EVENT TRANSCRIPT
Brookline Booksmith
Laurie Frankel/Nicola Griffith
Friday, June 11, 2021
Alex Abraham: Hi everyone who's made it in--welcome. I'll begin with a brief introduction while people are still making their way in. Hello and welcome. I'm Alex and a seller at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts. We're happy to have you join and appreciate your support. We have a live transcriber and ASL interpreter so thank you to them. You can find the live transcript button at the bottom of your window and you can see the live captioning. Set your chat to all panelists and attendees. There is a strict policy against abusive language or behavior.
I'll make introductions now. Nicola Griffith is our moderator. She is the recipient of several awards. She lives in Seattle with her wife. Thank you for being here. The author of the hour is Laurie Frankel. She has written several books and also lives in Seattle with her husband, daughter, and border collie. One Two Three tells the story of triplets Mab, Mirabelle, and Monday. It's a pleasure to have everyone here. Thank you to our interpreters and transcribers. Join me in welcoming Laurie Frankel.
Nicola Griffith: Putting on this sort of event is a lot of work. I encourage you please to buy a buy from this bookstore. It doesn't have to be mine or Laurie's book, but buy something. Many people don't understand that you can also get eBooks and audio books as well as printed books. We'll talk about 40 minutes. I hope you ask lots of questions. Q&A is my favorite part of the event so I hope you have lots.
One Two Three is about the town of Bourne and Mab, Monday, and Mirabelle. It's a powerful nuance novel about power, frailty, and love. It's serious and thought provoking. It's about how to survive and fight back. It's not afraid to look at awful things. There's no point where the reader feels awful. I want to talk about labels.
Laurie Frankel: This is going to be so much fun.
Nicola Griffith: It's about industrial greed and what some people consider normal. You don't pin specific labels on any of the 3 main characters. Most disabled people get tired of becoming type specimens. I know what your life is like when they compare me to other people. I want to hear about your choice to not use labels and a bit about the sisters too.
Laurie Frankel: I think we won't have a problem filling our hour. These are wonderful question. Bourne is a small isolated town and diagnosis, which is a difficult issue, would be different in this town. One question I ask is if you don't need a diagnosis to access healthcare or insurance, why is a label still useful or not? How might labels look different? Diagnosis is difficult with almost everything. Sometimes you have it and it's clear and easy to test for. That is rare. Mostly you think this might be right or could be improved and there are tests and conversations and the answer still isn't clear as to what needs to be done about it. The people in this town has the opportunity to talk about it.
Just because you checked this box, it doesn't mean I understand everything about you. That's what this book is about. There are 3 of them. Mab calls herself normal. Monday is what most people would diagnose as somewhere on the spectrum. Mirabelle uses a wheelchair to navigate the town. She only has the use of her right arm and hand. No one is diagnosed with anything.
Nicola Griffith: Diagnosis is an interesting notion. I wonder if the 3 characters would like a diagnosis. What is it called? Can I look it up? I love that you don't pander to that and have the need to put everyone in a box.
Laurie Frankel: As readers, we want to know. We don't quite know what's wrong. It's difficult to not be sure.
Nicola Griffith: It's also realistic. Few people fit every single box. You can't say definitely you have this. Mab, Monday, and Mirabelle are different to each other. They seem different to you at first glance. Do you ever get asked by readers how much like you your characters are? Are you writing about yourself? I get asked that a lot. For me, my fictional characters are like the people in my dreams. They're aspects of me but not like me. Some are more like me than others.
How did you find your way into Mab, Monday, and Mirabelle? Of the three, was one of them easier or harder to find your way into them?
Laurie Frankel: Everyone asks that all the time. People just assume they are me. It's interesting that they're the characters in your dream. They all have something in common with me but they aren't me, especially in my head. They become real people to me but less and less like me. They're outside of me. I used to be 16 but it's been 30 years and I didn't grow up when and where they did. I feel like I have things in common with each of them. I divvied up my 16-year-old self among them. At the beginning they sounded too much like me so there was a lot of editing. They sound different and tell different aspects of the story. They navigate the world differently from one another. That's the way I got to know them.
Monday was the easiest one to write. She feels strongly about specificity of language and me too. Mab is studying for the SATs and is obsessed with vocabulary. I was the same. Mirabelle is smarter than I am. Monday has a love of language and a dedication to what words mean. I share that so she was easy to write. She says what she means. It's fun to play with a requires a different kind of manipulation.
