Latest / Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship / #157: When a Community Shows Up: Childhood Cancer, Friendship, and Lifelong Ripple Effects (Amy Blumenfeld)

Transcript

#157: When a Community Shows Up: Childhood Cancer, Friendship, and Lifelong Ripple Effects (Amy Blumenfeld) · Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder if I try this as a story about a bunch of friends, which is what I like to read, from different perspectives, just make the heart of it about friendship and about the impact of witnessing a friend in childhood.
0:15
[SPEAKER_00]: What that ripple effect is on, all of those people, not just the person who is impacted the patient, but on all the loved ones and the people around them.
0:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I had no background infection and it just clicked.
0:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to Dier Nina Conversations about friendship.
0:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host Nina Badson.
0:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm writing about friendship for over ten years podcasting about it for four years.
0:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Today's episode is actually coming out right before my live event in Chicago.
0:46
[SPEAKER_01]: in Highland Park where I grew up.
0:48
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a reason I'm putting this episode right before then.
0:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Part of the element of this live event is that a portion of ticket sales are going to National Pediatric Cancer Foundation.
0:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Event is being hosted at my favorite store in Highland Park, Inaz.
1:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And they are very generously donating fifteen percent of all sales that day at really any of their locations, not just the Highland Park location.
1:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Two National Pediatric Cancer Foundation.
1:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Part of the reason that is important to me.
1:14
[SPEAKER_01]: other than just always feeling for any family going through pediatric cancer and their family and especially the child who is going through treatment and missing school and everything that goes along with dealing with cancer is that my nephew my sister's son died in
1:33
[SPEAKER_01]: of brain cancer.
1:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was eleven when he was diagnosed.
1:37
[SPEAKER_01]: He fought hard for eleven months leaving behind.
1:41
[SPEAKER_01]: My sister, his two sisters and his father and his step parents.
1:47
[SPEAKER_01]: He had DIPG, which is a certain kind of aggressive and very difficult to treat brain tumor.
1:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't talk about it much on the podcast.
1:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't feel it's my story to tell, but I did have his step dad, my brother-in-law on, and I'll link that episode.
2:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And Dave, my brother-in-law, is also one of the people who was really instrumental in helping me start the podcast at the very beginning.
2:10
[SPEAKER_01]: He was helping me produce it.
2:12
[SPEAKER_01]: helping me edit it.
2:13
[SPEAKER_01]: He taught me so much.
2:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm so grateful to Dave and he then also came on as a guest.
2:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And we talked a little bit about that period of life when Joshua sick and just the importance of friends and how community and friends came together.
2:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Today's episode also has that topic in mind.
2:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm speaking to author Amy Lubinfeld, who herself had cancer as a child, different kind of cancer.
2:34
[SPEAKER_01]: She did survive.
2:36
[SPEAKER_01]: She has done a lot of writing about and thinking about, of course, adult survivors of childhood cancer.
2:42
[SPEAKER_01]: We get into her story and how she turned that experience into fiction and how the friendship that was so important necessary in life saving for her family.
2:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And for her, in that time, became the seeds for her first novel many, many years later.
3:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And I will let Amy tell that story herself.
3:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Just to tell you a little bit about Amy, she is an award-winning author and journalist, a graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University.
3:09
[SPEAKER_01]: She received her master's degree in journalism from Columbia.
3:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Her essays and articles have been in the New York Times.
3:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Oprah Magazine, people magazine, all kinds of places.
3:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Her debut novel, The Cast, was selected as a New York Post-Best Book of the Week, and such good people is her second novel.
3:26
[SPEAKER_01]: We talk about both here.
3:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't normally go into such deep detail about people's books because I really feel strongly that it can be hard to listen to a story about a book without having read the book, and I actually myself have not read these two novels yet, but I really want to, and I'm excited to read them, especially after
3:43
[SPEAKER_01]: talking to Amy.
3:44
[SPEAKER_01]: But in this case, it really made sense because Amy's origin story of going through cancer herself as a child and the way her community came together both her childhood friend community and her parents community was just so instrumental in how these books came to be that we had to get into it as a huge part of the story.
4:03
[SPEAKER_01]: So you can see why I wanted this episode to be right before my event that is raising money for national pediatric cancer.
4:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for being here and let's hear from Amy.
4:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Hi Amy, welcome to Dear Nina.
4:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me.
4:16
[SPEAKER_01]: This is going to be an extra special episode because I don't always have the chance to go so far back into a guest childhood.
4:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Your experience and story is so extraordinary.
4:27
[SPEAKER_01]: It does factor into your work, but I want us to build there and I want you to take us on the journey of your experience and somebody who may have read your work will already know, but I think it will be new for some of my listeners.
4:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
4:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I am born in Brad, Queens, New York.
4:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I grew up going to a Jewish school.
4:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And my parents were active and our local son of God.
4:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I went to the nursery school there.
4:51
[SPEAKER_00]: My parents had all of their friends.
4:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It was his vibrant community.
4:55
[SPEAKER_00]: My friends were my parents, friends, children.
4:57
[SPEAKER_00]: When I was thirteen, I actually had schooliosis and it was in a cast for three months.
5:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I got out of the body cast thought everything was fine.
5:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Came home with a virus.
5:06
[SPEAKER_00]: They thought it was just
5:08
[SPEAKER_00]: annual virus.
5:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I never got better and eventually it was diagnosed when I was in eighth grade as Hatchgen's lymphoma, a form of cancer.
5:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I then had about eleven months of chemotherapy to local hospital and we thought I was fine.
5:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't even lose my hair.
5:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They said, all right, great.
5:24
[SPEAKER_00]: You're in a mission.
5:25
[SPEAKER_00]: See you.
5:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And a month after that, all the symptoms came back.
5:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And so my parents switched hospitals.
5:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They brought me with memorial, Sloan Canner and Cancer Center in Manhattan.
5:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I became the first adolescent with Hodgkin's disease to have an autologous bone marrow transplant.
5:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they had done this on other kids with leukemia and other diseases that they never done on an adolescent with Hodgkin's.
5:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Just for the listeners, you were about fourteen at this point or fifteen.
5:50
[SPEAKER_00]: At this point, I was all I was turning fifteen.
5:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
5:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And what year were you in?
5:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was diagnosed in eighty eight and at the point that I went into the hospital for the transplant out of his eighty nine.
6:02
[SPEAKER_00]: At this point I was in the end of ninth grade.
6:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I went into an isolation room for two months and they destroyed my immune system and then built it back with my own marrow.
6:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I had high dose of chemo, high dose of radiation, the whole shabang, and then eventually after about two months, I came out of that.
6:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But while I was in there, and this is really the heart of all of that, is that that community that I grew up in really rallied, not only did they come and they donated blood, and they supported and took care of my brother and bought him to
6:30
[SPEAKER_00]: baseball games and took them to their house to make dinner while he was doing his homework on my parents busy with me.
6:36
[SPEAKER_00]: They created this video tape called Amy Night Live because I was obsessed with Saturday Night Live at the time.
6:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I still am.
6:43
[SPEAKER_00]: They did the ninety minutes of just silliness and skits Saturday Night Live.
6:48
[SPEAKER_00]: They brought it to me in the hospital.
6:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It was one of the greatest gifts that I ever received.
6:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was about forty people.
6:53
[SPEAKER_00]: My parents, friends from the synagogue and their kids, that ten families.
6:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So the adults were going to do
6:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, completely.
6:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was directed and run by the adults.
7:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the book is inspired by the book is fictionalized and inspired by what actually happened.
7:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And we should pause to remind people that it wasn't so easy to make a video.
7:09
[SPEAKER_01]: It isn't like peeking up your iPhone and having eight thousand apps that you can edit with.
7:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, this is like real work.
7:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They had all those gigantic Sony handy cam things, you know, with
7:18
[SPEAKER_00]: microphone and halt to bang.
7:20
[SPEAKER_00]: They did it in a multi-purpose room of the synagogue.
7:22
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a bar mitzvah going on upstairs.
7:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The caterer was bringing the extra food down to this multi-purpose room so that the family that was making this video for me could have a little lush.
7:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just the kindest most thoughtful gift.
7:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the kids, some of them, came to visit me, some of them were too afraid to come because you had a weird gown and a mask from the hat and booties and gloves and the whole thing because it was an isolation room.
7:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was a little overwhelming for actually for many of them.
7:46
[SPEAKER_00]: But my parents' friends came and they visited and they donated blood.
7:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It was that community that really became my model for what friendship should be.
7:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You are there during the hard times and then you're there to get on the dance floor and celebrate during the great times.
8:01
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what these people were.
8:03
[SPEAKER_00]: A few years later, I wanted to become a broadcaster and a list.
8:06
[SPEAKER_00]: That was my dream.
8:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Michael Hauntlife was to be the anchor on the local New York news.
8:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I went to graduate school for journalism.
8:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They ask you, at Columbia, at least, they ask you to do a master's project.
8:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And they say, pick a topic that will sustain your interest throughout the course of the year.
8:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It no idea what I wanted to write about.
8:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a true form, I left it to the very last second to submit my topic.
8:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The day before the topic was due, I went to my annual checkup at Sloan County.
8:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And some sitting there in the pediatrics department on twenty two years old at the time.
8:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, this is several years after my transplant.
8:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I was sitting there and my little reporter's notebook jotting down different ideas of potential topics for this message project.
8:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing was sticking.
8:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything was born.
8:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The woman sitting to my right taps my shoulder.
8:52
[SPEAKER_00]: She's like, are you waiting for somebody?
8:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, no.
8:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So I pulled up and I showed her my wristband.
8:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I had my name.
8:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, no, I'm a patient.
9:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And she was sort of taken aback.
9:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And she started asking all these questions because her daughter, who was fifteen, was sitting to her right.
9:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she asked me all these questions about survivorship, help when I was out of treatment and what it was like.
9:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And after that appointment, I walked back from the east side to the west side across the far and I'm like, all right, I got my topic.
9:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a doubt adult survivors of childhood cancer.
9:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I ended up writing my master's project in journalism school.
9:24
[SPEAKER_00]: about that.
9:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And then at graduation, my professor said you need to turn this into a book.
9:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd never dreamed of writing a book.
9:29
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the first C that was planted.
9:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And he didn't save a kind of book.
9:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, all right, well, it's probably going to be nonfiction, a series of interviews with survivors.
9:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I'll turn into something.
9:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But at the time of twenty three, I had no job, but I needed money.
9:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I needed rent.
9:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I had needed health insurance.
9:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't just take time off to write a book.
9:47
[SPEAKER_00]: When I had a free moment here and there on the weekends or whenever, I would sock away a chapter and I would continue to interview people.
9:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I continued to stay up on the research and everything that was going on in the survivorship community.
10:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, it was turning into this really boring series of interviews that I just I would not read.
10:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, all right, well, maybe I'll write a little bit of a memoir.
10:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not working.
10:09
[SPEAKER_01]: What were you doing for a work in the meantime?
10:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the meantime, I was working as a magazine editor.
10:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I realized in graduate school that I was not cut out to be on TV.
10:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like a different type of writing.
10:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I was better in print.
10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I got a job as an editor and staff writer first in American Health magazine.
10:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I was a staff writer, George magazine, John Kennedy, Jr.
10:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember George magazine.
10:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it was so cool.
10:35
[SPEAKER_01]: That was a beautiful physically.
10:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It was, it's completely crazy.
10:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually have the posters in my house, some of them that were in our office when we folded.
10:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's like a shark.
10:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, it was larger.
10:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like it was a physically bigger magazine.
10:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember in that crackling.
10:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was writing a piece at the time actually about kids who grew up in the White House.
10:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I interviewed the children of former U.S.
10:59
[SPEAKER_00]: presidents.
10:59
[SPEAKER_00]: We had up this big feature spread out and then we folded with that issue, of course.
11:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the editor and chief at the time, he set up a meeting with people magazine and then people magazine said, come, continue to report for us.
11:12
[SPEAKER_00]: They ended up writing it as a big story for people.
11:15
[SPEAKER_00]: From there, I started freelancing.
11:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what I was continuing to do.
11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: But all this time, this thing was sitting inside of me.
11:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't get rid of this book.
11:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew whether it was my own need to fulfill this suggestion from my professor or if there was just this need.
11:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew I wasn't going to medical school and this is my way to give back to the cancer community.
11:34
[SPEAKER_00]: This was my contribution.
11:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I could not let go of this book.
11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And I did not know what format was going to take.
11:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Life goes on.
11:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Get married.
11:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I have my daughter.
11:43
[SPEAKER_00]: One day, I'm thinking, all right, I gotta do something with this.
11:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not working out in all these other formats.
11:47
[SPEAKER_00]: What would I want to read?
11:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I like contemporary fiction.
11:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like, well, what if I try this is a story about a bunch of friends, which is what I like to read from different perspectives and then just make the heart of it about friendship and about
12:02
[SPEAKER_00]: the impact of witnessing a friend in childhood, what that ripple effect is on, all of those people, not just the person who is impacted the patient, but on all the loved ones and the people around them.
12:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had no background infection and it just clicked.
12:17
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have some of your own experience in there.
12:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you also have all those interviews you had done earlier?
12:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe thinking this might be a non-fiction.
12:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Did some of that make its way, do you think?
12:27
[SPEAKER_00]: For sure.
12:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I had my own experience, but there's so many other people's long-term experiences, especially at that time.
12:33
[SPEAKER_00]: We were sort of getting pigs in the first generation, the generation before.
12:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The high dose radiation really could make you deformed in so many ways or have a long-term serious long-term effects.
12:44
[SPEAKER_00]: physically and emotionally, and it's still as the case, but over time it got better in terms of the treatments they improved things.
12:50
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't necessarily look at somebody now from my generation and say, you were sick.
12:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you would look at me and necessarily know that there's a whole bunch of scars and background and that's there.
13:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's important to sort of share those stories so people don't feel alone, but also to see if it's not just as I said, not just the person who is in treatment, this impacted
13:11
[SPEAKER_00]: siblings, impacted parents, it impacts your spouse down the road, it impacts your children down the road, it impacts your friends in various ways, it impacts your relationships and your priorities in the way you select friends and who's going to make the cotton, who's not worth your time and it's just everything and so for me and for many people it changes perspective.
13:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that was worthwhile and also religion too, that's a really interesting one.
13:37
[SPEAKER_00]: and impacts face and your career choice.
13:40
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a ripple effect in many, many.
13:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking about this whole ripple effect that we're talking about and the way that the experience of having a child with cancer obviously affected you, the person going through treatment and being in junior high when you first are having symptoms and through it, right?
13:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like when you're the very first time then into high school.
14:02
[SPEAKER_01]: than your parents and their friends in their community, I have to imagine that some people really rose up in ways that were unexpected and did they become closer?
14:12
[SPEAKER_00]: For sure, my parents, friends, who were really there for my brother and for me and for my parents, became to this day, like second parents to me.
14:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I also grew up with parents who have very close friends and it is an extended family in a way.
14:25
[SPEAKER_01]: This is who you count on, except when something really severe happens where you need, not just the theory of help, like, oh, you know people would be there for you, but you actually need someone to pick up the younger brother and take them to school and keep them on the weekend.
14:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And you don't always know until you're tested how people are able to step up.
14:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you did the fiction version in your book, The Cast, I'm curious how much of your personal story that fully made it in there.
14:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so funny.
14:54
[SPEAKER_00]: People think they know the truth.
14:56
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't.
14:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They're definitely elements.
14:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I took the most important things that I wanted to get across.
15:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And I put that in there.
15:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But then I twisted it.
15:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And I made it more dramatic.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I went off in other directions.
15:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I lifted from other people from their stories.
15:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And I put it in the main character stories.
15:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So there were some things that I wanted to get in there.
15:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The long-term effects of just what happens to back up the main character.
15:19
[SPEAKER_00]: There are long-term effects from treatment, especially back then.
15:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And they didn't know what they were doing.
15:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And the main goal was to save a life.
15:27
[SPEAKER_00]: There was also this goal of, okay, we're going to save the life and also try to ensure that there's a quality to that like that we're saving.
15:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't always work out.
15:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were all so these long-term effects.
15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to get as part of a long-term effect fertility.
15:39
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a big one.
15:41
[SPEAKER_00]: With me, I was very fortunate.
15:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I was able to have my daughter.
