Julie Orringer's New Novel: Think "Still Alice" meets "The Plot"
[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 and learned endless amounts about
[0:09]storytelling, reinvention and life itself because when you talk about books, you're really
[0:13]talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors, the best-selling and the not yet discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read and the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy.
[0:26]Okay, the greatest thing about having a podcast like this is that I read a book and I can
[0:32]then immediately talk to the author about it.
[0:34]I can DM.
[0:35]I can have a really in-depth conversation about the things I was wondering about and it's
[0:41]just the most amazing feeling for someone like me who is obsessed with books and loves
[0:45]authors so much.
[0:47]This happened to me with Julie Orringer with the book, Luna Phoenix Queen, a novel.
[0:52]I loved this book.
[0:54]I cried.
[0:55]I cried just talking about this book.
[0:57]It's beautifully written and we'll stay with me forever.
[1:01]It's one of those books and I got to meet with Julie in my house to do a podcast and it
[1:09]was just amazing.
[1:10]We sat on my couch and just talked about the book and then even after we turned off
[1:14]the recording, talked more and I'm such a fan.
[1:17]Here's more about Julie.
[1:19]Julie Orringer is the author of three award-winning books.
[1:22]She's got a breathe underwater, the invisible bridge and the flight portfolio, which was
[1:26]the basis for the 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic and was a book of the month club pick.
[1:32]She is the winner of the Paris Reviews, Plimpton Prize Refiction and the recipient
[1:36]of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the
[1:40]Dorothy and Lewis B. Coleman Center at the New York Public Library, the Radcliffe Institute
[1:44]for Advanced Study at Harvard and McDowell.
[1:46]She teaches at New York University and Stanford University and lives in Brooklyn.
[1:51]Enjoy our conversation and look for some extra bonus content on social from when we recorded
[1:56]together.
[1:57]Welcome, Julie.
[1:58]I'm so excited you're here.
[1:59]Thank you so much for having me.
[2:01]It's so much fun to meet you in person.
[2:03]This book, the flight portfolio, your last book has been right up there every time I
[2:07]walked in and out of my office, so I was so excited when your new book came out when
[2:11]I've seen Xqueed.
[2:12]It was so good.
[2:13]Thank you.
[2:14]Oh my gosh.
[2:16]I loved it so much.
[2:17]As you know, I posted about it.
[2:18]I'm like obsessed.
[2:19]I've told everybody.
[2:20]It's my go-to pick.
[2:22]It's so beautiful.
[2:23]Thank you so much.
[2:24]And thank you for posting about it.
[2:26]It really makes a difference.
[2:27]I really appreciate it.
[2:28]Oh, I hope so.
[2:29]Tell listeners what Lena Phoenix Queen is about.
[2:32]Okay.
[2:33]So this is the story of an academic midwestern couple, David and Bar Pennington.
[2:39]David, unhappy in her marriage, has been having a secret affair with a female colleague
[2:45]who she met as she was on the way to a conference in Ireland.
[2:51]And she's been writing about it in a kind of Romana Clay novel that she's been hiding
[2:57]from everyone in the world, including her lover.
[3:01]And over the course of her writing this novel should begin to notice memory loss symptoms.
[3:07]And it turns out that she is developing early on, said, Alzheimer's disease.
[3:14]So over a number of years, she oozes her faculties and then she really becomes quite a different
[3:21]person from the person who we met when we first saw her in the throes of the early days
[3:26]of her relationship.
[3:28]Meanwhile, her husband, Bar, who is a professor of creative writing and a fiction writer
[3:34]himself, has had some inkling that something's going on with this person, Svetlana,
[3:40]who is in both of their lives.
[3:43]And yet it's not until some time after David moves to a nursing home that Bar is sitting
[3:49]in her study, feeling lonely one evening, discovers her manuscript hidden in the wall of
[3:55]the house.