Nicola Griffith: In many ways when I read the book, I thought about Bourne and had a split emotion. It seemed like a town that I was glad not to have grown up in. Pollution, poverty, and everyone knows everything about everyone else. As a wheelchair user I was green with envy about the whole norming of disability. It's perfectly normal. Everywhere is accessible and no one is resentful of the accommodations.
How hard was it to get back to work? What is required and the reality of it. Those accommodations are not cheap. Some books would have a fairy godmother who wrote a massive check. How did you figure out how to make this happen?
Laurie Frankel: It seems like a horrible place to live or a remarkable place to live. These people have been abused but carved out a loving, supportive community even when they disagree. I did a lot of reading about universal design. It's accessible and no one is upset or pissed off about it. Help everyone and annoy no one. How can that happen? It's a small town and that made it easier. There's an out-of-work engineer with the know-how and time to solve problems in ways that weren't necessarily approved by the government. How can I solve this problem with clothespins? This town has given up a lot to fund things like ramps. The library closed and is run out of the triplets' house because the money went to build ramps.
There is some tradeoff. What if we move the tables farther apart in the restaurant? What if we got rid of the stairs and made the sidewalks wider and made the stop lights red longer so people could cross the street? Technology changes people's live. Under funding impacts people's lives. This town bands together and listens to each other.
Nicola Griffith: I'm struck by the notion of difficult conversations. This is a very realistic book and magical in others without magic. You do not ever depress the reader; in fact, quite the opposite. There is an amazing action sequence. I can't wait for people to read that. There were all these following clues. I don't know what genre I would put this book in. It's not what I think of as misery. How deliberate was that choice? I want to hear your thoughts on misery or not and how you figured out how to take the misery out of the equation.
Laurie Frankel: It was worrisome to me that it would be depressing in a way that you already know so you don't have to read about. You could as well read the newspaper. You already know there's too much money in politics and corporations have too much influence. As soon as I get to know characters, they become interesting people. The bad guys get more ambiguous. The dark moments are a prelude to characters figuring out how to surmount them. If people are assholes in the beginning, there's no hope. You have to give them 200 pages to learn and grow and listen to each other. The conversations in books are things that people learn from.
The more the characters become people, the less miserable the situation. People are inherently hopeful. The girls are 16. Mab has the idea that there's nothing to do in her town; all 16 year olds think that. It's a book about girls seeing what else is in the world. It's complicated but not miserable. I love them. It's hard to be miserable with people you love when you're pulling the strings.
Nicola Griffith: I would like you to take more credit than that. Misery is often the refuge of less competent writers; it's easier to sound smart when you're being negative. There's research about how negativity is regarded as intelligence in people. They are seen as more realistic and smarter; it pisses me off. It's harder to write good fiction that isn't miserable. Please accept the praise.
Laurie Frankel: Thank you. It's hard to convince people that you're trying to say important things without being depressing and miserable. It's not a sunshine and puppies novel. It's important to talk about how humans can be resilient in the face of terrible things.
Nicola Griffith: It's a deeply thoughtful book and is very smartly structured the way you begin and end and fit the voices together. It's a complex and multi-faceted book and important novel. The reviews I've seen seem to be fundamentally misreading you. There's one word that crops up a lot and that is "charming" and "plucky" and "quirky." As a queer, disable woman, it happens to me at work all the time. The narrators are teenage girls and disabled. Both groups aren't taken seriously and are underestimated. I would love to hear your thoughts.
Laurie Frankel: I have to be grateful because the reviews have been positive and warm. It's not a miserable book and therefore it has to be charming. It doesn't quite get to the heart of things here. It's me to some extent. I don't read the reviews for the most part. It's hard not to take them personally. Maybe I'm not serious but am charming or quirky. Mirabelle says teenage girls are not taken seriously. It's the night before their junior year of high school. She says people write us off and demean us. There's nothing more important than telling stories. That's how you change the world.
The book for me is the super hero story. It's how girls are super heroes. It's different from the Marvel movies and super hero stories we get. It's almost always male and physically triumphant with super strength and speed. He acts alone and destroys everything in his wake to save the world by himself. He's excused for poor behavior. Girls carry as they climb and work together and don't want to hurt people or destroy things. It's more realistic and interesting and bad ass. What is impressive is if you don't have super powers and speed. Mirabelle has but one hand. That is so much more impressive. We don't recognize it when it shows up.
