Stephanie Wrobel on Researching Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy & the Value of an MFA

 Mindy: Today’s guest is Stephanie Wrobel, whose debut novel, Darling Rose Gold, is available now. Stephanie joined me today to talk about her research involving Munchausen syndrome by proxy in order to write her novel. 

We're here today to talk about your new novel, Darling Rose Gold, which has gotten a lot of buzz already. A lot of people are talking about it, say that it will appeal to fans of Fiona Barton, Lionel Shriver, Riley Segar, anybody that likes true crime stories as well. So to start, why don't you just tell us a little bit about Darling Rose Gold and what it is about?  

Stephanie: Sure. So it's the story of a mother and daughter named Patty and Rose Gold Watts. And unbeknownst to Rose Gold, her mother had been poisoning her for her entire childhood for 18 years. And so Patty goes to prison for these abuses, and my book starts with Patty getting out of prison. Ah, at which point the now adult Rose Gold makes this sort of calculated decision to take her in. And then it becomes, ah, battle of wits as we try to figure out what each of these characters want. 

Mindy: And it is very much about Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which I know some of my listeners might be familiar with. But if you could talk a little bit about what M. S B. P is? 

Stephanie: Sure. So it's a mental health illness where a caregiver fakes or induces illness in the person that they're caring for, which is often a child. 

Mindy:  In order to gain attention for themselves and sympathy for themselves. Correct? 

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. To gain attention or love from the medical community. So usually doctors and nurses.  

Mindy: Darling Rose Gold is different from other books that talk about Munchausen's syndrome by proxy because of the fact that you you open with that reveal that this is in fact, what happened, and it's more about the path forward in this case. 

Stephanie: What I was really interested in doing is examining the why. Why perpetrators do this. Do they know that they're lying? Do they think that they're doing what's best for their kids? And so in order to do that, I feel like you kind of had to be up front, you know, at the beginning and say, Hey, these are the things that Patty has been accused of have been convicted of. And that kind of sets the tone for the rest of the novel. 

Mindy: I'm sure you probably had to do a lot of research in order to write this.  

Stephanie: Yeah, I read some memoirs. I read some news articles. I read a medical textbook, and all of that really helped to form these general profiles of both perpetrators and survivors of the abuse. And then, from there I was able to take it and flush them out and make them my own characters.  

Mindy: And this is also told in alternating viewpoints. So I think that is particularly, I think, challenging as a writer because as a writer you have to create sympathy for your characters on some level, even if it isn't this complete - yes, I'm on your side. You at least have to create - Okay, I understand why you did this, whether I agree with it or not. And I think that's something that, in my experience as a reader, simply, in reading the Game of Thrones books, which I read back in the nineties, I love to tell everyone I was way ahead of you.

But I thought that George R. R. Martin did such a good job with the character of Cersei, and that we absolutely hate her. We find her despicable until we get her POV chapters and when we get them. And I think that wasn't until the third book might have been the second. But when we get Cersei's POV. As a mother and you see that everything she has done it was for the, you know, the benefit of her Children. You begin to, if not necessarily sympathize with her, at least understand. So is that a challenge for you? As you are writing, Patty?

Stephanie: I think, Yeah, that's a really good parallel example. I am also a huge Game of Thrones fan and yes, you you got there before me. But I agree. You see some relatable sides of her in the show, but certainly not as much as you do in the books. Of course, there's much more room for character development in those giant bricks of books that they are. Getting back to Patty. Yes, it was. It was a bit of a challenge, but I think I just tried to put myself in her shoes and think somebody with this syndrome would be minimizing the terrible things they're doing and really focusing on the image of the perfect mother and caring for your child, and so that that's what I tried to do.

And also just really focus on the parts of Patty that do make her a little more relatable, or human, such as her own terrible childhood or her legitimate concern, when Rose Gold was first born about her well being and you know she was having these breathing problems. And I think that vulnerability, it's probably pretty universal with new parents, where they just are almost frantic, with worry of wanting to make sure that their newborn is okay and so by emphasizing those things, I think, instead of making it into this sort of like one dimensional villain who's just like bad all the time.  

Mindy: Motherhood is so complicated, it's complicated on so many levels, and we see, of course, today with everything that's going on with the Corona virus, we see people behaving badly in many cases, and I try not to get caught up in media cycles. But, you know, a lot of people are posting about people that are hoarding or people that are over buying toilet paper, for one thing. But other things as well. The first thing on my mind is I wonder how many of them are mothers, mothers that are panicking and are just doing... they're literally going like, you know, Nature Channel. I'm hoarding for mine and my own and my nest.

Stephanie: It comes out in a different action. But it is a primal urge and just this sort of maternal instinct to protect your young at like whatever costs. I'm not a mother, but I know it from watching my own mother from watching my sister, who has a baby, and it's just it does feel like this sort of biological pull. 

Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's what I always tell people. In one of my my first novels, It actually takes place during an apocalyptic situation, and the mother character in that story is very primal and more or less like, shuts down her household and is teaching her daughter how to use a sniper rifle and protect their water source.

And so many people have e mailed me and just been like, Oh my gosh, she's such a terrible character. She teaches her daughter how to kill and not to love. And I'm like, Well, but look at the environment. It's like she's teaching her daughter how to survive. That's what she's doing. She's being an awesome mom. Teaching her love and kindness is going to get her ass killed, Right? So that is one of the things that you know, I think about when I think about motherhood. But Munchausen's syndrome syndrome by proxy, which is... are you... do you practice saying that so that you say it right every time? 

Stephanie: I've started abbreviating it to MSBP. Once I say it once, I'm like, Okay, I got it out once. 

Mindy: Okay, I'm gonna follow your lead, then. Okay, So when you were researching M S B P, did you come across anything that, like, surprised you because of so many stories that are already out there? What kind of preconceived notions did you have and were any of them corrected or had to be updated by your research? 

Stephanie: Yes. So I didn't know a ton going in. But my friend, who's an elementary school psychologist, was the one who introduced me to the syndrome. And I think my biggest surprise was that it's usually women and often mothers who have this illness. I mean, I knew that it was frequently parents, but I definitely didn't realize that it was almost always women. That really intrigued me, not only because of the mother child bond that we've been talking about, but also, you know, when we think of violent abuse like it's, you know, women are not usually typically the ones committing the majority of it. And so that really made me want to dig in and find out what you know, what's happening with these women, that they're doing something that's so outside of normalcy.  

