Summertime Chat with Author Mary Laura Philpott

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and sixty, which is first airing in late July of twenty twenty two. I am interviewing Mary Laura Philpott, who is the author of Bomb Shelter, which is a new memoir that is out this summer. She is also the author of the memoir I Miss You When I Blink, which I know a lot of our listeners have read and enjoyed. Her book, Bomb Shelter was selected for the Modern Missus Dark c Summer book Club. I'm reading Died I Guess So. I know that a lot of people have come to know Mary Laura's work through that, so we are excited to talk with her talk about what you know, Bomb Shelter is about, you know, what her writing process is like, lots of great things that we talked about. So, speaking of summer reading, Sarah, how is your summer reading going. My summer reading is going really really well. I hit a big reading slump this year around like March April, and then I I think I wrote like I'm having a comeback to the end of April, and my reading has come back and I'm super happy about it. I just finished my sixth book in June, which is for me a little bit higher than my normal rate of finishing books. I think I read two nonfiction and four novels. Actually I guess one of them was a memoir because one of them was Mary Laura Philpotts I Miss You When I Blink, which I really liked. It was super cute, so I'm very excited. I haven't heard this episode yet, so I'll be dying to listen to it. And I've been writing down when I read every day on this little list, which has been kind of motivating for me. And I have been making good use of my Kindle, which I dug out of obscurity in a drawer and it's still charged and worked, and I've been using the Libby app, so kind of a good flow going. That's awesome. Yeah, because the reason you had been somewhat resistant to digital reading, but I think you had mentioned it just opened up some time to read that was not available otherwise. Yes, I mean specifically, I usually have to lie down in Genevieve's bed for about thirty minutes every night while she listens to her head's face sleep story and falls asleep, and I can read during that whole time, and then usually that reading momentum kind of carries me and I want to read further, whereas otherwise I would have just been angrily scrolling and waiting for her to fall asleep, and then by the time that was done, I wouldn't have energy to read. So this is working much much better. I actually tend to use my phone with the Kindle app in her bed just because it's like easier than my transition to the digital kindle, because it's just easy that way. Oh, and I want to mention my current reading, which was recommended by our Patreon people. We had a book month that was May, and someone recommended the American Royal Series by Katherine McGee, which is about it's like an alternative world where the US executive branch is actually a monarchy descended from the Washington family and it's so juicy and cute and fun and I'm enjoying it, which is interesting because I didn't think Washington had any kids. So this is a this is a completely alternative like everything is different, like you like, there are elements of history that are real mixed in. But it says if, yeah, it's an alternate world, Okay, sounds great, sounds great, and things things seem to be going well. So maybe that should have been the royalist street here on best of both worlds. Who knew? Just just kidding. Yeah, I don't know if I've been I mean I've been reading some. I read the book Under the Whispering Door by TJ. I want to say his name. That was a very different sort of book, but I guess some people had recommended as kind of a feel good sort of book in a way that I found a little bit annoying because it required changing I think a fundamental rule that had not been introduced as a possibility kind of earlier and within science fiction that's a little bit you know, A no, no, I don't know, but it was necessary to make it a happy ending. But I was like, well, I would have taken the sad ending. I was prepared for that. But anyway, it's a very fun read and certainly goes quickly. People might enjoy that if we looking for something a little different. I also just finished These Precious Days by Anne Pattitt, which is relevant to this episode because Mary Laura makes a cameo in there. She's not referred to as Mary Laura Philpott. It is just Mary Laura when Anne Patchett is talking about Parnassis, which is her books to own in Nashville, and Mary Laura worked there in marketing for many years before becoming a full time memoirist. So that is kind of funny to read that and realize what Mary Laura they are talking about. So I just finished that and enjoyed that. But yeah, Summer's former's been a bit of a whirlwind so far, but with a lot of travel. But as we're recording this in late July, I think should have hopefully settled down a bit for me, So maybe I'll get some more reading in always looking for more ideas, so please feel free to send them in and send in your listener requests too. Because Mary Laura, although I had wanted to interview her as well, I've met her a few times and find her wonderful, but the specific nudge was that it was a listener request to somebody who loved her books and wanted to hear from her, so we were happy to bring her on. So please keep the listener request coming. We would love to make as many of those happen as possible. Sarah and I do not know everyone, nor do we have the ability to convince everyone I'm on the show, but you know, for some people sometimes they're willing to give it a whirl. So let's hear from Mary Laura. