Hank Phillippi Ryan on What Happens After the Happy Ending
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:02]I'm Zibi Owens.
[0:04]I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show
[0:07]and learned endless amounts about storytelling,
[0:10]reinvention, and life itself.
[0:11]Because when you talk about books,
[0:13]you're really talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors,
[0:18]the best-selling and the not-yet-discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read and that the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy.
[0:25]Hank Filipe Ryan is back on the podcast
[0:29]to discuss her new book, Mother Daughter's Sister Stranger
[0:32]in Novel.
[0:33]Hank is the USA Today bestselling author
[0:35]of 17 thrillers, including one wrong word
[0:38]and all this could be yours,
[0:39]which was the 2026 Mary Higgins Clark Award winner.
[0:43]Hank Filipe Ryan has won every major award in the mystery genre
[0:47]with her thrillers translated into multiple languages worldwide.
[0:50]Her fiction is inspired by a lifetime
[0:52]of investigating true crime during her storied career
[0:55]as an honor reporter for Boston's WHDH TV,
[0:58]where she was awarded multiple honors
[1:00]for her groundbreaking journalism,
[1:02]including an unprecedented 37 Emmys.
[1:06]Her work has resulted in new laws,
[1:08]people sent to prison, homes removed from foreclosure
[1:11]and millions of dollars in refunds and restitution for victims.
[1:14]A TEDx speaker and indomand literary moderator,
[1:17]she has been called a superb and gifted storyteller.
[1:20]A Chicago native with roots in Indianapolis,
[1:23]Hank lives in Boston with her husband
[1:25]and nationally renowned civil rights
[1:26]and criminal defense attorney, enjoy our conversation.
[1:30]Welcome, Hank.
[1:31]Thank you so much for coming on totally back
[1:33]to talk about Mother Daughter's Sister Strangers.
[1:36]Although Mother Daughter's sister across that,
[1:38]so do we just call it stranger?
[1:40]What do you think?
[1:41]We call it Mother Daughter's Sister Strange, definitely,
[1:44]because every woman is at least one of those, right?
[1:48]And some of us are all of them.
[1:50]And so the book is about roles and what role we play
[1:54]and how those roles can change.
[1:56]And how even, you know, a mother and a daughter
[1:59]and a sister can sometimes be strangers to each other.
[2:02]Very true.
[2:03]Well, you start the book with a punch, right?
[2:07]It starts off after a plane crash,
[2:09]the memory, the hazy memory,
[2:11]the wondering of what happened,
[2:13]what was memory, what was fact,
[2:16]and how these sisters survived,
[2:19]and then how they approach raising another daughter
[2:23]into the morass of life.
[2:25]Talk a little bit about why this construct for it,
[2:30]why this particular set of what ifs and all of that.
[2:33]Well, it's interesting because I always think about,
[2:35]you know, did you ever lie to your mother?
[2:37]And of course, we all did.
[2:39]And I started thinking about what if our mom was lying to us
[2:43]as well.
[2:44]What if did we keep secrets from our mom?
[2:46]Sure we did.
[2:47]What if she was keeping secrets from us too?
[2:50]And how would we ever know?
[2:51]And then the other sort of element of this too
[2:54]are actually, one is when I was in college,
[2:56]long ago, I made a game during Thanksgiving
[2:59]and brought it home, which was called familial pursuits.
[3:02]And it was all questions about things that had happened
[3:05]in my family over the years.
[3:07]I had four siblings.
[3:08]And it was like, where was Hank when the barn burned down?
[3:11]Questions like that.
[3:12]And everybody had a different answer.
[3:15]Everybody had a different absolute memory
[3:18]of what had happened.
[3:20]And probably none of those were the actual truth.
[3:23]And so it made me think about how, as a family,
[3:29]every family has a history, every family has a story,
[3:32]every family has lore.
[3:34]And we grow up believing that those stories are true.
[3:38]But what if something happens in your life
[3:40]to indicate to you that maybe what you always believed,
[3:45]what you were always told is not true.
