2018, doctors offered her a double transplant, amazingly.
[5:29]The arms took, but the arms came from a man that the donor was a male who was older than
[5:36]her, but more importantly, bigger than her, of course, being a man, hairier than her,
[5:40]of course, being a man and quite as his skin was quite darker than hers and skin color
[5:45]as he'd appreciate is, is important, particularly in, in India, where, you know, with the
[5:50]caste system and what have you.
[5:51]And doctors said, do you want these arms and again, I'm aware of how my car, this is
[5:56]sounding, but she said, of course, I want arms.
[5:59]The surgery, I'm trying to be short.
[6:01]The surgery was the success.
[6:02]No, be sure.
[6:03]This is fascinating.
[6:04]This fascinating because the surgery, which took 60 hours and was the first of its kind
[6:08]in the world.
[6:09]And I actually worked on a neuropsychologist by trade.
[6:12]I work in a hospital and I got my hospital librarian to look up all the journal articles
[6:17]about this for me because I was fascinated.
[6:19]And she did and the surgery took about 60 hours with various terms of surgeons rotating
[6:25]in and out.
[6:26]I know.
[6:27]Amazing.
[6:28]Beautiful part is that it worked and within, you know, a month after surgery, she had
[6:31]functional arms.
[6:32]But the even better parts, you'd be, is that a year or so after the surgery, while
[6:38]these arms, when they first been attached, looked quite wrong on her for one of a better
[6:43]work.
[6:44]They looked big and dark and hairy.
[6:46]Within 18 months of the surgery, the arms had transformed quite dramatically.
[6:50]And this is where I hold up the, the paper have been, there's still a bit of a proportion
[6:54]to it, but they're, they've lightened in colour, they're not hairy anymore.
[6:58]And they're much more in proportion than what they were, which is, which is what I saw
[7:02]in the journal articles.
[7:04]So I'm, because I work in a medical field, that absolutely fascinated me, but it did also
[7:10]strike a chord because, as you mentioned, I lost my own brother, just over 10 years ago
[7:15]now.
[7:16]And he was an organ donor.
[7:17]My brother, Piers, was a pilot for Qantas, Australia's airline.
[7:22]He was the youngest pilot that ever employed, all he'd ever wanted to do was fly in his
[7:27]life.
[7:28]He was 39, when one day, Mum and Dad got a phone call from Qantas that Piers hadn't
[7:33]shown up for work and that was completely out of character.
[7:37]He just lived to fly.
[7:38]And they were, he had a partner, but she was a flight attendant who was the way flying
[7:42]herself.
[7:43]So Qantas contacted Mum and Dad, they went round to his flat, again, long story short.
[7:48]He'd suffered an enormous brain aneurysm and was still faintly alive.
[7:53]My mother, it was a doctor and she performed CPR and was managed to keep him alive.
[7:58]I thought it was blood everywhere.
[8:00]Until the ambulance came, but by the time my sister and I were contacted about the whole
[8:04]thing, and he was in ICU at the Alfred Hospital, which is Melbourne's major hospital.
[8:10]It was clear that he'd had this aneurysm and he was brain dead, that he wasn't going
[8:14]to be able to survive.
[8:16]And by the time my sister, who's 18 months younger than I, and I got there, they took
[8:22]us, they let us, you know, see Piers and be with Piers and then a doctor asked if he
[8:27]could speak with us privately and informed us that Piers was registered as an organ donor
[8:32]and they wanted to check with us, but it was okay to proceed with transplantation surgery
[8:38]with harvesting some of his organs, which, and again, I guess, I'm being medical.
[8:43]I was surprised they asked our permission given he was 39 and a registered organ donor,
[8:47]but apparently that's how it's done in Australia.
[8:49]I have no idea about the US.
[8:52]And look, you know, that was probably the only, well, obviously it was a terrible thing
[8:56]that happened.
[8:57]I don't have to explain that to you, although it did give us all a little bit of solace
[9:02]that something came out of it at the time.
[9:05]But again, the best bit of this story happened further down the track and that is that
[9:09]three years after my brother's death, my parents received a letter from the organ and
[9:14]tissue service, which is what is the service that coordinates transplants in Australia.
[9:20]And it was a letter from the person who'd received my brother's right kidney.