Mindy: You mentioned to that Patty in the book has a history of suffering abuse herself. So did you find in your research that that tends to be something that crops up, that the the mothers that are victimizing their children suffered some sort of abuse themselves? Is that typical?  

Stephanie: Yes, that's almost universally true from the research that I've done. It's either some sort of abuse or really severe neglect. Almost all of these perpetrators. 

Mindy: You said that a friend of yours introduced you to the concept when you were working on this novel? Did you write at the same time that you were researching? Or did you research first and then dive into the fictional aspect? 

Stephanie: No, I really did all of the research first, because I just felt like I needed to do a deep dive into who the perpetrators and victims are. Um, I feel like doing the fictional character development was hard enough, so I think like doing the more clinical research aspects of it would have been hard to do at the same time while developing the characters.  

Mindy: And did you yourself as a writer, have trouble sympathizing with Patty or is that easier once you had done the research?

Stephanie: I think it was easier once I'd done the research and I think, you know, like I said, just kind of minimizing the bad parts and not really focusing on that. The abuse is not really on the page. It's sort of just summarized what's happened in the past. Yeah, you know, in order to become her, I just kind of I focused on the best parts of her a lot of the time. I mean, the reader knows that she's horrible, and I don't think that that that I mean, I think realistically, somebody with this syndrome would not be sitting there thinking about the atrocities they committed. You know? They would be right thinking about everything else that they want, the things that are motivating them to do it.

Mindy: And the motivations are what is most important with any character and in any fiction, always motivation is what matters. But at the same time, when your motivation is going to result in harming someone else, that is a trick as a writer to create that sympathy and in a reader, connect for someone. So hats off to you. That's a that's a tough one. 

Mindy: Coming up, how being a copywriter and having an MFA helped Stephanie Transition into the publishing world. 

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Mindy: You're a former advertising copywriter. So I know that is very different from writing fiction. So could you talk a little bit for listeners that don't know what is advertising Copy writing?  

Stephanie: Sure. So any time you see a TV spot or hear radio ads, somebody had to write those. And so that's what copywriters and advertising do. There's also print ads and billboards and all the digital stuff you see online. Um, copywriters do all of that stuff. And so it was. It was very different, but it was also really good training for fiction writing because, you know, you are coming up with sort of fictional worlds and writing scripts and those kinds of things, and it really teaches you the art of concession and getting rid of extraneous copy and dialogue and all of that stuff. So I like to think that it actually, like, prepared me well for this.

Mindy: And did it also prepare you just in a marketing sense? You have your marketing chops now, right? It's like you already know how to market in a sense. I know that a lot of fiction writers come into that area of publishing really not knowing what's up and and really stumbling in that arena. So have you found it's helpful to you in that way? 

Stephanie: I think so. I mean, I think just having a general understanding of marketing, Certainly there's a lot of nuance that's very specific to the publishing industry that I didn't know. And I think actually, I kind of thought writing an agent query like that won't be so bad like I've done, you know, I've written this kind of stuff before. But it turns out it's still pretty challenging. Even if you do have, ah, marketing background. I mean, I think summarizing you know 90,000 words into a few paragraphs is a challenge, particularly when you came up with the 90,000 words. So I still had my fair share of struggles. 

Mindy: Oh, definitely that query letter. And that's what I'm always trying to tell people, because often, and I'm sure that you experience this, too. People ask, you know, how do you go about getting published? How do I get published? And I'm like, Well, it depends, of course, on what route you want to go, but when you want to be published by a traditional publisher, you have to start with a query letter.

And I usually say what you have to do is right a letter that's about 300 words long and make your book sound like the most interesting story that's ever been told and yourself sound like the most fascinating person that ever existed. And you have 300 words, and usually they're just like, Oh, and then they're like, I thought you just, like, mailed the book to the publisher and they printed it and I'm like, no, that's not right. 

Stephanie: Wouldn't that be nice, though?  

Mindy: Oh, maybe. Maybe not. Because I have some pretty bad books that I had faith in 10, 15 years ago that I might have just ripped right off. And ah, there would be some pretty bad stuff circulating with my name on it. So I don't know. Perhaps I was saved, saved by the walls that were put up to prevent me from printing really bad fiction.  

Stephanie: Yeah, that's a good point, I think. You know, with the query letter. It is, ah, daunting exercise to do, but there's so much stuff online now. I like Query Shark a lot. I don't know if you're familiar with it. But this agent, Janet Reid, who does who's been doing this blog for like decades now. And I just found those archives so helpful and just starting to practice and writing your query letter like long before you actually want to send it. Ah, lot of what I discovered as I was going through the Query Shark archives were people saying they read half the blog in one night and the other half the second night and like now they're ready to write the letter and send it off. And it's like I just kind of treated it as another writing project. And I worked, like, slowly shaped it over the course of I don't know, four or five months. And you know, once you know what the premise of your book is, I think you can start practicing your query letter. 

Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. And practicing is correct. That's the right word to use there by all means. I was querying for 10 years, and that's because I wasn't doing it right. And I was just, you know, doing like you said. I was just crash coursing and ripping something off because as a student in high school, I could get away with that right? I could get away with cramming and regurgitating and, you know, get straight A's and kind of sailed through. It doesn't work that way when you're, when you're moving into the adult world. There's a real craft in a particular craft to writing a query letter, and I tripped myself up. It's hard enough anyway. And then I tripped myself up by going in guns blazing and, you know, ripping off some really terrible query letters just being overconfident. But, I mean, that's the thing about being a writer. You can't go into it saying and I'm gonna fail. 

Stephanie: Yeah, I mean, you have to have some sort of, like, delusional level of hope in order to even try at this thing that... I think you know, when you're talking about writing like a 300 word email, it doesn't seem like it should take that long, given that you've presumably just finished writing again, 80 or 90,000 words. But I do think, but sometimes that can be just as hard as you know, writing the last page of the middle of your book or whatever, so I think it does require a lot of thought and examination, which is the last thing you want to do when you're also writing a book. But it's a really important step. 

Mindy: Absolutely. So you have your MFA. So why don't you talk a little bit... and I know that darling Rose Gold was actually your MFA thesis. And it is your first novel. So why don't you talk a little bit about the experience of getting an MFA and ah, developing this novel then as your thesis?  

