Susan Rieger, "Like Mother, Like Mother"

In this episode Brett sits down with writer Susan Rieger to discuss her latest book, "Like Mother, Like Mother". They talk about family secrets, generations of women, the blessing and the curse of genetics, and a crafty convo about felt art.

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Transcript

Brett Benner: 0:00

Hey everybody. And welcome to another episode of behind the stack today. I am joined by author Susan Rieger. Who's latest novel is Like Mother, Like Mother. A little bit about Susan, she is a graduate of Columbia Law School. She's worked as a residential college dean at Yale, and as an associate provost at Columbia. She has taught law to undergraduates at both schools, and written frequently about the law for newspapers and magazines. She is the author of The Heirs and The Divorce Papers, and lives in New York City with her husband. So, let's get started. Enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack. So I'm really, really thrilled to be sitting down today with Susan Rieger, whose new book, Like Mother, Like Mother is, it's just so terrific. So thank you for being here. I really, really, really appreciate it. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm so curious before we actually get into the book, because I know that you went to Columbia Law School. Thank you. And I just would love to ask about how the transition to writing started for you.

Susan Reiger: 1:07

Pitching accidental career, I don't even know how to begin to explain it. I went to law school during when the civil rights movement was on and the women's rights movements was on and you would do some kind of, you know, public interest law. But the year I graduated, I got pregnant, had a baby, I had to make money. My husband, Ben, was an academic. And, you know, we lived in a marquee. So, um, I just took jobs as they came along and I've always used my law, but I've never practiced. I loved law school. I thought it was wonderful and it's been very useful and it, and it's a lovely credential to wave about. But I've always used my law and I started writing op ed type pieces. Legal ones on legal issues sometime in my thirties. And I did that through my thirties and forties, and then I taught undergraduates law. And so it was a part of my work experience too. When I was at Yale, I was a Dean at one of the residential colleges at Yale and projects I had done when I was teaching law at Brooklyn Law School actually, was to prepare a moot court docket where you had to make up. A whole case and facts so that the students could write briefs and argue it so much fun doing it. And everyone else who had to do it hated it. And I thought this might make a good novel sometime. So after I had been divorced 10 years and I was at Yale and I had been there about eight years and I had was on, yeah, I had time on my hand. I just started writing my first novel, The Divorce Papers. And I just went from there. No, I was very lucky. My daughter is a novelist and she was incredibly helpful and encouraging and that was my original editor. So that

Brett Benner: 2:59

was very good. And here we are. All right. So for people who don't know the book, do you have an elevator pitch?

Susan Reiger: 3:07

My elevator pitch, um, it's about a woman, a very hard driving workaholic woman who had a very rough childhood and is now editor in chief of a very important book. And DC newspaper, and she has three children, two of whom are cheerful. And the third one, the youngest one wants her mother's attention. And her mother, because of her childhood is completely incapable of being a mother. And so the story is basically focused on those two women that you, we take them from the beginning, pretty much how they manage their relationship, my heroine dies on the first page, actually on the first sentence of the book. So this is not a spoiler. But I always say you have to bury your parents twice. The first time you put them in the ground. And the second time you say to yourself, they're never going to change. They're always who they are. I have to deal with them. And that's, that's sort of a kind of stream through this. There's also a little bit of a mystery. My heroine, Lila, her mother quitalized when she was two years old and never came home again. Her father said she died. And the question was, nobody ever really was sure she had died or not. And so part of the story towards the end is, whatever happened to this mother?

Brett Benner: 4:28

Lila is such an incredible character to me. I mean, she felt like a cross between Katherine Graham and some part of Martha Stewart, which could be influenced by the fact that I just watched that, um, documentary on CNN that they did on her. But even her relationship with her daughter, Alexis, bared similarities to her relationship with Grace. What was your inspiration for her? Cause she's such a amazing character.

Susan Reiger: 4:51

I suppose in some ways, I always said there would be no Lila Perera without real much of a needy with my mother. My mother is not like Lila in, in many ways, but she's also very tough. Very funny, not very motherly, you know, I'm, I'm Italian and Jewish and nobody was cozy or cuddly. Nobody was on time, but, um, and they loved me in their way. And I always think my mother did the best she could for all of us. She always had our back. Children weren't that important in her life. She had to raise us. And if anything had happened to us, she would have been devastated. But my father, her relationship with my father was always the most important relationship. And she did fine. She, when she became an empty nester, there were, and there was no narcissism involved with her or successes where our successes, they had nothing to do with her. She didn't get in the way.

