180: Sara Nović's TRUE BIZ and Asali Solomon's THE DAYS OF AFREKETE
In This Episode:
Sara Nović webcams into the Damn Library Zoom Zone to talk her new novel, True Biz. We discuss the limitations of prose in comparison to ASL, how she tried to mimic ASL on the page, some fantasies of Eyeth, and the propulsive nature of short chapters. Also a lot of other stuff. Plus, Sara brought along The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon, a book that both agree is "a feat of engineering" just like the NYT said.
Scroll down for a full transcript!
THE EP. 180 BOOKSHELF
WHAT'D YOU BUY?:
Christopher - Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson, Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
Sara - a webcam
ALSO MENTIONED:
Girl at War by Sara Nović
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Deaf Republic: Poems by Ilya Kaminsky
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Parakeet by Marie Helene-Bertino
The work of W.G. Sebald
The work of Elena Ferrante
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
Mad Men (AMC)
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Christopher - Bake a loaf of bread, buy nice spreads and jams for it
Sara - Blast Lil Nas X’s “Industry Baby”, make pasta
THE DAMN BAR:
EPISODE 180 TRANSCRIPT
Christopher: Hello to everybody out there in podcast land. My name is Christopher, and you're listening to So Many Damn Books. A blessing, a curse, a podcast. This episode we have Sara Nović joining me in the Damn Library Hyperspace Zoom Zone. And I am so excited to be hosting her. Sara Nović is the author of Girl at War and America is Immigrants. She studied fiction and literary translation at Columbia University and teaches creative writing and deaf studies at Amherst College and Stockton University. She lives with her family in Philadelphia, and her book True Biz is hitting the shelves this week. I am just so excited to talk to you. I loved Girl at War. I loved True Biz, I have been thrusting it into people's hands, and I am so excited to be talking to you about it.
Sara: Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I feel good. I've been doing a lot of publicity stuff, but this is like my first nighttime publicity stuff.
Christopher: In that vein, I am so excited about the drink that I created, inspired by your book. It's called “Heaven on Eyeth” and so, this concept. You know it, but the listeners might not, where “Earth” is based around things you hear. And so for the deaf community, they have an idea, a utopian idea called “Eyeth”, and it's something that I just haven't been able to get out of my mind since I read your book. And so I wanted to make a drink that was visually beautiful. And I know that mixing blueberries and lemon creates this really lovely like violet color. And so I just wanted to make something visually stunning. I love Jam cocktails. They're really, really easy because it's just jam, some citrus and some liquor. And so this one is two ounces of a dry gin, three bar spoons of blueberry sumac jam. If you can get it, Brin makes a really beautiful one. And then three quarters of an ounce of lemon juice and you stir that all together first, to sort of dissolve the jam, and then shake it with ice and double strain it so you can get some of the seeds out of it. And it creates this very lovely drink here.
Sara: Oh, wow, that's beautiful.
Christopher: It's such a pretty drink. It really tastes delicious. And I also was excited about trying to find a three ingredient cocktail because your novel is a three ingredient cocktail, with the three different points of view characters, who are so exciting. And I already am sad that the book is over because I missed them. You made such real characters. So that is, that's the drink. Heaven on Eyeth.
Sara: That looked really good. I'm jealous, and I actually like gin, which I think is not a popular opinion. I get a lot of flak for liking gin, but I'm happy that gin is in this cocktail.
Christopher: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I love gin. Gin is probably my favorite spirit of all of them, although I mess with whiskey a lot, but it's gin the most. I think it's because the first cocktail I was ever really into was just a gin and tonic. So what about you?
Sara: Yeah, I love it. I love a gin and tonic.
Christopher: What was your first cocktail?
Sara: I think I was a vodka person first. For better or for worse, you know,
Christopher: Do you have a drink for the recording today?
Sara: Just have water. Sad. Sadly, I'm a garbage person, so I just have water in a Dunkin Donuts cup.
Christopher: That's perfect. That's the other good cocktail to make at all times. Just ice water,
Sara: Water with like some old coffee. Oh, just the essence.
