 I, hello, welcome. Hello, everyone. Hello. We're gonna get started in just a moment. We'll let folks fill up the space and we see you or we see your, we see the number and we see your name. So welcome, everyone. But you're more than a number. More. More. I'm Anissa. I'm your librarian host tonight. And if you've never been to a program with me, I don't know why because I feel like I'm here every night. But I provide you with a link, a document that has links for tonight's program, library news. And as we go along, if books come up, I will add them to that chat. And it's just a living document so you can grab it now. I'll put it in there later as well. And hello YouTube viewers as well. All right, let's jump in with some news, library information. Tonight we are here as part of our summer stride. And we are thankful that Rebecca Handler is joining us as part of summer stride. Thank you Rebecca. And we will be in conversation and we'll have time. You can throw questions in as we go. So if you wanna ask questions, just do it. Throw it in the chat. And I want to welcome you all here again and acknowledge that we occupy the unseated ancestral homeland of the Ramishesh, the Loni peoples, for their original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramishesh community. And you can find out more information about Bay Area indigenous and native culture from this reading list that I just popped in the chat box. You can also find out what territory you are staying on. And this map is called Native Land. It's really cool because it's kind of interactive and it tells you what treaties were in place at certain times and when they were broken. And it's a worldwide map. So it's kind of cool. And then last thing I'll say is check out Segorte Land Trust. They're a women led run organization coming out of the East Bay and they are doing some amazing work in land back movement. All right. Oh, I had a slide for that. There it is. Summer stride. Yay. It's over. Oh my God. All the kids go back to school tomorrow. That is the end of summer stride for kids but summer stride for adults continues. So do your 20 hours reading. You'll get your tote bag. If you don't know what I'm talking about, 20 hours of reading, exploring, coming to events, get you an iconic tote bag that we've been doing a different design every summer long or I don't know how long, many, many years. And it's really nice looking and good quality. Yes. And it holds about 10, 15 books depending on the size. We have several campaigns. Yeah. Several campaigns at San Francisco Public. One of them is called On The Same Page. It's ongoing, been happening for 17 years. By monthly, we choose a selected book, author and we celebrate their book. And you can find it at every single library when you walk in, you'll find these books. And we're celebrating a great summer sizzle read, Beverly Jenkins, Wild Rain. Gosh. I will be right back. I wanna read that right now. I know, right? And it will only take you a weekend because it's that hot. I can tell. But it also has feminism and family planning and it's a historical fictional romance. So check it out. And she'll be in combo on August 23rd with librarian Rachel Fiege. Let's see, what else is happening? Oh, August is really a bit all about food. We've had some great food. Neocos Creamery was last weekend. We have Up This Weekend, Aresmendi, Other Avenues, Cultivate Community out of Venetia at the deep grocery out of Oakland. And I hear there's samples about to be had from Aresmendi and Other Avenues. So come out, we are in person these days. We need your support. It's still a struggle. We know it's still scary to go out, but Sunday is the best day at the main library because Aresmendi and the farmers market. So double your fun at the next center. 1 p.m., the future, past, present, and future of the co-ops in the Bay Area. We partner with The Amazing Medicine for Nightmares bookstore to bring Filipino and Latinx poetry Saturday, August 27th at 7 p.m. Part of the food mix was author to now to James Bird Beard Award-winning author, Christina Cho at Richmond, but we had to postpone so it's in September, but it's still part of summer strike. You can collect your tote bag until September 20th, so it counts. Our largest literary campaign of all the year and not years are very loose now because of COVID. So one year is equal to two. Our 17th annual, one city, one book we have selected. This is Ear Hustle, celebrating the work of Nigel Poor. Erlon Woods, this will be, you are gonna start seeing this everywhere. You're gonna see banners, you're gonna see buses, the books are gonna hit your library mid-September, we'll have a bunch of book clubs, and then we'll have a main event with Erlon and Nigel, November 3rd in combo with Piper Kerman from the writer from Orange is the New Black. And also there will be two months of programming aligned with this book. So topics about incarceration, abolition, reentry, the amazing Angela Davis will be joining us in the virtual library. I just can't even tell you how amazing the program we have and it will be powerful and it should be transformative. So get your book, you can get it now, you can get the audio book, you can listen to podcasts or you can wait until mid-September when they hit the shelf everywhere. All right, enough with the library news. We are here tonight to see, to talk to Rebecca Handler and discuss her debut novel, Edie Richter is Not Alone. Handler is a writer who lives and works in San Francisco, her stories have been published and awarded in several anthologies and her debut novel, Novel, Edie Richter is Not Alone is available now in at the library, in print, in e-book, in audio book or at your local bookstore. Don't buy from the A word, local. I'm gonna let Rebecca tell you about the book but this book has received star reviews in Kirkus and has been long listed by the Center for New