[3:47]And how much would you want to find that out?
[3:49]Is it better just to leave it the way it is
[3:51]with your happy memories or even sad memories
[3:54]leaving them the way they are?
[3:56]Or would you be compelled to go find the truth
[4:00]of what happened?
[4:01]So those kinds of things were together,
[4:03]the final little element of the book.
[4:05]And I wonder if you had this happen to you too.
[4:07]When my mom would read me stories when I was little
[4:10]and she would say, you know,
[4:11]and they all lived happily ever after the end.
[4:14]And I would say, well, what happened after that?
[4:16]And she'd say, no honey, it says the end.
[4:18]I would say, but it can't be the end.
[4:20]They lived happily ever, ever,
[4:22]after forever, nothing bad ever happened to them.
[4:25]And she always said, I was a problem, child, you know,
[4:29]asking questions about those things.
[4:31]But to me, the characters were real
[4:33]and they had to live on.
[4:34]And so that was another element that went into this story,
[4:38]how stories shape our lives, bottom line.
[4:41]And what if those stories turn out not to be true?
[4:44]Well, I'm glad you touched on this topic
[4:46]because I am often thinking about what happens
[4:48]to characters long after the book ends
[4:50]because you spend hours inhabiting lives.
[4:54]And sometimes like years in a first person narrative
[4:56]where you're so in it with someone,
[4:58]you can't just sh-
[5:00]that down. Where does all that curiosity go? How do you make sense of feeling so connected to
[5:06]something perhaps fictitious and then not knowing what else comes down the line? It's like
[5:12]a crazy exercise when you think about it. It is. It's kind of joy. It's kind of the magic of
[5:18]creating a character. I mean, we write characters and they feel real. They feel real to our
[5:23]readers we hope and they certainly feel real to us like friends and they have intentions and they
[5:28]have agency and they have hopes and fears. And they feel real. I mean, what are the things that
[5:33]so interesting about writing fiction is that, you know, I don't use an outline. So I don't know what's
[5:37]going to happen next. And as I started this book, it was about a young woman who is a one-of-be
[5:43]literary agent who secretly writes a blog about happy endings where she gives every character in
[5:51]every book a happy ending. Nancy Drew does not marry Ned Nickerson, but she marries a criminal defense attorney
[5:58]and she goes off to be a justice activist. You know, what happened to Nick Caraway in the great
[6:04]Gatsby? Where did he go after that fateful summer? And so she creates endings for books. She created
[6:11]a new ending for the little prince. And Zibi, all of that got cut. All of that got taken out of the book.
[6:17]No. But I mean, that was what started me in writing this as well. My main character, as you
[6:25]as you say at the beginning of the book is she and her sister are the sole survivors of a private
[6:31]playing crash that killed their parents. And, you know, as she'll tell you in the book, she took
[6:37]psychology 101. She knows that her search for happy endings for her characters is really actually
[6:44]her search for a happy ending for herself. And she's clear about that in the book. So I didn't need
[6:51]all those blogs to tell you that. But Eliza is in search for happy endings. And she becomes a book
[6:57]agent, a romance book agent, because those happily ever after endings are required. And that's what
[7:04]she wants in the world. And when her sister, her dearly beloved sister, goes inexplicably missing,
[7:10]she and her 11 year old niece Piper must go on the hunt for Piper's mom to find out what happened.
[7:17]And she knows that there may not be a happy ending in the story, but she's determined to find
[7:24]Well, Piper is okay with the the happiest of endings just being a piece of pizza at the end of the day.