Nicola Griffith: We are so conditioned to the boy super hero way. Yesterday I was writing my author's note for Spear that's coming out next year. I went on a rant about the wreckage they leave behind them. There's also the notion of the heroine's journey that makes me want me want to hurl. It's as bad as authoress. I wish people would learn to see that and that critics would learn to read disability fiction. Most of these are written by nondisabled writers. They can't understand the fiction where cripps are ordinary people. Thank you for this book in that way.
To me this is the point of your book. Young women will change the world. Do you want to talk about that?
Laurie Frankel: Everything you said if beautiful. Our daughters are going to save us; they will have to. They are learning that though their mother is also heroic and strong, they can't do things her way. They have to grow up and find its own way. People look at this book as "cli-fi" (climate fiction). These things happen way upstream above our heads and they're coming down. This generation will have to do things differently than we have. The model where you do things as a lone individual does not work; we have to be a community and help each other.
Nicola Griffith: I want to hammer home how joyous this book is. What was the most fun part to write? Is there a bit of the book where you would love to be a fly on the wall to watch a reader?
Laurie Frankel: No; I can't think of anything worse. My husband helps me with drafts and I have to leave the room. What if they think it's boring? I always love writing the ending of the book. I eventually stumble upon the ending and then revise the first part leading up to it. It comes together at the end. I love the end and writing and reading it.
Nicola Griffith: I need to read the end first so I know the writer isn't going to fuck with me. Just the last 3 pages; I want to know how people feel at the end. I got fed up as a child when they killed Old Yeller. I got worried at the big action sequence in the middle of the book.
First question - the names of the 3 sisters start with M. Why?
Laurie Frankel: The mother realizes that 3 is a lot of babies so she wants a trick to remember their names and so does the reader. They have syllables -- the first is one (Mab), then two (Monday), then three (Mirabelle). It helps keep track of characters. This is the deep dive into my brain. There's something really distinct about them.
Nicola Griffith: Is there an audio book and who is the narrator?
Laurie Frankel: There are 3 narrators plus a machine. They did an extraordinary job; I was worried about it. I talked about it with my editor. An audio book isn't a play. It's narrated by 3 people. They got 3 actors plus an audio engineer for Mirabelle's voice. Electronic voices used to sound strange so it would have been difficult to listen to. Now we talk to our phones, our car, etc., so we're more used to it. What technology would she have? How would it be used? We tried to balance these things into an audio book.
Nicola Griffith: Were you involved in that?
Laurie Frankel: I pointed out my concerns. Mostly they went off and did them. I listened to few auditions. All of that is well beyond my skill set.
Nicola Griffith: It's amazing how far things have come since books on tape. One more question: Although it's a new book, it includes hundreds of reviews and ratings. Was it published before the paperback?
Laurie Frankel: No, it just came out on Tuesday. I don't know. Maybe people read quickly.
Nicola Griffith: Many people get preview copies from the publisher. They keep track of that stuff.
Laurie Frankel: There were advance copies of the audio books as well.
Nicola Griffith: Do have a particular reading you do? Is there one sister you read more than the others?
Laurie Frankel: Because this tour is virtual, I haven't read from the book at all. I don't read the hard copy; I would want to make edits to it. You want to tinker with it. It'll be interesting if I read some of it in a live tour. I tried to make things as equal as possible among the sisters.
Nicola Griffith: You were motherly in that way. Each kid got their lollipop. We are almost out of time. Are there any more questions? I have one: If you could hope for a reader to take anything away from One Two Three, what would it be?
Laurie Frankel: I hope readers will feel empowered. It's about so many things. Central is the fact that people in Bourne got the rawest deal and feel they are powerless and then they figure out how. We all feel that way sometimes about something. We are downstream from a lot of things. They feel bigger than us but we don't have to take it. We have to figure out how to change it.
Nicola Griffith: I came away feeling a great hope in our daughters. Everyone should buy this book and read it; it's a gold star.
Laurie Frankel: Thank you so much for doing this. And thanks to the interpreters and Alex.
Alex Abraham: Thank you so much. You're amazing to listen to. You can get your copy of the book at brooklinebooks.com as well as Laurie's other books. Stay safe and be well and thank you.