Fiction. I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and it'll be us. And again, throw those questions down as they come. We're happy to, it's gonna be a nice free flow and convo. Hi folks, thanks Anissa. Yeah. And hi to my friend Nancy Monic who put a little note for us in the chat. That's very sweet, hello. Yes, we talked about Anissa and I chatted that if you can just put questions as they come up we're not gonna save them all for the end, we can incorporate them as we go. So we'll try to make this as conversational as possible even in this awkward format. But thank you so much for having me. Love the libraries so much. We'll talk more about my love for libraries but I'll tell you a little bit about this book, Edie Richter is not alone. It came out last March in the prime of the pandemic. There it is, we both have it. And it is the story of an idiosyncratic woman who is grieving after her father dies. He had Alzheimer's for many years. Her husband, Oren is offered a temporary position in Perth, Australia. So she moves with her husband, Oren from San Francisco to Perth thinking that maybe the remote landscape will help her heal from her grief when in fact it does the opposite and helps sort of her come to terms with this very dark secret that she has been harboring. So that's my quick synopsis of Edie. It was really just to my absolute delight that it received great reviews when it came out. It was interesting to release a book during a pandemic. Many other authors who I know have apologized to me that my debut novel came out during a pandemic because they're like, oh, they must have been so hard. But for me, I didn't really know any difference. And so any sort of reception that I got was icing on the cake. And actually the weird thing about Zoom events, all of my launch events were on Zoom is that they were extremely well attended. And Anissa and I were talking about that too. It's just this weird thing, which I know that we all have talked to death by now about, but I just felt the love and I felt the support. So it's just been a really, it was a really wonderful first year being a newlywed with my book. And now I get to see it in libraries all over the city, which is great. So I've had some fun when I'm in, I'm often in San Francisco libraries, perusing or working or both. And one thing I like to do now is see if my book is there and then I have a little Sharpie with me and I'll sign it. Bandalism, bandalism. Right. There's nothing cooler than having your book in a library catalog anyway. And it's not just our catalog. Once your book goes into any library catalog, it's in the world catalog. That's like famous. That's just so cool. And librarians have been really wonderful to me about it. So, and thank you to everyone for those of you who have read it or those of you who are considering reading it. It is available in the library. And as Anissa said in your local bookstores. And if it's not your local bookstore, you can order it, it's pretty cinch. Yeah, same with your library. If you, you know, belong to SFPL, you can just walk in and be like, can you buy this book? And they will. If you get the copy from Glenn Park, I believe it's the autographed copy going around. Exactly. So, tell us a little bit about how you decided to put this book into existence and coming into writing later in life and particularly around this book and this topic. Talk about that. Yes. So, I thought it would be interesting to talk a little bit about, because this is a library audience, I'm going to assume that it's a smarter group than sort of your average audience. We're all pretty smart on here because we go to libraries. And I thought it would be just sort of interesting to delve in a little bit to something that people ask me about quite often. But I haven't really spoken about in an event like this before, which is the fact that I came to writing fiction later in life, as they say, in my 40s. And so I can tell you a little bit about how that happened and what the benefits of that are. Because I have a feeling that there's other people in this audience right now who might have a book in them and might consider, or if not a book, maybe a musical album or something like that, some sort of creative endeavor. And I definitely fall into that category and I want to inspire all of you to go after those dreams. I have always written for my work. So sort of my professional experience in my career has been in fundraising for nonprofits. And then more recently in the past like seven, eight years I've been working in philanthropy where I work with foundations and help them with their grant making, which is very rewarding. In that line of work, I have always done a lot of writing and really enjoyed it. There is a lot of storytelling in the world of nonprofit fundraising and grant making. People resonate with stories and that's why they give money or that's why they get involved as a volunteer with a nonprofit. So I've always sort of had my eye out for stories, good stories. And I majored in anthropology a long time ago in college. And I actually think that I'm a big proponent of anthro majors and encouraging people to take anthro classes. It's kind of the underdog major I feel the social sciences. And what it teaches you is to observe people. And I mean, I could talk about that for hours but it basically teaches you that when you're observing people, you are always an outsider looking in and to write with a more sort of objective language than you might otherwise. And I feel like the anthropology background plus my years and years, almost 20 years of writing in nonprofits really helped me develop my style of fiction. Now how I actually came to fiction was because I, like Edie, moved from San Francisco to Perth, Western Australia in 2015. And when I moved, I started a blog which I still have which is called onewomanparty.com. And I started that