[3:56]And that's how he kind of uncovers through some thinly veiled clues, the details of
[4:02]the affair.
[4:03]And so that is actually all sort of tailored to the moment when we meet Bar, who has,
[4:10]after reading this manuscript, appropriated it, slightly rewritten it and published it as
[4:17]his own.
[4:18]So there's no trace of credit for his wife.
[4:21]It's as if she never had this idea or had anything to do with the narrative at all.
[4:26]It's his novel.
[4:28]And he's pretty proud of it.
[4:29]And yet he carries this persistent feeling of guilt and so at the beginning of a novel,
[4:38]we meet him in a state of kind of suppressed, suppressed guilt, thinly suppressed grief
[4:46]and profound loneliness.
[4:48]And it's in that state that he decides that what he most wants to do is to adopt a dog.
[4:53]And so he becomes obsessed with a dog at a local shelter who has been horribly injured
[4:58]in a fire.
[4:59]And that...
[5:00]an easy rapport that arises between them when he starts walking her is the
[5:05]launching point of this narrative. Oh my gosh. Well, and there's so much more that
[5:11]comes next. You've developed so many characters who are all interacting. You
[5:14]tell this from multiple perspectives, which is so interesting because when it
[5:19]starts, for example, Bar Pennington, who you often reproduce, just Pennington, I
[5:23]felt like we were gonna root for him. Right? Like he wants a dog and he's a
[5:29]little lonely and you're like, oh, this is such a sympathetic protagonist. And
[5:33]then as the book goes on, you're like, wait a minute, should I not, like, should I
[5:37]change how I feel about him? Did you have that in mind? Like, our thoughts
[5:42]about each of the characters continue with, I mean, I guess in any novel
[5:46]continue to evolve, but I feel like pretty dramatically in this one. Yeah, well,
[5:49]Bar is a character who's in a terrible situation, right? I mean, he's suffered a
[5:53]genuine tragedy. He suffered the loss of his wife too early on, said all
[5:57]Simon's disease. She's still alive when the book opens and he visits her
[6:02]regularly, but what he feels in her presence is this profound loss of the
[6:06]life they had together. You know, the memories that are really alive for him and
[6:13]are just fragmentary for her. And I felt as a writer, even though I kind of
[6:19]knew that he was going to be a lying, thieving bastard, I also felt terrible for
[6:23]him because I knew that he was suffering this terrible grief, one that he
[6:30]didn't really feel like he could share with a lot of people because even though
[6:34]Alzheimer's disease has touched so many of us early on, said Alzheimer's is
[6:38]relatively rare. And so I really did want him to be a character who we could
[6:44]feel with in the early sections of the book, especially because he does feel
[6:49]this connection and compassion for the dog, whose name is Luna at the
[6:54]beginning of the book, but we also come to understand that he is in a sense
[6:59]rationalizing all of his moral compromise through the lens of his loss and the
[7:06]lens of data's deception and not taking responsibility in any sense for the
[7:13]factors in their relationship that may have caused her to feel that she
[7:17]wasn't seen or that she wasn't being met emotionally in some way. And it's
[7:21]it's complicated. I mean, I think that there's no that there's no clear moral
[7:28]right and wrong when it comes to like how we experience grief. And yet what he
[7:34]does is what he does is reprehensible by any measure because in effect he
[7:40]he silences her. Oh my gosh. You have a little scene towards the middle
[7:46]slash towards the end of the book where you and you keep flashing back, right? So
[7:50]we get to know them. They're all the different flashbacks in different
[7:53]timelines throughout. But you have a moment where they get together and break up
[7:58]and she's telling the story to Spetlana. I'm pretty sure later and she's
[8:02]like, no, that very first time that we met and then we broke up and then we
[8:06]got back together. I was like, wait a minute. This total what how did that
[8:11]happen? I feel like there's always like a curse on relationships that like break
[8:14]up and get back together a bunch of times and all that. Yeah, that's right. So
[8:18]they like had a trip to Europe together and it was supposed to be this big
[8:22]romantic trip and then they fought on the way over and then they sort of
[8:25]separated while they were there and then they you know they had this
[8:30]reproach lot. And Spetlana hearing the story, I think, feels the way you do
[8:35]disappointed to know that that David got back together with this guy who