Christopher: Yeah, just a little bit. Just enough to remember. Well, the next part of the show deals heavily with consumerism because it's just a celebration of buying things. I've been very blessed by the mail, by the Galley Fairy this past couple of weeks, and received Karen Joy Fowler's new book Booth. She’s one of my absolute favorite authors. I loved her book We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves about a family living with a chimp. And she also was a professor of mine when I was at UC Santa Cruz, and now she's got this new novel that's all about the John Wilkes Booth family. And it's just following the family. Like, I believe it covers them before and after the assassination.
Sara: That sounds really intriguing.
Christopher: And then I also got this new book by Juno Dawson, and it's called Her Majesty's Royal Coven, and it's about a covert government department of witches who only answered the Queen Elizabeth the first, and it's pitched as The Craft meets Discovery of Witches meets Now and Then. And I just think that all of those things working together seems like it could be a great, great book.
Sara: Yeah, that's a serious cocktail.
Christopher: Exactly. So what about you? What did you buy?
Sara: Well, I went back to 2009 and I bought a webcam. I've been doing all these virtual things, and before that, I bought what I thought was a really good deal on a laptop, which it was. But the camera inside of it is just like maybe one megabit. So I had to buy a webcam, and it really took me back to the old Skype days of my youth.
Christopher Of clipping a little camera…
Sara: I've got it clipped on right now and it doesn't even clip. I think they've really gone backwards in technology. It's like, got something else going on. But now other people can see me sign..
Christopher:It is helpful for video chatting to give some video as much as you're receiving some video.
Sara: Yeah, especially if I’m signing. It was a bit of a mess. All right, fine.
Christopher: Time to buy a webcam. Yeah. I mean, who knew that that was going to be a part of like literary touring? You know, at this point.
Sara: Yeah, it was not what I was expecting, for sure.
Christopher: I am so excited to talk about your new novel, True Biz, it's heading out on sale this week, and I would love to hear from you about what it's about.
Sara: Well, I guess I can tell you about the title. “True Biz” is an ASL idiom. That is, it doesn't quite translate directly to one thing in English, but it can kind of mean “literally” or “seriously” or think “dead ass,” a meaning that I personally like to translate it. And so this book, I guess, is maybe like a version of that. It's some real, real talk about the deaf community, and it's a little bit weird because it doesn't quite translate or it might feel unfamiliar to a hearing reader in some ways. But on the other hand, it's also set, you know, at a boarding school, a high school. There's lots of universal themes running through it, but I think that readers probably can identify all of the teen angst variety, and also of the, you know, approaching middle aged angst variety. One of the perspectives is the headmistress. And she's got her own problems. M goal is to kind of create a place that would challenge hearing readers to kind of reframe the things that they think about the deaf community, but in a really like, plotty and fun kind of way as well. That was my hope.
Christopher: Well, you succeeded in spades. The three main characters, February, Austin, and Charlie, they all have different relationships to hearing. Can you talk about how you chose your point of view characters?
Sara: Charlie was a short story originally, but basically the three different perspectives, February's hearing, she's the CODA, which is a child of deaf adults, as you may have heard, right? No reason. But anyway, so she is a native ASL speaker, but she's also kind of like operating in this liminal space where she feels like she's of deaf culture and she is. But then when she walks out the door, she's still a hearing person. And then Charlie is somebody who grew up really isolated from the deaf community. She has a cochlear implant, and she was basically expected to just perform normalcy in the hearing world in public school, and it didn't work very well. And then Austin is from a multi-generational, deaf family. He grew up to feel surrounded by deaf people, and he's basically living the deaf version of what hearing people just like, take for granted. Like everyone around me in my house speaks the language that I speak, and we all share this one culture. And that's a point of pride for his family as well and for the community, too, because they're kind of like the bearers of ASL and deaf history. In a way, the family units that are deaf families are the ones that kind of carry it through. And when schools start to ban ASL or go into these more or less modes, you still have deaf families that are kind of like the keepers of deaf culture and an itself.
Christopher: Right. Charlie was such a great window. Because she needed this community, and she's also learning about it at the same time, it was great for a hearing person reading this to kind of be getting this, this history that she's never heard, but also I have not heard or I've not been taught. So I was very interested in that. And one of the corners of deaf life that you illuminated is other techniques for signing stories like the subtle shoulder shifts to mean like a different person or the way you move your hands to mean different types of things. And I was curious if regular prose feels restrictive.