as a way to keep in touch with people and to share kind of the experience of moving a family across the world, adjusting to a different culture, et cetera. It's a lot of like observational humor type pieces, what it's like to grocery shop in a different country, how Australians are very passionate about sports and flip flops, things like that. And I started to bump up against the fact that real life was hitting me and I had no interest in writing like a tell-all sort of memoir and I wanted to protect people's privacy. And so kind of one thing led to another and I realized that I couldn't kind of keep going with nonfiction. I had to explore a different way of writing about ideas and people and characters and stories. And I discovered fiction. I've always been an avid reader and have always been drawn to unusual characters. I would say if it's team character versus team plot, I usually go with team character, not that I don't want a good plot also, but I always look out for interesting people doing unusual things. And so I started writing some short stories. I took a writing class in Perth with the writing teacher named Susan Medalia who's a writer herself and a wonderful teacher. And I ended up submitting a few stories for publication in Australia. And then I got this kind of seed of an idea of this woman, this very unusual woman who has this experience with her father and moving across the world. And I started writing a short story called Edie Richter and it got longer and longer. And then I started, I started to think, hey, wait a minute, I think I'm writing a novel and I think I'll just try to write a novel. And years later, here it is. So writing a novel is a very long and solitary process. You have to be very patient with yourself and very patient with your writing practice. But that is probably a very long answer to your question. Well, that was great though. But I wanted to give kind of a general. So it opens it up to other questions, so the book, now that you mentioned it, because when I read it, my focus definitely was on Edie. But when you mentioned your character development, there are so many characters in this book and you can just feel like, so the husband character, you can just feel the annoyance, you can just feel it burping and bubbling. And he's not even doing anything wrong. You just perfectly build that character where he's like lovable, but you know, you just, as the wife, you're just bubbling. And it was important to me to show what I think of as a very real relationship. Absolutely, it was. I loved the husband and wife character, definitely realistic. But then also the characters that you bring in, the driver, the driver's ad guy, as well as the tourist. And even like light characters, like the bus driver and the characters on the bus, they're all just very well developed and very, it puts you in that place. So great job on the character development. And I just wanted, I just put in chat too, but you can, if you didn't see my chat, how many out of the 23, 25 people here and YouTube have read the book? If you, it's really juicy also, and it really gives a hook just right from the start. So I see some of it in any way. I'm glancing over occasionally and I do see people's lovely comments. Thank you so much. There we go, here it comes. All right. So for those of you who haven't read it, again, it's like, just like Wild Rain. It's a weekend. I think I read it twice over the weekend because I listened to the audio book first and then I was like, wait, I need a second. And then I picked up the book. Actually, you know, one of the, sorry to interrupt you. No, no, go right ahead. I was just gonna say that one thing I love is when people tell me that, I mean, obviously it's lovely when people say that they enjoyed the book, but particularly from people who don't read a lot of books. I've heard from readers where they felt that my book was like accessible and approachable and drew them in and they wanted to finish it. And honestly, for me, we are like busy people and we have all been through really, really hard things in the past few years. And a lot of us don't have patience for long books or are used to reading on the internet or reading magazines or whatever. And so I just, I love that. Like if this novel is nothing but a gateway to other novels, then I'm happy. And the fact that people have enjoyed it on top of that gives me great pleasure. It is sort of written like that kind of internet style where each section is kind of on its own thing. And then the timeline, the way you've developed the timeline which is not direct fully allows you to just absorb one chapter and they're pretty short. Even there's one chapter, there's one chapter that's like literally two paragraphs. So definitely accessible for sure. I tried to write it in a way where you could get into bed and read two paragraphs and just have something to think about. And, or you could read the whole thing in one sitting like I know, so. That's very blog style to me, no? Yeah, I'd like, yeah, I've always been a sucker for a short paragraph, I gotta say. Tell me like, so I love audio books and I definitely listen to audio books every night and this was a good one for me because not in a bad way, I'm gonna say this, but it put me to sleep, I'd listen to a chapter and then by the second I'm like, wait, what happened? But the audio book process, so I, a lot of people don't have any kind of say or like how it's developed in the audio book. Did you get any kind of say in that development? I did, I'm so happy you asked me that actually because it was a really interesting process. I wanted narrator approval and the reason for that is because there are, given the fact that Edie and her husband, Oren, they're both American but they moved to Australia. So it was important to me that if anyone were to attempt an Australian accent, it would be a good one because