Tom Lamont, Going Home

In this episode Brett sits down with writer Tom Lamont to discuss his debut novel, "Going Home". They talk about the all consuming challenges of raising kids, writing as a novelist vs journalist, fathers, faith and being Jewish. 

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Transcript

Brett Benner: 0:00

Hey, everybody. It's Brett. And welcome back to behind the stack. My first author interview of 2025. But before we get into that, there are a few new releases that are coming out today that I wanted to highlight. One is Alice Feeney's Beautiful Ugly. This is a really fun book. Thriller. Alice Feeney is the queen of the mysterious narratives and what you know and what you don't know. It's really fun. Also speaking of fun, Grady Hendrix. Witchcraft for wayward girls. Grady Hendrix tackles witches in this latest book. Tracy Lang has a new book, What Happened to the Craze, and speculative author Nnendi Okorafor comes out with her new book, Death by the Author. Author Sarah Sligar's new book Vantage Point. Another mystery thriller, and for those of you who are Josh Gad fans, he has a new biography called In Gad We Trust. And lastly, Daniel Black, his new novel Isaac's Song comes out today. Personally, I really liked his previous novel, Don't Cry For Me, so I'm really looking forward to this one. And of course, all of these books that I just rattled off will be up on my bookshop. org page so you can check them all out there and purchase them there as well. Now, my first guest on the show, this is also his release day. It's author Tom Lamont with his new book, Going Home, a little bit about Tom. Tom Lamont is an award winning journalist and one of the founding writers for The Guardian's Longreads. He is the interviewer of choice for Adele and Harry Styles, having written in depth about both of these musicians since they first emerged to fame in the 2010s. He's been a regular correspondent for American GQ. He lives in North London with his wife and two children. Going Home is his debut novel. Enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack. Thank you so much for being here today. I absolutely loved your book. And so I'm so thrilled that you're here. And also I should just say thank you to the wonderful Jenny Jackson, who, was instrumental, and she sent me this and she said, you have to read this. And, and it's funny because I. had been following the, the Guardian list of which you were one of the 10 new novelists of 2024 to watch. And I was obsessed with that list. It's, it's a fantastic group of authors.

Tom Lamont: 2:23

Yeah. It's like, um, yeah, it feels a bit like the arbitrary date they give to you, the release date of your book kind of groups you with a generational slice. And it's quite fun to sort of work out through your first year who your peers are, you know, and I guess in a way you'll always be connected to them. It's like the class of 2024 or 2025. And I guess, yeah, I'll always sort of have that lovely like filament connecting me to those 10 other writers.

Brett Benner: 2:48

Yeah. What a great group. So congratulations. I'm

Tom Lamont: 2:50

glad, you know, Jenny and that, that was the link here. Cause I mean, I, I, I've sort of slowly realizing how lucky I've been to have. Such a rounded figure, she's shepherding this book up to an American audience. You know, she's this incredible editor with a, with a starry reputation. And she's absolutely seen the process from the other side, from the writer, from the author's perspective, having written, published an incredibly successful book herself. And I feel like she's, she's this incredible resource for, for a newbie like me to, to, to be able to sort of tap into. I like, I just love picking her brain.

Brett Benner: 3:23

So do you have an elevator pitch for the book that you can give us?

Tom Lamont: 3:26

Oh, sure. Um, so we're in an elevator and I'm describing to you the basics. Yeah, exactly.