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Mary Laura Philpott to the show. So Mary Laura, can you introduce yourself to our listeners. Hello, thank you so much for having me, Laura. This is this is really fun. I'm Mary Laura Philpotts. I'm a writer. I wrote most recently Bomb Shelter, Love Time and Other Explosives, which is a memoir, and before that, memoir and essays sort of a little further down the essay end of the spectrum than the memoir end of the spectrum called I miss you when I blink wonderful. And you have two children as well? Yes, I have teenagers, Bless my soul. I have a right now, a sixteen year old and a nineteen year old, and I am fully in the throes of that. You know, people always say each year there are certain phases of life where everything's the same for a few years, and then there are phases where every passing year or even half year is like a whole new era. And I am fully there. Every six months it's like, whoa, we're learning all new things about human development. Yes, that's true. Well, the ages of sixteen to nineteen are known for. That is your older child home for the summer. We're recording this in summer, coming into summer break here. He's actually not. So he finished a year of college and was home long enough to jump all his laundry all over the floor and watch it and then pack it all back up. And he is a camp counselor in the summer out on the coast, so that's his favorite thing in the world. So he got home, left again, and I won't see him all summer excellent, excellent. Well, that's probably a good way to spend the summer. And your career has taken quite a winding journey for anyone who has read your books, and particularly I missed you with when I blink. You did a lot of different things. I mean it was Yes, I'm just going to try and remember here. Software consultant coming out of college. That's sort of an unexpected one. That's what my parents said. Also, yeah, exactly, a stay at home mom for a while, well, a bookstore marketer, a cartoonist, public television host, yes, and professional memoist. So maybe you can sort of connect this well in that when you say it, when you say them like that, I'm like, that does sound like a really eclectic career collection. But it's there were things all kind of streaming those things together. Except for software consultant at the beginning. That is something I did something to do coming out of college. I did you know? I was an English major, and I've always been a writer my whole life. I was a strong writer in college, but I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't want to be a novelist. I've never wanted to write fiction. I didn't want to go into journalism, and I didn't want to be an English professor, so I didn't want to go to grad school in English. And that left me thinking, well, I guess there's no real way to use this English degree, and I briefly toyed with the idea of law school. I did apply to law school, but then I pulled out at the last second. Software consulting is just that's the company. Accentri was the company that was on campus doing interviews of seniors at the time. I had this, you know, identity crisis. So they were there and I just walked up and was like, can you interview me? And, as you know, as one does in a moment of identity crisis, I just did the best possible job I could at imitating someone they might want, and I did it maybe right, a little too well, And I ended up working for Accenta for a few years. I did meet wonderful people. It is a great company. I got a really good business education, I think out of it, but I was I was never meant to be a software developer. I mean that just is not what I was meant to do, and so I left. But from there I did corporate communications for quite a while, so I worked in healthcare specifically, I worked for a hospital doing marketing communications, website, copy, newsletters, that kind of thing, and then kind of worked my way up through that world and ended up working for the home office of the American CA Society. That was my last full full time you know, in an office gig and I loved that job. I loved that organization. And what I was doing when I was working in corporate communications was storytelling. I was telling the stories of these organizations. I was telling the stories of people who had been served by these organizations. So early on in my career that was like mid twenties, mid twenties through late twenties, I was writing professionally and I was storytelling professionally, So I was honing those skills that I would end up using later, you know, once I had kids, and I sort of went back and forth from I'm just home with these babies to no, I'm freelance you know, freelance writing. But when I was freelance writing, I was speech writing. I was doing a lot of ghost writing op eds and things like that that would come out under other people's names. So I never stopped writing and I never stopped developing my skills for writing within the essay format or within the you know, a short non fiction piece of writing that is compelling and that tells a story and that gets you somewhere in two thousand words. That's always kind of been my favorite structure. And the bookstore job came along when we moved my family moved from Atlanta to Nashville. Nashville had this great bookstore. I was in there shopping all the time anyway, and you know, I struck up a conversation at one point with the owners and said, I want to subscribe to your you know, your newsletter, your blog, your social media and they were like, whoa, we don't really have that. I don't have one. Get it right, And in that, you know, in that way that I do, I was like, well, I'll do it. And the next thing I know, I had a job. And I did that for seven