I knew that my Australian friends would never forgive me if the audio narrator had a terrible Aussie accent. So I requested an Australian actor who could do an American, a convincing American accent as opposed to an American actor who can do a convincing Australian accent. So I think that the latter is a lot harder. And yes, and I wish that maybe someone can look it up for us and put it. I wish that I remember the name, I would love to give the voice actor a shout out. I don't remember her name right now. Meg, something, Meg. But I was really, yeah, I was really delighted. She does mispronounce Marin, someone pointed out. Yeah, Marin. There's some, I think like once in a while you can tell that she's Australian but I kind of love that. That doesn't happen. Yeah, I think she has an interesting accent. Oh good. There's some like East Coast or something that comes out sometimes too. Megan Smart, yes. David put it in for us. Oh, thanks, Dave, that's my husband. Daisy Fawn says that she read it and found it very entertaining and is one of those people who rarely reads a book. So it's really very accessible. Thank you so much. Yeah, I loved Megan's voice. And when she does Edie's voice, it's just so perfect. Well, Edie is such an unusual character who really just like speaks very bluntly and actually this might be a good, I wasn't even planning this, but this might be a good segue to me reading a little bit of it. Would that be, would this be a good place to do that? So I'm just gonna, I actually normally don't love reading too much on Zoom because I feel like we could lose people. I promise you I won't read too much. I'm gonna read like two pages guys, okay? But it's just really to give a sense of the voice of Edie's voice. So the way this book is set up is that Edie has some flashbacks of memories that sort of help inform her character and inform sort of what's going to happen. She's kind of slowly losing her mind. So I'm going to read part of chapter 25. After Orin left for work, I read an article online, Fatal Bear Attack in Wyoming. A man's body had been found outside a cave in Bridger Teton. Most of the flesh had been ripped from his bones. The man's name was Seth Lister. My first Thanksgiving away at college, I spent the long weekend with a girl named Lauren Lister at her family's house on Long Island. We weren't particularly close, but she and I worked together at the campus dry cleaners. When she learned I was planning to stay at school over the holiday weekend, she said, that's sad, you should come home with me. Her childhood room was very girly with lace curtains and yellow rose wallpaper which she used to peel back to write the names of boys she liked as well as anything else she needed to get off her chest. Dave, Carlos, mom is annoying. I wish Claire would break her arm. I slept on the bottom bunk and stared up at the glow in the dark adhesive butterflies. Lauren had a brother named Seth who was still in high school and lurked in doorways. He was the kind of person who would have hidden behind a tree at someone's funeral. I got stuck sitting across from him on Thanksgiving and had to watch him gnaw on a turkey leg until it was bare, at which point he deposited the large bone beside his plate on the faded purple tablecloth and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his plaid flannel shirt. He leaned over and whispered to me across the table. I can't wait to get away from all this. I don't think I had heard him say one word since we arrived the night before. I don't know what you mean, I responded, scooping more cranberry sauce onto my plate. This is bullshit, all this luxury, he said, rolling his eyes. I looked over at their father who was at the end of the table emptying a packet of Splenda into his coffee. The older neighbor couple on either side of him kept interrupting each other as they talked about a local politician they had run into at a bowling alley. Lauren was in the kitchen helping her mom defrost a store-bought pound cake. Seth continued, as soon as I graduate, I'm selling all my stuff and buying a car. I wanna drive cross-country and have time to think, you know, gotta stop eating meat too. This stuff is disgusting, he said, gesturing at the devoured leg. You looked like you enjoyed it, I responded, wiping my mouth with a paper towel, which I then crumpled and held in my fist under the table. I did, he shook his head. That's what's wrong with everything, Edie. Humans just take whatever they want. We don't even have to kill for it. We just go to Costco and buy dead animals wrapped in plastic for a holiday commemorating the slaughter of millions of Native Americans. I don't think it was millions, I said. Seth glared at me. Lauren came back to clear the table. Hey, Edie, wanna give me a hand? As we stood at the kitchen sink, scraping remaining food into the trash, she apologized for her brother. He is such a creep sometimes. You should see what he writes in his diary. You read his diary, I asked, stacking dishes in the dishwasher. Only once, she said, when I thought he might blow up the school. Seth ended up doing exactly what he said he'd do. Two weeks after he graduated from high school, he took off and he used a cord with a large duffel bag and a gas stove and drove west. The article said that park rangers shot and killed the bear they thought was responsible for the attack. They weren't certain this was the bear that had ripped Seth apart, but they killed it anyway. They had to do something. Thank you. You're welcome. So that was a little bit of the idea of like her. The remaining two paragraphs of that chapter really give a great idea of what she's like, too. Yeah, she just wants, she wants. Yeah, yeah. And I don't think she has some like social cue issues. Right, exactly, exactly. Not many. So some of the two main topics are like, as many as many topics, but memory and identity really