Brett Benner: 3:32

And it can be, if you want, this could be a very tall building. So,

Tom Lamont: 3:35

okay. So we've got a few floor big, maybe, maybe like a Vegas casino sort of thing. The story starts from the perspective of a young man, in his thirties, a Londoner called Teo, who, goes home to the North London suburbs where he grew up for what he thinks will be a pretty routine weekend care visit to see his ailing dad, a guy called Vic. But while he's there, something dramatic happens. He ends up having to stay much longer than he intended, and he ends up having to care for a two year old boy, a kid called Joel, who finds himself without really anyone else to look after him. And the story from that point revolves around Joel, who looks after him and how. There's Teo, a sort of reluctant parental figure stepping into an absence. There's Teo's best friend Ben, the least reliable person in his message groups. Uh, a bit of a hedonist and a narcissist, kind of a bloody nightmare. Someone. you would say at the outset is just about the least equipped to be involved in the raising of a impressionable vulnerable child, but who nevertheless forces himself to get involved. Vic, the father figure, who has some regrets about his own parenting journey, his own time as a, as a father in his 30s and 40s, takes the arrival of Joel in his house as a kind of second opportunity to try again as a, as a parent. And then there's a fourth adult character, her name's Sybil, she's uh, friendly with Vic, she gets to know the younger men, and she in her own way becomes involved in Joel's continuing care over about a year. I feel like the book is sort of rippled with melancholy, but on the whole I A joyful book. I wanted an uplifting book. I wanted a book that was honest about the, uh, granular experience of parenting from the perspective

Brett Benner: 5:32

of

Tom Lamont: 5:32

entirely unprepared people. That's how I experienced becoming a parent. I got run over by it. I got hit. By the truck of it, overnight, and learned everything as I went, as a lot of people do, as my parents probably did, as your parents probably did. Any number of, um, parenting stories, as different as they are in their specifics, generally involve headlong education in how not to let a child die. and really Joel, the two year old is the beating heart of the story and the care, the need for him to be looked after, to be raised, to be steered, to be entertained, to be fed, to be picked up, to be put back together again. that's the, Thrust of the book.

Brett Benner: 6:16

And we've arrived. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's funny because yesterday, when I was writing down some stuff from this, there was an article and now I'm sounding so Hollywood. There was an article on the Hollywood reporter. Talking about some of the state of current television right now. And it was talking about, three television shows in particular, shrinking, which is a show that I actually work on. And then this show, somebody somewhere, that's on HBO. And then the last one was, a man inside, which is a new Ted Danson show on Netflix and that set in a, retirement community. But. The article was talking about bridging the comedy with, melancholy and sadness and the success of that with all three of these shows. But it made me think of this because one of the things that the journalist said in the end, what works and what this is too, is there is a collective empathy without slipping into sentimentality. And that made a lot of sense. With this to me, because it really could have been maudlin and also, kind of cloying and sweet with the sun. And I feel like you really avoid all that in such a great way that it is very moving, but it's also so funny. I mean, there's parts of it that are like really, really, really funny with these characters and also Hugely identifiable, like you just said, for anybody who's been a parent

Tom Lamont: 7:36

Thank you for saying all that, Brett. And, and I do, but I do want it to be, I always knew if I was going to write about parenting small children, there was sort of a few hurdles I knew I was placing in front of myself that I'd have to get over. One of them was, I absolutely wanted this to be a novel that, you know, People could enjoy whatever their own engagement with small children, with parenting or not. And secondly, I just absolutely policed myself against as well as I could police myself against letting the two year old boy become Chloe because, you know, kids are as in life in fiction, a bit of a nightmare can be a bit of a nightmare. You know, there's, there's many a book I've sent sort of spinning across the room because I just can't bear the child. I don't believe them. I've never met one like these fictional kids. And I really, really challenged myself to try and get down. Essentially my son, my son when he was two and the Extraordinary and utterly ordinary ways that he approached the world, the sort of estranged middle state between being expressive and baffling, between verbal and nonverbal, between independence and total dependence. It was a very particular moment in childhood I wanted to capture. Kind of a part of childhood I think none of us really remember in ourselves, just slightly before memory, long term memory kicks in, but which it's so beguiling when you meet it, that age, this is sort of that rogue, I guess in England we call them toddlers, you know, because they toddle, they go everywhere, they're impossible to keep up with, they have their first taste of motion, of of exploration, of naughtiness, and they are at their most exhausting, and at their most magical, and so all of that I tried to bind up in Joel, but I hope it is a story that anyone can relate to, Read and get get something out of because it's also about the other end of parenting the the saying goodbye to one's own parents And sure that is something that for better or worse almost everyone will go through it has been through it came out of a time in my life as I was writing it where I felt very much sort of arms distance from both, you know, my, my little boy was getting older. My dad was dying and it was all happening at the same time. And at a certain point they just. They were essentially the same type of human, their needs were the same, to care for them was really similar. And I just wanted to put some fiction in that place, that strange moment in a life when you can see almost both ends of it, you're meeting, two people are almost meeting on a journey in and out.

