 We just want to welcome everyone to the Rogers Free Library and now Adam Ray will speak to you. Oh, thank you. When it was cooked, it was warm. If anybody feels the heat, please stop. Well, Joe, we just took half my speech. I'm going to be very brief, because I'd rather hear the two of them talk than hear myself talk. So anyway, just briefly, this event is a collaboration for the Roger Williams Library and the Rogers Free Library, really between two endowments that we have. They're Mary Teth White talking the library endowment and the Jane Bodell endowment that the Rogers Free has. So twice a year, we join forces and put on a program here in town. And for the students in the room, actually for anybody in the room. We do have one more talk this season at the library on campus next Thursday at 4.30 with Steve Allman. Its title of this talk is from Rage to the Page. And it's about how writers and artists can respond to the political and cultural environment that they find themselves in. Whatever perspective they have, I think those with single Steve can be pretty certain what perspective he has. But he's very dynamic speaker. So that's at 4.30. Obviously, well, everybody's welcome to come to that. Otherwise, I'm basically just going to hand this over to Susan Tayson, who is a Rhode Island based writer. And she also teaches writing courses here at the library as well. And Amy Waller, who is a California based writer who has written this memoir about her time growing up around the world that looks at issues of memory and family and place and so on, called When We Work Goons. That's a careful little set. I'm going to let them, instead of me explaining everything that you look about to hear, we'll just let them. Thanks. Thanks. And there are books for sale here. If anybody is interested, they are $17 with tax. That's 20% discount from the. Nice. That's as important as the food. Are we good with this thing here? Can you guys hear us? Can you hear us? Yes. Oh, good. OK, yes, a quick plug. Steve Almond is irreverent and energetic and wonderful, well worth spending time listening to him speak. OK. We can be irreverent too. Yes, we can. We might be. So yes, we can be even more irreverent than Steve. OK, I have a formal introduction that I'm going to read because we're very fortunate to have Amy Wallen here, visiting from the West Coast. Amy is a writer, an editor, a teacher, and a baker. She's the author of the bestselling novel, Moonpies and Movie Stars, which writer Mary Gordon called a delightful and exhilarating journey, kind of like being on a tour bus guided by Eudora Welty on speed, which isn't that much of a stretch if you think about it. The simile. Amy's essays have been published in the Gettysburg Review, the Normal School, Country Living, the Writers Chronicle, and other national magazines. Amy is associate director at the fabulous New York State Summer Writers Institute. Familiarize yourself with this organization and the wonderful opportunities it offers for writers if you are not familiar with it. Amy facilitates manuscript workshops in San Diego, which is a great place to do a manuscript or anything. She teaches novel writing at UC San Diego Extension. She founded Dime Stories, which is so cool. It's a podcast series. It's a great idea for authors to read original three minute stories, and it can be fiction or nonfiction. Very, very cool. She hosts Savory Solans, which is her way, and I'm quoting Amy now, of bringing pies and writing together in small gatherings at her home for lively conversations about a writer's latest book. Writers have to eat, and if you have to eat and you get pie, that's even better. I hear they're really good, too. I guess. I baked them for me, really. Yeah, that makes sense. That's why they're good. Amy holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she joins us today from the West Coast to talk about her latest book, The Memoir When We Were Ghouls, which is published by University of Nebraska Press for the American Lives series. Tobias Wolff is the editor of that series, and officially, please welcome Amy Wallin to our library. Thanks. Yeah, that was fun to do, and to meet Amy tonight. We had a glass of wine, and I said, if Amy has wine, I'm going to have wine, and if Amy has more wine, then I'm going to have a little bit more wine. We only had one glass each, so we're. We should be OK. If it gets embarrassing, we'll ask for more wine. We'll just have more wine, right. We've got this. So I have questions, but maybe you want to read a little bit first from the book. Sure, I'll read something. Do you want to pick? Yeah, I have a little something I read sometimes that is short, but also because I mentioned the memory star, so it kind of gives a little entree into the memory aspect of the book. But the genesis of this book, if that's the way to think of it, I guess, is I couldn't really remember what the story was. So I was calling him at home to my family, so that's part of the book, is actually trying to figure out what the story was. And then I played a lot with memory based on that, in the writing and then also just in the discovery of more of the story. But also then discovering more about my family as I'm having this kind of present day discovery as well as the past. So one of the things my parents do when you had mentioned if my parents were still alive, and so maybe this will help with that conversation too, is my parents are still alive. And one of the things they still do is when I call home, they're in their late 80s, is they put me on speakerphone, and then they argue with one another. So I just sit there and pretty much listen. But I might start with a question. But