Meghan Cox Gurdon on Being a Greedy Reader
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked! I'm Zibi Owens. I've interviewed more than 2,000
[0:06]authors on this show and learned endless amounts about storytelling,
[0:10]reinvention, and life itself because when you talk about books, you're really
[0:14]talking about life. So get ready to hear from today's best authors,
[0:18]the best-selling, and the not yet discovered. Come find your next great
[0:22]read and the story behind it. Enjoy! Megan Cox-Garden is the author of a memoir called Free
[0:31]Range Girl, which is beautiful. I love discovering authors who have interesting stories and
[0:38]interesting experiences and hers did not disappoint. Here's a little backstory about Megan.
[0:43]Megan Cox-Garden is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal's free expression newsletter
[0:48]and a weekly contributor to WSJ Books page. At the journal, she writes about biographies,
[0:54]histories, audiobooks, fiction, technology, and social science with a lively eye to the quirks
[0:59]of domestic life. She brings to her work a humane sensibility, grounded in traditional language,
[1:05]respect, and literature. Previously, over the two decades as the journal's children's
[1:09]book critic, she commented on cultural trends in books for young people while seeking to highlight
[1:14]works of lasting values. Her memoir Free Range Girl tells about her experiences in the mid-70s,
[1:21]going back to the land in rural Maine with her father. An ardent and authoritative advocate of
[1:27]reading aloud with five children she has had plenty of experience. Megan is also the author
[1:33]of the Enchanted Hour, the miraculous power of reading aloud in the age of distraction from 2019,
[1:39]which was an award-winning work of nonfiction, and soon it'll be available in seven languages.
[1:44]Hopefully, all to be read aloud. Megan and her husband, the English journalist Hugo Gordon,
[1:49]live in Maine. Welcome, Megan. Thank you so much for coming on totally
[1:53]books to talk about free range girl and memoir congratulations. Thank you so much and congrats on
[1:59]your own book. Oh, thank you. Thank you for taking me on this journey to Maine, to this time and
[2:05]place to just, I feel like I had a walk, like maybe it was the the road that you have is like
[2:13]features are prominently in the house and everything. I feel like I have had a total escape.
[2:19]I have gone somewhere totally new and it gave me such a sense of peace. Oh, I'm so happy to hear
[2:25]that because actually you are, you are, you are validating one of my greatest desires with this book
[2:31]which was to kind of recreate what it was like back in the day. This was the book takes place,
[2:37]as you know, between 1976 and 1977, which was a very particular point in time, childhood was
[2:43]very different back then. You know, the world that I lived in, the girl in free range girl,
[2:49]I keep thinking of it as the girl because of course this was, you know, she was a very young version
[2:53]of me and it's almost as if we're different people and also because, I don't know if you've played
[2:58]around with this, but I tried writing it the first time in the third person rather than in the
[3:03]first person. So I think of her kind of as this is character. Of course, she's identified now in
[3:07]the first person as I. Anyway, she lives in a completely different world from the one in a world
[3:14]that is now vanished. She goes, I go back to the land to live with my father at the age of 12
[3:22]in rural Maine and he was building a homestead with his own hands as you know because you've read
[3:27]without any power tools and was kind of an extraordinary, you know, this was the world,
[3:32]it was the world not just before the internet, not just before the touch screen, but it was the
[3:37]world before, you know, there was even really the idea of that. I mean, there may be, there may have been,
[3:42]you know, eggheads and labs working on it at the time, but you know, at the age of 12 in 1976,
[3:48]I sure had no idea any of this was coming. Well, you have so many scenes that have stayed with me,
[3:55]one of which is you trying to babysit or you babysitting your cousins and lighting the almost
[4:02]blew up the house with the stove. You, the gas was coming out, you lit a match, cinged off, I guess
[4:09]your eyebrows and I don't even know what, but and then you were just like, Oh, is it, is it noticeable?