Brett Benner: 5:50

It's funny because you say you're Jewish and Italian. And to me, my perception of both of those groups are very affectionate. And so it's interesting hearing you say that. Cause I grew up with, I was a WASP. And there was very, there was very to none, you know, so that's interesting to hear you say that I, I was thinking about, do you have a point when the two of the sisters are talking later, Ava and Stella, Grace's sisters are talking about their upbringing and they say, I'm paraphrasing here, but essentially, well, you know, our parents never hit us like we had a good, good upbringing and, uh, It kind of made me laugh because I've had that same conversation with my siblings about my parents. And I wonder if part of it was just the time too, but we'd always say like, it was never hit, never, never abused. Like we came out of it and thought, you know, they took care of us. They did. They put clothes on our back. They put food on the table. We didn't sit around and talk about. Feelings and so on and so forth.

Susan Reiger: 6:53

We didn't talk about feelings either. We, but my parents talked to us all the time. Um, and my mother did treat us like people and we talked politics, a lot of politics. Parents were very interesting. And, um, and I'm, I'm considerably older than you. I grew up in the fifties and sixties where, you know, you'd get up in the morning, get on your bike and wouldn't come back until dinner. We had a great deal of independence too. It's just a different kind of,

Brett Benner: 7:18

well, yeah. Do you find that your Relationship with your daughter was very different than your relationship with your own mother.

Speaker 2: 7:25

Oh, I think so. But I think you may have to ask her. I was just crazy about her and I was, because she grew up in New York city, which I didn't until she was six, seven, I was more protective. I mean, she wasn't allowed to go to the playground by herself and things like that. I suppose I have some of my mom's coolness, but I think she knows I adored her. And interestingly enough, my mom adored her. They had one of those classic grandmother granddaughter relationships. My mother thought Maggie was the bee's knees, the best ever.

Brett Benner: 7:57

That's, that's so interesting too. And do you think now, like, cause you had our grandchildren and how is, and how do you find that relationship? Because I do always wonder with that, with being a grandparent, sometimes a relationship is so different than your own child.

Speaker 2: 8:11

Well,

Brett Benner: 8:11

part of it is because you're not raising them day to day.

Susan Reiger: 8:12

Yes. That, that, that is a liberty. My grandsons are now 11 and 14 and they're, you know, a tween and a teenager. And they're, they're, they're talk to you, especially with their family, but they're, they're very much involved in their own lives. They're very adorable. I was very close to them when they were growing up because they lived in Brooklyn and I went once a week to see them. My granddaughter, on the other hand, who lived in Virginia and is now 18 and a freshman at Amherst. We've become very, very close as she's grown up and that has been, that has been very, become very important to me. And what I say about my grandchildren is this, they're the easiest loves of my life. They're very easy to love. Everybody else is much more difficult.

Brett Benner: 8:57

So Joe, who is Lila's husband, I love this relationship. And for our listeners and our viewers, it's all really about so much of their relationship is about gender roles because she takes on this kind of What would be considered a typical male view of things. She's the workaholic and she relies on him so much to take up the slack as a parent for these kids. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Susan Reiger: 9:23

Joe has a, it has a good career. He's a very successful lawyer, first a government lawyer and then in private practice. But he was the primary parent as, as one of the older sisters said, and it's very hard to tell them apart. Even I have difficulty telling them apart. When they talk about their youngest sister, Grace, they say, you know, you had two dads. You had, mom was one dad and, and dad was the other dad, but they called it, they called both their parents by their first name. Lila didn't want to be called mother. And so to be fair, they called their father, Joe. But they were very close to Joe. And Joe realized there were things he didn't do. For instance, one of the problems is that the two older sisters, they're called the virtual twins, the

Brett Benner: 10:06

Starper,

Susan Reiger: 10:07

it's very hard to tell them apart. And they know it. They know that about themselves. Their friends can't sometimes tell them apart. So they're only, they're 13 months apart. And Joe says, I should have sent them to different schools. I should have made them wear different flowers. I should, he, he knows the things he didn't do. And he said, if, if Lila had been a real mother, she might've been able to tell me this, but she didn't know anything. And because of Lila's very hard growing up, she says to Joe, when they are getting married, she says, nobody would have children with me. I'm not fit to be a mother. And her motto is, and was throughout Hippocratic code first do no harm. Joe is. Just really terrific. Guinness Book of Fathers.