Stephanie: Sure. So I was between jobs, between freelance jobs for quite a period of time in advertising, and I kind of felt like, Well, I don't have anything to lose right now, So I might as well finally give writing a novel, a try. And for me personally, I'm a super structured and organized thinker. I've always done well with a plan. And so I thought an MFA program would be a good way to expedite my learning of the craft. 

I hadn't really been seriously working on fiction at that point. I was just kind of plodding along in my advertising jobs and just leaving the writing dream on the back burner. So I went to Emerson College in Boston, and it was basically a crash course in fiction writing. I was very lucky too, really early on, connect with this professor who became my thesis advisor, and she really shepherded me all the way through the process from page one in our workshop to the very end as my thesis at the end of the program. I submitted it as my thesis, and then a few professors thought it looked kind of agent ready and suggested that I take it out. And so I did.  

Mindy: And then, at the end of your MFA experience, did anything about what you were doing with the book change. I mean, it's got a great hook, and it's very high concept and marketable. But was there anything about what you turned in as a thesis that changed then, in order to make it a sellable novel? 

Stephanie: The one thing I would say that my once I signed with my agent that she encouraged was just, there were a few small plot hole things that we kind of took care of. And then it was just kind of evening out the voice. So there were places where Rose Gold was perhaps like too crude or places where she was like too passive. And so that was always like my biggest struggle with this book was getting Rose Gold's voice just right, and I continued to work on that with my editors. When I you know, once the book had sold. 

Mindy: And did you find that it changed much from, Ah, your editors, as opposed to your professor's feedback, then from your MFA program? 

Stephanie: The professors had a lot more work to do because they were dealing with a much less polished document. So by the time it got to my editors, it was more kind of finessing vs, getting rid of huge like sections or chapters. But a lot of it was kind of in service to the same thing, which was just pushing the characters, pushing the voices and just tightening up some of this stuff.  

Mindy: What was that experience then moving from the academic area than into the publishing? Like you already had this marketing background from being a copywriter, but you're jumping into the query process and finding an agent. What was that transition like going from the academic realm then moving into the publishing world?  

Stephanie: I think actually it wasn't too rough of a transition because my background is closer to the publishing world than it is to the academic world in time. I did my FMA program kind of late, so I hadn't been a student, like I hadn't been in college in you know, 10 years or something. And so I was pretty primed by the time I was finished with school. I think it was actually more of an adjustment when I started the MFA versus when I came out of it as a kind of reframe being a student and being in academia. And so the concept of selling and especially like you said with the marketing advertising background, it was just a matter for me of finding the tools of finding out what I needed to do in order to get an agent and to get a publishing deal and then just kind of executing on that. 

Mindy: And how long were you querying then? 

Stephanie: It actually went really shockingly smoothly. From the time I sent the first query out, it took about a month, to sign with my agent. 

Mindy: Who is your agent? 

Stephanie: My agent is Maddie Melbourne. Sh's UK based, and so am I. So that's really nice to be able to see her in person all the time. And I actually did query both U S and U K agents, but, you know, in the end, just her track record and just she as a person is lovely. And I just felt like we had the same level of ambition for my career. And so we just got out really well from the beginning. 

Mindy: Being based in the UK, I know you had tours set up all across the United States that I am assuming have been canceled now. So that's a bummer. I mean, I'm dealing with the same thing. I was supposed to be on the road this entire month and that all, that all disappeared. It is what it is. So are you, kind of recouping by doing interviews like this by having a social media presence. I know it is very difficult right now to make yourself heard and seen, but the good news is that we're producing content for people that like to be at home. So this could be a golden hour. 

Stephanie: Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, it's obviously unprecedented, So who knows what will come of it and how it will turn out? I mean, it would be amazing if all of these cancellations at least resulted in because people are at home, they're reading more books, but that remains to be seen. My team and I are still sort of pivoting and figuring out, you know, do we do more virtual events? You know, do we do with stuff on Instagram or Facebook? Or, you know, what can we do where? And we're kind of like right in the middle of figuring that out.

I mean the book, my book just came out yesterday, and so the tour, I think I found out, you know, early this week or maybe late last week, that the tour was being canceled. Um, so it's a bummer not to be able to celebrate with friends and family, but I think it's also a very interesting challenge to see what we can do. Instead, when people are confined to their homes. 

Mindy: In the past, you know, few years audiobooks having exploded, and people, of course, if they're stuck in their homes, they can still download books, so we still have a line on our public. And as long as the Internet stays up! 

Stephanie: God. Can you imagine?

Mindy:  It would be bad. It would be very bad. Why don't you let my listeners know where they can find you online and where they can buy your book, Darling Rose Gold.  

Stephanie: Sure, So my website is Stephanie Wrobel dot com. Spelled the same way as my name and I am the most active on Instagram, which my handle is Stephanie Wrobel. Again, same spelling, and you can buy my book anywhere that books are sold.

Caroline Zancan On the Editor & Writer Relationship

Mindy:             Today's guest is Caroline Zancan, author of the novel Local Girls, as well as her latest, We Wish You Luck. She's a graduate of Kenyon College and holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. A senior editor at Henry Holt, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their Children. Caroline joined me today to talk about the unique mix of art and business that is the publishing industry. 

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Mindy:             Your new book is called We Wish You Luck, and it is very much about the creative world, creative people, how creativity and our own personal projects can become such a drive. At the same time, being very much also a story about female friendships. So if you could talk for a little bit as an introduction about We Wish You Luck. 

Caroline:          Yes, so We Wish You Luck is about an MFA program, a low residency MFA program, which means that students kind of come to campus for these residences that are 10 days long, and they come for residency twice a year. And then they do their long term writing projects off campus and kind of have, like, correspondence with Professor at the times in between. And so it's kind of a little bit like camp. It's almost like writer's camp. This novel is narrated by one class of this MFA program.

Something terrible happens to a member of their class and they only know little bits and pieces of the story through rumor, through gossip, through little bits of conversations that various members of the class had overheard. And they're kind of coming together to piece it together because, you know, they're only on campus ten days a year. 

Some of story happens off campus and in between residencies. So it's all kind of happening just beyond their line of vision and their line of knowledge until they kind of need each other to tell the story. So they end up working together to tell it instead of competing with one another the way that writers often do in writing programs. 