Brookline Booksmith
Laurie Frankel/Nicola Griffith
Friday, June 11, 2021
Alex Abraham: Hi everyone who's made it in--welcome. I'll begin with a brief introduction while people are still making their way in. Hello and welcome. I'm Alex and a seller at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts. We're happy to have you join and appreciate your support. We have a live transcriber and ASL interpreter so thank you to them. You can find the live transcript button at the bottom of your window and you can see the live captioning. Set your chat to all panelists and attendees. There is a strict policy against abusive language or behavior.
I'll make introductions now. Nicola Griffith is our moderator. She is the recipient of several awards. She lives in Seattle with her wife. Thank you for being here. The author of the hour is Laurie Frankel. She has written several books and also lives in Seattle with her husband, daughter, and border collie. One Two Three tells the story of triplets Mab, Mirabelle, and Monday. It's a pleasure to have everyone here. Thank you to our interpreters and transcribers. Join me in welcoming Laurie Frankel.
Nicola Griffith: Putting on this sort of event is a lot of work. I encourage you please to buy a buy from this bookstore. It doesn't have to be mine or Laurie's book, but buy something. Many people don't understand that you can also get eBooks and audio books as well as printed books. We'll talk about 40 minutes. I hope you ask lots of questions. Q&A is my favorite part of the event so I hope you have lots.
One Two Three is about the town of Bourne and Mab, Monday, and Mirabelle. It's a powerful nuance novel about power, frailty, and love. It's serious and thought provoking. It's about how to survive and fight back. It's not afraid to look at awful things. There's no point where the reader feels awful. I want to talk about labels.
Laurie Frankel: This is going to be so much fun.
Nicola Griffith: It's about industrial greed and what some people consider normal. You don't pin specific labels on any of the 3 main characters. Most disabled people get tired of becoming type specimens. I know what your life is like when they compare me to other people. I want to hear about your choice to not use labels and a bit about the sisters too.
Laurie Frankel: I think we won't have a problem filling our hour. These are wonderful question. Bourne is a small isolated town and diagnosis, which is a difficult issue, would be different in this town. One question I ask is if you don't need a diagnosis to access healthcare or insurance, why is a label still useful or not? How might labels look different? Diagnosis is difficult with almost everything. Sometimes you have it and it's clear and easy to test for. That is rare. Mostly you think this might be right or could be improved and there are tests and conversations and the answer still isn't clear as to what needs to be done about it. The people in this town has the opportunity to talk about it.
Just because you checked this box, it doesn't mean I understand everything about you. That's what this book is about. There are 3 of them. Mab calls herself normal. Monday is what most people would diagnose as somewhere on the spectrum. Mirabelle uses a wheelchair to navigate the town. She only has the use of her right arm and hand. No one is diagnosed with anything.
Nicola Griffith: Diagnosis is an interesting notion. I wonder if the 3 characters would like a diagnosis. What is it called? Can I look it up? I love that you don't pander to that and have the need to put everyone in a box.
Laurie Frankel: As readers, we want to know. We don't quite know what's wrong. It's difficult to not be sure.
Nicola Griffith: It's also realistic. Few people fit every single box. You can't say definitely you have this. Mab, Monday, and Mirabelle are different to each other. They seem different to you at first glance. Do you ever get asked by readers how much like you your characters are? Are you writing about yourself? I get asked that a lot. For me, my fictional characters are like the people in my dreams. They're aspects of me but not like me. Some are more like me than others.
How did you find your way into Mab, Monday, and Mirabelle? Of the three, was one of them easier or harder to find your way into them?
Laurie Frankel: Everyone asks that all the time. People just assume they are me. It's interesting that they're the characters in your dream. They all have something in common with me but they aren't me, especially in my head. They become real people to me but less and less like me. They're outside of me. I used to be 16 but it's been 30 years and I didn't grow up when and where they did. I feel like I have things in common with each of them. I divvied up my 16-year-old self among them. At the beginning they sounded too much like me so there was a lot of editing. They sound different and tell different aspects of the story. They navigate the world differently from one another. That's the way I got to know them.
Monday was the easiest one to write. She feels strongly about specificity of language and me too. Mab is studying for the SATs and is obsessed with vocabulary. I was the same. Mirabelle is smarter than I am. Monday has a love of language and a dedication to what words mean. I share that so she was easy to write. She says what she means. It's fun to play with a requires a different kind of manipulation.
