foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign montia and you're watching PBS books thank you for joining us PBS books in collaboration with Maryland Public Television is pleased to host a conversation with award-winning author Luis Alberto orea author of good Night Irene PBS books is proud to partner with the Library of Congress to promote their 2023 National Book Festival let's take a moment to hear from the librarian of Congress Dr Carla Hayden I'm Carla Hayden Library of Congress and I want to give a thank you to PBS folks for supporting the national Book Festival hope you can join us in Washington and online for this year's Festival on Saturday August the 12th well thank you Dr Hayden if you live in Maryland or in traveling distance to Washington DC then don't mess this year's Library of Congress National Book Festival on Saturday August 12th that's this Saturday from 9 A.M to 8 P.M the festival is free and opened to the public to everyone it's a quick drive or train ride away the complete schedule can be gotten at the Library of Congress National Book Festival official website at loc.gov bookfest but guess what if you can't make it you can stream information so have no fear you can stream from two of the main stages and then all of the content will come up about a week later and you can go through and curate your own experience well now through August 31st PBS books and PBS stations across the country will host a series of 10 virtual events with 11 authors they'll also be available on demand at pbsbooks.org on Facebook as well as on the national Book Festival website well here's a quick word from our station partner welcome I'm Erin Crest with Maryland Public Television and I'm thrilled to introduce this evening's event with author Luis Alberto urrea in celebration of the Library of Congress National Book Festival MPT is committed to sharing the voices and stories of contemporary authors because books really have the power to amplify voices and experiences in so many ways and this year the Library of Congress National Book Festival theme is everyone has a story for over two decades the Library of Congress National Book Festival has brought huge crowds to Washington DC and we are thrilled to be part of this important event we hope you'll join us on a journey tonight as we explore Luis Alberto ureya's novel good Night Irene which tells the true story of Courage of Red Cross women in World War II and of course PBS shares many World War II stories as well including masterpieces world on fire and her War her story World War II and so many more we're also thrilled that PBS books partners with libraries because libraries are a crucial partner for Maryland Public Television and for so many PBS stations across the country we hope you'll enjoy tonight's conversation we are so proud here at MPT to be part of this important event back to you Heather well thank you so much Erin and we are so glad that MPT is partnering with us on today's event well today we will talk with Luis Alberto orea and we're going to discuss his work his involvement in the festival and his latest book as Aaron shared so let's meet the author Luis Alberto orea is the best-selling author of many works of non-fiction poetry and fiction including the hummingbird's daughter and the house of broken angels a national book critic Circle award finalist he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his Landmark work of non-fiction The Devil's Highway now in its 34th paperback printing is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and letters award among many many other honors he lives outside Chicago and teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago welcome Luis bye good morning how are you good morning it is so wonderful to have you on the show and I'm so excited to get to speak with you about your fantastic book oh thanks Heather let's go I'm ready all right so I always ask authors to to in their own words we know your book recent can you describe for people who maybe haven't yet read it can you just give us the premise quick summary elevator speech my mother was what was known as a donut Dolly women who drove into combat in a huge two and a half ton truck to deliver coffee conversation and donuts to soldiers often Under Fire and uh they landed on Utah Beach and they did the entire journey following Patton around until they liberated book involved so in the acknowledgments you've noted that your mother served in a very specific they're called Club mobiles yes we talk a little bit what is a club mobile and um maybe more specifics around being a donut Dolly what's it what does that even mean a lot of them didn't like being called donut dollies so they used to say and you'll see it in the novel don't call me Dolly so much so that we had buttons made that say don't call me Dolly but since the book hadn't come out yet you know it would have made sense now they do um so the the clubmobile was a two and a half ton GMC truck uh double axles in the back six wheel drive a monster and uh they usually had a flatbed in back or or Troop Carrier setup but uh the Red Cross with Eisenhower's support uh transformed these trucks into rolling galleys and they they had donut cookers uh automatic donut machine they could make 30 000 Donuts a day if they had to um it had two huge coffee makers reservoirs for water and in the back a record player on a swivel they could pull down from the wall and they had loudspeakers and when the gis gathered to get the donuts they could play them the hits so she was a DJ as well as a a donut cook and um that the club mobile came out of the Red Cross clubs that they had for enlisted men and for officers and it was Eisenhower's Brilliance I think to make it mobile take it to the take it to the boys it's really an incredible I mean that the the your mother's history and what inspired you to write this story well you know there was a portrait of my mom always in our house in her Red Cross uniform so I grew up seeing that um she uh she had a a