years, six years, several years. I did that until I Miss You when I Blink came out and then I was touring for that book and it was just too much. But kind of along with the bookstore job, concurrently came hosting a show about books on Nashville Public television. Those jobs weren't technically connected. But the people at NPT had seen my work at the store and for the blog, and they were like, hey, if we can teach you to be on camera, could you come talk about books over here. So it's all story telling, it's all reading, writing, you know, writing about life. It's more connected than it perhaps looks on the surface. Now, well, it's a nice eclectic mix, which people who have read your books know that that is off in their format. But it's a you know, these two thousand word vignettes on related but you know, sometimes slightly different sequential topics. And but it's interesting you said you were moving to Nashville. One of the fascinating things is that it was more for you that you guys moved to Nashville than your husband. Even though the sort of normal stories like, oh, well, you know, mom's sort of been in and out of the workforce or you know, freelancing for a bit, and husband has the sort of set job and they move for that, right, But that's not what happened at all for you guys. Right, Normally you follow the primary wagejourner who has the health insurance, not the writer. Not the writer But the beautiful thing about what my husband does, which don't ask me to describe it, because I can't really I know it's something financial, is that it can happen in different cities, and he's always worked closely with the entrepreneurial world, which is booming in Nashville and has been booming in Nashville for the past decades. So when I reached a point back when we lived in Atlanta and we had kind of elementary, middle school age kids, and I was really had kind of hit a burnout point where the children were old enough to have lots of things to do all over town, but they couldn't drive themselves. So I was living that chauffeur life in a city that has experienced a lot of sprawl. So I was sitting in traffic for most of my waking hours. I had tried to find meaning in my daily existence through, you know, in addition to my freelance work, I was trying to do things like volunteer at school and maybe that would make me feel more connected to you know, the reason I'm in traffic all day, it just wasn't it wasn't working. I was not loving my daily existence. I felt disconnected from it, I felt like I was spending a lot of time doing things I didn't really want to be doing. I wanted to be more atten to a creative community, and I wasn't finding that in Atlanta. So yeah, I was the one who ended up finding somewhere else I wanted to live and kind of stay. Unto the rest of the family, Hey, could you guys come along with me? So I feel very, very lucky that that worked out and that my spouse had the kind of job that he could do somewhere else. Yeah, always good when you can move the family unit. And of course the bookstore for those, let's say, is Parnasa's Books in Nashville. It's a very famous bookstore for those who haven't heard of it, but probably many people have. It's a lovely bookstore there. So Mary Laura was working there. So we're going to take a quick ad break and we'll be back to hear more about her latest book, which is Bomb Shelter. So I am back talking with Mary Laura Philpott about her life and writing, her career, her family, and she writes a lot about her family life. So tell us a little bit about Bomb Shelter and how that came to be. Yeah, I will. It's interesting that you say I write a lot about family life because I'm still sort of getting used to accepting that identity. I resisted writing about family for a long time, partly out of a concern for my family's privacy. I'm a super super private person, even more so on behalf of the people I love, and partly out of I think a little bit of pride. Like when you are a woman and you write about family, as you know, there are people out there who dismiss your work because, oh, it's domestic, this is lady work. It's not real writing. And I think I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about that for a while. But the more I wrote about what it feels like to be a human being, which is just a complicated, difficult thing sometimes, the more I found myself kind of needing to write about family because family is so much a part of my life. And if you write about the dynamics in a family, you are writing about the human experience so much about what it means to be. You know, a thinking, feeling soul trapped in immortal body can be expressed by writing about being a family member. Trapped in a family. So that's a long way of getting to Bomb Shelter. Bomb Shelter is a book that would have probably happened in some way regardless of what was going on in my life. I was starting to write a few years ago about what it feels like to be middle aged, how things are changing at this point in life. My parents are getting older, my kids are getting older, my body is getting older. You know, a lot of things are destabilizing. And I was beginning to write some pieces about that and kind of wondering where are these going to go? And they probably would have gone somewhere sort of similar. But then something happened that kind of kicked everything I was thinking about into a different, more urgent gear, and that is that one morning when my son, my oldest of my two teenagers, was in tenth grade, my husband and I woke up at four am to a loud thump, and it was the sound of his body hitting the bathroom floor. He had gotten up to get a glass of water, and when we found him on the floor, he was