[4:13]What do you think? You know, and you just think about serving the meal. I couldn't believe it.
[4:18]Yeah. Well, I mean, this is what, I mean, that was really how it was. And I think, you know,
[4:23]one of the many things that have changed, like our parents back at the day would have been
[4:28]arrested if they tried to do with us today what parents are, you know, it's a completely different
[4:33]world. So I was at the age of 12 put in charge of two little children, as you described.
[4:39]And, and I, the only thing that worried me was I had to cook a meal for them. And we were in this
[4:44]little house in the woods. This wasn't our house. It was someone else's house. But, um, you know,
[4:49]I hadn't, of course, no way to call for help or get help or whatever. I was just one of the
[4:54]things about adversity in childhood, I think, is that it really does make you resilient. You're
[5:00]you're just you doing the thing. So in this case, I'm trying to build grown up and
[5:05]womanly in whatever and making a meal for these little kids. And I turned on the oven
[5:09]to cook some fish fingers and the oven didn't come on. And then I realized, oh wait a second,
[5:15]this is a gas oven. Yeah. And it was at that point that I thought, oh, you need to introduce a match
[5:20]to a gas oven. So I opened the oven and put in a match, you know, with results that blew off my
[5:27]bangs, my eyebrows, my eyelashes, the whole place, thank a burning hair, you know. And my
[5:34]principal thought at the time was not, how can adults have put me in this terrible position? But
[5:39]how can I conceal what has just happened from the adults so they don't think I'm a complete war on?
[5:44]I just, you know, that may have been a quirk of my personality, but I think it was also the kind of
[5:49]the time that that was. I mean, I don't know. I was babysitting also at that age, by the way,
[5:54]like I think I started babysitting at 10. Right. This is just like what happened? Now I have
[5:58]an 11 and 13 year old at home. And I'm like, oh my gosh, the fact that like if I were to trust
[6:02]them with like multiple children, like with no supervision, I mean, anyway. But the
[6:08]responsibility and the sense of independence back then was really amazing. And I think you
[6:13]capture that really, really well. I also found it really interesting the way you talk about your
[6:19]dad and how it was living at him for the one year and the introduction of your mom into the
[6:22]story who plays a peripheral role. She does come to visit. You talk about the backstory and,
[6:27]you know, getting married at 20 and how your mom dresses and then you have a big decision to make
[6:33]at the end of the book. So talk to me a little bit about your parents, your mom, and you know,
[6:39]all of that. Yeah. So actually what was, I have to say now having written this memoir, I kind of
[6:46]have become an evangelist for memoir writing for everybody. I think it is one of the most interesting
[6:52]ways of making sense of your own life and there are things that you learn as a child or you're
[6:56]told as a child. And you don't question them, you know, you just sort of absorb them and it just
[7:02]is part of what you think your background is. And then when you write it down or just try and put
[7:06]your memories in order, you think, well, that's funny. What happened there? So when, as if you
[7:11]when I was starting to tell people about writing this book, the first thing everyone said
[7:17]what about your mother? And honestly, I had never really thought about it. When I was 12,
[7:24]I had been, my parents were divorced when I was six. And when I was 12, I went from living with my
[7:29]mother in kind of somewhat unconventional circumstances, but much more conventional than it being in
[7:35]the woods to living with my father in this highly unconventional setting of the woods where there's no
[7:40]plumbing, no electricity, an outhouse, you know, all of that stuff. But why did my mother
[7:47]part with me at that age? Why did I leave her? What was it all about? And I hadn't really
[7:53]thought about it. So I mean, I don't think I know the answer. I think in truth, both my parents
[7:59]are dead now and I can't ask them. And I have asked one or two people who are still around from
[8:04]back in the day and they don't really know, nobody really knows. And one of the things I, again,
[8:09]another part of the argument for everybody, just for your own interest, composing a kind of
[8:15]memoir or going back and trying to think about your past in an orderly way. I think that there are
[8:21]different ways of understanding how things were done. And I think in the tradition of the trauma
[8:27]memoir, which this is very much not, the trauma memoir would encourage me to blame my mother
[8:34]for the scars inflicted. You know, it wasn't a cost-free way to live. It wasn't, there were,
[8:41]you know, there were downsides to being 12 years old and living with your father in the woods.