Foot Locker that the Army had given each of the women a soldier's Foot Locker and in our sad little apartment in San Diego uh it served as a coffee table and the Foot Locker was full of memorabilia that I wasn't supposed to look at but of course you know Mom's not around you open it up and she knew I had done it moms are psychic I'm warning all the guys here moms are psychic she knew I had gotten into it and uh so she tried to explain some of it and later in life she was consumed by horror isolation nightmares every night and I realized PTSD she she honestly had a lifelong horror from the experiences so it was both the best thing that ever happened to her and the worst but she was always deeply proud of it and um after she had died she died in 1990 I just kept thinking about this story and how so much of it has slipped away and I have all of her archives all her photographs all that kind of stuff and the woman who drove the truck who was a woman named Jill Jill Pitts and uh Jill became the character of Dorothy in the novel of course my mom inspired Irene um and I just want to say to you that Dorothy we thought she was dead and she was not in one of the weird things about the book it turned out that she lived 90 minutes away from us in Illinois we thought she was long gone we contacted her she invited us to please come see her she was this fabulous very candy very smart 94 year old veteran when we went in her house there was a portrait of my mother on the wall though they had lost contact with each other in 1954 so I knew when my mother started to isolate I was looking at the picture and the whole novel came from this moment and by the way Jill didn't like that Louise business he called me Lewis Lewis and I was looking at the picture and she said Louis I drove the truck but your mother brought the joy and my mom suddenly wasn't my mom it was this 27 year old New York Fashion plate who apparently brought Delight to all the combat that she could and that's where the book came from well that's an incredible story and if we can take a quick so inside the book I noticed before I started reading it that there are these images yeah that's that what are we looking at well let's see via the the one with my mom sort of in profile with her little hat on and her uniform was was really handy to me because you can only see these pictures in black and white of course and when we found at the World War II Museum in New Orleans donut Dolly uniforms we found out that they were blue that Eisenhower had sent off to a haberdashery in London to make them by hand so they would bespoke uniforms and that was transformative for me the pictures of them gathered around the vehicle that's the actual truck they drove it was the Cheyenne um there were uh 120 trucks in the in the that that uh campaign in that theater of of War um and when you see the the little cutie grinning with the pixius grin that's my mom the tall woman that's Jill and then they always had a third girl in the truck they called her um and uh in those early days those pictures are from it's a woman named Helen um and that was the milieu in which they lived and it was their their magical craft that took them into combat and got them out of combat in the book you note that you travel traveled thousands of miles visited many museums warehouses ruins archives countries Crematory as well as interviewed survivors and experts how long did the process take for you to write this book and how what was your research Pro process if we could discuss it a little bit because it's it comes it's inspired by such a personal story right um well uh in some sense I realized I'd been working on it my whole life didn't know it I think this is the uh the ultimate Testament I can write I don't know that I can do better than this book honestly that sounds like a shield but it isn't I just you know went places I didn't know I was going to go um I had her her stuff I had archives of photographs I had letters I have you know I that patch that's in the Montage is actually her Red Cross patch um in the book I have her her I have her ribbon her campaign ribbon you know all that stuff um and her journals which I found unbearable I couldn't take them so Cindy my wife you know we're Partners in all these projects um she read the stuff I couldn't take and then Jill you know years Jill was as like I said 94 when we met her she died at 102. and she had really beautifully uh organized archives of things and uh there are no official records that we know of because the uh the the Red Cross building with those records burned down and they're gone so the women have vanished Gone With the Wind so to speak um and you know you get stories from from people who whose grandmother or mother did it uh and they don't know where they serve they don't know the name of the truck they they just know Mom did this um then we had this wonderful thing happen on this tour I'm in the middle of the tour for Irene um a woman brought a picture of her mom standing in front of one of these trucks and she didn't know the name of the truck but we have we have our research that we've put together and we were able to find the name of the truck and where she was when she did the service and Cindy found out that this truck was the first truck through the Arc de Triomphe in the liberation of Paris so to be able to give that back to a daughter is is is the best you know it's better than literary accolades for sure that's incredible so in some ways the the product of your research in many ways the product of your research is this novel and that's what we're here to talk about well we're here to talk about you oh what a big deal you are but I also before we go there I want to know where is this research going to live so I'm sure like where is it going to live once you are on I mean I are you going to start another project and then where will all this research live so if someone wants to consult your research like will it be at the Library of Congress will it be or have you have you not