Sara: Yes, yes. And particularly for this book, because I wanted to be able to, in some way, represent myself on the page. And the page is so flat and ASL is so not, so that was something that I struggled with a lot in the early part of the book, kind of trying to decide how do I show ASL on paper, how do I also differentiate between ASL and English because I was thinking originally one of the first thing with that very obvious difference between ASL and English is the syntax that's basically backwards. So I was like, OK, maybe I can just write it in ASL syntax. But then I thought, like. For a hearing reader that's just going to look like, “broken english.” And that's not showing them the point, which is that it's actually better than English, particularly for these characters. So the way that the dialog ends up going to be set up in the book is basically spatial dialog tags, essentially. Some people speak from different places on the page, and that's kind of where they're set up, which mirrors the way that if I was telling you a story in ASL, I could kind of set people up around me like that. And then if I just like point back over there, you remember who I was talking about. So they have places from which they speak in a given chapter, and because it visually sets the dialog far apart from each other rather than just like a new line when you speak in English, I hope that it kind of illustrates that ASL for the deaf characters and even for February is like a much clearer way of communicating. And obviously, it's making it a visual separation as well.
Christopher: it was very effective, and it was also exciting to see this mixed in with not just regular prose and dialog tags, but also with text messages and technology, because your last novel was sort of a period piece. I don't know if you would necessarily think of that for something that's partially set in the early 2000s and the 90s. But it is! That was 30 and 20 years ago. But yeah, True Biz is very much set in the now. Um, and it was another thing that I had just never thought about, that Charlie is being introduced to all of these phone apps and these things that she'd never had access to before. And I wanted to know about your relationship with technology. Obviously, you bought a webcam, too. So there's that in the mix between and and also what technology means for story for you.
Sara: Yeah, I think technology makes fiction writing harder in a lot of ways. But, you know, for the deaf community, deaf people are stoically really early adopters of technology because we're not located in one specific place the way that another cultural or ethnic group might be, so we've always needed to figure out ways to communicate with one another even before, you know, the internet. So like, for example, in the 60s, we were kind of ripping the guts out of - I don't even know what you call this. I guess it's like a tele-, a sort of a telegram, like so the Western Union machine, people are going to the dump and ripping the guts out of that and attaching it to a typewriter in a phone line. So basically, you can text each other.
Christopher: Wow.
Sara: Before texting existed. So. Tech has always been a part of deaf culture and also a big part today of how we communicate with the hearing world too. For me, if I'm going to go into a store and everyone has a mask on, then I'm just going to type something on my phone and we're all going to move on with our lives.
Christopher: Right.
Sara: So yeah, the fact that Charlie just has never met another deaf person before. So it never really occurred to her because she had always been taught basically like the burden of communication is on you, and you have to do it this very specific way or you're doing it wrong, and so that's one of the things that River Valley opens up for her, I think.
Christopher: Yeah, I mean, at that moment, I don't know. My heart was just breaking for her that she hadn't had that community. And I love the community that you're that you built. River Valley. Is it based on anything?
Sara: No, it's a fake place. I started the very early parts of this project writing it while I was living in Cincinnati. So like the landscape of Colson, which is also a fake place, was made from things that I was just stealing from looking around. I like southern Ohio as a space for this school because of the way that it serves so many different communities and the way that the Kentucky and the Ohio border works. It was fascinating to me. So I kind of was like, what if you put this school in the middle of it and all these people are coming and it's a hub? This school is fiction, but that is how deaf schools function in general, because again, they're like the heartbeat, they’re the carrier of Deaf culture, there's no other there's no real Eyeth, there's no homeland. So it's in the schools.
Christopher: We’re recording this a week before your novel comes out, and I'm just curious how you're feeling. I want to know, how does this compare to how you felt when you were releasing Girl at War versus True Biz. What's different this time around?