at this point, when we were ghouls is the title, because I'm trying to remember a time when we were actually digging up a pre-Inca grave. And so I'm calling home to find out why we were there, like how did we end up at this place? How did we know about this? What was happening? What was going on? My mother denies we ever did it, and my father knows every possible detail you can imagine, like photographic memory-esque kind of discussion. So they're arguing about whether or not it happened. So this is my father. Marked, of course there was a body. My father argues with my mom while I'm on the phone. We didn't have any respect for the dead, she says, none. We were ghouls. She lets her own memory flip from one thought, one belief, one ideal to the next, whatever suits her. Or does she? My own memory seemed to decide on their own to show up, so maybe hers do too. I listened to her deny the pile of bones we unearthed, but I also fixate on the word ghouls. Something about me likes the idea of having a family made up of looters, grave robbers, and ghouls, the monsters incarnate. When I was young, I knew my mom was every bit as beautiful as Lily Munster, my dad as goofy as Herman. It's funny at first, and then maybe not so funny. I didn't know what we were doing, my mom repeats. I had no idea. Her denial is vexing, denial, the finest form of forgetfulness. She will insist she had no pardon until we agree with her. It's what she does. She wants it to go away. I would normally give in to her, want her to see how loyal I am. But this story I cannot give away, especially now that these memories are coming back to me like white horses pushing me under. I need to know all the facts. I need to start at the beginning, know how we got here, how we got there. I ask how they knew where to go, and my mother replies, someone told us about it at the dinner party the night before, and my dad says. And they had said it was a burial site. So what did you think we were doing, my father queries her? I'll just be a little more to get to the memory that didn't happen. When we first arrived, this is my father again, we had to drive over the two split logs. Remember that? My father trumps down cemetery lane. I don't remember that detail at all. It sounds scary, I say. No, no, they had a sense of humor, he said. The Riley's car wouldn't go over the logs, but ours would. So we all piled in our car and drove over. And then we came around a corner and had to stop because there was a big mound of dirt. On top of the mound was a mummified skeleton propped up, announcing the entrance to the cemetery. He laughs. He likes this part. We both do. Our dark senses of humor are complementary. I should be writing this down, I think, but I don't, not yet. Because I want to just listen and ask questions, to sift through the silt of memory and find mine and see what matches, what doesn't, what might fit together like a skeleton. There wasn't a body in the grave, my mom says again. We never found a body, I would remember. I have the vision of her yelling at the diggers to retrieve the skull that they had flung out of the grave. Sure we did, my father says. Remember, I kept the skull for years. A prince. He had that silver band around his forehead. I hadn't remembered the silver band until he mentions it on the phone call. But now I recall how that was the determining factor that the body we had unearthed was valuable, was a person worthy of respect, or I guess, respect during his lifetime. A crown, silver, or maybe it was tin, meant royalty to us. Oh, God, that's right, my mom says. We kept that skull in the pantry. Because where else do you keep a skull? Her memories come in lightning bolts like mine. No, that was Marty's skull, I say, that's my brother. He found it and kept it to make a lamp. Remember, it sat in our pantry until it didn't. Marty wasn't there, my dad says. And my mind comes to a jolting halt. As though while shoveling sand, I've hit titanium and the blow jars me. Marty is the beginning of my tale. He was always the part I knew was true. Why is my brother in my memory so clearly? I know I heard his voice over the sand dune. Why can I still see how he held up that skull and showed me the jawbone? Why do I remember him if he wasn't there? Go on, from there. We're tromping down Cemetery Lane with Amy and it's a great ride. I think that to start with, pick up off what you've just read by telling you that I wanted to know if your parents are still alive because when I teach memoir, every time, at some point, usually early on, someone or everyone says, I can't write this till everybody I know is dead. And they're insistent on it. And I don't know if it's avoidance behavior or fear or some combination. So, you not only write this story, but you call your parents and you email your parents and you visit your parents and you ask them questions. And then you listen sometimes and sometimes you take notes and then you include the conversations and some of the information and some of your thoughts about those conversations, whether they're written or oral, in the book itself. So it's one thread that appears and then disappears and appears and disappears from the now in the memoir. And it's very process-oriented. It's very revelatory of a memoir writing process. So it's kind of your laying bare the procedure by which you get some of this information or don't get some of this information. And I was just wondering if you could talk about the bravery of what that's like to A, ask them those questions, B, then write about them and C, include the questions in there. And I was gonna actually read with this question one of the examples because it's just too