come up in this book for me. There's a part where the kitty is in a support group at all time or support group and the question of identity comes up. And I think that's just such a powerful point for the book and for Edie. Yeah. And she's kind of, she seems to be coasting through and so in her head most of the time, but when she has that opportunity to talk about identity, I think that's just so powerful. And obviously memory because of the flashbacks come up a lot. Can you talk a little bit how you developed that and how that worked for you and how you identify as the writer of this book and sort of how much of your identity is into it? Yeah, I can, I'd be happy to talk about identity. Can you, Anisa, can you put our little faces next to each other again? Oh yeah, sorry. Cause you're like, it looks like I have a thought bubble coming up and like I'm thinking about you. You don't wanna be my, you don't wanna be your thought bubble, trust me. I mean, I am thinking about you right now because you asked me a question about, yeah. So this book is largely to do with identity and I'm glad that that resonated with you. She is wrestling with the fact that her father's, I don't wanna say too much without giving it away, but like her father's identity was changing as he was losing his memories. So it kind of deals with the question of like, who are we when we don't have our memories? Who are we when they start fading and how much of our memories make up ourselves and our identity? So, and I actually tried to structure the book in a way that sort of simulates the brain of someone with Alzheimer's. So to kind of shoot in more longer-term memories that Edie would start to have progressively more and more as the sort of story keeps going. I, in terms of my own experience with identity and Alzheimer's, my own father had Alzheimer's and died in 2013 and kind of helping care for him and then watching his demise and subsequent death ended up giving me kind of the seed of an idea for this story, because there was a lot of like what ifs. And again, I don't wanna like get into it too much right now, but his life and death certainly helped kind of loosely inspire the story and watching his identity shift and then watching roles change, you know, as you age and I think I'm part of what we're supposed to call a sandwich generation when we're between our parents, our aging parents and our children that we're raising and sort of we sort of have our, we have a lot of identities there, you know and I consider myself a lot of things including a wife, a parent and a daughter still. And I think my mother is thankfully still with us and I think I'll always be a daughter even without my parents, which is something that I noticed after my father died is that I still felt like his daughter even though he's not here anymore. And I think I will always feel like a daughter. Yeah, yeah. I think memory is really interesting too in the glimpses of Alzheimer, but also in just the glimpses of each person's memory. And so like when your father would bring up memories that he had, like particularly I'm thinking of the trip in Boston when he met you in Boston and that memory comes up. No, Edie's father. Yes, Edie's father, not your father. But how memory, even though, you know his memory is eschewed, I mean he could be in another state where his memory is still different from yours and not in Alzheimer. So memory is so fluid, I think and applying this to Alzheimer is just very interesting to me, I think. Yeah, I'm always really interested in the relationship between siblings and their memories and how you can have people who grow up in the same house and go through similar things and they have very different interpretations of it. And I noticed that with my own brother and my husband has many brothers and sisters and I noticed it when I'm with my in-laws how they talk about the same incident and they have like really different memories of how it went down. And I think that that's really, really interesting to think about. And it's like what is the truth then? Like who's in charge, right? Like who's in charge of the truth? We all contribute to it and we all have our own truths. I love this on page 80. My body was a collection of muscles and bones and a thing I had done. And I think that's just like a thing you had done. There's many things you could have done. And just those memories stay in your body. I like that about that sentence. Thank you. So this book really borders memoir to me. How much of it is memoir? I mean, it's seeming like it's a lot. And then how do you, it's such a fine line sometimes with memoir and fiction, right? Yeah, it's funny when you were talking about Edie's dad and you said, you're dad. And I was like, wait, did you know for a minute? I'm like, wait, did you know my dad? Yeah, the, I'm not interested in, I mean, I love to read memoirs. But I'm not interested in writing one myself. But I am interested in like, I always had this vision like when I was working on this book that it's like if you, and everyone has to bear with me because I'm not sure this like metaphor works like outside of my own brain. But I feel like if you took like a washcloth and dipped it in a bucket of water and that is your life, right? So then you pull the washcloth out and your life is all over it. And then you squeeze it. And what comes out of there is fiction for me. Does that, I don't know if that works for anyone else out there. What do we think? What do we think? Maybe that's just like I see washcloths for some reason. Maybe I need to wash my face. I don't know. But I feel like I always have this and I love water so much. I'm deeply connected to water. So I often have this image of just like I'm getting soaked with reality. And then I get to sort of squeeze it and make something else out of it. So I mean, when I was working on this novel I made because, you