decided yet aren't you Sly I think I'll put it behind a paywall ancestry.com here we come wouldn't that be the worst yeah yeah buy an Irene t-shirt um I uh Miss Jill when she passed away she had connections to University of Illinois Champaign Urbana we should we should head on down there and you can check it out but she the the the University made an archive and her stuff is archived at that library in Champaign I'm not sure what to do with with the stuff we have um I would like to organize it maybe get a you know an actual library or historian to help us get it all in order and and possibly put it somewhere um the people in New Orleans were super kind super generous you know it'd be nice to donate it or maybe leave it because I don't think I can part with it yet you know what I'm saying it's just it matters it means so much to me um and uh but I I would like to put it somewhere permanent I have I have my mother's photographs from buchenwald which are grim and horrible um and I have long thought I'm not sure I I like these photographs in my house um and they should be somewhere so I'm I'm thinking about donating those to the to the one of the Holocaust museums maybe the Smithsonian just to put it in the proper collection that it should be in history truck right I I feel like an exhibit it would it would be very much in the same vein but let's talk more about that later okay this year the Library of Congress National Book Festival theme very fittingly is everyone has a story as a Storyteller an outstanding Storyteller what challenge is did you uncover as you were detailing the experiences of donut dollies and you started to go into that but are the is there was there one or two things that really rose up as they just were in the way I one I would say that you mentioned already was the I always find it's the fire right like it's the fire that burns all the records and now you don't know you know it's but is that it or is there something else what do you think how could this huge story go so unheard for so long until you've brought it to our attention I don't know and you know I've I've complained about this for a little while on this tour but so one of the first pieces that came out I I wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times and the response was instant and overwhelming um the sisters wrote you know women and I think one of my main one of my main uh challenges is I am a dude so I just wanted to make sure I wasn't you know being Mr masculine and all that and and you know naming every bit of artillery or gun or you know what I mean to understand that this this experience was epic and heroic um and huge and to try to Hue as closely as I could to the women's experience the women's voices um and there were not many but there were a couple of mansplainers who showed up in the comments for the piece and they said yeah well he's he's exaggerating he's overstating things those women never saw combat those women were in the rear they were so safe that they never even heard a gunshot and you know the explanation was I've read those more four books you know and I thought yeah thanks for making my case pal you know nobody took this seriously and one of the one of the things one of the amazing little details and that's what you have to look for it's this overwhelming World War II World War II but it these women lived in detail they lived the war was in the truck in their friendships in their relationships with these boys that they were trying to hold up they were trained in a lot of things of course making donuts driving the monster truck gas masks all this weird stuff they had to train in but they were also trained in how to do the social work and the detail that just rang out to me what was that they were trained to play card games and board games to distract the boys however they were trained to always lose so the boys would feel you know special and they were happy to do those things and that that that touched me so much um and Jill who is my hero in all this you know she was very angry because she knew very well that they had been forgotten completely and she was mad at Steven Ambrose you know she didn't like this Band of Brothers business because where were we we were there making them coffee we were there wiping their brows they helped my mom and Jill helped in an emergency surgery on a GI who'd been shot up with machine guns where were we and then when Tom Brokaw God bless him I love him I don't know him but I love him you know from watching him he uh was doing those series about the greatest generation and so forth and she started writing to him and saying where are we where are we we've been forgotten you don't talk hardly about the nurses you don't talk about us at all we were there we were there and he didn't ever answer her of course it's a busy man but his secretary wrote to her and said something like it's very interesting and if we find a minute we'll we'll mention them and they never did so Jill had a life on Vendetta about him and she used to call him the one with the hair you know that one with that hair on television because she felt she felt betrayed by history she didn't think that they were on you know she had the soldier exalted but she did want to at least be recognized for what they had gone through or what they had done to to support those boys so let's talk about your characters um obviously they were inspired by real life people and stories um through your research you incorporated or did you weave in stories of other people's experiences into what you wrote In the novel oh yeah because as soon as people found out what I was doing they would you know my sister my mom my aunt and there were so many amazing stories that I tried to get as many as I could in there to try to you know to quote from the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour you know you want to give somebody as broad an understanding of their world as you possibly can and also with all the travels we did going to Europe was was an amazing experience