 Mindy:             And can you talk for a little bit about that arena of competition. Because it is there. And I think that's an interesting thing to mention. It's not only present in MFA programs, either. Obviously, that is a smaller arena. But in the broader world of publishing, competition is something that, or at least comparison, is certainly something that happens often. So if you could talk a little bit about that mindset within an MFA program, but then also in the broader scope of publishing, 

Caroline:          I have an MFA myself. And as soon as I got on the campus, it was just so apparent how badly everybody wanted to be good at this thing that it is very hard to be good at. Um, I find writing to be the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. Creative writing, storytelling. There's so many ways to get it wrong. Um, and so it's just kind of like thankless, hard thing to do, and they're on these campuses are people who want it so passionately, so badly, even though it doesn't always make a lot of money. And it can take years of working and grueling over something before it's even has a shot at publication and, you know, wanting anything that badly that's such a long shot can read bad behavior in anybody.

But at the same time, it was so clear that this impulse was coming from a good place. They wanted to write something good because they had been moved or their lives have been changed by something else that had been written beautifully written by somebody else. Anyone who's a writer, even people who aren't writers who are just readers or aspiring writers, you know, can think of a book or a poem or a set of lyrics that completely grabbed them and just shook them up as a person and completely changed who they are. And having that kind of profound experience oftentimes makes people want to have the same effect on somebody else through their writing. There is this competition, but it only comes from wanting to create a wonderful experience for someone else. 

Mindy:             Moving that then out into the world of publishing. I know that many people outside of the industry have this idea of the writer as a creature that doesn't actually exist. Completely solitary an isolated individual, that is, you know, kind of a manic creative, but also always rich. And the reality is that only 1% of published writers actually can live off of their income. So is that something that you can like address a little bit as far as competition In terms of success.

Caroline:          That's funny. Success is a funny word in writing, because what what really measures success? There's getting an agent it's so hard to do, and then getting published is really hard to do and then having it be well received critically, it's really hard to do. And then, you know a different measure of success is like selling a bajillion copies Is your goal to change one person's life by having written something beautifully that you're connecting with one soul? 

I personally write, because I just can't not. Like even if I knew no one was going to read what I wrote, I would do it just because it brings me to life in a way that very few things do. Like, there's nothing that puts me in a better mood than just like an hour of really immersed thought and work in a project that has legs. It's just, you know, sometimes the words come and sometimes they don't and a one hour session during which the words like really come, like that's so invigorating and enlivening. It's just incredible.

I would never discourage anyone from writing like, I think writing is so good for the soul. But at the same time, like there's no reason to write, except for because you have to, or you feel like you have a story to tell, or you enjoy it Like if you're doing it to get rich or to get famous, even to have it be your steady income to live. I wouldn't recommend putting all your eggs in your basket for that.

You know, I am an editor by day, and I've read so many brilliant manuscripts that are beautifully written that just there's no market for them or the publishing house doesn't have a vision for how they can break this book out to the people who want to read it. So editors are really buying books not only that, they love, what they think they have a vision for how to sell on market. Even being great is not always, like guarantee that great things are gonna happen to a book, which I don't mean at all to be discouraging. 

It's just like you have to write something, um, kind of with that in mind, knowing that you're writing it because you want to write it and there might be, you know, even if it's only a handful of people who need to hear this, you're putting it out there so that those three or five or 100 people can hear it. And in that reality and in this kind of world, you just have to think of success in different ways. 

Mindy:             It is a hard thing to say. It's a hard thing for people to hear, but it's still true, and that needs to be said. One of the reasons I blog and one of the reasons I started this podcast was because I, too, was someone you know, 15 years ago, I had this idea that if I got published, everything was going to be fine. Your life is magically changed. 

Well, you know, move forward like 15 years and you know, I am able to work from home. I am a full time writer and that's awesome. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I am not complaining, but it is a constant hustle. It is not just my book in come that is what I live off of. You know, I'm always traveling. I'm always doing appearances. I'm speaking. I am teaching. I have the blog and the podcast, those are monetized. 

Like everything. It's a constant, constant hustle, looking for contests to put your stuff into that will pay, looking for -  I do editorial work, freelance on the side. I make it, but it is constant. I think that it's important for writers to know that.

I want to pop back to something else that you said that I think is inspiring. You said that you would write anyway, you write because you have to and I love that statement. I also write because I have to. I was attempting to get an agent for 10 years. It took me 10 years and five manuscripts before I got an agent, and at one point I was like - I quit. You know, I'm gonna go, I have a bachelors. I was like, I'm gonna go get my master's in something a little more applicable so I could make a living wage and go do something else for a living and kind of give up on this dream of writing.

And so I did. I told myself multiple times I quit. But just because I quit trying to get published, it didn't mean that stories stopped happening in my head. And so once, once they were there, I might as well write them down. And once they're finished, I might as well try to get it published. And once I changed that mindset is when I became successful. 

Caroline:          I'm not surprised to hear that. I feel like that happens for a lot of people -  that's, you know, a familiar story. I also even now, having published two novels, I tell myself that the thing that I'm working on right now, like this is for me. Maybe I'll share it one day maybe I won't. I'm writing this story right now to see where it goes. I might finish it and then put it in a drawer for six months and take it back out and be like, this needs to stay in the drawer and let me go write something else or conceive of this other story and put it all together and maybe I'll decide. Okay, to show it to my agent and see what you think you know kind of go from there. But I think that if too many hands are on something to early you have too many grand, like final plans for something before it is what it is. It just kind of stops it from getting to be what it is trying to become. I think you have to kind of let something become what it is before you decide where it's gonna go, where it's gonna end up in what's to become of it. 

Mindy:             That's a great point because the actual creative process is organic. You can fiddle with it yourself. You can force things. You can, you can do certain things to make it less organic if you choose to. But the actual process itself is organic. Publishing is not. That is a business. And so as soon as you are looking at what you have produced as something that can be marketed. It has changed. It is no longer a work of art. It's a product to be sold, and that changes the way you look at it and how you interact with it. 

Caroline:          And also, like publishers, are businesses, you know. At the end of the day like, I think it is kind of the halfway point between art and commerce. There's a P&L for every book that is published by the Big Five, which isn't to say they don't care about great literature. They absolutely do. And you know they I think, you know, as someone who's part of this industry and most of my community and like my peers, my colleagues and my closest friends are also part of this community, and we are for the most majorly English major nerds

We didn't go into it as business majors like we got into it for books, and the love of books, and it's like not the highest paying industry and we're there because we love the books. But at the end of the day, like when I read a manuscript, my first question is like, Do I love it? That's always the first question. But then the second question is like, Do I know how to publish this? And then the third question is like, Does my company publish this kind of book well, or is it better suited for a different house? So it's not just, you know, which book is the one that had the prettiest writing? Uh, because it's just, you know, it is a business, and the business is kind of reacting to the marketplace. What people are buying. People don't always want quiet, beautifully written stories, right? 