Brett Benner: 10:53

I recognize that role because my sister had that. My sister was a nurse anesthetist and my brother in law always worked. But when they had kids, he just had more of the career that could make himself available to that. And I remember my mom always used to say, you know, your sister could never have had that career without her husband. But I also love that Lila So upfront about it, you know, she, she says, I, I, I understand this. It's not, she doesn't look at it as a failure. It's just a fact, you know, I couldn't do this without you. And also I'm not cut out to do these certain things that traditionally, what we now call a trad wife would probably be that none of these women in this book would be considered a trad wife. They're the anti trad wife. I also made me wonder a little bit too, if in terms of these gender roles, How much changed with COVID in terms of everybody was home for a while. Everybody had to be kind of participatory in a way that they didn't have to be for men who were used to being out of the house all the time and suddenly who are home contributing and doing things they never did before. It just made me think of that as I was going through this.

Susan Reiger: 12:01

Well, I suspect Lila went into the office during COVID. She goes, she does get COVID early. Lila would work everywhere and everybody, and by the time COVID comes around, her daughters are all grown up and out of the house, then she and Joe would find separate spaces to work. But I suspect she went into the office.

Brett Benner: 12:18

Had she lived, what do you think she would have wanted to be called by her grandchildren?

Susan Reiger: 12:22

Hello, Lila.

Brett Benner: 12:23

Everybody called her

Susan Reiger: 12:24

Lila. She says that at one point. She says, except for a group of people whom she calls the pod snaps, that everybody at the newspaper called her Lila, whether it was the porter or the janitor or the editor or a writer, everyone called her Lila. She was very democratic that way. Call someone by their first name. They can call me by their first name.

Brett Benner: 12:47

I love that. So one of the, one of the big themes of the book is this idea of, like what I said, the, the blessing or the curse of genetics and, and how much we resemble our parents, what we embrace and what we hope to kind of escape from. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Susan Reiger: 13:02

Say it, I, I thought about it. This, that we can, we can rebel against our parents. But we can't overthrow their influence and we can't deny the genetics. I, I mean, as I get older, I look in the mirror and I see myself looking like both my mother and my grandmother look nothing alike. The temperaments, Grace really is like Lila in many ways, or as Lila says, Grace is very much like me, but I'm nothing like her. Lila is a more ruthless version of Grace. Um, and Grace longs for something she doesn't have with her mother, but she. She didn't think she was all that cut out to be a mother either, though she does have a wonderful line. She said, you know, my sisters and I will never get over our mother. She said, and if I have children, they'll never get over me. She she seems to these things. She is temperamentally like her mother, though she looks like her father, which is interesting. Whereas the star birds have elements of their mother. There's no question. They look just like her. I mean, that family resemblance. Lila has a sister too, who looks just like her too, and that's one of other Grace's grievances. She doesn't have a beautiful name like her sisters. She's tall, they're short, she's dark haired, she's blonde, but she looks just like her father, whom she does love and knows is a great human being. I think certain things are just temperamentally there. You see it in your children. I've always had a temper. My mother said that when I was, you know, four, I was a foot stamper.

Brett Benner: 14:38

It is a strange thing to watch it in your own children. Just recognize yourself or your behaviors and your children, or sometimes things that you wouldn't have even necessarily seen in yourself that suddenly somebody else calls out and says in your child, Oh my, that's so much like you, or they're just like you, it's a, it's a strange thing. I also think so many people when they. Begin the parenting journey, start out saying, I'm not going to, my parents did this, and I'm certainly not going to do this. And how quickly you fall into some of those same patterns, whether you want to or not.

Susan Reiger: 15:16

Yes. I think you can't help yourself. They're, they're in, they're in your brain, they never really die. They never die. And they don't change. And they're just think the Greek and Roman gods were really, Zeus and Hera were really pretty much like your parents. When my daughter was very small, it reminded me when, uh, Marjorie Taylor Greene said that they, well she means people like me, control the weather. Well, I certainly wouldn't have sent, wouldn't have sent a hurricane to Asheville, that's for sure. No! Mar a Lago! I mean, come on! You and me! Anyway, so, um, but my daughter was about three and we were walking home on Riverside Drive, which is the windiest. Road in Manhattan and we're upper Manhattan on a hill too. And the wind is blowing and it's cold. And she turns her sweet little face to me and says, let me stop the wind. I said, do you think I can do that? And she said, yes. And that was the first, that was the first time she realized my human limitations. I think

Brett Benner: 16:22

after

Susan Reiger: 16:23

that, I wasn't, you know, we're very powerful in their life. When was sure. I think one of the things they say about children is children start to lie. Okay. When they're about five or six to, to, to test whether their parents really know everything and then go everywhere or, or invisibly following them around. And so if they get away with a lie, they can have a sense of some autonomy, which is a nice way of looking at children's lives, which they all do at home for, right?