[7:30]So, you know, bless the children. Thank you. As Piper will tell you, there's no question about
[7:37]that. Piper was really fun to write. It's fun to write an 11 year old because they're so on the
[7:42]cusp of wanting to be an adult half the time she wants to be an influencer and half the time
[7:46]she wants her stuffed animal. And her mom is missing, but she loves her aunt, but and she has kind
[7:52]of a complicated history. So how do you, you know, how do you as someone's aunt step in for somebody's
[7:59]mom? What does it mean to be a mom? And what can you give a child, especially when that child's
[8:06]future is in such jeopardy? And that's what I wanted to explore in mother, daughter, sister,
[8:11]and you see the themes coming through now the relationships between mother and daughter and sister
[8:17]and which how much do we really know about each other? Because Eliza's sister B would never
[8:23]disappear, would never abandon Piper, although it feels like that's what she's done,
[8:29]especially on the exact 11th anniversary of the plane crash. B has disappeared. That is
[8:36]it's Remembrance Day and she'd be would never not be with Eliza on that day. So you can see that
[8:43]something untoward has happened, but how bad is it going to be and what's really behind Eliza and
[8:50]B's life story? Wow. Did you, this is a stupid question. Remembrance Day is, did you come up with
[8:58]that or is that a thing? No, that's, I came up with that. That's a fictional thing. Yeah, for them.
[9:03]It's real. It's real to Eliza and B, obviously, but no, that's a thing that felt right, right?
[9:10]And that's what they talk about is how do you, how do you grieve a parent who's dead, who's
[9:18]left you physically, but certainly not emotionally, who's left you with love and left you with
[9:23]questions, you remember them. And it's nice to have a day where that's your total focus that
[9:28]you come to the cemetery. You tell them how you are now and you relate one story that you
[9:34]remember from your past. So I wanted to take that day and make it be really sacrosanct, you know, show
[9:40]you that B would never on purpose miss this day. Wow. Well, I have an 11 year old and it's funny
[9:48]because when I was reading the book in my head, 11 sounds younger than like my actual child is 11.
[9:56]Like 11 year old, I don't know, but maybe.
[10:00]He's mature or something.
[10:01]I don't know.
[10:02]Not that you wrote Piper Young.
[10:03]I just mean when I hear 11-year-old, I think, oh,
[10:07]well, easily distracted, like you could probably pretend,
[10:12]everything's fine, but they are too smart for that, right?
[10:15]That these 11-year-olds are not getting any wool
[10:18]over their eyes.
[10:20]That's true.
[10:20]And we embrace that in Piper.
[10:22]I love that how Eliza embraces that in Piper.
[10:25]She respects her and she thinks about that.
[10:28]And there's this balance of listening to her
[10:32]and understanding her grief and her fear
[10:35]and her child, like a little bit denial
[10:40]that something bad has happened.
[10:43]So those are the rocky steps that you
[10:45]have to take with somebody who's that age.
[10:47]Because they're not really, they're not even teenagers yet.
[10:51]And some of that, when you're supremely worried,
[10:55]you might pretend that everything is going to be OK.
[10:57]Especially if you have an aunt who has no idea how to be a mom.
[11:02]But it's really just trying to do her best
[11:03]for this little girl who she obviously deeply loves.
[11:07]Well, I like how you included the game.
[11:09]Maybe you didn't have the blogger.
[11:10]But at least she could play the game of, like,
[11:12]let's write a happy ending for this story.
[11:14]And that's very fun.
[11:15]Obviously, you love games.
[11:17]This is great.
[11:18]What other games do you have up your sleeve, thank you.
[11:20]And we'll see.
[11:21]It's also that the game that they play of endings
[11:25]allows Piper.
[11:26]And what Eliza is really doing is allowing
[11:29]Piper's imagination to grow,
[11:31]allow her to think of stories and what might happen.
[11:34]But that's a good technique to have in life
[11:39]is to see what, imagine what might be ahead.
[11:41]It's a problem-solving thing that she's teaching her.
[11:44]And she's also teaching her to be optimistic.
[11:47]How do you have a happy ending?
[11:49]How do you look forward to something,
[11:51]even as Eliza fears that something really
[11:54]awful has happened and worries,
[11:56]how is she going to explain this when the devastating thing
[12:00]happens?
[12:01]How is she going to handle that with Piper?
[12:02]And what will her responsibilities be?
[12:05]I mean, this is a fast-paced page turning thriller, I hope.