Mindy:             And you were saying earlier, What determines success? What's your definition of success? And you mentioned awards and great reviews and things like that. And then you also mentioned selling a bazillion copies. And sometimes in fact, my experience, often times those are two separate things. 

Caroline:          They are. I think they are separate things. The third thing, seeing a Goodreads review or getting an email from someone being like, Oh my gosh, or instagram post its like - this book made my day or was such great company during you know, it's been a few posts like this was my pandemic reading like it kept me occupied. Like I do it to connect with other human beings. I think that it's the great connector between people who will never otherwise be in touch with one another. And so that's so largely off the page and unseen like I, if someone could be reading my book right now when I would have no idea because reading is something that generally happens in private on the individual basis. So when you do, like, get that connection or the reinforcement that it's happening, it's a really lovely, beautiful thing.  

Mindy:             Agreed. And as a writer, you get those e mails, you get those tweets, you get those instagram posts, and sometimes it can be what keeps you going through your day. 

Caroline:          Totally. Totally. It just makes you feel like Okay, somebody... I feel heard like somebody out there heard what I had to say. It's like that for me. That's enough.  

Mindy:             Coming up. Being both an author and an editor and the often misunderstood author editor relationship. 

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Mindy:             So you mentioned the pandemic. Obviously, we're all in it, and I myself follow the publishing industry pretty closely just to see what's going on. I'm really curious, like, what do you see as an editor? How do you see publishing being impacted in the immediate, obviously, but also then, like long term, What's the tail on this? 

Caroline:          I mean, it's so hard to say, because we still don't know. Everyday, it changes every day. The news is different and giving us a different timeline, publishing kind of, it feels like a very safe, comfortable, inviting group of people to work with. I trust that my company is gonna keep me safe and not call us all back to work before it's safe to get on a subway in New York City again. So I have that trust, but so I think that that means we're probably, you know, gonna err on the side of going back later. But what that means in terms of the calendar, I have no idea. 

But I can say I am impressed by how quickly we have gotten up and running just remotely. Like we're still here. We're still open for business. I'm still reading submissions. Agents are still sending submissions out, I think throughout the history of the written word and books, the way that people read and the way that people make books has changed. The format books are read and the the way that people decide which books are going to be made and how they make them is always evolving. But there I think that the way we hunger for, and that way we value stories has stayed consistent, like, I think, as a culture and a society. We've always agreed that this is something we value now more than ever. This is important, like we're here, we want to be publishing books, books aren't going away on, and we're just trying to keep up with how that looks like in practice rather than in theory. 

Mindy:             Yeah, and I'm interested to see because audiobooks, of course, absolutely exploded in recent times, and a lot of that is due to the average American commute. So with so many of us not commuting anymore, I'm really interested to see if there's a medium shift. 

Caroline:          I think it's too early to say that. There will be like short term trends and long term ones, but I'm curious as you are.  

Mindy:             So let's talk about being a writer and being an editor at the same time. What's it like being on the other side of the desk? 

Caroline:          I like to think that being a writer myself makes me a more empathetic editor. It's very vulnerable making to put your work out into the world. It's hard to really grasp how vulnerable making it is until you've actually been through it. So I'm more of a Mama bear editor, I think, having been on the other side of it, I also really love the process. Like I love the editor writer relationship on either end. Like I believe in the editing process. Some writers don't like to be edited, especially ones that are really established. 

I actually have gone the opposite way, like the further along I've gotten in my career. The more I'm like, yes, this is needs to be a group project I'm like, actually more loath to finally let go of a manuscript. Yes, this is actually ready to go out into the world they like, want to discuss it even more. Just in general, I love that back and forth between the writer and editor in the collaboration, whether I'm giving the suggestions or incorporating them.  

Mindy:             My editor is Ben Rosenthal at Katherine Tegan Books, and we've been together for oh boy, I want to say six books now, possibly seven. We've been together a long time, I trust Ben. A lot of people outside of the industry and especially aspiring writers misjudge the editor writer relationship. Whenever I'm teaching or if I am doing a presentation to the general public, I generally get that question - Has there ever been anything that your editor made you change? And I'm just like, Dude, your editor doesn't make you do anything. Yeah, I mean, a real editor, anyway. I mean, I have heard one or two horror stories, but few and far between. It truly is a collaboration, and that's something that is, I think, greatly misunderstood.  

Caroline:          I mean, an editor's job's really to like to protect the writer from the public. I think more than anything, the way that I look at it, actually. Here's how this is coming across, maybe you mean it to come across this way. Here's what's on the page and here's the takeaway from it. If you want that to be the experience and you want me to have that question, great. If you didn't want me to have that question and you wanted me to know X or Y, you should put that in there somewhere. It's to me... I just want to make sure my writer's expectation of how a reader is perceiving something are absorbing something matches the way that reader actually is. 

Mindy:             And it's very easy as an author because you have a preconceived notion of what that character's motives are, what they're thinking, how they meant what they said, what their action is supposed to represent. But it might not actually be on the page. It's called Manuscript Blindness. That's something I deal with a lot. Just as a freelance editor, I will have someone say, Well, this character is supposed to be this certain way, and I'm like, Really? Cause it's not on the page. I don't see it at all. That's not how I interpreted it.

Caroline:          I feel like there's such a gap between what's in a writer's mind and what's on the page. So it's like, really, that's just what the editor's job is to close that gap. 

Mindy:             And I think too, having those relationships with your editor, it is interesting because once you've worked with someone on more than a handful of books, they know you, they know how you operate. They know your strengths and they knew your weaknesses. And without exception, every time that I have sent a manuscript off to Ben. I already know what my edit letter is going to say because I know my own weaknesses. I know what they are, but that it doesn't make it any less frustrating when I actually get the letter right and it's and it says exactly what I knew it would say. And I'm just like Mindy, you already knew that you already knew that. Why didn't you just fix it on your own? 