Brett Benner: 16:54

Yes, so much of that is what this book is about too, is learning about past and learning about our families and just the stuff that you learn about your parents as you age. My mother, before she passed, she, she had dementia, but I used to really appreciate when it all started because she, these memories would begin to surface that she confused sometimes my brother with my father. And so she would be talking about things that I knew were parts of her life that she lived in that we never knew about. So I would try to get more information, you know, whether she would look at my brother and say, like, well, You know, he's, he's been staying out late. I don't like this, the people that he runs with. And of course, this was like my brother she was talking about. So I would, I would always kind of just kind of prompt her and tell me more, tell me more. Cause I was very curious about this history and about their relationship and about things that because, and this is something else I wanted to ask you in terms of what I said about. You know, your relationship with your daughter, I find as a parent now, there's so much more openness between myself and my children about things we talk about, and it's also because of how we live now and because there is a news media that's in your pocket and information that's being disseminated. So I think there is a lot more information that gets shared, but nothing was told to us when we were little. My parents were my parents, and we kind of lived in our own bubble of kids, and they provided and did all those things, but I just knew what I knew, which was like, okay, I could watch TV Saturday morning, I go to school, I do the things I'm supposed to do.

Susan Reiger: 18:27

Parents, I knew a lot about my mother's history, because my grandfather was a labor leader, and he, he led the Lawrence Strike of 1912, Red and Roses Strike, and I always say that I'm just a real mutt, you know, everybody in my family has been intermarried, and nobody's been grand. I'm But I do come from labor royalty, uh, a lot about him and her growing up, but there were two stories. My, my mother never told me that were until she was confronted with them. When my grandfather died, he had a large obituary in the New York times and we were very, very proud. And as we get to the end, it says she has, he has survived by his son. And two daughters, he said, you know, my mother and a woman named Vera. And we say, who the hell is Vera? I'm 11 years old or 12 years old. And I say, it's Vera. And she tells us then my sister, I have an older sister and a younger sister. And she tells us, and she says, she was her half sister. Her father had been married before. And she said, she was always mean to us. I never liked her, gone. Never talked about it, never met her and children keep their parents secrets. I mean, I told people my mother had a sister when I was grown up, a secret sister. The second one was when I was getting moved in with my first husband and I'm in my, you know, early life, what I mean, 24, 25 years old. And my, and my grandmother says to me, this is the one married to the labor leader. She says, well, you know, your grandfather and I were never married. And I said, no, I didn't know that would have gotten, if they would have gotten married, if they got married about 1912, something like that. And she said, yeah, she said, most, a lot of our friends, they were, they were left wing. They were anarchists and socialists. And so she thought it was perfectly normal. And so she wanted to get me a help swarming gift when I was moving in with Peter and I wasn't married to him. And she bought me two sets of sheets for our queen size bed. That was my grandmother. She was different. So I suppose that's probably of having grandmother grandfather relationship. I never said anything to my mother about this. But a few years later, my father mentions it for some reason over dinner. My mother has gone out of the room and he mentions it to me, only to me and says, you know, your grandparents, your mother's parents were never married. And she found that embarrassing, somewhat humiliating, which you would never know from my mother. You can't imagine her being either of those. Yeah. But she, I think she did sort of at a time want middle class respectability, which she did not grow up with. And so I'm now maybe almost 30, but I don't say anything to my, and then some years later we're talking about family secrets with my sisters there too. Don't know. They know about Vera, but they don't know about my grandparents. And I said, and so I said, well, you know, family secrets, you know, my grandfather was And my mom says, well, what kind of secrets? I said, well, like. A Nan and Grandfather weren't married and she says, this is so lie to lie. Yes. End of subject. Never. That's the kind of thing. That was period. Yes. Somebody said, you know, we say no as a complete sentence. Yes. It was like a complete sentence. It's just who she is. And so I think it by two books. And my second book in this book, there are secrets, family secrets. And I think it, I think every family has its secrets. Um, and my parents didn't certainly confide in us unless we made them. I'm only interested in families. That's all I'm interested in as a, as a writer, as a reader, I'm interested in a lot of things, but as a writer, I think families, everything, you can find everything in a

Brett Benner: 22:25

family. I want to talk really quickly about Ruth. Who is, becomes Grace's roommate in college and then they become best friends and she's, she's a very kind of integral part of the story. Can you talk a little bit about her? I loved her character. I, I also just thought it was such a unique perspective because she really does develop a relationship with the family in her own way with each of them. And so what made you bring her in and give her the importance in terms of a character that you did?