know, Edie lives in San Francisco and moves to Perth and because my father had Alzheimer's and her father has Alzheimer's later. There's like the connections are very obvious. I made like deliberate choices to make it very different. So I have a brother, I gave her a sister. I made him, I made her father have very early onset Alzheimer's. My own father did not. My father was much older when he got Alzheimer's. I made the mother character very different from my own mother because I knew the wrath that I would experience if I made the mother recognizable. And then lastly, and probably most importantly I made Edie very, very different from myself. So she does have the facts of her life. Many of them are inspired by facts of my own life. She waitress at a seafood restaurant in Boston and I used to be a waitress at Legal Seafood in Newt Center, Mass. So, you know, I certainly like use some things that I know and have experienced but I really enjoyed creating another character who is like, is a fantasy. You know, I think we all kind of fantasize about being someone who's very blunt and it does not really take people's feelings that much into consideration because that is a questionable way to go about life. I think that actually I am a little judgy of people who tend to say whatever they want all the time. Like, I'm not sure that that's the best way to go about it but I loved writing that kind of character and I loved getting her into trouble and I loved seeing her sort of try and her failed ways to resolve, you know, her conflicts with her neighbor. There's sort of this neighbor character that's kind of her nemesis and her mind and she becomes obsessed with this neighbor. And yeah, so that was really, really fun. I loved like switching it up for sure. We can definitely- And I was just gonna say like, what did they always say like what all fiction is memoir and all memoir is fiction? Exactly. Like I think whenever I read memoirs, I always wonder, okay, what did they make up? I'm like per our earlier chat about memories. You know, it's- Exactly, right? It's, yeah. It's very subject. It's memory. It's not necessarily fact. In very subject. Rachel says she loves the neighbor relationship. I, you know- I live vicariously. Thank you, Rachel. I don't think I wanna live vicariously by next to that neighbor. But also, Edie really played a part in it, right? Like I just like, who goes through- I don't know, I'm like, this is like, like she would just go in and rearrange the house. Yeah, there's what you're referring to is her neighbor asks her to take care of her house when they're away for several days to feed the fish and, you know, bring in the mail and stuff. And so Edie, you know, does what she's supposed to do and then takes it 10 steps further. She accidentally spills some coffee and then one thing leads to another and she's having the house professionally cleaned and which is really strange to do with someone else's house. So yeah, she makes some bold choices for sure. I love that too, Rachel. I'm glad that you like that. I like that relationship. That was very, very fun to write. In fact, I would love to like read something that's from Fiona's perspective, you know, having this crazy American neighbor move in. Let's see. Oh, someone wrote, William wrote, what's next? Well, what's next? I'm going to assume that you maybe mean, what am I writing? I'm thinking. I think that sounds like a good assumption. We're just like, what am I doing after this Zoom? I'm gonna have dinner and then. I am working on a new novel. And it is taking me a while, but it's gonna happen. And I'm really excited about it. It's very different that the protagonist is a woman. She is very different from Edie. The story takes place over the course of one night in San Francisco. And it is about a woman who starts to believe that her life could be a play and that there is an audience watching her. And I have a first draft of it as Anne Lamont would say, a shitty first draft. So you always have to write your shitty first draft. So I've got that and working, plugging away on the second draft. Yeah, but thank you for asking. I like that you bring up Anne Lamont because she is a library favorite. And one of her, I don't know if it was a book where I saw her speak while she talked about her child and how she raised her child with a group of librarians and there couldn't be a better family than librarian staff, library love. So I'd love to hear some of your library memories in San Francisco. Yeah. Your favorite library and from our attendees. Let us know your favorite library even if you're not from San Francisco. Yeah, definitely. I would love to hear what people, I just wanna have a little library love. Like we've gotta do that. Like let's just think about libraries and thank you everyone for your lovely comments. So I grew up in San Francisco. I'm a native. I grew up near Westportal. And so the Westportal branch was my sort of regular library. And I'm not sure if that building has changed that much. Like it kind of every time I walk in, I feel like it still smells the same like old musty books. And there's the wonderful children's section and huge wooden desks where you can work. And it's just like a glorious building. And I used to, so I went to Herbert Hoover Middle School and after middle school, I would walk down the hill with my friend Leslie Tucker and drop her off at home and then go to the library or Leslie would come with me and sit there, sort of do my homework, but mainly just like look at the stacks. Sometimes I would leave my books on the table and walk down the street and go to Shaw's Candy Shop and get some fudge. Or I would go to the wonderful, so the Westportal Books Shop, which is wonderful where you could buy my book if you want, plug. The bookshop used to be called Toy Village back in the day and it was a little toy shop that sold those. I don't know