[8:47]I mean, no question and not having a woman around. So you know, but as I say, free-range girl is
[8:52]not a trauma memoir. It's in some ways, I don't know, an affectionate memoir, a tender memoir.
[8:58]And so I kind of, I've had the opportunity to choose how I interpret what happened in the past.
[9:03]And one of the things that came through, you mentioned that my mom had been married.
[9:07]In fact, she was 19 when she was married and 20 when I was born.
[9:10]I was young. 19 married.
[9:12]Yeah, no, that's fine. That's fine. And also, you know, she was foreign. She was from South Africa.
[9:16]She'd been raised in a very different environment. Noelle, right?
[9:19]You know, she was going through life for the first time too. So that's kind of, yeah,
[9:26]that's how I, you know, writing the memoir caused me to ask myself the question that
[9:32]was obvious to other people. What about your mother? And also to answer it with some,
[9:36]I think generosity, I hope. I don't want to, I don't want to drone on here, but my father was
[9:41]a very interesting eccentric character. And I hope that you saw that in free-range girl.
[9:47]He, he was a quirky guy and he was, he was funny. He, he was very flowery in his language.
[9:55]And he was kind of a historical romantic. He always wanted to.
[10:00]You know, if there were in an impractical but elegant piece of equipment, he would rather
[10:03]have that than an inelegant practical piece of equipment.
[10:09]So what drew you to writing about this specific period of time in your life?
[10:13]Because as you say, there are so many different ways to write about your life.
[10:17]There's so many different memoirs like we all could write a trillion memoirs, right?
[10:20]You could write about your whole life, the whole sweeping trajectory of your life.
[10:24]You can drill down into one traumatic event.
[10:27]You can, and you've chosen to highlight, you know, this, this like lovely film.
[10:32]It's almost like a documentary or like a, like a short film about a time in place.
[10:38]And it's immersive and beautiful.
[10:40]But why, why go back here?
[10:42]Why, why this?
[10:43]Yeah, that's a great question.
[10:46]I, I did toy with those other ideas because I think, you know, I think it's possible to draw
[10:51]some lessons from the fact that, and as my father used to say, I was an only child from
[10:55]a broken home, and that I grew up to get married and stay married and have five children.
[11:01]You know, I mean, there's kind of, there may be a lesson there.
[11:05]But I, I decided to, so I really, you know, I thought long and hard about it.
[11:09]And I decided to write about that one year because it was so incredibly vivid.
[11:14]And I also think, you know, all of us who have been, which is pretty much to say, all
[11:19]adults, we have been 12 and 13.
[11:21]And that is a really big year.
[11:24]What you start at 12, it's like what teachers say about middle school.
[11:28]They come in like lambs and they leave like lions.
[11:31]It's a little like that, like your 12, you're still many of us anywhere are still really
[11:36]children at that stage.
[11:37]But by 13, you know, the picture is changing a little.
[11:40]We're becoming more kind of aware of the adults around us that they may not be perfect.
[11:45]You know, in the case, in my case, you know, the book begins with the introduction of
[11:50]middle school.
[11:51]It doesn't quite begin.
[11:52]But there's a, there's a lot of horse craziness, which you just get little intimations
[11:56]later of boy craziness, which is kind of, you know, that's the natural trajectory.
[12:01]I love the M&W with the 17 magazines in this like, you know, little house, yeah, the
[12:06]wood, you know, like, and you just like learning about students, you know, there's a kind
[12:11]of catechism you get from those beauty magazines, but you're a young, young girl.