[8:40]must have read flagged her in some way even at that time. But you know, the
[8:45]forces of attraction are so mysterious and we tell ourselves all kinds of
[8:50]stories about our lives, you know, especially when we're quite young, you know,
[8:54]about the fantasies we have for what our lives might look like. And I think
[8:59]there's also a literary intellectual connection between, you know,
[9:04]Bar and David toward the beginning of the their acquaintance that that's really
[9:09]powerful for both of them. And so it's funny. I mean, we can envision another
[9:14]storyline for her where she went in a different direction. I'd be the next
[9:18]book. Yeah. But part of I think what the book explores is how we come to know
[9:24]ourselves slowly over time. And that's just as true for a person who's
[9:28]suffering from Alzheimer's disease, is it is for any other person because it's
[9:33]like you, you know, Alzheimer's disease is it's a series of changes that
[9:38]occur to your psyche. But, you know, I can speak from experience of, you know,
[9:43]my deep closeness to people I love who has who have Alzheimer's disease. Like
[9:47]there's still self-knowledge that evolves over the course of the disease. Can
[9:52]you share a little more if you don't mind about your own experience of it and
[9:55]who has it in your life and what that's been like? Sure. So my...
[10:00]first close experience of it was you know the loss of my grandfather and it was it was so painful
[10:07]because as we were in this very close conversation about his experiences as a young man
[10:13]in Hungary and in France before and during the Second World War he was losing his present day
[10:19]memory you know he was losing his short-term memory but his long-term memory was sort of brilliantly
[10:26]intact and so we were having these long conversations in which he would in a sense
[10:31]be time-traveling and it would be almost as if we were living those moments that he had lived
[10:36]earlier and it was amazing to me to see that that he was still able to possess those moments and
[10:43]even translate them to me emotionally as he was you know aware of the fact that I was
[10:48]writing a novel that touched upon his experiences and upon that time and then it was quite a few
[10:55]years later that my husband was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease it was actually
[11:00]just before the pandemic like a few weeks before the pandemic and it was interestingly not a total
[11:07]shock because we had been noticing memory loss in his you know in his writing and in his daily life
[11:13]for some time before that I mean he had kind of attributed it to the possibility that he had
[11:18]sustained injuries when he was a young person playing football for many years that were manifesting
[11:24]later and for all we know there may still be some connection but yeah the last six years of our
[11:30]lives have been you know have been affected by that disease in a way that I don't even begin to have
[11:38]words to describe oh my gosh is he still living at home is he in oh yeah he's he's at the gym right
[11:44]now so he's okay yeah yeah I think he's doing marvelously well I mean he's somebody who
[11:51]has always had a really positive attitude he's always felt like there's something you can do
[11:56]there's always a way to to make the situation better even when it's you know quite difficult by any
[12:02]measure but he decided early on that he was going to do one of the things that he knows how to do
[12:07]best which is to throw himself into exercise fitness you know careful thought about his diet
[12:14]good sleep and you know being with the people he loves and I think that even though you know we've
[12:20]a decline in many areas his life the power that he's shown in persisting with his exercise going
[12:28]to the gym like being socially present you know being a great parent to our kids you know I think
[12:34]it's made a huge difference for him and for all of us I mean don't you feel like as you read
[12:41]the newspapers and everything like any minute they're gonna come out with something gonna help
[12:46]I mean I feel like I know we start and it must feel so frustrating there's not here yet
[12:50]yeah I mean for so long I feel like researchers have been chasing some really compelling potential
[12:57]solutions and yet it always just seems like a vanishing goal but that's I think one of the reasons
[13:05]that for any person who has been diagnosed with a disease like it's not a moment to lose help
[13:10]it's a moment to take care of oneself a moment to like do everything you can to you know preserve