fun not to read. From this little excerpt that I picked, you get a great sense of Amy's sense of humor in the book, her parent's sense of humor and the tenor of what these interactions were like in trying to get this information. So I call home again. I share my new information with my mother first. There is a curse on those who messed with those graves like we did. That's why I have all these allergies, she replies matter of factly. She is allergic to everything from paper to pickles. She is not allergic to potatoes. Fortunately, vodka is made from potatoes and my mother believes in curses. A lot of information in there and you get a sense of character as well. I hear a mumbling in the background. It's Amy, she says. Then to me, your dad's home, I'll let him talk to you. Thanks, I say, appreciative of the approval. There is a curse, I tell my father. First thing through the phone, digging up the grave means your life is cursed. My life cursed, he sounds surprised. Do you mean instead of just one Cadillac, it could have had two? That would be my parents. That would be Amy's parents. Those conversations probably sound familiar to anybody who has a parent. But this is different because this is going into the book, it's in the book. So can you talk about that process? Well I think the four part comes from being in the publishing world and knowing how hard it is to get published. I just assumed it would never make it to the real world because I have sort of a pessimistic view, I think. Then it did. Then I did go through the combination of, I mean you could probably tell a little bit, my mom's a little bit narcissistic. I thought, okay, my mother's either going to love it because a lot of it is about her or she's going to hate it. Then I thought, this is why people say I'm not publishing it until they're dead, is that process between when I got the publishing deal and when it came out. I did have a little, I want to congratulate my parents for actually dealing with it. Now I can tell you some interesting and funny stories, but one was my mother read it and she did think she was basically going to be the star of it. She read it and she was very excited and she was all gung-ho and then she read it and she's kind of the antagonist in the book. And she calls me up and she says, you make me look like a daiquiri, swilling, negligent mother who lived in Nigeria. And I said, well, actually mom, they weren't daiquiris, they were salty dogs. And she goes, oh my God, I did love those salty dogs. So it just kind of worked out. Like if you could just bring it back around to her, it worked out okay. And then she calls my brother. And so this is my brother telling me about the phone conversation he had with her about it because she called him up and she goes, well, Amy's memory is just really wrong. Well, the whole book is about how my memory is wrong, but she's like, her memory is really wrong. She just got everything wrong in that book. That was not the way it happened. And my brother, because there's one part in the book where my parents go into a pub in London and they leave me in the vestibule. And so I'm seven years old and I'm sitting on this vestibule with people coming and going like, so it's, well, they're in the pub drinking with their friends and I'm not allowed in. And so my brother says, yeah, her memory is wrong because I was actually with you guys in the pub and I remember and we left her there for three hours. So it's like this, like I didn't remember that it was, when he told me that I was like, wow, really for three hours? And he's like, yeah. So there's, I play with the whole idea of, none of us really remember exactly and we don't really know what that exact, you know, what did actually happen in the past. And I don't believe anybody's memory is exact. What I was interested in, in all of these was what is the truth in between them? Because I felt like the cracks in between all of those are really what, maybe not what happened, but who this family was. Because I was trying to figure out the question I have throughout the whole book is, are we hideous people? Are we ghouls? Are we awful people? And yet we're a family and fairly cohesive, so, yeah. That's a great, a great anecdote for your mom. It's almost like the book needs an afterword. Yeah. For this little, like what was it like? Because that is a question for memoir writers. It feels forbidden, you know, that voice in your head is specific for memoir, I think, in a way that it isn't for fiction, because you can always say, I made it up. That's a great way to get at this question of, one way to read when we were ghouls, I think, is as a coming of age story. And the book focuses on Amy, young Amy, I'm gonna call you, from ages seven to around 11 or 12. And one description is, with my short and pudgy eight-year-old legs, I trudged back over to the far side of the deep sand dunes to hide. Hiding was what I did. Hiding was a place I could be myself, where I chose to be alone. I also hid hoping my mom would come looking for me. She never did, but I still tried. We read this book and we fall in love with young Amy. And we want to protect her and we want to befriend her. And I can't believe it was three hours. It's a very harrowing scene. The doors are opening and closing. People are going in and they're coming out drunk and she's sitting there waiting, apparently, three hours. You didn't know how long it was. I didn't like the memory. And at one point you hid and then they said, well, you're fine and it's a harrowing scene. But it's told through the voice of young Amy. So you're just sort of there with her. And she survived to write the memoir. She's not still