[12:17]So so I thought it was a really, it's a really fruitful time of life.
[12:20]And that would be interesting.
[12:22]And the other reason, of course, is that that was the year that I went back to the land.
[12:27]And I would say, honestly, there are huge swaths of life that are just a blur to me.
[12:33]Like, what was I doing in 2014?
[12:36]I don't know.
[12:37]I was so busy with children, I don't know.
[12:39]But, but that year, 1976 was like, burn, it was so vivid because everything was so different
[12:45]and it was so, you know, life back then was very tactile and there was nothing smooth
[12:51]without living in rural Maine at that time.
[12:54]There were no, you know, kind of screens to swipe your hand across.
[12:58]There was no, there was no mediation of any kind, you know, if you were cold, you didn't
[13:04]turn up, you know, turn up on the furnace with a, you know, dial or something, you had
[13:08]to go and start a fire with kindling and paper and logs in a cast iron stove that clattered
[13:15]you know, so it was, it was in a sensory way, it was a very intense time of life, which
[13:20]I think, by the way, is also connected to being 12 because I think there is a, there is
[13:25]a sensory kind of intensity around that age of life.
[13:29]So interesting.
[13:31]So can I ask what has happened?
[13:33]The book ends and we know what happens.
[13:35]You give us a little epilogue, yeah, you have half of the buildings, I mean, you have
[13:38]all this stuff happened.
[13:39]But then what?
[13:40]Like, what has happened with your life?
[13:42]I know you're in Maine now.
[13:43]Give us some highlights.
[13:45]Okay.
[13:46]So I grew up and went away and got moved to New York, worked for the Wall Street Journal.
[13:53]I can never, you can have no idea how hard it is for me to tell a short thing.
[13:58]I mean, you don't have to just tell, so I, I met my husband in New York, started working
[14:04]in journalism, we moved to Hong Kong and got married in Hong Kong, that we moved from
[14:10]Hong Kong.
[14:11]I worked as a foreign correspondent out in Asia, then we moved to Japan, had our first baby.
[14:17]And then we moved to London and had our second baby, then we moved to Washington and started
[14:24]our third baby, but did not finish her until we got to Toronto.
[14:28]We had our third and fourth babies in Toronto.
[14:31]And then after 9-11, we moved, we just, you know, there was, we were out of the United States.
[14:37]We were really torn.
[14:38]Should we go to England?
[14:39]Should we go to the United States?
[14:40]There was a very strong after 9-11.
[14:41]It was just, as you know, such a, such a galvanizing time and we decided in a kind of spirit
[14:53]of defiance, we were going to move back to Washington.
[14:55]We'd really loved living in Washington and also, you know, take that, terrorists.
[15:00]We're moving to Washington and that we had our fifth baby there and we wound up staying in Washington for, you know, a long time, 20, 20 something years and recently sold our house there and have moved back to Maine, which is just wonderful.
[15:13]Oh my gosh.
[15:14]And so you were doing the full time journalism thing, raising five kids.
[15:21]How did you do all that?
[15:23]No, no, no.
[15:24]How do you do it?
[15:25]That's the real question.
[15:27]How did I do it?
[15:29]I don't.
[15:30]I mean, I think back on it now.
[15:31]I think, oh, my word wasn't that busy.
[15:33]If I look at my calendar from pick 2014 and 2015 is just it's just full of stuff.
[15:39]You know, I got a wonderful gig writing for the Wall Street Journal.
[15:42]I covered children's books for the journal for 20 years because it was really fun being a foreign correspondent and bombing around the world and going to interesting places, but it wasn't really consistent with or congruent with raising a large number of small people.
[15:56]And I made a big priority.
[15:58]One of the things I think really helped me actually was that I had a really good role model in a dear friend of mine who showed me about reading out loud and how that could be sort of the center, the organizing calm center of the storm of family life.
[16:10]And as a result, I did not erase children.