[13:17]your cognitive state so that there's time for you know for further medical solutions to be developed
[13:24]because I agree with you I think it's probably not long until we have some real substantive help
[13:31]to do you feel in part writing the book is like imagining the worst case and preparing for it
[13:36]in a way oh it's interesting I mean I feel like the experience of writing the book was so far from
[13:41]my personal experience I think that one of the things that really is powerful about fiction
[13:48]both for us is readers but definitely as writers is that in the world of our short stories and
[13:55]novels we have control we can decide what happens when and who's in the room at the time and
[14:02]who receives justice and who suffers from injustice and we don't have that kind of control in our
[14:07]lives where you know as much as you know we possess the power to fight against the adversity that
[14:14]comes into our lives there's a limitation to what we can do especially when it comes to a degenerative
[14:19]disease but within the pages of a novel anything can happen and that is I think that's one of the
[14:26]reasons we read too we never know how it's going to turn out I also think that I want to come
[14:32]back to something you mentioned earlier about the structure of the book there are eight sections
[14:38]in the book and six different voices in which those sections are told and one of the things I
[14:43]think that was that was compelling to me about the structures I was writing was that as always
[14:50]writing about a family affected by Alzheimer's disease I was interested in seeing the disease
[14:56]from different angles you know and not the disease from different
[15:00]angles, but the characters who are experiencing that disease is part of their lives.
[15:05]How does it play out in the lives of a lover or a husband or a child?
[15:12]How are the particular ways that those relationships are affected?
[15:17]And so even as I feel like I was experiencing certain discontinuities in my own life that
[15:23]I couldn't have expected, there was a kind of discontinuity of form present in the
[15:28]book that seemed to reflect in a way my own emotional experience.
[15:34]So interesting.
[15:35]And you learn so much more about each of them through each other's eyes, like there's
[15:39]only so much you can know from what's there versus what people, which I found really fascinating,
[15:45]especially from the point of view of the assistant, blanking on her name, Eevee.
[15:50]So like at first you have one perception of what Eevee is like, and then when we get
[15:55]to hear her and her story of her brother and her family and all that the twist that happens
[16:00]towards the end, you change again how you feel perhaps about far and how you feel about
[16:05]the whole situation and even then, when they start interacting.
[16:11]And of course the dog, so well, I mean, who among us hasn't had some assistantship or
[16:18]assistant position at some point where we feel like we're providing a service to somebody
[16:24]an essential service who, somebody who maybe doesn't see us as a full human being, you know.
[16:31]And I think that's very much the case for Eevee that in the first section, when we meet
[16:36]her as somebody who's in the house helping bar with his classes and his papers and he's
[16:41]becoming obsessed with this dog, we can see that he's not really paying attention to her
[16:47]as the complicated human being.
[16:50]And writer in her own right that she is, he's kind of seeing as somebody who might come
[16:55]to his aid, but he's also hot for her, he issues also this like, you know, beautiful young
[17:00]woman.
[17:01]And so I think he sees her as a kind of source of zone appetite in a way.
[17:07]And I think in general, over the course of this novel, women move from positions of
[17:13]objectification to subjectification where we really feel the interior emotional and
[17:21]intellectual and creative experience of these characters who may have been silenced or not
[17:26]given a stage earlier in the book.
[17:29]And so it was really important to me that Eevee have her own section and not just a section
[17:35]that refers to her relationship with him, but one that refers to her relationship with
[17:40]her work, one that refers to her family relationship.
[17:43]This brother of hers, Alex has been, you know, Deafson's birth.
[17:47]And what was it like for her to grow up in a family where she had this intensely close
[17:52]relationship with a brother who she's to a large extent, lost touch with now and who
[17:57]she just gets these little snippets of communication with.