[12:09]That's full of twists and surprises.
[12:11]But it turned out also to be sort of a love letter
[12:14]to mothers and daughters and sisters
[12:17]about those relationships and the bonds
[12:19]that we have with the ones that we love.
[12:23]In your acknowledgements, you write that when you read a book,
[12:26]you go right to the ending and you almost see it
[12:28]as a disservice to the author by not doing that,
[12:31]because you're going to be so busy trying to figure out
[12:34]everything that all the clues and everything
[12:36]they got to the end and instead,
[12:38]you want to be able to focus on the language and all of that.
[12:41]Tell me more about that because I rarely go,
[12:44]I mean, I don't think I ever go to the ending
[12:47]because for me, that takes some of the enjoyment away
[12:51]from the ride.
[12:52]Yes, you are obviously so absolutely right.
[12:56]There's just no question about that.
[12:58]And I hope that you're millions of listeners
[13:01]will not flip to the endings and my bits or your won'ts
[13:04]or any part, anybody's, but so don't do that, or I do that.
[13:08]But for me, at least, as an author,
[13:12]I do it as an exercise, sort of an educational exercise,
[13:15]almost as research, almost as deconstructing.
[13:18]So in certain books, I'll read the first chapter,
[13:22]then I go to the end to see how it ends.
[13:24]And then I go back to the first chapter
[13:26]and read it from the beginning to deconstruct
[13:28]how the author got there.
[13:31]And also to sort of respect the author's writing enough
[13:34]and enjoy it enough.
[13:35]So I'm not worrying, like, is he going to die?
[13:37]Is she going to die?
[13:38]Are they going to fall into the river?
[13:39]What's going to happen to the dog?
[13:40]Who is the bad guy?
[13:41]Because in a really good book, if we're lucky,
[13:44]read a really good book, we're turning the pages as fast
[13:46]as we possibly can to see what happens.
[13:48]And all that gorgeous setup, all that beautiful writing
[13:52]and all that wonderful structure,
[13:53]and all that foreshadowing, and all those clues
[13:56]that every good author has put into their book,
[13:58]we just miss, because we just want to find out what happened.
[14:01]So it's sort of allowing me to take away the suspense,
[14:05]and I know that's the point of reading suspense
[14:07]is to have suspense, but you know, whatever.
[14:09]And I read it for education.
[14:12]I read it to teach myself bottom line.
[14:15]I read it to teach myself how to be a better writer.
[14:19]And the wonderful books that I read,
[14:21]by wonderful authors that I admire,
[14:23]I try to understand how they got to that ending.
[14:27]So, you know, and I don't care if I know the ending,
[14:31]because it's a different way of reading a book,
[14:35]but to me, to me, it is just as enjoyable with that.
[14:41]Well, you, as I said, we agree.
[14:43]Don't do this at home.
[14:44]Do as I do, not as I say, or don't, never mind.
[14:48]I don't even know the expression.
[14:49]We have talked about this in the past,
[14:51]but you came from a career in TV journalism,
[14:55]and transitioned to being an author, yet you're up.
[15:00]Your appearance on the scene of all of these things can do nothing but inform the quality
[15:05]of your writing.
[15:06]Talk about how using that type of lens helps on your creating scenes and suspense and
[15:12]page-turning pages.
[15:14]Thank you.
[15:15]Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it?
[15:16]I'm a firm believer in that everything we do in our lives.
[15:21]It is there for what it is, but it is also the foundation for the next thing we do.
[15:26]And we don't even know what the next thing we're going to do is going to be.
[15:29]And yet everything we've done will lays that groundwork.
[15:33]And there is nothing that could be better groundwork for writing crime fiction than having
[15:37]been a true crime reporter, having been an investigator reporter.
[15:40]You know, I did that for 40 years.
[15:42]But from the standpoint of suspense, you know, I don't want you to turn the channel when
[15:46]my stories are on TV.
[15:48]And I don't want you to be able to put my books down, you know, I want you to mist your
[15:51]stop on the subway because you want to just have one more chapter or stay up, you know,
[15:55]just a little bit longer for one more chapter.