Nicola Griffith: In many ways when I read the book, I thought about Bourne and had a split emotion. It seemed like a town that I was glad not to have grown up in. Pollution, poverty, and everyone knows everything about everyone else. As a wheelchair user I was green with envy about the whole norming of disability. It's perfectly normal. Everywhere is accessible and no one is resentful of the accommodations.
How hard was it to get back to work? What is required and the reality of it. Those accommodations are not cheap. Some books would have a fairy godmother who wrote a massive check. How did you figure out how to make this happen?
Laurie Frankel: It seems like a horrible place to live or a remarkable place to live. These people have been abused but carved out a loving, supportive community even when they disagree. I did a lot of reading about universal design. It's accessible and no one is upset or pissed off about it. Help everyone and annoy no one. How can that happen? It's a small town and that made it easier. There's an out-of-work engineer with the know-how and time to solve problems in ways that weren't necessarily approved by the government. How can I solve this problem with clothespins? This town has given up a lot to fund things like ramps. The library closed and is run out of the triplets' house because the money went to build ramps.
There is some tradeoff. What if we move the tables farther apart in the restaurant? What if we got rid of the stairs and made the sidewalks wider and made the stop lights red longer so people could cross the street? Technology changes people's live. Under funding impacts people's lives. This town bands together and listens to each other.
Nicola Griffith: I'm struck by the notion of difficult conversations. This is a very realistic book and magical in others without magic. You do not ever depress the reader; in fact, quite the opposite. There is an amazing action sequence. I can't wait for people to read that. There were all these following clues. I don't know what genre I would put this book in. It's not what I think of as misery. How deliberate was that choice? I want to hear your thoughts on misery or not and how you figured out how to take the misery out of the equation.
Laurie Frankel: It was worrisome to me that it would be depressing in a way that you already know so you don't have to read about. You could as well read the newspaper. You already know there's too much money in politics and corporations have too much influence. As soon as I get to know characters, they become interesting people. The bad guys get more ambiguous. The dark moments are a prelude to characters figuring out how to surmount them. If people are assholes in the beginning, there's no hope. You have to give them 200 pages to learn and grow and listen to each other. The conversations in books are things that people learn from.
The more the characters become people, the less miserable the situation. People are inherently hopeful. The girls are 16. Mab has the idea that there's nothing to do in her town; all 16 year olds think that. It's a book about girls seeing what else is in the world. It's complicated but not miserable. I love them. It's hard to be miserable with people you love when you're pulling the strings.
Nicola Griffith: I would like you to take more credit than that. Misery is often the refuge of less competent writers; it's easier to sound smart when you're being negative. There's research about how negativity is regarded as intelligence in people. They are seen as more realistic and smarter; it pisses me off. It's harder to write good fiction that isn't miserable. Please accept the praise.
Laurie Frankel: Thank you. It's hard to convince people that you're trying to say important things without being depressing and miserable. It's not a sunshine and puppies novel. It's important to talk about how humans can be resilient in the face of terrible things.
Nicola Griffith: It's a deeply thoughtful book and is very smartly structured the way you begin and end and fit the voices together. It's a complex and multi-faceted book and important novel. The reviews I've seen seem to be fundamentally misreading you. There's one word that crops up a lot and that is "charming" and "plucky" and "quirky." As a queer, disable woman, it happens to me at work all the time. The narrators are teenage girls and disabled. Both groups aren't taken seriously and are underestimated. I would love to hear your thoughts.
Laurie Frankel: I have to be grateful because the reviews have been positive and warm. It's not a miserable book and therefore it has to be charming. It doesn't quite get to the heart of things here. It's me to some extent. I don't read the reviews for the most part. It's hard not to take them personally. Maybe I'm not serious but am charming or quirky. Mirabelle says teenage girls are not taken seriously. It's the night before their junior year of high school. She says people write us off and demean us. There's nothing more important than telling stories. That's how you change the world.
The book for me is the super hero story. It's how girls are super heroes. It's different from the Marvel movies and super hero stories we get. It's almost always male and physically triumphant with super strength and speed. He acts alone and destroys everything in his wake to save the world by himself. He's excused for poor behavior. Girls carry as they climb and work together and don't want to hurt people or destroy things. It's more realistic and interesting and bad ass. What is impressive is if you don't have super powers and speed. Mirabelle has but one hand. That is so much more impressive. We don't recognize it when it shows up.