Sara: Well, Girl at War, I was a wreck and I was just like, I had no idea what to expect. I was freaking out. I was not eating properly. I was just like, I was totally a ball of nerves. And this time I am feeling nervous and feeling like I don't want hearing people to read this one book and then stop and be like, OK, check. Deaf people, I get it now. And there's so much talent in the deaf community, in theater and writing and in film. And I think like, I just want there to be a multiplicity of narratives out there. So that's something that I'm worried about, like the kind of people putting a lot of weight of representation on what is obviously just, you know, a few perspectives of these characters that are made up. But also, I'm really excited. Like when I released Girl at War, I went to a bunch of deaf schools and talked to all the kids, and we looked at book clubs at lunch and we talked about why you should write and read and what's the importance of that? And I really liked the idea that maybe they can read this book and actually see people like them. I didn't read a book with a deaf person and that until grad school and it was The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, and all the deaf people go crazy and die. And I was like, Well, let's just kind of a bummer.
Christopher: Oh no.
Sara: Yeah, I'm happy that there's joy in this book. And I'm hopeful that deaf kids and deaf people will enjoy seeing a little bit of themselves in a book too.
Christopher: I feel like that'd be really cool. And I'm hopeful for that for you too. You write about these closed communities in these sort of didactic sections, you write about the Martha's Vineyard ASL and and also that idea of the utopian, Eyeth, that was a world that I was very interested in after coming away from reading your book.
Sara: I mean, they don't exist so much anymore. There are a few places left in the country where per capita there's a ton of deaf people, like Rochester and D.C., where you can kind of like walk around and live life and and be deaf without anyone thinking it's weird. In pretty much any other place in the U.S., people are really combative with you because they’re like mad at you, because they think you’re ignoring them or something. So it's not a closed community, but at least there are places where the assumption is not that you're an asshole, basically how we're operating the world. Yeah, they don't fully exist. And I think that deaf schools are kind of like the closest that we can get to that today in a way.
Christopher: The closest we can get to Eyeth.
Sara: Yeah, I mean, unless we like secede and it's a deaf, we get a deaf republic, just like Ilya’s book. Oh, it's funny because I think the hearing perspective leans so heavily towards like integration into mainstream school and like in the educational sphere, the idea of the least restrictive environment, which means, we put you in the mainstream classroom with like the least amount of support possible so that you can like “be normal”. But I always kind of pushback on that and say, like, what if the least restrictive environment is the place where you can actually talk to your teacher without an interpreter, or you can actually talk to any one of your classmates? Or you can do an extracurricular activity? Like whattje hearing world views of the restriction is actually freedom, and that is what you get out of like a more closed loop community like a deaf school or obviously Martha's Vineyard. I mean, what makes Martha's Vineyard unique is actually that it was deaf and hearing people, but the hearing people kind of got on board.
Christopher: Right, right. That utopia that that we speak of is actually available to us if more people just learn to sign. And I felt that while I was reading, my own lack. I was honestly pained watching the pages like dwindle. I just wanted to know, is there more in the True Biz world? Are we going to get more of these characters? Is there a sequel in your mind? Could you return to these characters? And how do you feel about sequels in general?
Sara: I don't think I have sequels in me as a human, because people ask me the same thing about Girl at War. They're like, well, what happened to her? I was like, oh no, she went back to college. There is more on the cutting room floor. There's like a hundred bonus pages of Eliott around that kind of detail his descent into this church and the whole yeah, thing that's going on over there.
Christopher: Elliot's late breaking story is so harrowing and so sudden. Like, I wasn't expecting to get a full new drop in of a character like that. And it was very effective.
Sara: Thanks. Yeah. No, there's a lot more about that that probably no one will ever read. But the other thing is that right now we're developing a TV series and it's really early days. So it's like, maybe it will never get made. But I do feel like I'm not bored of these characters yet. And like we've been playing with like, well, what if this was the first season? Like, what happens next? So that's been really fun and something that I've never tried to do before. And also in a form that I haven't tried to do. And in a way that I haven't tried to do, because it's very collaborative and writing True Biz was very like me, locked in my room by myself for five years or whatever. So it's all kind of cool to share the characters with another writer and kind of think, like, what are the possibilities that I wouldn't even have come up with?
Christopher: That is so exciting. I would love a True Biz TV show.
Sara: Me too.
Christopher: Oh, good, I'm glad we're all agreeing. You brought along a book that also details a community, The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon. And it is such an interesting book. Can you tell me why you suggested it?