in that vestibule. So we do, we fall in love with you and you're also quite independent and able to ask for what you need, even when you don't get it. So I was wondering, from a writing standpoint, what it's like to go back and find seven, eight, nine-year-old Amy and what was that experience like? Cause you spent a lot of time with her, right? Right, yeah. Well it was interesting because it did keep coming up without, when the book came on, I was only gonna write an essay and I was gonna tell the story about the digging up the grave. I had no intention of, I fought to writing a memoir. But I did keep coming up with this, kept coming up with the abandonment and how they were so easily able to leave a small child in different places. And I think the one, for me is there's the one I'm seven and they leave me in Nigeria alone. So that was where I was like, okay, there's a theme here with my family. And so there was this, it was also that discovery of I do like being alone as an adult. I like being alone a lot. So there was also that like, oh, that's why I'm okay with being alone. And I have friends who are constantly like, oh, my husband's going out of town. Can you come hang out with me? So I don't like being alone. And I'm always like, oh my God, I love it when my husband's out of town. So it's sort of like an interesting discovery of going back and hanging out with little Amy. And then also hanging out with who my parents were. Like I also gained a lot of compassion for my mom because she was basically a single mom a lot of ways because my father's job took him into like the Niger Delta and also into the jungles, et cetera. So he wasn't home a lot. So it was one of the things I realized like when I was little, I didn't realize what she was going through. As an adult looking back and her having to take care of little Amy, it was, oh, wow. I can't imagine being at the time she was around 42 years old. Looking back and thinking, I can't imagine being 42 years old in Nigeria with a seven year old, not really knowing anyone and having to get around. And I came from a tiny town in Texas and having to get. So I gained a lot of compassion for my mother and what she had to go through. And my father and my siblings. And so it was the whole process was like a mirror, but then also seeing the other. I mean, when you're seven, you are in your own little world, in your own little narcissism. And then looking back and sort of going inside that again is sort of interesting. Yeah, I will say one of the things like she did like also in that memory, like when she read the book, she said, okay, I just want you to know, I'm reading the book and I know you felt really bad and you felt like we didn't love you and we left you. I just want you to know, I really do love you and that I will never leave you. In fact, I'm going to haunt you for the rest of your life. So. So your mom titled the book then. Right, she did. I have to tell her that. So yeah. I can tell her she would love to have credit for that. I bet. No, don't give it to her. Yeah. No, that's interesting. It feels like there's abandonment, but there's resiliency and but you're seven. So when we were at Ghouls is a coming of age story, I think, and it sounds like writing the book was also sort of a coming of age in a way as a book process should be. I mean, otherwise you could do something else or take a pie. And it also takes us on a journey, first of all, a literal journey. Your dad gets a job with an oil company and we go from with you from Blue Collar, Eli, Nevada to Lagos, Nigeria with eight million people or something, then to Lima, Peru, then to Bolivia, and then we return to the States. And this is in four years or so. About five or six years. Or five or six. In the book it felt, yeah, about that. Yeah, seven to 12. So you were there. So yeah, I got your memory on this one. The book takes us through the cultural changes that you experience. And I should say because some of you probably haven't read the book yet because you haven't bought it yet, Amy's brother and sister are in 11th and 12th grade and the American school in Nigeria only goes up to eighth so they get shipped off to Switzerland. And so it reads like Amy's an only child but there are these occasional appearances of the siblings and they come and then they leave and they manage to reveal the fact that there is no Santa, which is another sense of abandonment because she's in Nigeria with her Barbie dolls. At least they could leave you a Santa. That goes out the window too. It's really, you just really wanna hug young Amy. So there's these cultural changes that you experience and there's also what was interesting to me was there's a shift in apparent social status because I was, and so my question is what is it like to write about that shift you're going from and I'm quoting you a dumpy blue collar house eating beans and cornbread to servants and swimming pools and fancy parties. And that's in addition to speaking the language and your siblings are gone and your dad's out somewhere doing something and mom gets malaria because, you know. Well I think that's the part I was also trying to examine in that question of are we hideous people because we went from being blue collar to suddenly being white collar but like that first scene is we're exploiting the family and I'm an eight year old so I'm complicit only in the fact that well I'm making these excuses like but I'm eight years old so I'm drug along on the trip but who are these people that are exploiting the land and the people and you know the oil company is you know raping and pillaging the land as well but we're so who are we as people we're ugly Americans