[9:24]And donations in Australia have to be anonymous on both sides, but the parties that the
[9:30]parties can co-op and communicate with each other through the organ and tissue service.
[9:34]And this man, that was of the age that my brother had been when he died and he's like
[9:39]30s, he'd had a major infection that had turned into complete kidney failure.
[9:44]Three or four years before the transplant, he'd been on dialysis for that time.
[9:50]And while dialysis saves lives, it's also a very difficult way to live.
[9:53]It certainly impairs the quality of life.
[9:55]He'd have to give up work and he was not able to take his sons to the football.
[10:00]or had three young boys, it wasn't able to travel
[10:02]because he always had to be around for dialysis.
[10:05]He received my brother's kidney,
[10:07]and just one is all you need.
[10:08]The day that my brother died,
[10:10]and he left hospital within the week.
[10:13]He said he felt better at the moment he woke up from surgery
[10:16]and now heard this in my research
[10:18]that kidney transplants particularly work very quickly.
[10:22]He said he felt better within 24 hours.
[10:24]He left hospital within a week.
[10:26]He was back at work within a month.
[10:27]And he finally wrote to us and he said,
[10:29]I'm sorry, it took me so long,
[10:31]but he was going overseas to the UK,
[10:33]which is a long way from Australia.
[10:35]With his family for his wife's sister's wedding,
[10:37]and he said, it's finally made me realize
[10:38]I could never have done this on dialysis.
[10:41]And it's made me realize he said,
[10:42]I've always been grateful.
[10:43]I think of my donor every day.
[10:46]And he said, but I think even more of you,
[10:48]his family who've lost your loved one,
[10:50]and I'm so grateful to you for allowing this to happen.
[10:53]And now that had happened seven, eight years,
[10:57]seven, six, seven years before I wrote the book.
[11:00]And I never even thought about pulling it into a book
[11:03]because even novelists don't turn everything traumatic
[11:05]that happens to them interfection,
[11:07]at least not straight away.
[11:09]So, but it wasn't until I saw that article
[11:12]about the Indian girl and her arms
[11:14]and I thought about what a miracle,
[11:16]transplantation and organ donation is
[11:19]that suddenly all these pieces fell into place.
[11:21]And I suddenly thought, I want to write about this.
[11:24]And the time was right by that stage.
[11:26]I was over the initial brief, and I mean,
[11:29]you never get over it completely of course,
[11:32]but I was able to write about it by that stage.
[11:35]And while Daniel, the man who loses his life in the book
[11:39]is not my brother peers, they're very, very different.
[11:42]It's not peers' story, but certainly, yes,
[11:45]that was inspiration for writing about organ donation
[11:48]and transplantation.
[11:50]I'm gonna take a breath, but I'm also gonna say,
[11:53]while I've concentrated a lot on organ donation,
[11:56]the book is really, I think, just as much about that,
[11:58]if not even more, it's about sisters
[12:01]and it's about relationships, isn't it?
[12:03]And it's about family and blood.
[12:05]So, which was not what I expected
[12:07]when I started writing it, but, you know,
[12:10]happened as I was writing it, I suddenly realized,
[12:12]these girls, they really don't get on, you know,
[12:14]for all that they're keen to do this for Daniel,
[12:17]they're not, they don't get on themselves.
[12:18]And that was what had me the narrative thrust of the book,
[12:22]if you will.
[12:23]Interesting.
[12:24]Right, you said early on that,
[12:26]even though the two sisters who are closest to age,
[12:28]you would expect them to get along, right,
[12:30]there's this, you know, assumption,
[12:31]oh, they're close, they'll be friends,
[12:33]they'll be best friends.
[12:34]And yet those were the two that were furthest apart,
[12:37]in a way that Daniel was actually much closer
[12:39]to the one who was like, what, seven or eight years apart
[12:43]from him.
[12:44]That's right, Daniel is really the one that holds the family
[12:47]together, he's the fourth in the lineup,
[12:49]there's three girls, Alice and Brydie and Claire,
[12:52]above him, then Daniel, and then the younger sister Emma.
[12:56]You might, I'm just, as an aside, you might notice
[12:58]that the siblings are named alphabetically,
[13:01]so it's ABCD-E.