Susan Reiger: 22:51

I always think someone like grace needs to be moderated. And since, and in my first book, I have a character who's somewhat grace like, and she has a best friend who's always sort of moderating her. And I like, I wanted to write a book about friendship. There's that famous. line from Doris Lessing, which she used in The Golden Bull, she said, I can't remember the names, Mary Light Joan. And the idea that the two women's friendships should be very important to a novel, I, I think is, is a good thing to have. Um, I think women, I think friendships now are, are talked about much more, but there's also something so straightforward. And I was thinking about, actually this morning, lovable about Ruth, everyone. Loves Ruth and, and she has no sense of humor, which is unlike anybody else, anybody else in the, in the, well, she, she, she recognizes humor. She just doesn't have one herself.

Brett Benner: 23:52

She's the straight man,

Susan Reiger: 23:55

but she's, and it's not that she's sincere. She's very, she can be very matter of fact. And I think her matter of factness appeals to Grace, too. And what Grace provides for her is a kind of gendering. Grace presents a whole different world. Ruth is Southern and Baptist, and she, she has this roommate who comes from this very liberal Jewish family. And, and, and the thing about being Jewish in this book is I wanted to write a book that where being Jewish was no different from a novel where people were Christians. It was just, they aren't religious, they're very secular, it's just who they are, it's not a major theme in the book. And you know, that's what I wanted it to be. You know, Grace is exotic to Ruth and Ruth is exotic to Grace. And as Grace says, they put us together as roommates because we're both tall, though I don't know how they knew that, but one is 5'11 and the other is six feet. Yeah, I do love Ruth. She's because. She's, she's, she's sort of Joe like for Grace because, you know, she's someone who loves her but who speaks to her quite frankly and tells her to pull up her socks. Sure.

Brett Benner: 25:09

You just, you were talking really quickly about the whole Jewish aspect of the book and how that's not what you, you know, that you just wanted to be a part of it. And it's interesting because that was my next question for you and I was going to preface it by saying Ruth would classify herself as a Christian, but, but only in the ways of kind of adhering to the tenets of treating people well. As I always say, my personally, I feel like there's a big difference between spirituality and religion and there's a, there's a very wide cast there based on my own experience. But, and grace being Jewish and they don't celebrate any of that. The holidays, but they asked this question and I wanted to ask you, what is your Jewish?

Susan Reiger: 25:42

What is my Jewish?

Brett Benner: 25:44

Yes.

Speaker 2: 25:45

I think what my, well, I'm, I'm my, my father and, and my second husband is Jewish. My first husband was an English Catholic, more like my mother than like, and I, I would say I married my mother the first and my father the second. So my father and my husband are one part of being Jewish. They're sort of very lovely Jewish men, not at all religious. But they're very sweet natured. That's one, that's one thing. So husbands, husbands and fathers are Jewish. Bagels and lox are Jewish. A lot of, a lot of my closest friends are Jewish or half Jewish or married to Jews or, you know, I mean, it's New York City. I mean, it's not like everybody in New York City is Jewish, you know, and, and I can't remember. He said it though, Lenny Bruce, everyone in New York City is Jewish and no one in Montana is Jewish, right? It's just, it's just, it's just. It's a cultural thing. You know, we're we, we think of ourselves as Jewish, we know we're Jewish, also semi exotic being Italian too. And, and, and so it's just who I am. I mean, it's very much a part of me, but it doesn't figure much in my

Brett Benner: 26:51

daily life. I probably put that kind of working with gay, so, right. Yeah. The same way. Right. So, yeah, it's just, you know, it's part of the fabric of the whole

Susan Reiger: 27:01

that's, you know, so, you know, many, many gay couples have choke it. And you have children just the way straight couples had children for, you know, a century. And it's just, that's just normal life. That's who you are and what you do.

Brett Benner: 27:15

Yeah, exactly. I have two things because I want to be conscious of your time. One of my favorite lines in the book is said by a character, which is, if I looked back, I couldn't go forward. Do you believe that for yourself?