basically and at the same time one of the also really great things about my mom was she was really like she usually didn't like hanging out with the American women she did like finding the local women and getting more involved in what they were doing like she wanted to learn the language really badly she wanted to be part of that group of women and I think in some ways also against her looking by I think she felt ostracized because she wasn't you know she hadn't gone to college like most of those women had and so but then she could be with the Bolivian women who were the upper class Bolivian women we weren't you know with the street I was actually I played with the kids on the street but it was culturally she liked getting involved in that world and so I think that was one of the benefits to it but I think a lot of that again comes from we didn't know our place because it was a new it was an odd situation you know we weren't my dad's job wasn't it gave him a lot of benefits but he wasn't like a high level executive it was just enough that we got really nice things when you go overseas with an oil company they you know put you up really well you come back to the States you're right back where you started from interesting so yeah so coming back we were back in the dumpy little house and you know it was a better situation than it had been before we left but yeah and you knew you were sort of there's no serve and there's no right yeah and so that's interesting because the bracketing the parameters of the memoir the material you chose makes sense because of that because it is almost like we're taken out of this situation and put back and that taking out and what ensued from that is the story is where the story gets because it challenges on so many levels like who are we because of that time yeah and it makes an interesting I think commentary on just sort of sociological level what happens to identity when it gets plucked out of the familiar by whatever your dad's job a death in the family you know of a hurricane you know a political change in your neighborhood something like that what you know where does identity go and that's one of the great things about the read is that we watch this child in real time this is a great accomplishment in the writing for the reader to have that experience it feels so real it feels so and again I said she feels abandoned but she also feels resilient somehow and very observant and it's wonderful to be there but not like fall in the sewer and have to be watched with Fiso Hex which I had you know it triggers memories too the book so your own ghouls and it's some crazy stuff going on there that's told in a very straightforward manner thanks but kinda creepy so the memoir also takes on the personal and shows where it gets political so we have the Biafran War and you write it was started by my people the countries with red white and blue flags American culture class, my motherland, my family entitlement is it part of our culture? What culture do I belong to? You write about everyone being asked to leave Bolivia I think it was except for Sears which is ironic and R.C. Kola as they can stay, the big corporations can stay but everybody else has to get out you describe your quest for what lies between innocence and guilt which is a very intense question we could ask ourselves daily still no matter where we are but you are a child in these travels you had nannies, you had adults cooking you meals and sending you to bed you went to school in countries whose languages you didn't speak whose customs are utterly unfamiliar you saw more dead bodies in various states of decomposition than anyone should see and especially a child most of us will not ever see as many dead look how calm she looks when I was in a meeting I was going to think I was thinking am I going to be able to tell that you've seen all these dead bodies like waiting for watching with friends watching when is it going to pop is that the verb you it's like it's getting bigger and bigger and now it's going to go our school was kept driving by this one body on the side in Nigeria poverty was extreme the extremist of extremes and there was a body on the side of the road for several days so my friend and I we were like taking bets on when the body was going to pop that's resilience and that's a child's view and so can you talk about what execution days were I just thought maybe you should say that because you guys have snow days right well we move from like from Ely, Nevada to Lagos, Nigeria so one's on the equator and one's in the mountains and the Sierra is at 8,000 feet and you can guess which one and so in Ely we had snow days because you know when it snows and there's too much on the ground that you know we can't get to the school we had snow days and usually made up for them at the end of the school year well in Nigeria the public execution theater was next door where the army barracks were next door to our school and all that separated us was a chain link fence between us and the public and the public execution arena was basically three oil barrels and they used, they just used the army guys with their machine guns or their rifles or whatever to shoot them so we got execution days off because they didn't want the kids to be at school for that and I thought it was because they didn't want us to be there for the executions but I learned later is because the traffic in Victoria, our schools on Victoria Island was so bad because everybody wanted to go to the executions that they let us out of school so because the bus school bus it was too much for the traffic to get to school so I would get execution days off so when I was looking