Sara: I mean, I don't have very smart reasons. I really like reading about Philly, and I think this book is beautiful and not exactly what I expected when I started reading it, but kind of perfectly… I think the New York Times review of it, described it like “a feat of engineering” or something, which sounded to me like a weird way to describe a book? But then when I read the book, I was like: yes, actually. So basically, it's set around a dinner party that this family is having, and her husband just lost a bid for political office like local state rep or something. And they're having a dinner to thank their donors, and it’s kind of like a consolation dinner. And she's also got information that maybe her husband has done something wrong, money-wise, and maybe the FBI is watching him or coming for him, and that's kind of like the setup is everyone's about to come over to their house. But it also moves through time, back through time and around. And specifically like to this relationship that she had in college. A romantic relationship with a woman named Selena. So that's kind of the gist of it, but it's a really beautiful book. It's a little slim book, which is nice.
Christopher: Yeah, I love a book that clocks in under 200 pages - and, your book did this too - there's like 200 pages and there's 40 chapters. Every few pages, a short chapter.
Sara: I love a short chapter.
Christopher: It's the best. It's so propulsive. Yeah, a feat of engineering is a fantastic way to describe that, iit feels so organic the way that she comes away from it, and then when you come back into the room, it's like, Oh, right, I'm here with you. I remember now, you were just talking to that one person.
Sara: I think in the hands of a lesser writer, this would be a very vanilla book, almost because you're like, OK, a flashback to somewhere else. OK, back to the table. But it never feels like that, and I don't even know exactly how she did it. It's magic a little bit. I think that the moving back and forth in time in the short chapters is jut… it's like eating a row of Oreos or something, you know, I was like, I have to read the next chapter.
Christopher I also loved the way that she cites media, the way that her characters interact with songs and movies and TV shows, it's just very considered and warm, and there was a point where she even sort of name checks Virginia Woolf, which I thought was so confident because she's clearly sort of messing around with a little bit of Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. Yeah. And I know a couple Mrs. Dalloway diehards that I was like, I've got another one to put in your lake. Like this? Yeah. Now that you've just finished Parakeet by Mary Helene Bertino, now it’s time for Days of Afrekete.
Sara: I think it's a beautiful book. I think it's also there's like a few times where super deadpan humor. There's like, I think the moment when she first meets Selena, there's a line, like, “There's a long pause during which she died,” or something. She was like feeling really awkward. I laughed out loud a few times during this book, and it was all that, very like, small things that the narrator just kind of like drops in for your viewing pleasure.
Christopher: I completely agree. I mean, she's so adept at quickly, just like three lines and, you know the whole character. And you know, that sort of quick sum up can also be extremely humorous.
Sara: I think a lot of it does play with the tension. You know, there's tension at this dinner party. It's almost like tension in between, like what's going on in their head and what's actually happening there. There's all these like kind of, you know, there is an examination of class and race going on and these like awkward people who have given money to this campaign who just are saying some things like, and you’re like, “Oh God, just stop talking, please stop, you’re stressing me out.”
Christopher: My favorite comedic moment was when a donor, a related donor, is like, “OK, so you didn't win. So give me my money back.”
Sara: I was like, damn.
Christopher: I was so drawn in so immediately with all the layers of tension. But at the same time, it's not like... It's not like a drawn taut book. It's not like you're waiting for the hammer of the FBI to come down at any moment, even though that could happen. It's more… it's quieter because you're following her as she's like, “How do I even end up in this moment? How do I end up married? I don't want to be married.” It was funny how much empathy and sympathy you're feeling throughout.
Sara: Yeah, I think that's a good point, I think the coolest thing about this book is that it's compelling not, you know, not because you're waiting for the FBI, but actually the existential crisis is the more interesting part than the like physical threat that could actually happen.
Christopher: I was really drawn to also when you run into an ex in a random place and you suddenly have to like, be a normal person. And act like, “Oh, yeah, I see you sometimes, and this is normal.” And the way that she responds like, “Oh hey.” And she describes her as like, “Oh, as though I see her all the time and we had just been separated in the store.” I know how that feels. It's like, “How are you cool? And I am not in this moment?”
Sara: And she was obviously not cool right from her as physical appearance later, and what we know of her mental state, but still, you can totally, totally feel yourself in those shoes. Like, why am I so bad at this?
Christopher: Yeah, yeah. In the way that this is sort of Dalloway-esque and you know, you can put this on this stack of Dalloway-esque books, are there any authors that when someone says, “Oh, this is like them, this is in this realm,” that you kind of jump for? Is there any style that it's like, “Oh, if you describe it like that, I'm in?”