Caroline:          Well, sometimes, too. They are like a 1,000,000 different ways to fix something, right? So I feel like the editors job is also to be like, Here's the thing I'm noticing. Here are 10 different ways you can fix it and you can choose any one of these 10 ways. You can choose any combination of these ten ways, or you can come up with an 11th completely different way to change all that. Sometimes I as a writer at least need to like go through the 10 ways to fix it that are not the right way to land on the right way. You know, I need to, like, walk through all the potential solutions before I can figure out exactly what the fix is. Even if you knew kind of what you were saying, you knew where the problem lied in your manuscript, the conversation that exists or lies in the editor's letter back to you helps you kind of find that fix.  

Mindy:             It does. I absolutely agree. Why don't you, last thing, tell us where people can find you online and connect with you on social media and also where they can find the book, We Wish You Luck.  

Caroline:          I will start with the last part. I think the book is is available wherever books are sold or your favorite local Indy, Barnes and Noble Online. I know that a lot of the Barnes and Noble's are closed right now, but they're still definitely shipping books online. Amazon, of course. I think that there are like delays everywhere because of closing.

But I think it's more important now than ever to be buying books because you know, we want bookstores to be able to open when all this is over, even if you don't want to buy my book by someone else's book. So please buy a book that doesn't have to be mine. And then I'm on Twitter and Instagram. I'm a more active instagram er Caroline Zancan is my name is my Twitter handle and then CarolineZancan82 is my instagram handle. So please, I'd love to hear from you. And everyone stay well and reading. It's a great way to pass these weird, strange, lonely days.

Kiley Reid: On Representation of Language & Examining Race in Fiction

Mindy:             Today's guest is Kiley Reid, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop where she was the recipient of the Truman Capote fellowship. She lives in Philadelphia. Such A Fun Age is her first novel. Kylie joined me today to talk about Such A Fun Age and how writing two dimensional characters, people who are both good and bad, is how to make them true to life.

Mindy:             We are here to talk about your book, Such A Fun Age, and I would like first to start off just with you telling us a little bit about the book, what it's about.

Kiley:               Sure. the book starts on a Saturday night in September. In 2015 we meet Amira Tucker. She is a 25 year old African American babysitter. She's a Temple University graduate, and she's at that phase in her life where she's really not sure what she wants to do. She lives in an apartment she doesn't like. But one thing she does love doing is babysitting. So Amira is babysitting three-year-old Briar Chamberlain. They're in a grocery store or they're having a good time. They're singing and dancing until a security guard and a customer upon seeing a black woman with a white child accuse Amira of kidnapping, someone else pulls out their cell phone, they record it Amira is humiliated. And Alex Chamberlain, Briar's mom feels terrible that this happened while, you know, Amira was under her care. So she tries to write the night's wrongs, but the book turns into a comedy of good intentions after that.

Mindy:             Yes, very much. And that's one of the things that does make it so compelling because it's a very modern story. And it's a very much about one scene, one moment that triggers life altering events for many people. Obviously the babysitter is being racially profiled and is experiencing this, which I'm sure is not the first time in her life that she has been racially profiled. But then we have an upper class white woman who is, you know, trying to fix it. It just ends up being a kind of a tumbleweed rolling down a hill, gathering weight, turning almost into a ballistic missile.

Kiley:               Oh yeah. I think there's a lot of people who have wonderful intentions both black and white, but there's a huge emphasis on them as individuals rather than a collective society. There's this overwhelming feeling of, okay, how can I say the perfect thing in this moment? How can I do the perfect thing with this racially charged incident? And there's little room for, all right, well why does, why does this incident happen in the first place? I think a little bit too much emphasis is put on the individual by many people.

Mindy:             Yes, absolutely. And it also brings up the question of whether or not it's performative.

Kiley:               Right? There is that that level too, I also am really intrigued by memory and memory serves a huge role in this novel and memories that people have become self-serving. They get twisted and warped. And as I think memories do often and they often kind of shape who we are, whether they happen to like that or not. And so in writing this book, I wanted to really honor the truth of memory and not always tell the reader exactly how something happened because I think the more important thing is how it happened for that character. So there's definitely some conflicting memories that the reader has to grapple with.

Mindy:             That's wonderful. And it brings up an interesting question too of are our experiences shaping us and who we are? Are we or are we rewriting our experiences to fit the image of who we think we are.

Kiley:                That's an interesting way of putting it. I think it's, sometimes it's both in studying memory a little bit you know, for the most part, memories come about when a really strong reaction happens in a moment. But sometimes I think when you're telling a story and you get a big reaction from it, the feeling that that emotion of feeling accepted because you've told a story also gets encoded on you in a certain way. And certain stories we tell over and over again, they get bigger and bigger as we tell them because we want a reaction out of it. So all of those things I think really factor into these characters.

Mindy:             Ah, that's fascinating. I read an interview that you gave with NBC and you were talking about as a writer myself, one of the things that I really enjoyed you bringing up towards the end of the interview, and I'm going to quote you here. You say, "the characters that I enjoy the most, the author has set me up to not know how to feel about them. I think it's a bit romantic to believe that racist and homophobic individuals are those ways all of the time.”

Mindy:             Which is a great way to kind of flip what we were just saying. When you have someone with good intentions trying to do the right thing, possibly it being performative or even just like an ego boost or self cleansing in some ways. And here you are also bringing up the opposite, people that truly are racist or homophobic or acting in these ways purposefully. Are they always that way? A another quote from you, you say that you "try to give each character a win, a moment when they are redeemable." And I love that. I think it's so true. I mean, you know, one of the cliches that we often hear as writers is that you don't want to write a mustache twirling villain. They are not compelling. So I mean, I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about that. Seeing both sides of all of your characters, even the ones are, you know, not so easy to swallow.

Kiley:              Totally. I think that showing character strengths and weaknesses just remains so much more true to who we can be as human. When I taught undergraduate workshops at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, I had students who are not writers, which is kind of my favorite student. Students who need an art credit and hope to get an a from it from an art class. And I had a lot of tendencies from my students to write these villains that were just so two dimensional - kill and steal and say bad things and are very, very rude to people. And we talked a lot about how much scarier is it when that that horrible villain goes home and plays with his children and is really loving towards them. I think that those sides can exist really harmoniously. I remember when I was a child, I lived in Tucson, Arizona, which is a very white town and I had friends who their parents loved me and they loved when I came over and I, they made me feel part of the family, but they would never allow their children to date or marry an African American man. I think that all of those, those, you know, feelings make up a human. And so I wanted to show characters that are sweet and kind and also have really terrible and harmful ways of thinking about people. Because I think that that's more true to how white supremacy can exist.