at how snow days make you so happy I think execution days were pretty cool because we got out of school but you didn't think like that that we did but you did it was a day off I mean it was I had to hang out with my mom that day right yeah so it was all good very different very different experience in the book so think about that next time you get a snow day or you don't get a snow day right yeah okay you can have execution days yeah when the we shouldn't even uh-uh not in this day and age we shouldn't think like that it could happen you didn't hear that here not a good idea so okay so you fold into the memoir fun cultural references that provide flavor as well as context some are heavy like Richard Nixon resigning and the Manson murders there was a two-part special her mom let her watch the first part and then decided she couldn't watch the second part which really doesn't seem fair at all what's interesting is the first part was the goriest part yeah yeah the second part was just the trials apparently as she dismissed it but other references are lighter like comparing your parents to Herman and Lily Munster and a teacher who looks like Samantha Stevens from Bewitched but that teacher's nothing like the real Samantha so much of the delight in reading the book comes from young Amy's observations and the voice you give her to describe her experiences and here's a quote I am a petunia in an onion patch my mother once told me she the petunia her family the onion patch it was becoming clear to me that I couldn't be like her I wasn't even sure what a petunia was I truncated it a little bit because it's got piccolo stuff in it too but and so you talked about in the book the snubs from other kids the fears the excitement of seeing your siblings once in a while so there's humor and a kind of good naturedness like even now you're talking about it you're talking about your mom and feeling clear about how you feel about her and getting more perspective on her so I was wondering if you were conscious of giving Amy this tone did you try on different voices before you kind of struck the gold of what you did strike here oh sure you know it was interesting in the process again like I said I resisted writing memoir but then I think there was there was one draft where it got really ghoulish I guess you know it got a little too serious for me even I would read like I'd read the draft and I was just like oh god why and my family is very funny everybody has it's sort of you know I mean with your own analysis on that and that's probably true we're very sarcastic and very you know ghoulish we have a dark sense of humor and I think I realized that wasn't there you know that's a really that's the part of my family that I really like like that's the part that makes it fun hanging out with my family and I had to go back in and really weave that in and look for that and think about when that would have come up because you know my mom my mom can be funny and she can look at herself and see you know she's not as narcissistic as I might make her out to sound on the first go round she still won't really talk to me about the book but and then when I was just home actually about a month ago with my brother we were sitting at the dinner table and come to find out during the biaffron war we had to be ready to leave they said my brother was talking about a boat that he used to go out on with a friend of his when he would come to visit from boarding school and my dad said well you know why that boat was in the harbor because it was one of the other oil companies boats and he goes oh yeah it's because we had to be able to evacuate within 12 hours at all times and I said I had like I had no idea and I said we had to be ready to evacuate I said so when I was left there and when I was seven by myself if we had to evacuate well what have happened to me and my brother was like oh you would have been raised by Alice and you know as it became this like joke and my mom just got like real quiet like didn't say anything but it became like a joke but I'm also thinking in the back of my head I'm thinking what if we had to evacuate and I was like would I one would I be alive two would I be you know living with my nanny Alice and her family which probably would have been kind of cool but yeah so there's things that are still discovery and still but I felt like each draft I felt like I got closer to what I felt my family was really like which is dark and funny and we do have these conferences I mean this is what we do we have these conferences we're still having them I know it's not a I mean that's why the conversations are in there because that's what we do so. And it works to highlight process too which is wonderful for the reader just to send and for the writer to think about how you present material like this and what's the best expression you can give it you know how you can how you can make that sing that way and I'm glad you didn't have to evacuate me too. I'm already worried about young Amy and I know she's okay so so but you did it's interesting that you had to kind of go dark dark in the writing first like let me strip all that humor out and then kind of bring it back because it felt wrong to you but you had to kind of pull it all in one direction which again speaks to process and how. I think the level of forgiveness like I also reached a place of forgiveness and that word sometimes gets thrown around too much but I think for me there was this part of like I said I got I realized while my mom was there also alone as a single mom I mean things like that that brought me to a different place that I'm like okay I actually need to tell this story without