[15:58]So that idea of entertaining, of pacing, of curiosity, of suspense, of twists and
[16:05]surprises, of being, of changing someone's life, I mean, it reminds me that as an investigative
[16:11]reporter, my stories, what are the key, of writing a good investigative story?
[16:17]You have a character who you care about, right, who has an important problem that needs
[16:22]to be solved, you're tracking down clues as a reporter and following leads and going to
[16:27]places and doing interviews, you're hearing people talk.
[16:30]And in the end, you want the good guys to win and the bad guys to get what's coming
[16:34]to them and you want some justice and you want to change the world a little bit.
[16:40]And that's exactly the same, an investigative reporting and crime fiction writing, isn't
[16:44]it?
[16:45]That's a good story.
[16:46]Also, you want it to be entertaining and enlightening and new and unique.
[16:52]I mean, when I've been a television reporter for 40 years and I started out, you know,
[16:56]hearing cat shows and craft shows and, you know, moved on to, you know, basketball
[17:02]finals and then finally political conventions and true crime.
[17:06]And no matter what story I did, I wanted it to be that a gem, you know, the best story
[17:13]about a cat show that anybody has ever seen in the universe.
[17:17]You know, every story was important to me, no matter what it was.
[17:20]And I would raise the bar on myself every time in writing my stories, be better, be smarter,
[17:25]be more entertaining, be faster, be more unique, be more important.
[17:29]You know, I've gotten, you know, we've changed laws and changed lives in Massachusetts.
[17:33]I've gotten millions of dollars in refunds and restitution for crime victims in Massachusetts.
[17:39]So telling a story and creating a little movie about an important thing and then having
[17:45]it have a great result is absolutely spectacularly rewarding.
[17:51]And I took all of that passion and all of that search for justice and fairness and equilibrium
[17:58]and social justice and I put that all into crime fiction.
[18:02]So it's just changed my life so much to have that television background.
[18:09]I embrace it every day.
[18:11]The one thing, and I'll just say this very, very quickly, the one thing that was different
[18:15]about writing for television and writing for crime fiction is that I'd never, when I started
[18:20]writing my first book, when I was 55, 20 years ago, when I started writing my first book,
[18:26]I didn't know whether I could make stuff up.
[18:28]You know, I'd never done that before.
[18:31]I'd only used real facts, real setting, real dialogue, real clues, real documents.
[18:37]And I'm sitting here right in the same place that I'm sitting right now looking out the
[18:40]window at the Sugar Magle Tree and thinking, I'm going to, I have to use my imagination
[18:45]now in a different way and will I be able to do that.
[18:51]You know, it's really a challenge and a lot of magic to create a new world and new people
[18:58]that never existed before.
[19:00]And I just, I just embrace it every day now.
[19:03]Oh, I love that.
[19:05]You mentioned that you are one of five siblings.
[19:08]So what was your relationship like with your siblings, given that sister is one of the
[19:13]main monikers on the book?
[19:17]How long do you have, ZB?
[19:19]Good.
[19:20]You know, I'm looking at your relationship, you know, I'm the oldest.
[19:24]So you can, you know, you get the hierarchy right away.
[19:26]So I spent my life telling them all what to do and what was the age range.
[19:31]So there's me and then my sister, Nina, who's three years younger and my sister, Nancy,
[19:36]who's 10 years younger and my sister Liz, who's 11 years younger and then my brother
[19:40]Chip, who's 12 years younger.
[19:42]So I'm a lot older than Chip, you know, so that, you know, at that point, your relationship
[19:47]really, really changes.
[19:49]It's horrible.
[19:50]My sister, Nina, who's so close to me and I used to gang up on my little sister, Nancy,
[19:56]that we'd make up, we'd make up rules and games like you can use.
[20:00]can use foreign words and scrabble when we did it.
[20:03]But Nancy couldn't do it.
[20:05]We play cards and say, oh, yeah, eights are always,
[20:08]eights are always wild cards.