Susan Reiger: 27:29

I'm back, but I don't know how useful it is. I mean, well, I, you have to know this and I've spent 10 years in psychoanalysis. I'm From the age of 35 to 45, and here and there I've met a brush up, but I had a good analysis. And I think having spent 10 years looking inside myself and crying a lot, I'd sort of say I'm finished with that. I did my interior life and I have to just deal with what's going on now. So later in life, I look back less. I might have memories, but I'm not at all in it. But, you know. Lila never looks back in a, you know, there's the, the unexamined life is the only life worth living. And then there's that epigraph at the beginning, don't look back, someone may be gaining on you. Anyway, so that, that is some, a theme of the book. I look back, I've given up on that extreme introspection of

Brett Benner: 28:31

a young person. Okay. So moving off to two things. First of all, I want to say congratulations because I know the book has been optioned by universal television for a series, which is really exciting. Um, now are you going to be involved in that in any way?

Susan Reiger: 28:46

Well, I, I, I have some kind of associate in the contract, some kind of associate producer somewhere. Producer.

Brett Benner: 28:52

Yeah.

Susan Reiger: 28:52

I think, I think I won't be very involved. I think I have to trust them. And so I think more or less it's, it's, it's going to be theirs. There's a wonderful. A book called The Wild Robot, and they made it into a movie, and my liked grandsons just loved it. And we all read it to the multiple turns. And they made a movie, which they all went to see, and they all loved the movie. And they said it was so different, and they didn't mind it. I think you mind it when they take a story you love, and it isn't good, the movie. They think they've been named it, and it isn't good. But he said they love the movie, and they love the book, and they're very different. And that's it. So, um, I'm, I'm willing to live with that.

Brett Benner: 29:38

That's great. It'll be fun for you, I think, in terms of casting to watch how these people come together. Yes. Yeah. I

Susan Reiger: 29:45

decided, well, I decided Lila, Scarlett Johansson, she's half Jewish.

Brett Benner: 29:50

Yeah.

Susan Reiger: 29:51

Oh, I don't think you need to go Jewish to play Lila, because. Right.

Brett Benner: 29:54

Off to wardrobe. Right. My last question for you is, tell me about, I was on your Instagram, tell me about your felt art.

Susan Reiger: 30:03

Oh, my felt art. I started it in 2016 when I was running against Hillary Clinton, and he said at the convention, only I can save you. Only I. Still saying it. My daughter then had a bookstore, a children's bookstore, and I've always liked to work with my hands, and she said, You have to make something that we can sell at the store. So I made felt. Christmas ornaments of animals, you know, simple felt, you know, both sides. And um, you know, I did a fox, I did elephants, I did, um, a frog and a lily pad. That was very, very nice. And uh, things like that. So, so I had felt, I had a lot of felt. And so I, I don't know what made me do it, but I, I sat down at the table, I spent 12 hours doing it and I made my first felt, which was Trump. And he was a caricature, you know, with that blonde hair. Flying across the set and holding his little hand up saying, only I, and that was my first one. And then, so I felt, Oh, well, why don't I do someone I like? So I did one of Hillary Clinton. And so then I just got into it and I just went on a, and when Trump won, I just went on an anti Trump chair and done them recently because I just don't want to spend time with Mr. Trump.

Brett Benner: 31:32

And I get

Susan Reiger: 31:33

it. I get it. So I, I, I, I'd now do, um, birthday cards. Oh, nice. I, I make felt thicker. I like working with my hands. I think, I think working with your hands is very important. I think. I think it's good. I think the brain works better. I'm really sorry. Children aren't learning how to write anymore because I somehow think that using your hand affects how you brain. It's true. I'm, I'm not very scientific. This is all, this is fine.

Brett Benner: 32:04

No, I understand. And I was, I was, I was watching one of these videos that someone posted the other day on Instagram about like, if you were a child of the eighties, you remember these things and all that. And one of them was the chalkboard with the cursive letters above it and the smaller case and uppercase. And I thought, wow, it's so weird that all of that's lost. And like, you know, my kids don't know any of that. It's just, it's such a strange thing. Well, this was wonderful. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I'm so excited for you. The book, Everyone Again is Like Mother, Like Mother. Buy it from your independent bookstore if you can, but just get it. It's, it's really wonderful. And uh, again, thank you for being here and I hope you have a lovely day.

Susan Reiger: 32:49

Thank you for having me. You too. Bye bye.

Brett Benner: 32:53

Thank you again to Susan for joining me and for all of you listening. And if you've liked this episode, please like and subscribe. If you have the time, it would be really helpful if you can also leave a review. One more thing. There will be no episode next week because November 5th is, of course, Election Day here in the United States. So everybody get out if you're in the States and vote. And I will be back with a new episode the following week. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you all soon.