Mindy:             Absolutely. Because they're not all Adolf Hitler.

Kiley:              No. Yeah.

Mindy:             It's the guy that came and fixed your sink and was perfectly polite to you or the woman that smiled at you and asked about your day. But you know, I mean it's, it's everyday people,

Kiley:               Everyday people. Totally. And in the first scene there is this really big moment of racial bias at the same time for the remainder of the novel. And Amira is struggling to get health insurance. And I think that that's another extension of racism. Why don't domestic workers have an easy time of getting health insurance as they're working sometimes much harder and longer than other professions. And so people often ask me, you know, is this a book showing that racism is getting better or worse? And I think the only way of answering it is kind of like how humans are, is I think that it evolves in different sometimes insidious ways. And so I was hoping to show exactly how that happens with Amira.

Mindy:             Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's also a very good way to actually illustrate a, it's a, it's a buzz word now, but systemic racism and then actually illustrating it through these everyday actions of everyday people rather than, you know, people marching with Tiki torches, you know, and it's like that's the-- while it's a horrible visual, it's also makes it easier for everyday racism to I think, hide.

Kiley:               I think so too. Yeah. And I have to, I mean, as a human I'm so interested in these big socioeconomic issues, but as a reader and writer, I love the tiny little nuance to moments that do so much heavy lifting and show years and years of of history come back to one tiny moment between a woman and her babysitter. I think those moments are really fascinating.

Mindy:             Coming up, working life with a living wage, representing race on the page through language choice and the truth that resides in fiction.

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Mindy:             So you mentioned socioeconomic issues being an interest for you. You set this book in Philadelphia partly because it has a more progressive approach to setting standards for domestic workers who on average have an income of $10,000, which you obviously cannot live on. So if you want to talk about that a little bit, cause I know that you yourself had experience as a domestic worker walking away from the book for a little bit. If you just talk about your experiences as a domestic worker and then also just the plight of these people that have to live on not a living wage.

Kiley:              Absolutely. I did work as a nanny for six years and Amira Tucker, my protagonist, and I couldn't be more different when it comes to personalities. But I definitely remember not having health insurance and being, having a a very, you know, mild level of panic all the time. Thinking, what if I get hit by a car? What if I cut myself cutting this birthday cake? That would change the course of my life and paying for it would set me back in a way that I may not come back from. I think emotional labor and domestic labor is fascinating and it goes back to a history of slavery, a history of not giving farmers and domestic workers the same rights as other people and farmers and domestic workers were mostly black and Brown people in the 30s. And people like Amira are still struggling with that today.

Kiley:                But I will say one thing that is so uplifting for me to know is Philadelphia is kind of leading the way along with Seattle, I believe with a recent bill passed for a domestic workers bill of rights, where everyone who babysits for a family more than five hours a month is now contracted. Whether they signed something or not. And things other jobs I've had for so long, like sick days and paid leave and lunch breaks and time to get off of your feet, those things will be included. There's a moment in the novel where Amira thinks, I really want to quit and she thinks, you know, I can't just put in my two weeks notice. That's not how this works. But under the domestic workers bill of rights here in Philadelphia, that is how it works. And things like that are very encouraging. I think they're going to be hard to implement but still encouraging, nonetheless.

Mindy:             I survived on a rather low income for a period of time in my life. And you are absolutely right. It is so scary if you don't have health insurance, those really simple things like cutting a birthday cake or you know, driving. I, you know, you have to drive if you're lucky enough to have a car, you know?

Kiley:               Yeah.

Mindy:             You could be injured. I mean, any of us, you know, I'm literally sitting in my office right now. There is no guarantee that the ceiling won't fall on me. I mean, right?

Kiley:                Right, right. You never know. Yeah. It's a crazy thing, especially with domestic labor with children. It's this profession that you have such a small margin of error, not just for yourself, but for the child. If something happens to that child, that can change your life, their family's life forever and with such a high stakes situation, if you're lucky, you get paid $15 an hour. It's kind of, that doesn't make any sense. And I, and I hope Philadelphia leads the way and changing that for other women.

Mindy:             You've had great luck right out of the door with Such A Fun Age. Emmy winning writer, producer Lena Waite has snapped up the film and TV rights even before publication. Reese Witherspoon has adopted it as a book club book. It has just had such a wave of enthusiasm, even pre-publication. So I know that you have gone through quite a bit of training and education in order to... You were accepted into the Iowa's Writer's Workshop at the university of Iowa, but you also had stumbling blocks before that. Again, I've done some reading about your experiences and you were rejected from nine schools that you applied to for your MFA and to have this, this experience now, I would just love that, know your feelings of the compare and contrast those different ups and downs as a writer.

Kiley:                The first time I applied to grad school, I got those nine rejections and it was so difficult. So much of being a writer is having other jobs to support your writing habit as it's not, you know, sustainable for a bit. And it's really hard to know, okay, when do I pull the plug on this and say this isn't for me? And so I tried again, I had the our opportunity to move to Arkansas with my now husband and I worked in a coffee shop and I wrote copy for a few companies for, for work and wrote for a few magazines in Arkansas as I applied again. And the second time around I was so much more grounded in what I wanted to do and my sample was just so much stronger. And instead of, you know, "Oh please, let me write at your school." The second time around it was, "Hey, I write about really big socioeconomic issues down to tiny little petty instances. Let me know if I can do that at your school."

Kiley:                And the second time it worked out a lot better and got into nine schools and I was so pleased to take this novel to Iowa where I completed it, but I think that rejections are part of the process. I could probably wallpaper my room with rejections, but the ones that always stand out are the good ones. I've definitely had rejections that say, "Hey, this one almost made it." And as a writer, you're like, Oh my gosh, I can, I can do this for another three months. This, this little phrase is going to carry me for a little bit. And I think that's just part of the process.

Mindy:             Absolutely. I agree with you 100%. I was trying to get an agent for 10 years and that is pain, you know, and it's just, you're talking about wallpapering with rejections. I mean, absolutely. Absolutely. And you're so right about those positive rejections though because you can have that one phrase. I remember I did get a specific rejection from an agent that I really wanted and she said this isn't a good fit for me at the moment cause the genre was off. But she was like, "you are a good writer and I believe you will succeed." And there was just that one line.

Kiley:               Exactly.

Mindy:             And my heart leapt in my chest and it was as if she had signed me, you know, I was so happy.