Brett Benner: 10:12

Yeah, my father. Passed when my son was first born. In fact, my parents were out visiting in Los Angeles. It's the first time that he had seen him and he died that week while he was here. And, it's such a strange moment to All of a sudden, recognize the journey. as a parent, but you're also still a son. And you're almost sandwiched between these two realities of learning to or discovering how to parent yourself while also watching your father, in this case for, for you, it's weird, isn't it? It's, it's very strange.

Tom Lamont: 10:52

It's a deeply weird phase, because also I think a lot of people, me included, learn a new type of forgiveness for your own parents. When you become a parent yourself, you suddenly understand it. You understand so much more about the decisions they made, the ways they frustrated you, the limits that were put on your life, the rollercoaster of the, of the journey. And I'm sorry, in your case. That's heartbreaking as a situation to be in because you were probably learning all these things about dadhood in, in this case, the mix and the mess of that. And you lost him incredibly quickly, too quickly well, in my case, it prompted new conversations with my father, you know, just about, it made me, you know, much more, much more sympathetic. And, it was like, you suddenly saw the, the answers on the back of the page, you know, you suddenly, saw your own childhood in greater depth in the round.

Brett Benner: 11:45

Absolutely. And I think you have a, if not an understanding completely, at least I don't want to say sympathy, but a kind of reality of everybody's just human and they were probably trying to do the best that they were capable of doing in whatever circumstances they were given at this time. You said that the character of Vic, some of it was inspired by your father and, and that situation, and I've read, another interview with you where you said, you know, your father was not a meddler like Vic is, do you think if your dad read it, he would have recognized himself? Do you think he would have liked the character of Vic?

Tom Lamont: 12:18

That's a really lovely question. I, I have thought about it because I know the page I was writing when he died. I wrote it kind of chronologically and I can sort of see, I've got a book in front of me now and I can sort of see the moment in the book where he passed away. I write every day. I wrote that morning of his death, the day he died and I wrote the day after. We knew he was dying and I sort of knew that the time track I was on, he was probably never going to read it. And That did allow a certain freedom in writing a character that drew certainly heavily on his biography and his personal experiences in life. As I write in the Acknowledgements, I made some pretty chunky changes to the, to the, to the character of this father figure, of, of Vic, because in order to make the plot go, I needed I needed my fictional Vic to be a meddler, as you quoted. He needs to get involved a few times, not always to the advantage of everyone concerned. So your question was, would he recognize himself and would he like it? I know that he would. Brim with pride, just about the fact of the book and about the fact of it being published. I don't think he would recognize certain parts of the descriptions. And I think he would be alarmed at other things, other observations. As you or I would when our children grow up and write about us. But, but I think he would like the character. I think he would, as a lot of readers have fallen for Vic, which I'm really pleased about, because he's, he makes a mess of things a few times. I think my dad, who wasn't a terrifically hungry reader, was very empathetic and gave me a very solid grounding in trying to think about things through other people's eyes. experiences, you know, just try and walk in other people's shoes, which is the root of empathy, which is the root of being a human, really. And he was a great teacher of that. And so I think he would vibe with Vic. Yeah, I want to think so. Luckily, I've never really had to Find out though, you know, these, I don't know how other, I don't know how other authors go through this. I mean, you've, you've met them, you've interviewed them, you know, when you capture people or aspects of people or slivers of people and put them on the page and they're still alive to read it. What must that be like? How'd you, what's the next Sunday lunch? Like, you know,

Brett Benner: 14:27

deny, deny, deny.