and a lot of it a lot of the actual Irene research was done with our youngest daughter and my mom was 5'3 and so is our daughter and she never of course met my mom but it was incredible to go to the locations we found the houses she lived in she you know was bivoactive we we found the bomber base in England that my mother served on and here was my daughter looking like my mom walking in her footsteps and for example probably not not my number one favorite moment but one of them was at the B-17 base it was the glattan air base and by the way there were air bases all over Cambridge sheer American bases at the next one over Clark Gable was serving so there's a little bit in the book where the you know Dorothy and Irene keep driving over to the gate under some pretense hoping to see Clark Gable Drive by um but we were at the base and it's still there it's now Regional Airport but all the B-17 runways mile long are there in the middle of Meadows and the the airport manager uh they didn't have any idea the women served there they didn't even because there are no records those women were stationed at the base at the bases all over Cambridge here giving coffee giving Donuts delivering mail taking comments whatever they needed to do at the base parked at the base every morning making coffee they were there at 4am before the sorties left so that everybody would get on a plane you know with a cup of coffee and three hot donuts wrapped in a napkin and they'd be waiting there when they came back so Jeff we drank a toast to them which was very sweet you know shall we drink a toast to we're Brave ladies of the donut dollies I said yes Jeff let's do it you know and we drank it to us and then he said would you like to walk the runway I said yeah heck yes let's go and we're walking the runway with our with my daughter and he says to me you know if you come out here early enough you can still hear the engines so I was getting all excited I'm Mexican so ghost story is the best but we stopped on the runway and he walked off into the tall grass and he started digging around and he brought up a triangular piece of of Runway that was broken off and he brought it to me and he said I think you should have this because your mom might have stood on it you know things like that unbelievable it's on my desk at home that's incredible well for those of you just joining us I'm Heather Marie montia you are here watching PBS books it is my pleasure my extraordinary pleasure to be here with award-winning author Luis Alberto orea and he is discussing his latest um book good Night Irene which is based on his mother and we're talking about World War II and the amazing work of the donut dollies so we were just starting to talk about characters a little bit and the two main characters you have Irene Woodward um she's this woman with spunk from a well-connected prominent New York City family and she aims to escape her abusive fiancee and find purpose um you also have I mean these your characters are incredibly complex right because she she is like becomes best friends with like you know if Opposites Attract this is the opposite like I think a six foot two um women named Dorothy Duncan who is from the Midwest and a farm and I can just I I've got it in my head exactly who who can you talk a little bit about these these characters because both of them were trying to escape they both were looking for purpose and they create this incredible Bond which obviously is inspired by your mother uh your mother's bond with is it Jill Jill yes yes um yeah you know women's friendship it's it's it's an amazing thing and you've Jill used to talk about this we spent as I said earlier years hanging out with her and getting the lowdown on the real nitty-gritty of their lives and I think she was she was sad that the depth of women's friendship the true power of it free of the lens of our postulating as dudes we think we're the record keepers of everything but what's a real women's friendship like what is it like and uh it really it really touched me deeply um and there are a lot of scenes in in that book just about their friendship and there is a romance there's a little story about that guy if you want to hear it later but there's a romance where Irene falls in love with the Gin but the reality is that the love story is between Irene and Dorothy and uh you know the the love story that would last for all time was this friendship with this person even though in real life my mother's Sorrows pulled her away from everything she never went back to New York she didn't go back to her family she stayed in California and she didn't like it so I thought my mom's very confusing um and like I said Jill gave me a a an eyewitness account of who mom was uh in her vivacity before she was wounded um so that was important also since we're talking books here you know my my I guess Discoverer was Ursula Le Guin and you know Ursula was my first uh Mojo Master she published my first story in an anthology and she she guided me through a lot of things and I was a callow callow youth I met her in 1977.

I took her to see Star Wars dig that and she was hilarious because she kept correcting the science she would lean over she used to call me luisito leaned over in her seat and she said luisito when they go into hyperspace those those Stars need to turn blue oh okay you know and when they slow down they should be red I said wow okay um and she's the one who told me I was in college and she told me we see toe it's time for us to become feminists isn't it and I said what and she said yeah you need to be a feminist and I said how do I do that and she said You Begin by taking women's lit classes for the rest of your college career I said okay you know Doris Lessing here I come and uh that was brilliant and she guided chided scolded praised LED uh revamped me and she had a lot of opinions about men writing about women and every one of them ended with don't do that okay there's a well will you take a minute and read an excerpt from your book