Kiley:               Yeah, it's nice having writer friends in those moments too. Because they're there to celebrate with you. Wait, it wasn't like a form rejection. It wasn't a dear author letter. This is amazing. Keep going. Those moments.

Mindy:             Yeah. When someone on the inside of where you want to be is acknowledging that it's a possibility that you might get to be on the other side that that... I mean sometimes that's all it's takes. You're, you're right. I lived off of that one line complement for three months.

Kiley:                It's amazing how long that those will take you or even just, you know, someone like when you're workshopping something. When I walked into the workshop with this novel, one of my friends said okay, I've cast the entire book. Do you want to know who should play who? Just her enthusiasm made me so excited about the book and that just gives you a little boost that you really need at that moment.

Mindy:             Absolutely. And it also can reinvigorate you about your own work, I think.

Kiley:                I think so too. When you see it from someone else's perspective. A workshop can be really difficult, but when everyone is getting excited and saying, Oh my gosh, at this moment I thought she was going to do this and she did this. It gives you a lot of clarity to what you've been doing in your room alone for so many hours.

Mindy:             That is absolutely the best way to put it. Because you do achieve a certain amount of manuscript blindness when you're working in, you're diving so deep and digging and you're getting down into the insides of it. It loses it, it loses sometimes that personal connection, if you're just looking at it structurally or looking at the craft aspect, sometimes you lose the human angle that you had. And when other humans are then reacting to your work and giving you that feedback and you remember why you did this.

Kiley:                Oh yeah, exactly. That's the best. When someone says, Hey, and this moment, why wouldn't she just close the door? And you're like, Oh wait. Yeah, she's a human. Why wouldn't I just have this person do the human thing. And it's nice to be reminded that you need other humans to write about humans. Sometimes.

Mindy:             We are easily, easily isolated just because of the nature of what we do. And I personally live in a very rural area. I don't have the option of going to a coffee shop or something like that to work. And so I substitute in the schools simply so that I can be around people sometimes because you lose that connection, you can't write about people if you don't know them.

Kiley:                I completely agree. Yeah.

Mindy:             [Bell Ringing] As you can tell, I'm in this school right now.

Kiley:               That's fine.

Mindy:             Any thoughts then on the success that you've had? Because you've just had an enormous amount of prepublication buzz and a lot of people talking this book up and I'm personally and just like super excited about it. So not necessarily looking at it from a, did you ever believe that this is what happened to you, but more of what is the experience like?

Kiley:                That's a good question. The experience is a bit surreal and it's one of those things that like I lived in in New York city for nine years and I was a babysitter for so long, but I felt like I didn't really make sense of that experience until I took myself out and took a year in Arkansas. And all of those experiences kind of made more sense to me when I stepped, stepped away. So I'll probably have more information on what's happening now in a few months. But I will say that one of the surprising and wonderful parts is the messages that I get from a lot of black women saying, you know, I read all the time and I've never read a black protagonist before. And I didn't realize it until that till now. Or when I was in the process of finding an agent, I did have some say to me, you know, we may need to pull back on the slang language that you use.

Kiley:               And that was one area that I, it was a hard... I, you know, you want them to have the best book you can have. But I wanted to keep my dialogue from, you know, young African American girls to white toddlers to different friends. I wanted to keep it all extremely hyper real. And now on the other side, hearing women at every reading say these people talk like me and my friends talk. That's so wonderful. And to know like the first goal is always just to have a gripping story, but to have people see themselves in this novel has been lovely stuff. That's been a good part.

Mindy:             Well, and I think even just using code switching in the book as a matter of daily course without, you know, saying this is code switching, it's honest, right? I mean, this is representation of a real world, a diverse world. And I think that of course everyone should have the opportunities to see themselves on the page. And I, I love that. You know, you stuck to your guns and you're like, no, I mean we're gonna we're going to keep this the way that it is, which honestly, your readers are gonna react to that. Lovely that the black women that are reading it can say, Oh, this is great. I identify with this. But I also think it's wonderful that a white woman such as myself could read this and be like, okay, I don't identify with the slang and the conversations that are going on here, but it's good for me to be exposed to it and I can appreciate it.

Kiley:              Absolutely. That's my, I mean that's like one of the main reasons that I read is I just want to see into other, another world. And so there's so many times where I say, Oh my gosh, this is so different. Or Oh, this is exactly like what I do. And that's just part of, you know, being a reader and a writer. And so that's been really lovely. I think that I had to realize that people are bringing in all of their own stuff to my book and they're carrying a lot of experiences and sometimes prejudices and, and feelings like, or even just like, you know, not feeling well that day. All of those things are bringing into the reading experience. And so knowing that all I can do is just tell my version of the truth. My professor Paul Harding at grad school just said over and over, your job as a fiction writer is to tell the truth. And so that's always my goal and I'm glad I've been so thrilled that people are enjoying it so far.

Mindy:             And I love the quote there from your professor. I am a librarian in my day life. I don't work full time, but [bell ringing] as I said, you can tell him in the school today.

Mindy:             One of the easy ways that we break down the difference between nonfiction and fiction when we're talking to younger children is we say, well, nonfiction is true. And the older I get, I'm just like, you know, I don't like saying that to the kids. Because then the flip side of that, you know, and is that fiction is false. Like it's not, it is true representation. It's... The people may not exist and be real people, but you know, they are, that person is out there in the world. So I've just kind of been redefining to myself as a writer and as a librarian and someone educating children like, is saying, nonfiction is true degrading or misrepresenting fiction in some ways to these young minds?

Kiley:               That's interesting. And I don't know if it, who knows if it could be, especially because when I think about my process, it's mostly reading nonfiction to become inspired for my fiction. I think that the more true elements I can insert into my fiction the better it is, and the characters that aren't real will seem even more real. And I think that fiction can often do this really special thing that the essay or the think piece can't do, where it just makes you so entranced by a person who doesn't exist. But it makes you see the world you live in, in a different way often. So yeah, we might need to redefine that for children. I don't know.

Mindy:             Last thing, why don't you tell listeners where they can find you online and where they can find your book, Such A Fun Age?

Kiley:                Absolutely. Such A Fun Age is available, pretty much I think where all books are sold for the most part. I can be found on Kyliereid.com and that's also where you can order the book. Twitter is not my thing. It goes a little bit too fast for me, but I am available on Instagram at, at Kylie Reed.