[16:13]I was an only child, but I read aloud to them every night and this really helped me.
[16:19]It sort of taught me in a way how to be a mother.
[16:23]And it was this great bonding experience and I got a book out of it.
[16:27]2019, I published the enchanted hour, which is all about reading aloud.
[16:32]Yeah.
[16:33]So I mean, it's been translated into many languages.
[16:35]Right.
[16:36]That's amazing.
[16:37]Yeah.
[16:38]Yeah.
[16:39]I haven't seen all the translations, but I I've received charmingly small amounts of money for them.
[16:43]So that's good.
[16:44]That's charmingly small amounts of money.
[16:47]Love that turn of phrase.
[16:49]What a friend of mine calls an elegant sufficiency.
[16:53]Oh, that's amazing.
[16:55]So in terms of books being a lifeline and I know you referenced a bunch of books in this book as well.
[17:01]Describe the role of books in your life.
[17:03]Then now.
[17:04]Yeah.
[17:05]Well, okay.
[17:06]Thank you.
[17:07]So I was a greedy reader.
[17:08]I was one of those kids and you probably were too.
[17:11]You're just just you're not content really unless you're running your eyes over some print.
[17:16]So I and I read with a lot of greed.
[17:19]And I read with some ambition, mostly indiscriminate though.
[17:22]I read whatever was to hand.
[17:24]So I read my father had some books that you know he had for instance,
[17:29]Hunter Thompson's a time with the the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang,
[17:33]totally inappropriate for me to read.
[17:35]It's like a nine or 10 year old.
[17:36]And I read it.
[17:38]So I read Steinbeck through him.
[17:40]My mother wasn't.
[17:41]She was not well educated, but she was a very adventurous reader.
[17:45]So I would see things on her bedside table and I would, you know, get at them.
[17:50]And when I was in middle school was I sixth grade.
[17:53]I guess that counts as middle school.
[17:55]I tried to read my way through the entire school library.
[17:58]I think this is something that bookish kids like to do.
[18:01]It's like the ultimate ambition reading all the books in the world.
[18:05]And I didn't get very far, which in a way,
[18:08]I tell the story in free range girl.
[18:10]I was reading something grossly inappropriate for a vulnerable young person.
[18:15]And my school principal saw what I was reading and was very cross about it
[18:20]and yanked the book out of my hands.
[18:22]And I was indignant how dare he tell me what I can read.
[18:25]And at the same time I was kind of pleased because it meant I didn't have to read my way through the whole school library.
[18:32]But certainly not the nice.
[18:34]You know, one of the other things, vampires,
[18:37]they say loomed large in the 1970s for a lot of us.
[18:40]There was a lot of pop culture stuff about vampires.
[18:43]And that was the time, you know, Stephen King published Salem's Lot,
[18:46]which figures in free range girl because, you know,
[18:50]his story takes place in a small town in Maine.
[18:54]And as a, as a 12 year old, not perhaps the greatest grasp on what was reality and what was fiction.
[19:02]I thought maybe it was, there was a quality of documentary to it.
[19:05]Like maybe it was true.
[19:06]Maybe there were vampires in small town, Maine.
[19:08]So as I said, I read that.
[19:10]I read Dracula.
[19:12]You know, I read a lot of things that I don't know.
[19:14]I wouldn't say they, well, they certainly scared me.
[19:16]But did they make, I don't know.
[19:18]I think I was a bit of a scaredy cat, actually.
[19:21]But in the way of children,
[19:23]I was more scared of things that I imagined, like grizzly bears in the woods of Maine,
[19:29]which there aren't, or vampires, you know, intercepting me when I was in the outhouse at night.
[19:34]You know, that was scary to me.
[19:36]But things that might really have hurt me.
[19:38]Some of the risks that the character, the eye character and free range girl takes.
[19:43]I wasn't scared of those.