[13:03]Which I did not need with that, I did not notice that.
[13:06]I didn't even, I did not notice that.
[13:09]Oh my gosh, very clever.
[13:10]Well, it sounds clever, I did it for my readers
[13:14]because it's hard on a reader to be confronted
[13:17]with a whole lot of characters at once
[13:19]and trying to remember them all.
[13:21]But birth order is really important in this book,
[13:23]as you just said, you think the two firstborns
[13:26]or the two oldest are gonna be closest,
[13:28]and then Daniel is actually closest to one
[13:31]at seven years older than him.
[13:33]And birth order is really important to this book.
[13:36]So I wanted the reader to be able to quickly always identify
[13:40]where each character came in the birth order,
[13:42]if that makes sense.
[13:43]So by giving them ABCD-E, you know, readers who noticed,
[13:48]could work out, okay, that's, she's the youngest
[13:51]and she's the youngest by 13 years to the oldest.
[13:54]So there's a big gaps and I can't remember what they were saying
[13:58]before I got to start doing my first gaps,
[14:00]but I'm really glad you told me that.
[14:02]That's super clever, I love it.
[14:04]And I feel like I'm more on for not even noticing.
[14:07]But anyway, that's what I was gonna quickly say,
[14:11]Daniel, even though he's fourth, that's right,
[14:13]is really the linchpin or the fool prim in the family.
[14:17]He's the one that all the sisters are closest to.
[14:19]And so when he dies,
[14:22]the sisters who already weren't that close
[14:24]because of personality differences and age gaps
[14:27]are even further apart because they no longer
[14:29]even have that central one person
[14:32]that they all love and particulate relate to.
[14:34]So yes, I was interested in that
[14:37]and when that happens in a family too.
[14:40]And did that, did something similar happen in your family?
[14:42]I know this is about your novel and novel not fiction is
[14:46]very much not non-fiction,
[14:48]but did you, were there echoes in reality?
[14:51]Not in that specific way.
[14:54]No, it's just my sister and I.
[14:55]And then my brother who was seven years younger
[14:57]than myself actually, I guess.
[14:59]And actually, I probably identify my strong level,
[15:01]my sisters with Alice and the oldest
[15:03]because I'm the oldest.
[15:04]And Alice and is a typical oldest child
[15:07]in that she's responsible and organized
[15:10]and a bit bossy and a bit of a pain in the neck.
[15:12]And that's probably me as well.
[15:15]I didn't actually realize that there was a same age gap
[15:17]between Alice and Daniel as there is between peers
[15:20]and myself, but there's only three of us.
[15:22]So it's not quite the same.
[15:23]But age, yeah, age plays a part, you know,
[15:26]seven years is a big difference.
[15:28]One of you is a high school and one is still at primary school.
[15:30]It is a big gap.
[15:31]And yeah, that was part of the reason
[15:33]that the sisters aren't as close as they could be.
[15:35]It's the age gaps.
[15:37]My kids, there's seven and a half years
[15:39]between my twins and my youngest.
[15:41]Oh, wow.
[15:42]And then I have another daughter in between.
[15:43]So, thank goodness.
[15:45]Yeah, okay.
[15:46]So, you know, about age gap.
[15:47]I'm fascinated by birth order and all the interrelationships.
[15:50]I always find myself wondering, you know,
[15:52]what the four of them God willing, you know,
[15:54]as they grow up with all the different relationships
[15:57]will be and I like seeing it all unfold.
[16:00]I love is that they say that because, you know,
[16:02]you said, was there an echo and you was,
[16:03]no, there's only three in mind,
[16:04]but I'm three siblings in my family of birth,
[16:07]but I wanted at least five,
[16:09]because five just keeps you so many
[16:11]as you're saying so many different relationships to play
[16:14]with, you know, A versus B, A and B versus C,
[16:17]or you know, C, D and E versus A.
[16:19]You know, this just,
[16:21]and as I mentioned, I'm a psychologist by training
[16:23]and by practice, I work two days away
[16:25]because I'm a psychologist.
[16:26]And those, the plethora of relationships
[16:30]and all the different ways they can unfold.
[16:32]But the ways that can so quickly be reversed
[16:35]or turn on each other as well,
[16:36]oh, I just love playing with that.