[20:09]And she'd say, no, they're not.
[20:11]And we're like, yeah, they are.
[20:12]So it was pretty terrible.
[20:14]Some of us are still close.
[20:15]Some of us are not so close.
[20:18]Every family is unusual in its own way.
[20:22]So I learned a lot from them.
[20:26]Nina was the popular one.
[20:28]And Nancy was the chef.
[20:29]And Liz was the equestrian.
[20:31]And Chip was all of them are alive.
[20:34]Was the political activist.
[20:36]So we had a good family.
[20:39]We lived way out in rural Indiana.
[20:42]So rural that you couldn't see another house from our house.
[20:46]And my sister and I used to, OK, my sister, Nina,
[20:48]and I used to ride our ponies to the library
[20:51]to get books.
[20:52]And we fill up the saddle bags with books
[20:54]and read up in the hay loft of the barn behind our house.
[20:57]So Nina and I fell in love with Nancy Drew out there.
[21:01]And then she went off to do her own thing.
[21:03]And I stayed in the hay loft with Sherlock Holmes
[21:06]and Agatha Christie and all the wonderful Golden Age
[21:09]mysteries.
[21:09]And I became a reader and then a writer.
[21:14]Wow.
[21:15]Gosh, that sounds like fiction right there.
[21:16]The saddle bags.
[21:18]I mean, people listening can't see you,
[21:21]but you don't look old at all.
[21:24]Like you don't look like it is remotely possible
[21:26]that you could be describing this type of scene that
[21:29]sounds like it's out of little has on the prairie or something.
[21:32]It does indeed.
[21:32]I know it is quite a picture.
[21:34]And I turned into kind of a city girl.
[21:35]But those, that background being outside,
[21:40]being on my own, I had, I was the geekiest, nerdiest,
[21:44]little girl, most unpopular person you could ever possibly
[21:46]imagine.
[21:47]I had no friends and no dates and no fun and no parties.
[21:51]All I had was books.
[21:52]All I had was books.
[21:54]And it seemed very bleak and sad at the time,
[21:56]although I loved it, you know, I completely loved it.
[21:59]And now look, you know, how formative that was.
[22:02]I wouldn't be right here talking to you
[22:04]if that childhood hadn't happened.
[22:07]And that is astonishing to me.
[22:09]Wow.
[22:10]Do you feel that all of your siblings
[22:13]would step right in if God forbid something happened?
[22:16]Yes, I only pause because I think how much I wouldn't like
[22:21]to ask them to do that, you know,
[22:23]what a sad situation that would be.
[22:24]So, you know, you and I are writers, you know,
[22:26]we come up with every possible terrible thing
[22:28]that could possibly happen.
[22:29]And it goes through our mind in a minute.
[22:30]But sure, of course, and I for them,
[22:32]there's no question about it.
[22:33]No matter if we're far away from each other,
[22:36]if we haven't talked to each other for a long time,
[22:38]you know, if something happens, who are you going to call?
[22:41]Is your family, you know, under under,
[22:44]no matter what circumstance?
[22:45]Yes, I didn't mean to be so dark in my questions.
[22:48]I'm just like thinking about the fun of the begin
[22:50]and all of that and you know,
[22:52]not every, not every sister would pick up the slack
[22:56]in that way.
[22:57]And I do think that one of the things that,
[22:59]and you're right, of course,
[23:00]not every sister would pick up the slack.
[23:01]And not every sister is required to pick up the slack.
[23:04]You know, that's why every family is different.
[23:06]But in mother-daughter sister's stranger,
[23:09]be and Eliza went through this terrible thing together.
[23:13]They were in a plane crash, their father was the pilot,
[23:16]their parents died, they were in the sister seats in the back.
[23:19]They were in the hospital together.
[23:21]They were teenagers at the time.
[23:23]And they spent their time in the hospital
[23:25]trying to figure out what happened
[23:27]and why that plane had crashed.
[23:29]And as a result, their bond is even more special.