yeah Cindy's fetching and hang on all right here we go shortly after first arriving at the glattan air base Dorothy was ordered to report to London and begin two weeks of training in the fine points of piloting a club mobile while she was gone their Pals in the Cheyenne rolled in and lined up with them like circus elephants nose to tail Irene was so jealous that they had a handsome GMC with dark gray Galley on the back that she could just spit but it made life better in two ways the Cheyenne had a record player and Phyllis would play swinging records over their loudspeaker and Jill came over to help Irene in her bus which meant she did not have to work it all alone there were days when winter did not want to loosen its grip outside unexpected snow fell on the fields and everything seemed gray but inside the club mobiles it was warm and bright though the others grumbled Irene actually enjoyed the wintry respite something about needing an overcoat and gloves reminded her of New York thank you so in good Night Irene a variety of themes blender War conflict belonging a sense of purpose loss heroism love um I'm not going to say which theme you have to you have to tell me but if you could tell us all a story that is representative of one of those many themes that is something that happened between Dorothy and Irene oh Lord there's I know there's many yeah um uh there there there's a scene later in the book which is one of my favorite scenes in the whole book and uh I I wrote it under the constant prodding of Cindy because she wanted a deepening of some things and there's a moment you know Irene has a dalliance with a of course a dashing fighter pilot and uh you know she she's mooning and thinking about him and there's a uh you know kind of a come to Jesus moment when the two of them uh are coming toward the climax I think of the book and they're sitting by the side of the road and just having that talk you might be lucky enough to have that deep deep gloves off talk with your best friend about what love is and what matters and to realize that oh romances come and go tragedies come and go this war is going to end one day we will still be here we are what matters this thing we have between us um and it it it got to me because I I'm at that age when many of my best friends from childhood are gone this has been an orgy of death the last couple of years and that scene of it's dramatic but it choked me up because I realized that those friends will always be the friends of my lifetime and they're gone and I miss them terribly and I thought yes you know there's a lot of loss in this novel a lot of death and loss but those two those two were the story and it was also you know uh and Muhammad Ali rope-a-dope I'm not going to give too much away but you know you you you you you want to give a good ride it's you know it's almost like making a movie isn't it you want to make sure things happen and set a certain emotional tone to deepen the tragedy and lift up the Ecstasy later for people who don't know would do you mind sharing who Cindy is because I believe we've referred to her twice Cindy is my beloved wife everyone out there Cindy is is this amazing person who is also acknowledged in the the acknowledgments as as his basically his partner in crime on this project and and I just wanted to pay um for the paid proper respect for all of the all of the work she's done and is doing to make this happen as well so thank you Cindy um oh they they do say behind every great man there is a woman I'm not saying that that one has to be better than the other because we're all we're feminists right so I I would say I I'm actually behind Cindy uh and you know as we talked before we went on the air we're on we're on the donut Dolly tour of America right now we're we're on the Irene book tour and it's insane and one of the foolish things we thought would be fun to do was to buy a new SUV and drive all over the country like the ladies would have and it's killing me Cindy's like let's go I'm ready to go and I think every morning but it's been amazing because you know there's something about it and we've learned to our unending Delight that every town in America has a favorite donut shop so now we pull into a town ask where's the best donuts and then we go and we talk to the people and you know put the picture up and it's so cool so we're having a running you know Research into the best Donuts across the country so that might be a good article someday but yeah it's a it's it's a great it's a great thing to do it in Partnership I don't have patience for that you know the Great pipe smoking genius in the loft you know listening to to uh jazz or Mozart and you know wearing his cardigan no no no I'm listening to Nine Inch Nails really loud and and drinking coffee all day and talking it out with Cindy did you find writing this novel was therapeutic for you personally oh yeah yeah I was afraid of it honestly I didn't know how I was gonna deal with the repercussions or the responsibility but I knew I had to I didn't know if I'd publish it or not um but I knew I had to and I wrote several versions of it uh and they were pretty awful and I realized I was working my way through it and uh my agent Julie Bearer is very patient and smart and she read every version and and every one of them didn't want to talk about World War II I thought what a cliche I mean all you have to do is go to Costco in the Costco book table has got dozens of World War II books you know with kinky young women seen from behind dancing down the road or something and I didn't want to do that I wanted to do something something you know your bid for not maybe eternity but for serious something and Julie would read every draft and she'd always say that's really good no that's really interesting realism all that but you know World War II and they say forward to it's about the aftermath World War II and after a couple of drafts I got the message I thought oh hmm World War II and as soon as I did that then all this other you know focusing