if people remember the rolls of stickers that came on like big rolls and I had a sticker collection. And so we'd like cut off stickers and so I'd bring those back to the library and put them in my like textbooks and stuff. We used to have to cover our textbooks with brown paper and so I remember sitting in the library like sticking stickers on my brown paper wrapped books. And now, oh my God, I just want to read everyone there. I'll let you read it, Amisa. Oh, I see another shout out for Westportal Shaw's. Yeah, there is, so Shaw's is the candy shop and I remember when it was gonna be sold and it was sold to people who actually renovated it. It looks beautiful. Yeah, I think, oh, Allison, hey, Allison. Yeah, Toy Village presents wrapped in red and white striped wrapping paper. I know, God, that was the best. So yeah, I went to Westportal Library and then now I'll go to Westportal or go to Parkside on Taraville. And what I love is I can do holds like from home. So I'll go look at the catalog at home and then find, I just did this with John Cheever. I'm going through John Cheever's stories and I put it on hold, or sorry, I requested it and then I got an email like three days later that it was ready for me to pick up. So come on now. Yeah, I know, right? And we also have like what used to be called Interlibrary Loan but Link Plus, like they come quicker than our local branches. If we don't have it, one, ask, we'll buy it, two, get it from Interlibrary Loan. It comes so quickly. It's so great. It's called Link Plus. Oh, hey, Matt Smith. Matt Smith Library Center Library, Fortland, nice. And then I saw a shout out to the North Branch and Berkeley Public Library. I've been to some amazing libraries. You know how librarians are, they just want to go to every library. But like the Calistoga Library is so cute. It's adorable if you haven't been there. That's right, go there. It's a nice one. I mean, one of my memories is pretty recent with the libraries where, when at the beginning of COVID, when it looked like we were gonna be shut down for maybe like a couple of weeks. And then remember that when we all thought we were gonna be closed down for like a week or two? And then it was like, oh, the libraries are gonna close for a while. So come get books now. And I took my teenagers, I was gonna say they're now teenagers, but they were younger than, I guess I had one teenager and one younger one. We went to the West Portal Library and we left with like the max amount of books. Like we just, we left with, I don't know, 50 books. 150 books, all three of you could check out 50 books. I mean, plus DVDs. Yeah. And I remember just thinking, God, it felt like I was hoarding, you know? Like, cause I had this panic set in. Everybody did, yes. Are we not going to have any books for a while? Yeah, that was interesting. We luckily, you know, didn't take us too long to get into the whole curbside pickup action. But yeah, what a wild time we've all been through for sure. I know. So many Belcier brands. Sorry, but Ellen said the Belcier brand. I don't think I'm in there. What street is that on? That's on Coddington, I want to say. It's nice. And it's just, it's really super neighborhood branch. Like it's just got a core group of users. It's really wonderful. Yeah. I've worked at every single branch as either a bookshelver, a page or a librarian except Golden Gate and Presidio. So I have been around. Great debut, Rebecca. There's some other parts in here. Other parts in here. That's Excelsior. Thank you. Anissa, when we were talking before, you had asked about kind of the process of getting it published. Yeah. Which I'd be happy to touch on. I don't want to get like too deep in it in case that's not interesting to everyone. But I will just say, I mean, I referenced before it takes so long to actually from like, you know, start to finish when you start a book to get into the world. And I was coming from, so I was living in Australia where writers by and large do not have agents. That is not a thing. So if you write a book in Australia, you can send it directly to publishers where in the States, we are a much larger country with a much larger market and writers generally try to get agents before they get published, before they seek a publisher. So when I came back from Australia, when I searched for an agent began and I don't know if he's on this call, but hi, Steven, if you are. And that's another weird thing is Steven and I have never met in person because of COVID. Because I worked with him before COVID and then COVID, like we were, you know, he's in New York, so we talk on the phone and then COVID hit and yeah, we just still haven't met, so it's wild. I have like a lot of people who helped me bring this book into the world. I've never actually like sat down and had a coffee with in person. It's pretty crazy. So yeah, the process of getting an agent was that took a while and then the process of getting published. So with the agent, he, you know, pursued different publishing houses and unnamed press. If they're here, hi, love you guys. And yeah, and then we got this wonderful, you know, offer and relationship with unnamed press out of LA, which is a smaller independent press. But the whole thing is, and part of, you just have to be so, you have to get comfortable with rejection for sure. And I think my experience in fundraising for so long where you basically get rejected for a living on a daily basis, prepared me for writing. So, and what I learned was, you know, if your book is rejected by an agent or a publisher, oftentimes it has nothing, like you can't read too much into it. Oftentimes it has nothing to do with your skill or the subject matter or your writing style or anything like that. It has like, there's so many other factors, you know? So I remember talking to one agent who said, I love your manuscript, but I just sold a book that had