having a seizure. And so I tell the story in Bomb Shelter of calling nine to one one that day in the hospital is kind of before and after day where this was the moment where nothing would ever be the same in our family. And the book is not a memoir of the epilepsy journey. It's not a memoir about my son or my relationship to my son. In fact, those events kind of weave their way through and thread their way through the story periodically, but they're not the bulk of the book. But they are writing about that experience allowed me to write in a more I think, a more emotionally vivid way about how it feels to wish that you could keep everybody alive and okay just by loving them hard enough, but knowing you can't, how do you get up every day and find meaning and positivity and even humor. How do we keep going when we can't fix everything with love? That's what Bomb shelters about exactly. And I think you know, as listeners are sort of thinking about this question. We've had parents of kids with special needs on and things like that. There's something about taking care of smaller kids with chronic medical conditions that's more under your control. Right. You can make a small kid go to doctor's appointments, you can make them take their medicine you can make them do whatever sort of lifestyle thing they need to do. But with your you know, teenage son, you're dealing with the fact that, like, okay, he's not supposed to drink alcohol with this medication. Like you know, it's hard enough to get your kids not to do stuff like that, and here you are, you know, having the medical thing to worry about with it, or that you know, he needs to take his medication. Adolescents forget to put their underwear in the hamper, and yet here you are needing him to take something so that he doesn't pass out on the floor somewhere. So you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about that aspect of somebody who you're trying to launch off into the world, but you have to also, you know, do the caretaking at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, for a second there, I thought you were going to say they forget to put their underwear on, and I was like, yeah, they do that as well, you know, and they forget it all. I mean, honestly, the health crisis part of this phase of life, and the health crisis part of this book highlighted and really brought into clear focus some things that I think are actually true about parenting adolescents in general. I could have written Bombs Shelter without the epilepsy, because adolescence, you know, and it's different in every family, it's different for every kid. That in our family, it kind of started off very gently, Like I remember when my kids were thirteen and fifteen and people saying, oh, teenageers are so hard, and I was like, are they? I mean, I love my teenagers. There's so much more interesting than little bitty kids, Like we can have really good conversations and then they learn how to drive, and it's like, this is amazing. I love having teenagers. But for me, the hardest part of raising teenagers has come the closer they get to leaving the nest and the closer they get to independence. And I think it's for the reasons that you just said, there's no longer this sense of Okay, you are a cog in the wheel of this family unit that lives in this house, and we all do these things. We all go to bed at this time, we all eat dinner at the same time. Whatever. They have to go out and learn how to do things on their own, and the only way to learn is to try. And when you try something new, you will fail. So now we're in this phase of life where it's like I'm watching them go out and do things and make mistakes and make choices that maybe I wouldn't have made or probably would have made at that age, but wouldn't make now. And there's a whole new powerlessness in this phase of parenting health emergency or not. It's just a whole new thing to me. This is harder than parenting toddlers. Yeah, no, it's it's very different. I mean I would say there's since I have teenagers, and I would say there's just I was up, you know, big chunks of the night with the toddler for he had a fever and it was just good. But you know, then I still have to get up and get the teenager of school. So they're you know, sary thing is fun something. It's all hard. It's all hard. So let's talk about your writing a little bit about how you work, Like what does your day to day writing practice look like. I mean, I'm looking at the Mary Laura Philpott nook in the house where I suppose the magic may happen or maybe not, I don't know, but maybe you can talk about them. Yeah, Well, it kind of varies by season, so where listeners should know that Laura is looking at me. And what I call my office, it's really just a dead end in a hallway that no one else is using. And I put a death here and I put a chair in here, and now it is my zoom studio. But this is not actually where I end up doing most of my work, because often when I am working, everyone is home, like bomb shelter. I wrote a lot of that during the pandemic. Truly, everyone was home and could not leave because we were on lockdown. So I will take any space I can get. I will work on the back porch if that's the quietest place. I will work in the kitchen. If everyone else is in their rooms and this hallway has gotten too loud, I'll take the hallway. I'll go sit in the car if I have to. I'll take any space I can get. But if I am in the phase of work where I am writing, which is most of the time, I'm in a phase right now where I'm not as much. This is like a book promotional phase. I'm like getting off planes and stuff, and it's weird and different. But when I'm writing, I'm definitely