being angry and so yeah. Which is good to remember if you are writing a memoir and you're afraid that all those people who are still alive are going to read it it works out. Yeah yeah it's okay. Mom forgives it has a drink. Right she just has another drink. Which is good so are we so I have two more questions but we can open it up I don't want to do we have questions that we want to ask. You guys can ask me anything. How did the rest of your family, your father and your siblings think about the book? How did they accept what you wrote? They actually were pretty they did pretty well too my sister who I have sort of an on again off again a little we're sisters so yeah so I was worried about her she's not in it as much because it was she wasn't really around much she went away to boarding school and then she'd come home once in a while and but she said she got it read it right away and said that I got all the abandonments she she had those same kinds of experiences you know and I wasn't sure how she would take it she was one I was I even sent the book to her specifically and said hey I want you to have this so you feel like you know so you I mean my mind I'm thinking so you feel like you got it but I was like I want you to be one of the first ones to have it. My brother is kind of the hero in the book so I even at one point when he was reading and I said I bet it's a little weird to read a book about your like you're in it like you're the you know the protagonist in the story or you're the one of the main characters and he said he said no he said but I actually like he said I like the guy in the story that better than the guy I live with every day so so that was something but he is kind of he is my hero you know so I think obviously that was my own bias as well and then my dad which is actually an interesting part of sort of that post publications of two is my father since the book was published or since I got the book deal it was before it was published was diagnosed with dementia and he has it's interesting because there's actually a part of the book where there's this part where I feel I'm I I am wondering if he's part of the DEA because of the places where we're living and I'm trying to get that information from him and he won't give me the information he won't tell me and his friend but it's really I mean I know certain friends of his were and so I'm trying to get the information from him and then as I'm calling home asking his questions he's like telling me some of the stories he had told that were you know suspiciously DIA or CIA connection stuff and they get more and more elaborate and so I tell those stories and here I share those stories of him giving me more information and I'm thinking because it's about me that he's about to tell me like he's revealing more to me like he's I'm special and he's going to tell me more he's gonna give me the secrets and then we find out he has dementia and one of the things I learned in the process when we were going through this part with him was this dementia like we're starting to see it more I really I find out and I read more about it and basically the kind he has is his memories his long term memories actually get more detailed instead of being more so when he's telling me a story he does tell me more detail but they're interesting details like this is aside from the CIA part but I want things I had asked him out after the book came was a tell me about your first day of work and he used to be in my dad's already like he like looks like or at least it looked like John Wayne Mr. Macho and Texan and he's to be his real Machismo story so then he tells me this story this time where it's all about like all the same elements of the same story about the first day and he's there with all these guys and they're going out onto the drilling sites and but then he just keeps adding in this one element about how all the other guys had metal lunch pails and he had a paper sack and how embarrassing that was and for a whole week he had to go to work with just a paper sack for his lunch and all the other guys had these metal lunchboxes and how humiliated and it was just like my dad kind of has always walked around with all this shame and it was kind of like the shame was sort of oozing out of him now so because I play with memory in this I found the dementia thing like afterward became again more of like well this book is even like now I even have more thoughts about memory than I did before and then my mom's reactions were basically what I told you and she basically when I bring up I like I'm going to the east coast for my book and she's like uh-huh she doesn't mean we're not going through I think with the patent of the shoes how she just oh how she made me wear patent of the shoes instead of yeah the leather shoes the communist shoes right and it just that that particular scene just blew my mind because it was a government thing and she hadn't done it right and she just owned right up to it and took you right to the place where you could get the appropriate shoes right though the patent leather sounded beautiful they were good looking shoes I just had to say such good looking shoes and so and so after I read that I said to myself yes she is a good mom yeah yeah no and she was I mean and she was fun to be with so yeah yeah but this was the rest of you know too at night in Peru I'm sorry we had to wear a school uniform a government required it so every school had the exact same uniform across the entire country so that we all looked equal and I showed up my mom we was wear black shoes black leather shoes my mother bought me patent leather shoes I got sent to the office my first day of