on my mother's pain which was what I was doing because that's what I knew did not touch the glory of what she lived for example she her world was so different from mine so she was the only American in my entire family the only New Yorker I'd never been anywhere I'd been to Sinaloa I'd been to the Grand Canyon oh Disneyland but I'd never been anywhere and here she was talking about Manhattan too boy the family knew Steinbeck the family knew Einstein one of her best friends was the editor of Paris Vogue who was besties with one of Hemingway's wives and so she would tell me all these inside stories about these people which was astonishing thanks to my mom Hemingway was one of my early literary Heroes she adored him and I stole the opening from Ernest Hemingway thank you very much there's some there's some literary gossip for you I I stole the opening of a Movable Feast he starts that book with the word then and you're running before you know what's happening and I thought thank you papa Hemingway I'ma steal that yeah so that that was all you know that was all that was all really interesting to me and it evolved as soon as I realized that and you've got to know she and Jill knew Patton he knew them they saw him all the time um and when the movie Patton came out she made me go see it which was when I was a callow youth the last thing I wanted to do was go watch a three-hour long World War II Epic about some general and we sat through it three times wow I thought oh my God Mom and she said to me one of the cryptic little clues that led to the novel without knowing it was we were on the bus home and she said to me Georgie Patton was a very naughty boy and I was like Mom what do you mean and I thought don't tell me I don't know whatever but I think I don't think it was in in naughty you know womanizing just just a Hellraiser I think she was very amused by this well this has been an amazing conversation to learn about your book there is because the Library of Congress National Book Festival is happening on this Saturday um can we expect to see you there I believe I will be there I will be there I might even bring donuts you never know um have you been there before yes yeah many times a couple times yeah and you see all your Heroes you know and you find yourself hobnobbing with Legends and and just being there is is it's so fantastic of course so yeah I always I only went once I went in 2019 and I realized that um my people were there not only could I see the people I I've always um I've read and I aspire to it but then I I'm finding new people I admire and I can read their works too yes just every genre every type from kids graphic novels poetry fiction non-fiction sci-fi anything you want is there and um I think the one thing I learned was make sure you make a plan before you go because if not it goes like that because it's only one day it's overwhelming and you you won't be able to see all that you want to see and you won't be able to to go spy on all of your Heroes so you know it's it's a it's a luxurious pain to say hmm this hero or that hero you know this favorite or that favorite but uh it's all just so it's so wonderful and it's in these times by him especially the you know all the struggles that we've gone through in the country and with politics it is so astonishing to go to some place that makes you just celebrate there's something so good still here and it's between book covers so it's a it's a beautiful thing well I think it's for the curious person and what it's similar that's why PBS PBS and libraries um people who go there are curious and you want to always learn and I think I know for me reading your book and getting to spend the last hour with you I've learned so much and it's been incredible and I just want to thank you for your creativity your honesty for also for Cindy to to to help with all of this because I'm sure this was not I mean traveling and getting to those archives and just every little piece of what you did to make this book as incredible as believable the characters are so developed and you are in the room when something scary happens it you are in the room with Irene with Dorothy with you know and I and I just I encourage everyone who hasn't yet read it pick it up and read it um and I just want to thank you and I are you besides your book tour I can't imagine you could possibly be working on something else but is there anything else you want to share that you could be working on or projects yeah well you know I am a literary Factor even um I just put I just published very small press book of poetry because I I like to I like to have poetry poetry is my secret weapon um but I do that for me I don't try to you know push myself as the new Rod McEwen or something I'm just doing that quietly and Irene was so all-consuming that I blew right past a delivery date for my next novel because I think I don't I don't know if I can write any more novels but I'm going to and uh this one's a more Jolly sort of a modern myth kind of a book called the zebras of Tijuana because uh I'm fascinated with my hometown having an obsession with painting donkeys to look like zebras so you know it's sort of a it's sort of a Garcia marquez-esque romp about where that happened where to come from and uh who are the people um and one of the characters from into the beautiful North returns so that's fun I hope I'll get to have you back then I get to talk and hear more about it so thank you so much for being here and for sharing and we look forward to seeing you again soon it's time to close the show I just want to remind everyone out there if you can get to the Library of Congress National Book Festival this weekend August 12th all day it's free and open to the public please come it is an incredible experience it's tons of fun um and you will learn and you will you will laugh you will cry you will do everything you will want to do in one day um until next time I'm Heather Marie montia and happy reading [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you