Tom Lamont: 14:30

Yeah. Well, it's like, what's the Zuckerberg line? It's like, move quickly and break things. Yeah, you fake it till you make it.

Brett Benner: 14:35

I think I'd be more concerned If I was the person that you modeled Ben off of, then I, I would be like, um, uh, hello?

Tom Lamont: 14:43

Well, a lot, a lot of, a lot of readers of the book have told me there were Ben's in their own lives and

Brett Benner: 14:48

there's been in everybody's life. That's the thing.

Tom Lamont: 14:51

And a lot of them are dated Ben's. A lot of the women are dated Ben's still, half burned, half sort of, yearning for him.

Brett Benner: 14:58

Sure. No, he's incredibly charming and just incredibly self involved, which is kind of what his appeal is, you know, too.

Tom Lamont: 15:05

Well, I think we, we, I, I'm not like that at all. And I think there is an appeal for passive people, for quiet people, for introverts, to be, to have an extrovert, to have the energy of someone a little narcissistic in their life, because it's so propulsive, it's so exciting. You pay the consequences, but you also just get to go along for the ride a bit, you know, and I think I learned writing this book that in a narrative that involves multiple characters in a, in a novel like this one, you really want a few. fuel sources, a few sources of propulsion of energy. And I remember kind of loving settling into another Ben chapter as I was, when I was deep underway on the writing of this, because I would tingle with a bit of that energy, you know, the bit of the energy that I don't otherwise possess a kind of sure. They care. Hmm.

Brett Benner: 15:57

Are you more of a Teo?

Tom Lamont: 15:58

Teo, so yeah, so Teo's uh, quite, quite dutiful, quite auxiliary, if we were going to enter the sort of manosphere blog terminology, he is a baiter, and has recognized this and resigned himself to it. The world don't go around without baiters, you know, and childcare, which is a huge part of this book. It only happens with the responsible, with the dutiful, and you can't tell, you can't tell the story of a, even a moderately successful parenting journey without one or more dutiful people. And so I wanted to try and tease out through Teo's journey and Teo's story, some of the drama, some of the glamour, some of the grandeur in that, with a two year old kid. You have to be there, in the middle of the night, you know, opening the band aid, you have to be telling them the same story, reassuring the same fears. On a Tuesday morning, you are pushing those swings again and again and again. If that doesn't get done, the job doesn't get done, you know? And I I've always been quite, uh, feminine, I think in my viewpoints. I've always, I'm lucky. I've had really strong women in my life, great friends. I've been with my wife for a long time and. I think there's lots of mistakes or things I did as a young parent that I, you know, possibly wouldn't do again with experience. But I know that I came into it very much like bolstered by not being a kind of wild, uncontainable, extremely masculine dad who just couldn't bear the idea of domesticity. There was a big part of me that Could and would do that and see the, try and enjoy the journey of that and the granular experience of that. I mean, I, I would love to think that one or two readers from this, who were unsure about their capabilities, unsure about the limitations of parenting would read this book and see that it isn't, it's its own world. It's the next adventure, you know, it's a really amazing thing to go through,

Brett Benner: 17:57

Oh my God. It's. It's the best. And, and when you're in it, you're like, dear God, how will I ever get through this? And because there is no manual for everything is so individual, but it's literally like, hang on, here we go, because you don't know what you're getting in any facet of it. And one of the things that people will say it is it never ends. It never ends. It gets better. The dynamic changes and as they continue to become themselves, that's truly magical. And as they are as people, and you begin to relate to them differently, and hope that whatever you do next will not send them into therapy for the next 10 years,

Tom Lamont: 18:37

I'll be coming out on the couch. I've come to think that parenting The reason it's so hard to put yourself into it before it happens, it's kind of like illness or bereavement. It's the totality of it. You can't, it's very hard for the human brain to imagine 24 hours, nonstop indefinitely. You can imagine an hour of stress. You can imagine a day of pain. It's very hard to, or pleasure. You can, and it's very hard to just see the, sort of infinity of parenting or certainly what feels like infinity unfurling in front of you. And, no matter how much I tried in the buildup, it wasn't till day one, minute one, that you start, you start to understand.