smarter in the morning. I am not one of those people who can be like, all right, ten pm, time to sit down and write. I'm useless by ten pm, So I get up everybody whoever's up and around, make sure they're fed. They go do their thing, and once I have a little bit of quiet, I write and write and write and think and erase and delete and do the things I'm doing and whatever document I'm doing things in until lunchtime ish maybe early afternoon, and that is when that part of my brain starts to get tired and I just can't use it for much more than about half a day. But a practice that I started when I was working on a bomb shelter that I think was really helpful honestly to the book. I think it made the book better, but also was just really enjoyable and neat for me, was using the afternoon time, which is still workday at least when you know I have teenagers who don't need me for anything in the afternoon, I don't. And you know, if I've done all my email and everything else I need to do, I've got this worktime, but my brain can't write. Using that time to read with a pencil in my hand. Read anything, read biographies, read thrillers, read romance, read poetry, read literally like just from the bookshelf of stuff I already have. But I also did shop sometimes and highlight what other writers do well, and highlight lines and structures and pieces of dialogue that make me go ooh, this makes me think about something I could do at some point and kind of use that like a like class time, so that when my brain can't be actively producing, it can at least be sort of passively absorbing things that make me better at my job. So that's kind of how I broke up my workday. And that's really cool. That's a that's a cool thing to do. And I'm curious. I mean, first, how you wind up choosing essay topics. I mean, is it that you know, you get an epiphany like that I must write about this. You try out different things and see where it's going. I mean, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you know if something is going to sustain the two thousand words. Yeah, So it's if I'm writing a standalone piece, like if I'm writing an essay that is no part of a book, or that I don't think is going to be part of a book, and I'm hoping to pitch it somewhere, you know, send it to the Atlantic or the New York Times or whatever. Often I'm drawn to whatever that essay is about, and I write about just regular life. I don't write about like politics and news and that kind of thing. But often I'm drawn to write about whatever that thing is that's going on in my life because I can't stop thinking about it. It's almost like the topics of my essays demand to be written, and the only way I can get them to leave me alone is if I sit down and start writing and taking a part. Okay, why am I obsessed with whatever? The turtle in my backyard? Why can't I stop thinking about that? Well, it's making me think about this. It's making me think about this, and I start pulling in emotional threads that maybe are more universal, that don't have to do with just my life. Almost always it's because something just won't leave me alone. And that's the case for essays that go into books as well, except that often those essays have something in common. So I'll write about here's something I can't stop thinking about this. It's this thing that happened, and I'm going to tell you what happened or what I learned from it, And then you know, a week later, I'll realize I have more to say on that thing I learned because something else happened that also taught me something about that. So now I'm going to go over here and tell this story. There's a thread kind of connecting things. And if I've written, like with Bomb Shelter, I got to a point where I had written a few essays and realized, these are all about the same thing. These are all about this, why can't we just keep everyone safe by loving them enough? And how do we go on once we realize that's the case. And so all the stories I was writing about were things that spoke to that question in some way. I mean, there's an essay in there about when I was in second grade, a girl in my neighborhood was kidnapped, like classic eighties the thing we thought was happening all the time, it wasn't really where stranger breaks into your house and stealed your child. And I've been obsessed with that story my whole life. I just never stopped thinking about it, and I I took some time while I was writing Bomb Shelter to go Why can't I forget that story? Why am I obsessed with it? Why did it stick in my head? You know, from the time I was seven on, and it very much ties into what Bomb Shelter is about, this idea of how do you keep the people you love safe? What are the real threats in the world, what are the threats that we imagine? And also, once you've seen something horrible happen that people go, oh, that will never happen, But once it does, how do you tell your brain it won't happen again? Good question. I know it was a crazy story. I'm I'm not being very you know, it was one of those stranger danger things that yeah, vast majority of kidnappings are, of course, like custodial cases and things like that, but no, it was. It was a pretty crazy story. Yeah. So a lot of times I'm just writing about things that I that I can't stop thinking about, and people ask a lot of times like how do you remember details of things that happened in the past. For the stuff I write about, these are the stories that burned themselves into my brain. I'm not having to think very hard to remember because it's all right there. The stuff I can't remember I don't end up writing about exactly. And how do you revise? Like, so let's say you've got this you know essay, I mean