[16:38]So five was having five siblings to play with was a delage.
[16:42]It really was.
[16:44]It is such an interesting sort of thought experiment,
[16:48]what happens to the pieces of yourself that live on, right?
[16:52]Because it challenges the whole notion of self
[16:54]and our relationship to our bodies, right?
[16:56]As specific scientific things, like so apart from the soul,
[17:01]when you could, but then I wonder, you know,
[17:04]for the girl in the article,
[17:05]the donor of those arms, right?
[17:08]Like how great would it have been for someone
[17:10]who loved that man to sit there and like hold it hand again?
[17:13]Oh, absolutely.
[17:14]And I do have a scene in the book as you'll know
[17:16]of Allison when she makes the hand transplant,
[17:19]Daniel's hand transplant recipient.
[17:21]And when I was doing research for the book,
[17:24]I, you know, I covered all this standard organs
[17:28]you think about when you're thinking about donations
[17:30]like kidney, liver, lungs, all that sort of thing.
[17:33]And then I suddenly thought,
[17:34]because I've heard about this, I've read about this girl.
[17:37]I suddenly sort of wonder if that's ever happened in Melbourne
[17:39]if there's ever been any, or not Melbourne, Australia,
[17:41]if there's ever been any organ, you know, limb transplants.
[17:43]So God bless Google, quickly googled it.
[17:46]To my delight, I found that there has been one hand transplant
[17:49]recipient in Australia.
[17:51]And that man lives three hours out of Melbourne.
[17:54]I tracked him down again using Google and a local paper
[17:58]and I went and met him and he was absolutely fantastic.
[18:01]No. He and his wife the year way.
[18:03]And they came to the launch of the book
[18:05]and they were the guests of honour.
[18:07]And he received his transplanted hand
[18:10]at the age of 68, which is late in life
[18:13]to be given an organ like a hand,
[18:15]and a hand transplants terribly complicated, obviously.
[18:19]But you have to pass a battery of psychological tests
[18:21]to be given something an organ like that.
[18:24]And he was apparently the one who passed them the best,
[18:27]so to speak, I'm not expressing that well.
[18:29]But 30% of recipients of organ donation recipients,
[18:34]at least in Australia, don't take their medicines
[18:37]or don't do the right follow-up, would you believe?
[18:40]There's a high percentage, which doctors and scientists believe
[18:44]is some sort of psychological rejection
[18:46]of needing a transplant or what have you.
[18:48]So recipients are often not, you know,
[18:52]if they're near death, they're not screened.
[18:53]But recipients often receive a lot of psychological screening
[18:56]before they are given a transplant, again,
[18:59]at least in Australia, I have no idea how it works anywhere else.
[19:02]And he'd come through all the tests with blind colors.
[19:05]And by the time my book was out, he was 79
[19:09]and had two, he'd lost all four of his limbs to men and jartists.
[19:15]And he had two prosthetic legs and one transplanted hand.
[19:18]And he came to my book launch at 79 and held court.
[19:22]And he held up his hand and said,
[19:24]when I was making my speech and said,
[19:27]if anyone wants to come and have a look at it, feel free.
[19:29]And there was a line of people going to look at it.
[19:32]And he was great, he was loving showing it off.
[19:34]But yeah, it is, I remember sitting at his kitchen table
[19:38]and he showed it to me and there is something,
[19:42]it's very scientific, obviously,
[19:44]but there's something magical too about saying
[19:46]what is a part of someone else functioning
[19:49]and someone else's body.
[19:50]And while I'm very much a scientist in my work,
[19:53]there is a woo woo kind of me that, you know,
[19:57]got goosebumps and just thought, oh my goodness.
[20:00]you know this is someone's life going on in a different form.
[20:03]So tell me about the process of turning the story
[20:06]or your idea into fiction and your whole sort of life as a novelist.