[18:00]And I think I'm glad to hear that you were surprised by the way you came to know her
[18:06]because I feel like that is maybe a memetic of the experience that Bar might have had.
[18:12]Had he just chosen to look past his superficial understanding of her, you know?
[18:18]Amazing.
[18:19]You're so clear about the intentionality of the book, right?
[18:24]A justification to subjectification.
[18:26]But when you're writing it and when you started out to write it, like what was the inkling
[18:30]of the idea and did you have all of these goals in mind or did you realize they were
[18:36]happening as the novel progressed?
[18:38]Now you're so right to talk about it that way because it was so when I think about the
[18:43]initial impetus for the book, first of all, the chapter that was like the seed of this
[18:48]book is not actually in the book.
[18:52]So the first grain of the book was this short story that took place in Paris and it was
[18:59]about two women, one of whom had just suffered her fifth miscarriage and had gone to Paris
[19:04]to present a paper at a literary conference and her friend who was also in Paris presenting
[19:10]her memoir, which dealt with her time as a research assistant for this guy who had stolen
[19:15]his wife's manuscript.
[19:17]And so the whole story was these two women walking around Paris at night.
[19:22]One of whom had just had this horrific experience of loss and the person who had published
[19:27]this memoir was in the process of a precipitous divorce and the city is so beautiful,
[19:34]the light is sparkling on the water, it's the summertime, so it's light until 10 o'clock
[19:39]at night and they're so angry.
[19:41]They're just so emotionally out of step with the beauty of the city and it was that
[19:47]rage that drove me into the narrative and then I just started to think more deeply about
[19:54]the scenario that I had alluded to in the memoir and I thought, well who was this guy?
[20:00]his wife's memoir and who was this woman who was secretly or still his wife's novel and who was
[20:06]the woman who was writing a novel fully in secret like not telling anyone in the world that she
[20:12]had penned this book and as I thought about them a little bit further I just thought oh my god
[20:17]no here's this is where I want to start and so instead of going all the way back to the beginning
[20:25]and writing the story chronologically which would have been impossible because at the time I was
[20:30]really just thinking of it as a short narrative I thought what's happening this guy right now
[20:37]what's it like for him to live in the aftermath of this really poor decision that he made and
[20:43]that he really dug into and I thought this guy is miserable and it's like he knows that he would
[20:50]be shunned from like the human family if he were to come forth with this story and so instead he
[20:56]turns to the canine family and he makes a bid for this dog for this dog's affection but in that
[21:04]first version of the story which then became the novel section that is the lead off of the book
[21:12]he was he was much more of a jerk than he is in this section because I think that I really
[21:18]didn't understand I really didn't understand the whole emotional complexity of his situation
[21:24]I mean I started this book before my husband was diagnosed like not long before but actually like
[21:31]some weeks before he was diagnosed and so I think memory loss was somewhere in my mind but
[21:37]these weren't experiences that that I had lived in any kind of intimate way not even like
[21:43]tangentially or was I fictionally in the way that we like change events as they move into a
[21:49]novel but but I was thinking a lot about the tragedy that had befallen him and the change that
[21:57]it occurred in his marriage and I think even then I just started becoming deeply interested in
[22:04]that woman who was wrong and realized that in fact I wanted to move into her perspective and learn
[22:11]who she was and so then the first three sections to some friends just thinking oh well maybe
[22:18]these are three stories that would anchor a collection and one of my friends said you must just
[22:24]admit that you're writing a novel so that was that was kind of how it came to pass oh my gosh
[22:31]wait take me back a little bit how did you even become a novelist to begin with
[22:36]like when did all this start oh gosh I mean I really did not think that I was going to become
[22:42]a novelist I started out as a short story writer and before that I wrote plays like long ago