Alzheimer's in it and I'm not sure I can sell another one. So something like that, like that's just really out of your hands. So yeah, that's kind of how I got published thing. And then with this new book, we will, once I have a good manuscript that I'm, you know, really proud of, we will shop it around. The agent will shop it around to different publishing houses. So it's sort of same thing. And do you have a publicist? I do not have a publicist. I have, I mean, I should say, there is a wonderful publicist and a couple of people at unnamed, but they're a really small shop. Yeah. But I don't have my own publicist now. Yeah. Interesting. I'm always like, could I be a publicist? Yeah, I guess people do. I don't know how many people talk about it. Yeah, I think it's huge. I have to pay for it. Yeah, yeah. It's not, I mean, agents only get paid when you get paid. Right. Whereas publicists, I think you pay them regardless. I don't think they get, I don't think they get paid based on where you get published or, you know, where you get marketed or whatever. And there's a question in the chat, which is, what's your writing process like? Which is like, you know, Yeah. Early, do you? Yeah. I mean, tell you about my like fantasy writing process over my reality one. My fantasy is that I get up early and I just like, you know, sit outside, get some nature. And then I write for three hours and I have no other responsibilities because my brain works best in the morning. That rarely to never happens. So my writing process is I try to write something every day. So I have a job and a family and, you know, obligations in general, but I try to write something every day. So even if it's not like, you know, I always keep a notebook with me. So sometimes writing every day is just writing a page, handwriting a page in a notebook. Other times it's working on my book. Other times it's writing something for my blog, which is a great, I kind of use that blog now. Onewomanparty.com, you should subscribe and learn when I have a blog post up. I kind of use it as like a sandbox, you know, I can just like try stuff out. I can write like nonfiction observational stuff. I just wrote something about outside lands where I went a couple of weeks ago or I'll write a little like weird short story and just play with it. So that's fun. So that's kind of like warm-up writing for me. I kind of use my blog as like a warm-up place. But yeah, a book I try to write a little bit every day if I can, even if it's a line in the book. Like honestly, that's kind of where I am at this point. Interesting. And I'm not a, you know what? I would also love to be a nighttime writer, but I'm just, I don't really think well past like 3 p.m., let's be honest. Yeah, that's what I tell my boss all the time and they don't buy that. My boss might be on here for all I know, sorry about that. Yeah, but I do, I have, speaking of my work, I do, I work for a wonderful, I'm not just saying it because maybe some of my coworkers are on here, but I work for a wonderful company called Pacific Foundation Services. We manage a bunch of foundations, mostly, most of them are in the Bay Area, but they know that my passion is writing and they have been so flexible with me and I work on a part-time basis with them. And I'm very, very lucky to be able to do that. So just a little shout out to PFS. That's great. That's great. Yeah. I had a question and it slipped on through, but does anyone have any final questions for Rebecca Handler and get her book, get it at the library of your choice? We have 28 locations or at the book, well, it's not called West Portal Book, it's called Book Shop, West Portal or something weird. Shop, West Portal, that's right. I can also do like a little plug for the paperback version that's coming out. Oh, when is that coming out? October 4th. Awesome. And I don't, I'm supposed to- That's a great sign, right? That's a good sign. Now all books come out in paperback. Yeah, yeah. I'm excited. And the cover is really fun. It's a different cover. All of the books in your cover out there. It's really cool. I would hold it up, but they haven't arrived yet. Yeah, so the paperback comes out October 4th and then I also just want to remind everyone or tell everyone that I love, one thing I love is dropping in on people's book clubs. So if any of you are in a book club or know anyone in a book club and wanna recommend AD Richter is not alone, then find me on social media, I'm on like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all that jazz and or on my blog, you can write an email on there. And let me know when you guys are meeting and if I'm able to like zoom in or if it's in San Francisco, I've met up with I think three book clubs in San Francisco now like in person, which has been super fun. It's fun, it's really fun to talk about this book with people who've read it because then we can get into all the nitty gritties and spoilers and stuff. So yeah. Yeah, we're definitely holding back here. So I recommend you all check out the book and I'm actually gonna, I'm gonna like recommend it to our adult librarians that they throw it down for the book club. That sounds like a great idea. It'd be really, really fun. Yeah, I would love to do it at the library. Yeah. Alia Vols who wrote Homebaked, she's always willing to just drop in at a book club. So fun, fun book too. We love our San Francisco authors. We love, you know, San Francisco books. They aren't as, they're a little fewer and far between than they used to be since we priced out all of our authors, but it still exists. So friends, you know, you can check out all of San Francisco books at San Francisco Public Library or shop local Rebecca Handler. Thank you so much. Library pleasure. Thank you all. Thank you guys so much. And thank you, Anissa and everyone use your libraries and go support them. All right, have a wonderful night everyone.