Sara: I mean, I think Sebald probably. Tell me it’s going to be like Sebald, I want to read it. Maybe Ferran too. I’m down for like a mad lady in the book. Actually, True Biz came out of like a light fangirl of Celeste Ng and the way that she kind of starts all her books by telling you the ending. And then somehow you still can care for the rest of the book. Like, I want to try that. So, yeah, anything that's like Celeste Ng-vibes, I’m in.
Christopher: So the minute someone describes True Biz as Little Fires Everywhere but with a deaf school, you'll know it's arrived.
Sara: Yeah, then I pass out somewhere, probably.
Christopher: I so loved The Days of Afrekete, like anybody who's looking for a shorter read, I mean, if any of the things that we've talked about here so far are interesting to you, just go pick it up. And also, I can highly recommend, of course, your novel True Biz. But now we're moving into the recommendation portion of the show. And I feel like not recommending a book at all. And that's not just because I have been reading some of books and putting them aside, I've been doing that with a lot of different books. True Biz and The Days of Afrekete are the only things I've been able to finish recently. For whatever reason. I think partially because I've been rewatching Mad Men, and that's just like taking up all of the space in my head. So my recommendation for this week, for this episode, is to go and bake a loaf of bread. I have recently started getting into baking peasant bread, peasant loaves, which is really just…
Sara: What does that mean? Tell me.
Christopher: It’s just flour, water and yeast and oil. Like, it's very, very simple. And I think the peasant bread just comes from the fact that it's simple and it's not like an overnight rise or anything. It's just a couple of hours, and it makes a really nice piece of bread. I've been getting into toast. I feel so old saying that, but you could put so many good things on toast andyou end up in this cycle where you buy a bunch of fun jams and spreads for your toast and then you have all these spreads, so you have to bake more bread.
Sara: Then you can put them in a cocktail.
Christopher: And then you end up putting them in a cocktail because you bought too many jams. So bake a loaf of bread. It's so fun. I love baking, but this is my first try using like yeast and things, and I am surprised at the how pretty much every single one of these peasant bread loaves come out edible, so I'm feeling like if I can do it, anybody can do it. And it makes your whole apartment or house smell amazing. There's just, you know, the list goes on and on.
Sara:I love a good loaf of bread. Yeah.
Christopher: So what do you recommend?
Sara: What am I doing right now?
Christopher: You can recommend anything you like movies, tv.
Sara: Just blasting “Industry Baby” into my head. My hearing aids have Bluetooth, just like on a loop for the past week. Lil Nas X, just over and over again, so I don't know if I can recommend it. I find it delightful.
Christopher: He was my most listened to artists last year, so I get it.
Sara: Oh, that's lucky. I have a two year old who is obsessed with Taylor Swift, so I think our Spotify is just like some good things, and oh, Taylor Swift. It's better than if it was Barney, I guess. But to your bread recommendation, the other thing that the child and I like to do is make pasta. He's obsessed with the noodle making machine. It’s very similar dough, it's just flour and water, pretty much. And then you roll it out and slide it through that thing, you get spaghetti, it's magic every time.
Christopher: So we're basically just leaving the gluten free people out right now and just saying like,
Sara: We recommend carbs.
Christopher: It makes sense. We need our comforts right now. You can find comfort on a plate. You can find comfort in a bookstore.
Sara: Maybe you can read a book while eating a slice of toast and really live your best life.
Christopher: A slice of pasta toast.
Sara: Ew. That’s disgusting, we don’t recommend that. Don’t do that.
Christopher: I mean, you do you, if that's going to bring you joy? I don't understand it. But you could. Well, seriously, I feel so excited to be evangelical about True Biz. It is a really exciting book that I, you know, I could read a dozen of these.
Sara: So thanks for reading it. I'm still in the stage where it feels weird that people are reading it, so I'm glad you have it in your hands over there. I am glad you enjoyed it.
Christopher: True Biz is available now from all the cool bookstores. Go and prove your own coolness by asking for it. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Sara: Thanks for having me. This was very fun.
Christopher I'm so glad!
Sara: Even with only water in my cup. Still a good time.