[19:44]You know, I wasn't scared of a gas oven, which actually demonstrably blew up in my face.
[19:49]You know, I think this is, this is one of the things about childhood that is so
[19:54]endearing, really. Children's appreciation of the world is,
[19:59]I wouldn't say just.
[20:00]But it's it's unrealistic in a way that is that is very not feel very tender about it actually that's lovely
[20:07]Do you feel like when your kids got scared about things you had a different point of view and how you comforted them?
[20:12]I don't know about that. I will say that I
[20:16]When I was raising my children, I tried to
[20:19]Give them some of the freedom that I had and some of the responsibility and
[20:24]And I'm not sure it worked out entirely in everyone's favor
[20:28]I have talked to my children about it and several of my children are kind of
[20:32]I mean, they're all fantastic people. I would say that wouldn't I but it's true. How how how older they now?
[20:38]Oh, so my eldest is 32 and the next one down is about to be 30 and
[20:44]the dinner then then there's 26 25 and 21
[20:49]So they're they're big kids now. They're grown-ups. They're adults and
[20:52]And in some cases, I think the responsibility and the freedom and independence that I gave them as a deliberate act
[21:00]You know produced the kind of resilience and vitality and versatility and resourcefulness that I'd been hoping
[21:07]But in a couple of them or a couple of them said me, you know, I think actually it may be kind of anxious
[21:11]So we may also be not just with you know inputs and and and outcomes
[21:16]But the natural innate personality or temperament of people
[21:21]You know, maybe not everybody is cut out to be a free-range girl. You know
[21:25]So interesting
[21:27]Were there moments when you started writing that you were like, oh gosh
[21:30]You know what I forgot about that and then I just like came to you as you wrote
[21:33]Well, this again zippy. This is why everybody should write it memoir. It was
[21:37]Fascinating. It was fascinating. There were things that I hadn't that I had forgotten the most surreal experience I had
[21:46]Was so this is near the end of the book
[21:49]But I went to the freak show at the county fair where the local fair was in the county fair a local fair
[21:56]And I'd never been in a freak show before and back in the 1970s freak shows were pretty freaky
[22:02]And I don't know if they even exist now. I kind of suspect not anyway in my memory
[22:07]I went back through the sort of flap of this canvas tent
[22:12]And I looked at the things in my memory as it were that I remembered very clearly
[22:17]And then it was a kind of out-of-body thing
[22:19]I found that I was able kind of to turn
[22:22]In the consciousness of that memory to turn inside the memory and then I saw something that I had definitely seen that I had forgotten
[22:30]So it was a really interesting process. I think
[22:32]It is absolutely true that memory is not reliable. I mean, I know this as a journalist
[22:38]And book group book critic, which is what my day job now I
[22:42]Can read something in a book and I think something happened to a character when the character was four turns out the character was three
[22:49]You know, and that's a very that's a short-term memory long-term memory too
[22:52]You know, you family stories bleed into your own stories and other people's
[22:58]Remembrance is couldn't color your own
[23:00]So, you know, I don't know that it's all reliable, but it's as close to truth as I can get and I know that there's nothing made up in it
[23:09]So interesting, huh? So when you are have your book critic hat on so to speak
[23:15]What do you think makes a great book boy? I think that's a huge question
[23:22]It's a bit it's or less
[23:25]What are causes of the first world war? Yeah, I would say I would say a distinct narrative voice
[23:31]You will look what mean you tell me you're that you you run the business on this
[23:35]I think a distinct narrative voice. I think
[23:39]Pro-style for me is very important
[23:41]You know if it's a confident and if there's something going on sentence to sentence
[23:46]But you know literature or books anyway, they're an art form. They're not a science
[23:52]And I think I may be less equipped to answer that question than I should be honestly
[23:58]It's partly feeling. I think that's what it is like when you look at when you look at a piece of art or piece of sculpture
[24:04]Something you look at the material you look at the shape
[24:07]But you also consult your interior
[24:10]Out like does this move me does this disturb me does it make me smile?