Brett Benner: 19:18

So I'm just so curious, what was the Genesis for you for the story? Like where, where did this come

Tom Lamont: 19:23

I feel kind of like a geriatric debutante in a way, being in my early forties, but that's partly because I, I'm a journalist in my daily life. That's been my, been my career, been my shaped a lot of my personality and It's been the background of my, of my adult life. But I have been trying to write novels for a long time, and I've written a couple to completion that didn't quite work, weren't really it, never found homes, never, were never bought, I say all this to explain that This book, Going Home, which is my first published book, is very much the first novel I finished that felt right, felt it worked, felt real, true, and partly that was because the previous work I was trying to do was very much drawn from kind of a off cut, an overspill from journalism, I would do a rich piece of reporting, spend a lot of time diving into a subject to write a long piece of narrative nonfiction, and I will be left with this kind of pool of excess and interests and, um, questions and fascinations. You asked where this book came from, and it really came from some frank conversations with, my agent, Jane Finnegan, and with a couple of editors in London, including the editor who finally bought this book, Fede Andonino. Where they basically said, the bits in you that work as a fiction writer are actually quite far from the journalist in you and they're intimate, they're quiet, they're close, they're domestic, they're interpersonal, they're about people, small groups of people. These are the bits that works, not the societal howls where you're wearing your journalistic hat and you want to point out all the, the ills and it was just so clarifying for me to hear that. I mean, depressing initially, and sort of like as good a punch in the stomach as I've ever had, probably. And after the sort of ache went away, and I was able to sort of figuratively stand up straight again, I just got to work on something totally different that was very close to home, was absolutely drawn from lived experience was set in the part of London where I grew up. it's about secular Judaism and losing your faith. Experiences I've had or been adjacent to. It's about, as we've discussed, a little boy who, you know, I've, I've had one and it's about the way friendship kind of evolves and sometimes deteriorates from school onwards as you as you yourself leave childhood and enter adulthood these bonds you've made can they can be enriched for sure but they can curdle as well and sometimes both these were all things in the stew as i started to write it i, I just, I went away and wrote for 18 months every day, didn't stop every morning, didn't stop. And where I was writing from was just totally different. It was from, it was from the heart and the spine, you know, it wasn't really so much the head and, I could feel from, The process of it, that it was, it was right. And, I just felt confident in what it was, I felt it was real. It wasn't like, scraps. It felt like it held together. It's art, as a journalist, you're constantly leaning on the rails of fact and place and time and moving through time. And a novel can be anything it's ephemeral and you make the internal logic, you build the universe, however big or small it is. And, so it has to come from a different place, I think. And so I guess I spent my thirties. making mistakes that help me understand where it has to come from. And if it's had that effect on you, as I'm delighted to hear you say it has, that's because of that time. I think that's because of that, that. learning process that I'm glad to have gone through.

Brett Benner: 22:58

That's awesome. One of the things you mentioned that I wanted to ask you about was The Judaic element in the book. You have these characters who are all Jewish and it's not a plot point necessarily or anything like that. I mean, one of the characters, Sybil is a rabbi and she's such a fantastic character that I wanted to talk a little bit more about in a second, but where did that decision come for? I know that your mother was Jewish and your father was Scottish Catholic.