[22:49]when I was like a teenager but when I was in college I took a lot of writing classes I kind of
[22:54]secretly nursed a desire to to move in the direction of the arts my parents were about doctors
[23:01]and so I kind of thought I would like be pre-med in college and then pursue that path but
[23:09]then I had a series of really inspiring professors and Cornell was a place where we had a lot of
[23:16]really wonderful visiting writers too and so the fiction writer Dennis Johnson came to give a
[23:21]reading at school and I stayed after the reading to ask him a couple of questions and talk to him
[23:26]as I you know my heart was just in my throat and I just couldn't put the words together but
[23:31]he understood that I you know I really wanted to know what the trajectory was how did a person
[23:39]living in our contemporary world follow a path from obsession with literature a love of reading
[23:46]a long practice of writing to a life as a writer and so he was the one who suggested that I
[23:53]applied to Iowa to the Iowa Writers Workshop and I did apply there in addition to a few other
[23:59]programs and I just had a marvelous experience both at Iowa and then a few years later at Stanford
[24:06]and the Stegner Fellowship program but both at Iowa and as a Stegner I was totally just a
[24:12]short story writer like 100% and it really did not occur to me that I would ever write a novel
[24:20]but then around the time that my husband and I were about to go to Europe for the first time
[24:26]this would have been in like 1999 my grandfather and I were sitting and talking at a family event
[24:33]and he mentioned that he had been an architecture student in Paris before the war and that was
[24:38]the first I had ever heard of it I mean I was utterly stunned to know that he had had the
[24:44]secret history outside of the life that I knew about in Hungary and so I started to ask
[24:51]him some questions about what life had been like in Paris and why had he left Hungary to be a
[24:56]a student in Paris and how he had gone back to Hungary and
[25:00]what had happened during the war.
[25:01]And as I started talking to him
[25:04]and heard the power of the narrative
[25:07]as he was framing it to me, I just thought,
[25:09]this is a story that has to be told
[25:11]and there's absolutely no way it can be told
[25:14]in the framework of a short story.
[25:16]It must be a novel.
[25:18]And so I made a really frightening leap of genre
[25:23]and form, and I did so with the help
[25:27]of my absolutely incredible editor, Jordan Pavlin,
[25:31]who I've worked with since the first books
[25:35]and so story collection and through all of the work,
[25:38]including this novel, which I really,
[25:42]I mean, we got together the other day
[25:44]and we were just sitting in her office
[25:45]and I was just objectively thanking her
[25:48]for the hard work of co-invisioning that went into this book.
[25:54]She really saw what I was trying to do
[25:57]from the outset and she just asked all the right questions.
[26:00]So there's no answering this question
[26:02]of how I became a novelist without mentioning
[26:07]how totally instrumental and important
[26:11]our literary relationship has been.
[26:14]When I was writing the invisible bridge, my first novel
[26:18]and I had recently completed a draft
[26:21]and was starting to get deep into a revision,
[26:24]I went to her office almost every week
[26:27]for like two hours at a time and just sat with her
[26:30]and talked about the manuscript
[26:32]and talked about how to unfold the narrative
[26:35]and deepen the characters
[26:37]and explore the relationship between the brothers
[26:39]and the lovers and the place.
[26:42]And I just, I don't know how it would have been possible
[26:46]for me to have a courage to write that book
[26:49]had it not been for her faith in that.
[26:51]Amazing.
[26:52]Now I want to get the two of you together.
[26:54]Oh yeah, we'll have to look back on that.
[26:57]Absolutely amazing.
[26:59]So if you were to give advice to aspiring novelist
[27:02]for short story writers, what would you say to them?
[27:05]It's funny, I was asked this question recently
[27:08]and the question was like what is the one thing
[27:12]that seems so important and so worth arguing for?
[27:16]And I kind of answered the question
[27:19]flippantly in the sense that our amazing writing professor
[27:23]Frank Conroy put it to us when I was a graduate student
[27:26]and that is to say that his recommendation
[27:28]was that everyone had to write for three hours a day.