[24:13]Does it make me feel affectionate do I notice the writing or am I just drawn into the writing?
[24:19]One of the things I tried to do with free-range girl again
[24:22]I mentioned that I had started writing in the third person
[24:26]Because I just again thought of this characters and this is this far away place
[24:30]And you know just remote from me now and from us now
[24:34]But I tried to write it as cleanly as I possibly could just to write down the true things
[24:40]Without a lot of ornament without a lot of commentary
[24:43]You know, and I don't know I mean you've read it more recently than I have probably so I don't know if I if I sustain that
[24:50]I am myself
[24:52]I'm very fond of quite ornate writing
[24:54]If it's done well and it's and you know it's persuasive
[24:57]But with this I think you can get tangled up in trying
[25:00]to be fancy with effects. And sometimes just very straightforward writing. Who is it or well
[25:06]or someone or well among others counseled that you who was it who said kill your darlings might
[25:13]have been twain might have been that or doesn't sound like Orwell. But anyway practitioners of
[25:18]great writing have often encouraged us to be as straight as we possibly can. Take out the French
[25:24]phrases. I'm gonna take out this right now. Hold on, I think it is Mark Twain. Oh, it is Mark.
[25:32]Kill your darlings. No, it's actually coined by British writer Sir Arthur Quiller Couch in his 1914
[25:39]lecture series on the art of writing. Okay. But that's a great example. I've never heard of Arthur
[25:45]Quiller Couch. Yeah, yeah. But again, people who it's it's a wonderful insight. Oh, you know who
[25:52]it was. It was Vonnegut. Vonnegut also talked about that. He talked about how I think he said something
[25:58]like when you see a sentence that makes you particularly pleased strike it out. And I think it's
[26:06]I think I think that's true. I think that's true. When I look at my own work afterwards, I sometimes
[26:11]that I've been really tickled with some fruity phrase and and it might slightly distort everything
[26:17]around it because you're trying to get to that sentence and then get out of that sentence. Whereas
[26:21]if you just it's a little less ego, a little more transparent, you know, I think you're a very
[26:28]transparent writer by the way. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I think there's no sense of you kind of concealing
[26:35]or being being fancy. And I don't fancy. That sounds like I mean, that is a term of appropriate.
[26:42]What I mean is being like consciously artful. Yeah, manipulative. I don't, you know, I think yeah,
[26:49]no, it's great. I can do it. I just don't like we all can do that, right? Like you can do a sentence
[26:55]with like all the big words. Like I know how to do that. But then I look at it and I'm like,
[26:59]just say it. Just say it exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that whole, you know, there are a lot of
[27:06]great writers practice reading their work aloud. And that boy does that show up. Oh, oh,
[27:13]you have time. I want to tell you about a mortifying incident if I if I may. So I was recording
[27:18]the audiobook for free range girl back in August. And I had gone through the manuscript
[27:24]a zillion times. My beta readers had gone through the manuscript a zillion times. Everybody
[27:30]at the publishing house, more house, they're wonderful. And they've gone through the manuscript
[27:33]a million times. But as I'm reading it out loud with an engineer and a, and a director, I saw
[27:41]various infillities, including incredibly. I describe a ship as being square-masted.
[27:49]Hmm. Well, it might be square-rigged, but it's not square. There's no square-masted.
[27:54]You know, it made through that that error had made it through all sorts of human eyes.
[27:59]So I decided this is my posture is if there is an error in the book, that means it's not AI.
[28:06]So this is bona fide human written content. I love that. Megan, such an interesting conversation
[28:13]loved it so much. Book so lovely free range girl and memoir congratulations.
[28:18]Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi,
[28:24]formerly momstone have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend,
[28:28]leave a review, follow me on Instagram at zibi Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much.
[28:35]Go and buy the books.