Nicola Griffith: We are so conditioned to the boy super hero way. Yesterday I was writing my author's note for Spear that's coming out next year. I went on a rant about the wreckage they leave behind them. There's also the notion of the heroine's journey that makes me want me want to hurl. It's as bad as authoress. I wish people would learn to see that and that critics would learn to read disability fiction. Most of these are written by nondisabled writers. They can't understand the fiction where cripps are ordinary people. Thank you for this book in that way.
To me this is the point of your book. Young women will change the world. Do you want to talk about that?
Laurie Frankel: Everything you said if beautiful. Our daughters are going to save us; they will have to. They are learning that though their mother is also heroic and strong, they can't do things her way. They have to grow up and find its own way. People look at this book as "cli-fi" (climate fiction). These things happen way upstream above our heads and they're coming down. This generation will have to do things differently than we have. The model where you do things as a lone individual does not work; we have to be a community and help each other.
Nicola Griffith: I want to hammer home how joyous this book is. What was the most fun part to write? Is there a bit of the book where you would love to be a fly on the wall to watch a reader?
Laurie Frankel: No; I can't think of anything worse. My husband helps me with drafts and I have to leave the room. What if they think it's boring? I always love writing the ending of the book. I eventually stumble upon the ending and then revise the first part leading up to it. It comes together at the end. I love the end and writing and reading it.
Nicola Griffith: I need to read the end first so I know the writer isn't going to fuck with me. Just the last 3 pages; I want to know how people feel at the end. I got fed up as a child when they killed Old Yeller. I got worried at the big action sequence in the middle of the book.
First question - the names of the 3 sisters start with M. Why?
Laurie Frankel: The mother realizes that 3 is a lot of babies so she wants a trick to remember their names and so does the reader. They have syllables -- the first is one (Mab), then two (Monday), then three (Mirabelle). It helps keep track of characters. This is the deep dive into my brain. There's something really distinct about them.
Nicola Griffith: Is there an audio book and who is the narrator?
Laurie Frankel: There are 3 narrators plus a machine. They did an extraordinary job; I was worried about it. I talked about it with my editor. An audio book isn't a play. It's narrated by 3 people. They got 3 actors plus an audio engineer for Mirabelle's voice. Electronic voices used to sound strange so it would have been difficult to listen to. Now we talk to our phones, our car, etc., so we're more used to it. What technology would she have? How would it be used? We tried to balance these things into an audio book.
Nicola Griffith: Were you involved in that?
Laurie Frankel: I pointed out my concerns. Mostly they went off and did them. I listened to few auditions. All of that is well beyond my skill set.
Nicola Griffith: It's amazing how far things have come since books on tape. One more question: Although it's a new book, it includes hundreds of reviews and ratings. Was it published before the paperback?
Laurie Frankel: No, it just came out on Tuesday. I don't know. Maybe people read quickly.
Nicola Griffith: Many people get preview copies from the publisher. They keep track of that stuff.
Laurie Frankel: There were advance copies of the audio books as well.
Nicola Griffith: Do have a particular reading you do? Is there one sister you read more than the others?
Laurie Frankel: Because this tour is virtual, I haven't read from the book at all. I don't read the hard copy; I would want to make edits to it. You want to tinker with it. It'll be interesting if I read some of it in a live tour. I tried to make things as equal as possible among the sisters.
Nicola Griffith: You were motherly in that way. Each kid got their lollipop. We are almost out of time. Are there any more questions? I have one: If you could hope for a reader to take anything away from One Two Three, what would it be?
Laurie Frankel: I hope readers will feel empowered. It's about so many things. Central is the fact that people in Bourne got the rawest deal and feel they are powerless and then they figure out how. We all feel that way sometimes about something. We are downstream from a lot of things. They feel bigger than us but we don't have to take it. We have to figure out how to change it.
Nicola Griffith: I came away feeling a great hope in our daughters. Everyone should buy this book and read it; it's a gold star.
Laurie Frankel: Thank you so much for doing this. And thanks to the interpreters and Alex.
Alex Abraham: Thank you so much. You're amazing to listen to. You can get your copy of the book at brooklinebooks.com as well as Laurie's other books. Stay safe and be well and thank you.