[27:30]And the fact is that if you are working a job
[27:34]that's not, you know, primarily writing
[27:37]and you're trying to maintain a life
[27:39]with all of his complexities,
[27:41]it's actually practically very difficult
[27:43]to write for three hours a day.
[27:45]But I think that the essence of his advice was
[27:48]that the important thing is to have a writing practice
[27:51]to be in contact with the work on a daily basis
[27:55]to have something that's always ongoing.
[27:58]My other wonderful professor Tobias Wolz advice
[28:01]was to finish what you start.
[28:02]And if you embark on a draft, get to the end of it.
[28:05]And that was true both for short stories and for novels.
[28:09]When I came to him in the midst of just starting
[28:12]to think about a novel and said, how do I do this?
[28:15]You know, he said the only way to do it is to do it.
[28:19]And you know, so I think that what does that mean
[28:23]actually on the page?
[28:24]What it means is that first of all,
[28:28]you are constantly imbibing the kind of narratives
[28:32]that inspire you.
[28:33]And you are somebody who I think is just like an exemplar
[28:37]of this in the world.
[28:38]I mean, you are like a voracious reader
[28:41]who then evangelizes what you read and love.
[28:44]And I think that what you're doing is constantly
[28:48]reminding us that our relationship with story
[28:52]is so important and basic to who we are as human beings.
[28:57]That's never been like the vibrancy of that idea
[29:01]has never been more present to me
[29:04]than it has been in the last couple of years
[29:06]when I've seen some of my students relying on AI
[29:09]to kind of do their reading for them.
[29:11]There's no substitute for it.
[29:13]If you are somebody who thinks about fiction writing,
[29:17]if you're somebody who wants to develop
[29:20]the deepest kind of empathy,
[29:22]reading is the number one job.
[29:23]And then in the reading you do,
[29:26]you'll find a path toward the story that you want to tell.
[29:28]And then it's a matter of making some small part
[29:32]of the day sacred to getting that idea onto the page
[29:36]and following it through to its end.
[29:38]Oh, that was very inspiring.
[29:41]I'm like, now I need to go right to the thing today.
[29:43]Yeah, absolutely.
[29:45]Julie, thank you so much.
[29:46]You were just the most gifted beautiful writer.
[29:49]I am so excited to see this book
[29:50]into the world.
[29:51]And I just loved it so much.
[29:53]And these characters live on so crystal clear in my mind.
[29:57]I feel like you just.
[30:00]to create an actual people.
[30:01]Like, oh my gosh, thank you so much.
[30:02]And the dogs we barely even talked about,
[30:04]the dogs were huge.
[30:05]The dog is a huge part of the book
[30:07]and the love of animals.
[30:08]And what a dog can do for you
[30:10]is my dog's camp first downstairs, you know.
[30:13]Oh my gosh, yes, my dog, I know right now
[30:15]I was sitting on the couch at home
[30:16]with her chin on the arm of the couch waiting.
[30:20]She's like, I'll come back.
[30:21]Oh, but yes, dogs, you know,
[30:25]I would say that like, if you're a writer
[30:28]and you've been thinking about guiding a dog,
[30:31]absolutely do it.
[30:33]The book comes out during national adopter shelter dog month,
[30:37]which is just like this wonderful felicity.
[30:39]And yeah, I think that dogs are just world changing
[30:44]for everybody in the novel,
[30:45]but they really are for everybody
[30:46]who has one in their lives.
[30:48]I mean, it's just been a source of constant joy
[30:52]for us as a family.
[30:53]And I'm happy to hear it for you too.
[30:56]I never said.
[30:57]Aw, thank you so much.
[30:59]Thanks for coming on.
[31:00]My pleasure.
[31:00]Thank you for having me.
[31:02]Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi
[31:05]formerly Momstone have time to read books.
[31:08]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review,
[31:11]follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens
[31:14]and spread the word.
[31:15]Thanks so much.
[31:16]Oh, and buy the books.