Tom Lamont: 23:22

Yeah. I felt slightly like I hadn't really read it before. You know, my mom was raised in a pretty liberal, pretty secular Jewish family, a massive North London family, very close, very loving, still are still enormous numbers of us. And my dad, Was, raised in care, in Scotland and at the time being raised in care where he grew up meant being raised by nuns, you know, within the Catholic church that did it for him in religion. He was very circumspect about, what he would say, or the memories he was willing to tap into from this time. It was an enormous and tragic stretch of time in his childhood from a horrendously young age. But I had as a journalist, I had the extremely strange experience of happening upon a government report about the care home he was in that was, put together retrospectively by the Scottish government. So I did get to find out some of what he'd been through and yeah, I mean, at the very least of it, I understood why he was a lapsed for sure. But I think he, when he met my mom, he was pretty deep into his life. He was in his thirties and he never really had a biological family and he'd had some pieces of, um, adopted families and bits of experience, I know he was magnetized to what my mom had, which was dozens of people, a warmth, a spirit and energy of, of a big, cacophonous family. He kind of had this strange. Non converting conversion. He never took up the religion. He never tried to apply for that process you can go through to convert. He just sort of hung around it, and I think liked it, and took what he took out of it. And so my brother and I were raised in quite a funny kind of mutt like religious way where my mum's family went, were initially more religious than they then subsequently were, so they were on their own journey, kind of out of faith. My dad was just, came colliding in from the side as a kind of doubter and a skeptic and, but someone who loved the community and they loved the warmth and the ceremony and the occasion of it. And we were sort of raised in this funny sort of in out space, in a very, very culturally Jewish, certainly in our family lives, but religion here and there. I was Bar Mitzvahed, which is fairly major religious rite of passage to go through. And at the same time, that was more or less the end of my sort of academic religious engagement with the synagogue I grew up in. Sybil nominally the most religious as the community's rabbi is on her own journey with, with doubt, with loss of faith. And then Vic, I exaggerated and some of my dad's own collision into Judaism in that Vic loves nothing more than to hang around the synagogue. He just likes to be a part of it. He's never, he's not, he's not of it. He likes to be near it, the warmth of it. And that was Vic. Pretty true to the spirit of my old man,

Brett Benner: 26:14

I've always felt like. Judaism and the Jewish faith and Jewish people, it does engender such a sense of family and community in a way that many other religions don't, at least, certainly, I think, here in the States. And I've always been somewhat envious of that there's just such an incredible sense of community that's fostered and it's so prevalent here. I kept thinking of like this whole idea of it takes a village in terms of raising a child, but also just with that particular community. And, and that's why Sybil to me is such a great and wonderful character because I love that you have this person who is religious leader who you know arguably we think they are going to have all the answers and this unwavering faith in whatever it is but they're also human and they're also faced with the fact of having doubts about certain things and Why things are happening the way they are or you know, whatever it is. And she's so real and so human.

Tom Lamont: 27:12

Thank you. Thank you. She, she was the character I was nervous isn't quite the right word, but I was apprehensive about it because she's the only woman I fully inhabit in this book. I think that was a slight problem of courage on my part, and it's something I definitely address in the future. But it was partly a hesitancy because I just didn't want to get her wrong. And I approached it partly by pulling from women I'm close to, my wife included. And partly there's just. There's a lot of me at 40 in her because she's 10 years older than the other characters. I'm writing sort of As an author, I'm, I'm, I'm tapping into my memory of what it was like to be in my early thirties to write the two main male characters in the book. And with Sybil, she's ten years on from then, and I get to be sort of me now, almost sort of, checking in with the young, the youngins. And, just having that little bit more sense of myself. I mean, in her case, she's having these doubts. She's going, it's the same tragedy that prompts the dilemma of Joel's care that prompts Sybil to question her faith. And, although she is going through something, That would be traumatic to happen to a religious person, a person who's chosen to be a religious leader, as they're calling. To lose your faith, that's going to be up there in the most difficult things you can go through. But I very much wanted her to Concurrent with that be know who she is. She's someone who knows who she is, as I think I know who I am in my forties in a way that I haven't done before necessarily. So I'm so I'm delighted to hear you responded to her like that.