[23:33]I mean, they're not only sisters, but survivors.
[23:37]And that survivor bond is incredibly strong.
[23:41]And so again, that's why in mother-daughter sister's stranger,
[23:44]when B does not show up to pick up her daughter Piper,
[23:48]that it's not like, oh, she's flighty.
[23:49]Oh, she forgot the day.
[23:51]There is something really wrong.
[23:53]And only Eliza can figure out what that is.
[23:57]And she has to take Piper with her.
[24:00]So on one hand, it's sort of this funny little homes
[24:04]and Watson thing with Piper as the sidekick detective
[24:08]trying to help, but with an undercurrent
[24:11]of something really bad has happened.
[24:13]And that's the thriller aspect of the story.
[24:16]What do you think is the hardest thing
[24:18]that you've had to survive?
[24:20]Oh, gosh, it's interesting.
[24:22]I was thinking about that just today.
[24:25]The things that happen in our lives,
[24:27]whether it's the loss of someone or the divorce
[24:32]of parents or my own divorce or disappointments
[24:36]in upon sight and down the other.
[24:39]And I was thinking today about how I hope I've changed
[24:43]over the years and my response to that.
[24:47]You know, how sad or upset or embarrassed
[24:52]or humiliated or grieving we are.
[24:55]In the world, there are endless numbers of people
[24:59]who are...
[25:00]worse off than that, whose lives are incredibly tragic. And, you know, we're just, I think
[25:06]to myself, I'm just a little, I'm just one little person with a little disappointment,
[25:11]you know, just, you know, try to keep the world, try to keep the world in balance a little bit.
[25:20]I mean, I own my sorrow when things happen if I'm upset, if the rug gets pulled out for
[25:26]under me, you know, I could be, you know, kicked off my equilibrium, you know, pretty easily.
[25:31]But I just, you know, that's why my books are about empowerment, I think, city, is that if there is a
[25:37]Hank DNA to the book, to all of my books, it's about a strong woman who gets the rug pulled out
[25:44]from under her, something that she doesn't expect, and she needs to get her power back. And I,
[25:52]you know, of course, I want to like twisty page turning total immersion stories. But I also,
[25:57]when I have an undercurrent for readers of when something terrible happens, you can survive,
[26:04]and you can get your power back, and you can regain the balance in your life. And you can even be
[26:10]happy. I mean, we both all have times where we think I will never be happy again. I will never
[26:17]be happy again. It can't be. But I will tell you this, when I met my husband, my current and all
[26:23]the last husband, Jonathan, who's in the other room, we met about 30 years ago, and we don't
[26:28]celebrate the anniversary of the day we met. We celebrate the anniversary of the day before we met.
[26:35]And we call that you never know day, because you never know what wonderful thing is around the
[26:41]next corner. And when we're sad and when we're disappointed and when we're feeling like giving
[26:47]up that our life is over and that we will never have a happy ending, how many times does, you know,
[26:53]the next day or the next week, something happened that wouldn't have happened without the bad thing.
[26:58]And makes the bad thing be worth it because this wonderful thing happened that we never could have
[27:03]predicted. And I, you know, that's what I live by. You never know what wonderful thing is around
[27:08]the next corner. And we only have this one life. We have this one life. And we have some power to choose
[27:17]how we're going to live that. We don't have power to choose what will happen all the time,
[27:23]but we do have the power to choose how we're going to deal with that. And I'm still working on
[27:29]that. And we're all still working on that. And I think that's why I do what I do now. But you never
[27:35]know what wonderful thing is around the next corner. Big love, sad. Oh, thank you for sharing that.
[27:40]I gave me goosebumps. Hank, thank you so much for discussing your family and this
[27:46]family and how to how we can all rewrite our stories essentially. So thank you so much for
[27:54]coming on mother, daughter, sister, stranger, congrats. Thank you, Zibi. Thank you so much for all you
[27:59]do. Love you. Bye. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi. Formerly, mom's don't have
[28:05]time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at
[28:12]Zibi Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and bye the books.