 Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday so I don't talk much about my personal life here for reasons that are contained within the phrase personal life, but today I want to tell you a story about my wife Sarah. Before Sarah and I started dating we had a two person book club and one of the books we read together was The Human Stain by Philip Roth and when we got together to discuss the book one Saturday afternoon at her apartment in Chicago we discovered we'd both highlighted the same passage. The pleasure isn't in owning the person, the pleasure is this, having another contender in the room with you. And haircut. I always knew Sarah was smarter than me, but it's been my ambition to be a contender in the room with her and for the last 16 years we've been reading each other's writing and challenging each other's ideas. Her thinking about art and love and how to make things has shaped everything I've done in my professional life so deeply that really it's kind of impossible to disentangle our work. I mean on our first date she said to me imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia which I promptly inserted into looking for Alaska and still think is the best line in the book and in turn I've read and helped edit the wall label she wrote as a museum curator and the art assignment videos she writes now for her brilliant series with PBS Digital. I didn't like art when I met Sarah or at least I didn't yet know that I liked art but she is so talented at helping people to see what can be useful and interesting and even transformative about making art and looking at it. Through her work Sarah has shown millions of people that art is not only about like 17th century masters painting portraits or for that matter only about the billionaires who collect those portraits and use them as tax shelters. Art is people throughout history trying to capture and express something significant something about what it felt like to be alive or what we valued or how we might shift our values and by helping me to understand that Sarah has helped me find art not just interesting but essential because every once in a while art just cracks me open like the first time I saw this Raymond Petibon painting that ended up taking over my novel Turtles all the way down or when I first saw the imagined maps of Guillermo Quitca which inspired much of my novel Paper Towns. Other people's creative work fuels yours and vice versa. I learned that from Sarah and a lot more people are about to learn it from Sarah because she is publishing a wonderful book called You Are an Artist. This isn't really Sarah's first book in her work as a museum curator she co-wrote Andy Warhol Enterprises and edited a really fascinating book about graphite but this book is written for a much broader audience and it's so good I really think anyone who's interested in making stuff or understanding how stuff gets made will love it because as the title puts it so succinctly you are an artist whether you know it yet or not. The book brings together lots of assignments that Sarah commissioned from artists as part of the art assignment but it also has lots of new assignments and fascinating essays about how contemporary artists are working and I've just learned so much from this book like the first thing that I learned is that it's probably harder to support someone who is writing a book than it is to write a book but also I learned so much about art and how life giving the act of creation really is for humans. It's so good I feel like Sarah's not gonna brag about it adequately because she's like an esteemed scholar and curator and not a carnival barker but fortunately she married a carnival barker. You Are an Artist is an amazing book that will help you see the world in new ways and just maybe change your life it has a phenomenal cover beautiful color illustrations throughout seriously your life and your home are incomplete without this book. You Are an Artist is available for pre-order now wherever you get your books and it comes out on April 14th. Sarah thank you for being a contender in the room with me and congratulations on your wonderful book you continue to astonish me even after all these years in fact maybe especially after all these years Hank I'll see you on Friday.