Brett Benner: 28:54

It's also a real testament to kind of the staying power of faith because having something that would shake your faith or make you really start to think and then to kind of dig in and say, you know, as she describes it, or as you describe in the book, She lost a means of fluid conversation with God. I loved that line. So it's finding your way back and what is it that helps you find your way back? And I think so much of that then becomes rooted in her interactions with Joel and Teo and with all of them in terms of finding a sense of community again and finding a sense of purpose and all of that, which I loved. I want to jump back to Joel and Tao and going back to something we were talking about in the beginning, which is kind of the, totality of, of raising a kid and something I, it just stuck with me so much. And, and I reread it last night cause I just found it so moving is this is such a simple thing, but it's the nighttime routine. And, there's this great moment when Teo is laying next to Joel in bed. And he's talking to him and Joel is asking questions and questions and Teo's trying to get him to go off. And you captured this so incredibly well. And later Teo is, is, Is talking with Ben and Ben says, you know, I don't even know. How do you know When they've gone to sleep and he said you'll know because the rhythm changes and I was like, that's it and i've had those conversations and it was so right on and and I remember sitting in a rocking chair in my son's room every night and You know, he would be talking and you would just hear him breathing. And, and I kept thinking like, please just go down. Please just go down. Please just go down. And one in one of two things happened. I wanted him to fall asleep before I fell asleep in the chair, because arguably then you wake up and your neck is stiff and you're like, God damn it. I've just, I've just wasted the entire evening because all you want is to get them to a point where you could get down and go downstairs and maybe watch something on TV for a half hour before you fall into sleep. Yeah. Right. Okay. And so I just love that. It's so beautifully captured. And the moment you think they're done, I used to remember slowly getting out of the chair and please, and thinking to myself, please don't creak, please don't creak, please don't creak. And one fit hits the floor and all of a sudden he'd be like, Papa. Yeah, I'm here. I'm here.

Tom Lamont: 31:07

I'm here, buddy. I know. It's. It's like, um, you, um, and you can't sound exasperated. It's the one tone of voice that's guaranteed to like, right out of the depth.

Brett Benner: 31:16

Yes.

Tom Lamont: 31:17

I always thought of it as like, they're like, uh, they need an S I think I put this in the book, you know, they need an escort to sleep. They need, they need to be marched to sleep as if you're the police taking them to the station and you're sort of pushing their heads down to get them into the back of a car. And like, they just, they can't be, they can't be left alone in those moments, but they kind of want to get there. You definitely want to get there. And you, you get to know, you get to know every floorboard, right? You get to know, oh my God, it's another Creek of every chair, but you also know, like, you tones and, you know, on their part, there's the, there's the snuffles and the rhythm of the breathing on your part, you know, that just the wrong kind of voice can snap them back at back at, you're looking to create this. This strange, it's almost like a trick. It's like a con. It's like, it's like a long con you're trying to play on them to get them to just to let go of the rails of consciousness and just go just drift off. But the rewards are enormous because then you've got, oh, you've got, you've got a few hours, you know, you've got the evening.

Brett Benner: 32:16

Yes, that's exactly right. Um, well, Tom, I could literally sit here and talk to you all day, but, I just want to thank you again. The book is fantastic. It's a homecoming novel. It's a family novel, both about found family and given family, and also a book about faith and, and, and childhood and parenting. So, um, please get it and polar bears. Yes. Yes. Like, this is what I love so much. Cause people will look at this cover and not understand it exactly right away, but the resonance of this is, is fantastic. So congratulations. For your success and for all of this, it's coming with it. It's great. And, and, um, and good luck with that off.

Tom Lamont: 32:54

Thank you for having me, Brett. This has been really fun.