presumably you've been crafting it, and then you are then working on it more, and do you have any particular process or tips that you figured out for that? Revising is my favorite part because that's art. That's like, all right, now we're going to make it sound good and look good and be this fully engaging, entertaining experience that engages people's senses. That's great. That's so much easier, not easier because it's hard, but it's to me better than the part where I'm like, what is that? What am I trying to say? What's the story? I love revising. I save every version of an essay. So if I have a version that's five thousand words long and I know I've got to get it down to three thousand for some reason, like I'm, you know, pitching it to a publication or whatever, I'll save the five thousand word version and then I'll just hack away at it and I'll save that version. And then if I'm like, that wasn't quite it I'll hack away edit it in a different way because I never want to be shy about edits because I'm worried I can't get something back, you know. I want to be bold with my edits and actually try. Okay, what would it take to make this really good? What if I took the whole first page out. I don't want to not do that because I'm like, oh, but I might want the first page back. Just save it. It's over there. It's in what. I have a document that I call legos, where I take like little pieces of things. I work like a sentence that I'm like, this sentence is so great. It doesn't belong in this essay, but I'm going to use it somewhere. I toss it into the document called legos, and it's like a big Bucks blocks. I can go in and pull it out later and build something else with it. So I try to save everything, save all the pieces, so that I'm never shy about being bold with my edits. I love editing. It's the best part, you know, when you can get in there and say, Okay, now this paragraph is saying exactly what I mean for it to say. Now, how can I say it in a way that starts to sort of play with the reader a little bit like the chapter in Bomb Shelter where we find my son on the floor and we call nine one one. That's probably the piece I worked on longer and harder than anything else in the book, because what I wanted to do with it, in addition to telling you a story and making you understand why this me character was left in the state she was in and had all these questions to think about, I wanted you to feel what it was like to be there that morning, so that you could really take this journey with me the rest of the book. I couldn't breathe that morning. I was breathless. So one of the things I did in the final rounds of editing that piece was a just my senate structure and my words and where I put the punctuation so that if you were reading it, you know how when you read, even if you're not reading out loud, it's kind of like you're reading in your brain, you would get shorter breath like. That's the level of editing that I love. When I get to that part and when I get to okay, there are three different words that mean the same thing, which one do I want for sound or which one do? I like the look of it on the page. I love that stuff. Yeah. No, it's always fun to turn something into something better. Yes, and it's it's a different process entirely than just creating something out and nothing. Yes, totally. I feel like the sculptor shaping you know what's Yeah. So yeah, that's great. That's great. So does something big need to happen for there to be another memoir? Are you planning on? Ah, that's a great question. I mean, I will say when I came home in twenty nineteen, when I came home from touring for I Miss You, when I Blink. When I was at about this phase of the book cycle season, people kept asking me, what are you going to write next? And I was like, I got nothing. I don't have anything. I don't know what I'm going to write next. I have nothing to write about. And everything that is in Bomb Shelter, or at least everything that was in like the first half of Bomb Shelter, had already happened. It was right there. I mean it was and it was not forgotten. It was like recent It was all right there. But I hadn't reached the point where I could start to see connective threads between the things that were happening. So it's entirely possible that in six months I will wake up and go, oh my gosh, there's all this stuff that has happened since when I turned in bomb shelter, and I'm seeing connective threads. And I have something to say, and I have a question to ask, and I have something to engage readers with. I don't believe that you have to have monumental things happened to you in order to get to write a memoir. I think it's more important that you have a monumental question to answer and to grapple with. You can use everyday life, sir, you know, monumental questions, or in six months, I could be sitting here going all right, I got to figure out how to do something else. I don't know. I'm sure it'll come to you. I'm sure. I hope that's encouraging toet hear Mary laur because I always thought, you know, if I were to write about my life, my life was a very boring. So that was Memoirs of everyday life are some of my favorite books because it's the question, the emotional core of a memoir. That's the part that's supposed to be relatable to people. So if you were writing a memoir about that time you got kidnapped and held hostage on a pirate ship, I've never been held hostage on a pirate ship. But if you wrote really well about what it feels like to think I have no control of this situation, and you really made me feel that, I've had many situations in my life where I felt out of control and where I felt like other people are making the decisions