school in Peru because I was wearing patent leather shoes because the government would not allow it and my mother was she got called to pick me up and she was not happy about having to yeah like seriously you're making you're gonna make me you called me in here for this so yeah dress code right yeah there there are a lot of wonderful details like that there's a line who needs parents when you have inoculations and and and lots of interesting observations about memory and it is it does seem it's poignant that your dad is coming down with dementia and and you know the details are coming out and their poignant details too about the paper sack for the lunch and and there's a wonderful line that I'll read my family was always doing that telling me it couldn't have happened that way and yet that that's in the book and you wrote the book and it's a wonderful book as you can tell and it has everything from dead bodies to patent leather shoes to drinking moms and interesting siblings and breaks the myth of santa once and for all and what next do you know what's next for you um yeah well maybe not I don't know I that was a not a straight answer at all there but um it was just it was a out of the question yeah I avoided that one yeah but that's a good that's a good one unless we have more questions here but that's a good closing questions of what what is next yeah um a couple of different things one I'm taking notes on my father and his dementia because again there's a lot of humor and sadness in that as well um and getting to know him through that process um it's hard obviously for him and he's a he's still at that stage where he's aware he has it but doesn't want that he has it and um and then just the transitions of that whole part of our lives and he has a lot of stories so like the fear of losing those stories so I'm taking notes on that I think I still I mean because he's going to I think I might be too close for another memoir again I never tried I never intended to be a memoirs I have another couple of fiction things I'm working on one is a novel I've been working on for many years about a I actually worked in El Salvador for a while with the maternal and child health um non-profit and um I have a story about a guy who when I worked down there he was um it was right after their war and um a combination of things was you know like in their desk drawers there would be a grenade um which you know I was always like um and then also um one particular family that I usually stayed with when I would go down there um they had wanted to immigrate immigrate and the husband was a doctor and he had always said the wife wanted to immigrate to the US because it was so dangerous in El Salvador like we would go to buy bread and it was you know barred windows and this is the nice part of town and we had to hand everything through little windows and um and so I just I the the novel is what if they had the so the husband said we can't immigrate because I'd have to be a gardener I don't want I want I'm a doctor and son Salvador and I have a career if I went to the States I'd have to be a gardener and so I imagine him because also everybody was getting brutally murdered so what would have happened had his family um something had happened to his family and he had immigrated what would he what would his life be like um so it takes place in Burbank at an old folks home kind of thing and um and he's the gardener um but he's also a doctor so he's with these older people which is sort of ironic because now I'm also the other so I'm obviously dealing with a lot of old people in my stories and then I have a another book that I'm working on a collaboration with a friend of mine and it's how to write a novel in 20 pies and he's an illustrator that sounds good and it's a irreverent book on a little bit of the process I went through to get my novel my first novel published and so everything from sitting down writing the book all the way through getting a book deal and celebrating that and it's um it's got some advice but we do he's an illustrator he works for an advertising agent it's really a reverent illustrations it's kind of like an Annie Lamont bird by bird with a little bit of Nora Efron and um and basically pot and you mentioned the pipe baker thing how I got through writing my first novel was by baking pies so when I would get stuck or like I don't know how to get through this obstacle or I had to mull things over or I just need to see something creative be finished because this is taking me so long I would bake a pie so it's about getting through the first novel with pie so but also how to do it with pie sounds good so yeah and um there's another book that it's just kind of playing around so sounds great it's interesting that the novel in progress is um you're getting to move people from one country to another country just like you were moved and but now you get to play with them sort of like you played with your Barbies and the Miss Polly doll and all this right now that's interesting I hadn't really thought about that way but it is sort of like taking that like moving from one culture to the other yeah journeys and the different also the reversal of the demographics thanks that's helpful I think that's probably worth a pie right yeah exactly well I think we should thank Amy we should do book signing unless there are questions recipes there are some recipes on the website and Amy's website for pies yeah right or how to write a novel a read a novel yes wonderful interviews and stuff thank you to Susan that was fabulous it was great questions fun great great book it's coolish thank you perfect perfect for October so some some book signing