[20:13]Look I I'll leave you with this is my it's only my second novel to be published in the US
[20:18]but it's my sixth novel altogether and I have to say I actually find writing really hard
[20:25]and sometimes I don't know why I do it but obviously after six novels there must be a good
[20:31]reason and I feel compelled to but I have to say I found this novel really easy to write which is
[20:36]not usual for me. Now I started this novel I read that article the day that my or two days before
[20:43]my daughter's 18th birthday which was also the day that her school closed down for the first
[20:48]lockdown for COVID back in 2020 and my daughter was doing year 12 a final year at the time
[20:56]she's very anxious and she ended up doing seven months of her final year of school at home online
[21:02]as you possibly where Melbourne where I live in Australia had the longest series of lockdowns in
[21:07]the world we were locked down for the best part of two years not consecutively but you know we
[21:12]had like a six month lockdown and it got out for a few weeks and then a one month lockdown and
[21:16]this is a COVID novel I started writing it in oh well I got the idea in the first lockdown
[21:21]and researched it in the first lockdown I met my hand recipient oh a transplant recipient
[21:26]between lockdown's one and two and that really once I met him I really thought yes there is
[21:31]there's really magic in this idea for me and I started writing it in lockdown two and I finished
[21:36]it in lockdown six which was our last lockdown and I actually found it really easy to write
[21:41]which as the set is unusual for me I set the novel in Sydney Australia's other major city even though
[21:46]I live in Melbourne because I've suffered up with being in Melbourne in our lockdown and again I know
[21:54]you had something like this in probably in New York and lots of parts of America but we were
[21:58]only allowed to leave the house for an hour a day and we weren't allowed to go more than five
[22:02]kilometres from the house and for the best part of two years that's all I did and I was all my other
[22:07]novels I set in Melbourne but I was over thinking about Melbourne and I thought I'm going to set
[22:12]it somewhere else I can pretend I'm somewhere else by the harbour so I set it in Sydney and thank
[22:18]God for that novel because I couldn't do my work as a psychologist the hospital I worked for
[22:22]shut down what was closed to everything except you know emergency surgeries and things like that
[22:27]and I'm just so grateful that I saw that article two days before the first lockdown started and I
[22:33]something to keep me from going absolutely mad in you know the 18 months or so that we had a lockdown
[22:39]and I'm very grateful for that yes oh my gosh and how do you balance US lunches Australian lunches
[22:48]like how does that how did you find it for your last book tell me a little more about that
[22:54]well this book launched in Australia six months ago so I did lots of launch stuff for it then
[23:00]but that's all you know that takes four or five months and then it's all started dying down
[23:05]and then suddenly just come out in the US and the UK in the last couple of weeks so it's nice actually
[23:11]to get a chance to talk about it again because I hadn't talked it then overseas took a holiday when
[23:15]overseas with my husband which you know of course borders were shut and we weren't able to do for
[23:20]three years so we've been in Europe for the last month it's really nice to come back and start
[23:24]talking about it again I must say and hope that it's reaching other readers and other areas
[23:31]but look I work as a psychologist as I said two days a week and I write two days a week that's
[23:36]that's my plan for my life and I try to keep one day a week free for I don't know you know if
[23:41]we're doing all the other things that mothers have to do because they don't have time to do anything
[23:46]else and it generally works pretty well I really like that balance in my life I don't want to
[23:52]work full-time as a psychologist I don't want to write full-time either having two days a week of
[23:57]each I feel really blessed as an overuse word but I do it's a great balance in my life of being
[24:02]out in the world doing stuff with other people and being inside in my own head and creating worlds
[24:09]I love that that's beautiful what advice do you have for aspiring authors?