for me and I have no options, and I would relate on that level. You can tackle that same theme. You can tackle all those same questions with a story about being eighteen and feeling like you have no control over your life and there's nothing exciting about it other than you go to high school every day. But the meat of it, the emotional core, is what makes it relatable, because I really don't want to get kidnapped. I don't want that to happen to you either. Although, speaking of exciting things, you recently interviewed somebody that is a fantastic interview. Tell us about meeting Dolly Parton. I will, so it's so funny Nashville is such an odd town. When I first moved here, people would say, oh, you live in nashvilleal you probably know so and so, you know, they would name these there are a lot of famous people who live here, and the fact is I do know a lot of them, but just because this is where I live, and they live here also, and our kids go to school. So it's Nashville's a weird, kind of low key celebrity town. But Dolly Parton is the one, like mega mega star who I thought, well, I will never meet Dolly Parton, because who meets Dolly Parton. She doesn't just go to the grocery store. I'm not going to see her in the carpool line. But back toward the end of last year, I got a phone call, actually a text one day out of the blue that said, Hey, I work with Parade Magazine, which is that little thing that comes out in some of the Sunday papers, and we're going to do a big feature on Dolly Parton and James Patterson because they are writing a novel together that comes out in the spring, and we need to know if you would be It was really short notice. It was like, we need to know if you'd be available next week to come spend the day at Dolly's compound with them and be there for their whole photo shoot together and sit down and talk to them. And I it was so funny because I thought this text does not need question marks, like yes, of course I'm going to come. I will cancel whatever else I'm doing. And so I got to go and sit with Dolly and Jim, who are like America's grandparents. They are so they are both so smart, they are both so at the top of their game and such savvy business people who have built empires. And at the same time they are both like roughly my parents' age, and you know, we're getting settled in our room to do the interview and they're like, oh, I need a pillow for my back, and just hand me a Kleenex. You know. It just it was so delightful in that they were both humanized, like there they are, they're just people. But at the same time, I did not leave thinking they were any less of the you know, huge stars they are. Like, I didn't walk out going, oh, Dolly, she's just like me. No, she's Dolly Parton. She's on a whole other level. But she's also and this is wonderful, exactly how you imagine her. She fully embodies the character of Dolly Parton at all times. That is awesome. That is awesome. All right, well, Mary Laura, we always end with a love of the week. I am going to state mind first so that you can do yours. I love your nook. It is gorgeously decorated. I have to say I'm a big fan of doors. I've been thinking about doors this week because the chaos that is outside in my house is just like constant. And when I am in my recording space here, I have two doors between me and the outside world because this is an interior closet inside the home office. And I find that the more doors that are between me and other people, the harder it is for them to reach them. So I love it. Maybe when I'm older, I can have a nook in the hallway, when my kids are older and grown up. But for the moment I am barricaded in here. Oh that's fanta emi. What is it they say, like tall fences make good neighbors, or goods they make a neighbor, Like many doors make a good working mom. Yes, I think. Okay, here's my love of the week. I recently started re rewatching for the third time The West Wing, which is just my comfort show. But this time I'm watching it and listening to the podcast that I didn't listen to when it was originally on. I think it started back in twenty seventeen, hosted by Josh Molina, who was on the show called The West Wing Weekly, where they go one episode at a time. I'm from the pilot all the way through the end, and they just analyze these episodes on a micro microscope level, and it is such an interesting masterclass in storytelling and directing and writing. You know, they have Aaron Storkin come in and speak, they have the actors and directors come in and speak, and it's almost like I feel like I'm kind of going to a little story school listening to the podcast, and then I sit down and I watched the episode and it's just I mean, it's like a big bowl of mac and cheese. It's so comforting. I love it. It It makes me so happy. Those of us who may have watched it the first time in the nineties or so when I was out, yes, it was very much of the time. Yeah, all right, Well, Mary Laura, thank you so much for joining us, so I really appreciate it. Can you just tell our listeners where they can find you? Thank you so much for having me, Laura. Yes, I have a website, Mary Laura Philpott dot com and that is where you can sign up for my newsletter, which I send maybe monthly, and I always give a book recommendation and then usually a link a song and some sort of fun picture. I'm on Instagram. Instagram and Twitter are probably the two I use the most. I do have a Facebook page. I started a TikTok, but then I lost my password and I abandoned it. So the TikTok was were you're going to showcase Frank the Turtle? Right? Yeah, I thought about it and then I just lost Steve. So Instagram, Twitter and sign up for my newsletter and we can