[24:14]Writing is a long game it took me my first novel was published at 40 and 55 now but I wrote
[24:23]three novels before my first novel was published I wrote novels for 10 years before my first novel
[24:28]and that was my other one that actually got into the the US it was called after the fall but
[24:33]that's as I said it's been 15 years since that came out just about now I wrote for
[24:38]novels for 10 years before the first one got up got published and I hear that I hear a lot of people
[24:43]who are overnight successes who write their first novel and you know get it up and it does well
[24:47]but for more writers that I know and I know a lot of writers having been in the game for the
[24:52]the best part of 20 years the more writers I know have had to work you know long and hard
[24:57]and persistence is the name of the game is is keeping you bottom in that chair and just turning
[25:02]up to do the work the other thing I would say is be really familiar with your genre I write
[25:07]commercial fiction know what is going off what's popular in your genre try and work out if
[25:13]there's areas there's gaps too if there hasn't been you know when this story came to me about
[25:19]all the donation a part of me did think is that to macabre for the market is that too confronting
[25:24]for people but I did also think I'm not aware that there's been I mean there's been my sister's
[25:29]keeper and there's been a few books about organ donation but not a lot so I did think yeah it's not
[25:34]something that's been overdone so I think it's important when you're you're trying to sell a book
[25:38]to a publisher to be able to show exactly how it fits the market both in terms of what's already
[25:44]there but also in terms of what's not there so I think that's important too yeah and read aloud
[25:50]that's my final thing I read everything I write aloud my husband is retired and has been since
[25:56]he was 50 were using another part of the house he goes I just hear your voice coming from the study
[26:02]all day there's just a constant murmur of your voice he goes what are you talking about and
[26:06]it's just me reading out every sentence I write because to me that's the only way you know if the
[26:11]sentence flows and and if it hits these correctly so to speak so interesting yeah I read what I
[26:18]write to my husband but when he's like next to me not with him in another room I don't read
[26:25]anything I don't show anything I write to my husband until it's published everybody does it
[26:29]differently I'm really insecure about my work and I think okay if if you know hotter or whoever
[26:35]penguin my publisher's in Australia I think it's good enough now I can show it to my husband but
[26:41]not until penguin or hotter have gone given at a take that is really funny I know it's silly isn't it
[26:47]but no it's not silly so are you have you started your next novel or maybe you've already finished
[26:53]another novel by now no I'm I'm I'm actually two-thirds of the way into my neck what I hope will be my
[26:59]next novel you know I've written four or five novels and haven't got up but they don't always get up
[27:03]that's that's the part of the persistence I am very interested as a practicing psychologist
[27:09]I'm very interested in the intersection between the psychological and the medical which is
[27:13]sort of what I'll leave you with this is about and and what others of my books have been about as
[27:19]well my previous book before I'll leave you with this which wasn't published in America it's called
[27:24]The Way Back and it was actually inspired by an American case actually by Elizabeth Smart the
[27:28]kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart and I thought you probably know that case I wasn't interested
[27:34]per say in the kidnapping I was interested in how somebody gets over something like that something
[27:39]is traumatic is that I guess that novel is that post-traumatic stress disorder which again doesn't
[27:45]sound particularly sexy but it's that sort of thing that I'm interested in how people deal with
[27:50]psychological things and the reason I'm mentioning that is because part of what I'm working on
[27:54]at the moment is that things crossed in Australia a screenplay somebody's option that in a
[27:59]screenplay is being written for that at the moment so it's things crossed it will get up I'm
[28:05]still going to get funding but so I'm half involved with that process I'm also working on a novel
[28:10]about an IVF mixup which again came from an article I read in the paper and is based on a true
[28:16]story and again it's that lovely interface for me not for the people involved of the medical and
[28:22]the psychological and where that leaves us so very interested in a sister break production and
[28:27]all the ethics around that so yeah well that's what's happening at the moment yeah I've got to
[28:33]finish that body into the year well I'm so impressed Kylie this is amazing you're you're
[28:38]obviously you're just so bright and so introspective and you see the whole big picture no it's
[28:44]true I mean you're a vantage point as a psychologist but in that world and being able to tap into
[28:51]the fiction like maybe this is the new thing you know two days a week psychology two days a week
[28:55]writing we'll take off maybe you're just a trend center here I'll never an earlier doctor I was
[29:01]the last person I know to get a mobile phone but yes I'm prepared to be an earlier doctor there
[29:05]you suspect and I recommend it to everybody it's a great life balance so yeah and one day I
[29:12]went to do the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning so I moved the dog oh my gosh well thank
[29:19]you so much for coming on congratulations I'll leave you with this and yeah I can't wait to just
[29:25]follow along and see what else you come up with next thank you so much for having me it was a great
[29:29]conversation all right thanks so much bye bye thanks for listening to this episode of moms don't
[29:35]have time to read books don't forget to follow me on Instagram ads and be Owens and at moms don't
[29:40]have time to read books also sign up for my newsletter at zibbowens.com and sign up for my virtual
[29:45]book club and meet lots of authors on zoom every other week thanks so much to Steve and Ryan
[29:50]in fact texture sound for the sound editing and thank you to morning moon productions for providing
[29:55]this fantastic intro and now trim music