stay in touch. Sounds good. All right, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks well, that was a fun interview. Hope you guys enjoyed that. So today's question comes from a listener who wrote this specifically to spare out, but we can both chime in a little bit on here. She says, how old were your children when you started becoming intentional about planning and tracking your time. We'll call this listener T in case somebody wants to find the question from Tea as they are searching here. The context is that Tea has a four year old and a five month old. She was doing well using her planner and sometimes a bullet journal before her second child was born. Now she finds herself feeling we're at peace with all the work. And she found herself then feeling at peace with all the things she had going on. But now as she has her second kid, she hasn't managed to get back into our routine after the baby. Works at home, and I'm constantly forgetting things, forgetting kid things, work things, me things, you name it. She said. I used to love planning in the mornings before the rest of the house was awake. Now I roll out of bed at five forty five am with a baby and can't stop to think. I would love to get back into it, but I don't feel like sitting down with my planner if I know the baby is going to scream in two minutes, or my son is going to run downstairs and try to scribble in my planner. So Sarah planning with little kids, so so so hard, And I know exactly that impulse you mean where you're like, if I could just get like a moment in the morning to just sit there and lay out my day, everything would be better. But you just can't get that moment because you're tired and your kids are waking you up and it just feels insurmountable. It will get better. I promise it will get better. Every single time I had a baby, I switched from my more elaborate daily planner to a weekly planner and wrote a lot us in there because my brain just couldn't handle it and I was too tired, and there just wasn't the band with And you're right, your kids might well hopefully your four and a half year old would know better. If jennybeve scribbled, she knows like she wouldn't even dare scribble in my planner. I shouldn't tempt fate, but I don't know. Make sure they understand how incredibly important that is to you, and hopefully that wouldn't happen. But in terms of the actual band with issue and the fatigue and the just not having peace to do it when you have the energy to do it, I totally understand and I just think you're normal. And in a year or so, when your kids are sleeping more normally, more regularly, when you're not up through the night, and when you can kind of count on a more consistent wake up time, I know you will have your planning mojo back. I guess. Then one other thing I'll mention is that if it's super important to you to have a little morning planning session, see if your partner could certain days per week perhaps cover you, even if it's from like five forty five to six am. Although again, I bet your nursing, and I bet your baby just wakes up and they just want you, and that's why it's like it's frustrating. But see if there's anything you could do to get that a little bit of morning coverage, if it would help you to feel a little bit more centered to lay out your day. But don't feel bad if you can. Yeah, although way to say if she is nursing first thing in the morning. I fought, you know, in the time that the kid was on the left side, so I could use my right hand, I could do stuff like right in a planner or type. So yeah, and the kid is quiet, then right, like that's the time that you might actually be able to do something because they're not requiring you to interact with them because they're busy eating. So just throwing that out there as an idea, one handed typing or writing. Your handwriting will not be the best in the world. They what I think. When you're the kids this age, it's about functional planning, not on the You know, you don't need to worry about the washy tape and the little multicolored dots or whatever it is you guys do. I don't know. She asked you, and she said planning, so I assume she mostly means planning, but she said she used the word tracking. I want to throw out here that I started tracking my time in April of twenty fifteen, which was when Alex was three months old. He's now seven and a half, so that means that I did track time through my two youngest kids babyhoods. But I think somewhat differently from planning, like tracking is just a pretty rode activity, like I just check in three times a day and write down what I did since the last time I checked in, So it's literally a three minute process per day that is done in one minute chunks. So if you are interested in tracking your time, and I think it's actually a really kind of cool way to see things like how much am I sleeping? When is the baby waking up? When am I feeding him? How many times per day? You know, and have that memory as well of your kid's young years. You might try doing that, you know, to throw that out there as something that might be more feasible than maybe intense planning. But as for planning, I mean I would also with Sarah say you might want to like dial down expectations a little bit and try to plan, you know, ten to fifteen minutes on Friday for the upcoming week, maybe five minutes at the each end of each work day to plan the next day. You know, don't worry about making it elaborate, just do a little bit, and often even a little bit can keep things from being chaotic. Yes, yes, all right, well this has been the best of both worlds. I was interviewing Mary Laura Philpott. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.