15:44
[SPEAKER_00]: and so she's biologically mean and she'd look like and she's my husband, but I wasn't able to carry because of the radiation that I had.
15:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we used a surrogate to have my daughter.
15:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to have that story and the story of teaching my daughter to be proud and to not be ashamed of her birth story.
16:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I put that into the box.
16:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was from me.
16:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But a lot of the other parts were just the mix of a story from here, a story from there.
16:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I sort of chopped up the impact of religion, the impact of that connection that tethering to your friend.
16:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And career also, the impact that it has on career and priorities, and choosing a spouse, and really what matters to you, and seeing it all from the perspective of, oh my god, how short life can be, and how that played out on all of the friends in different ways.
16:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The cast is essentially like the big chill.
16:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I say meets the fault in our stars.
16:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a reunion of old friends.
16:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It is so not a cancer book, but it's about how, you know, all these friends are, it's a reunion.
16:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Twenty-five years after her, their friend goes through cancer treatment.
16:47
[SPEAKER_00]: She's fine.
16:48
[SPEAKER_00]: She survives.
16:49
[SPEAKER_00]: They all reunite for a weekend in the country over July, for and all of their lives are in different places.
16:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And it comes back to that illness, but it's not about the illness.
16:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't wait to read it.
17:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how I haven't read it yet.
17:01
[SPEAKER_01]: It's so my kind of book.
17:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll definitely be reading it.
17:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't talk about it yet because I haven't read it yet.
17:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such a good premise.
17:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it easy to find an agent?
17:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I bet it was.
17:10
[SPEAKER_01]: When I read just what the books about in the way that it's written on the back of the book, it's so compelling.
17:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I know that query letters and getting an agent.
17:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there was probably many iterations.
17:19
[SPEAKER_01]: How hard was it to get a published?
17:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Funny, the beginning when it wasn't fiction.
17:25
[SPEAKER_00]: When it was the survey interviews, and then it was the memoir, nobody wanted it.
17:29
[SPEAKER_00]: When I put it together, and I pitched it exactly the way I just explained it to you, someone came through.
17:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew that.
17:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I just could tell because I mean, I've been in the hole, I try to get an agent world a long time ago when I was writing fiction.
17:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I know it's not easy to get an agent.
17:43
[SPEAKER_01]: So I wasn't suggesting it would be.
17:44
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just that this story in the way you say it is so to me a no-brainer as a book.
17:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm not surprised that it got scooped up.
17:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The community that I grew up in really inspired me.
17:55
[SPEAKER_00]: and they created that model for me.
17:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Friendship really is at the core of my work.
17:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And so such good people, my second book, I knew that I wanted to write another book that had at the heart of it, long-term friendship, childhood friendship, but I didn't want to write about health.
18:10
[SPEAKER_00]: If you want to do anything medical, I grew up.
18:13
[SPEAKER_00]: hanging on our wall was said, et cetera, tiered off in our living room, justice justice shall you pursue.
18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And my dad, when I was young, was a criminal defense lawyer at the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx.
18:26
[SPEAKER_00]: When I was in seventh grade, he became a judge, but when he a criminal court judge.
18:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I was young, he would have his colleagues come over to our house, and they would discuss their case around our dining room table, and so I would listen to them.
18:40
[SPEAKER_00]: plotting out and talking about the fact that when he was a judge, I used to sit with him on the bench and during a raimance, particularly in I would wash this whole drama unfold, it was a whole language and the action with the prosecutors and the defense attorneys and the defendant.
18:55
[SPEAKER_00]: that directly in my line of sight across or in a bunch where they pused the audience section where these loved ones of the people were sitting.
19:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know if they were there for the defense or from the side of the prosecution.
19:08
[SPEAKER_00]: All I could see, but these angst riddled faces directly in my line of sight and I'm like, what's their story?
19:14
[SPEAKER_00]: That has stayed in my head for many years when I
19:17
[SPEAKER_00]: knew that I wanted to write a second novel and I wanted it to be about friendship.
19:21
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, I wanted to be about the criminal justice system.
19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I have just no clue what that's going to be.
19:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, we were invited to a gala event for a fundraiser for a halfway house.
19:36
[SPEAKER_00]: gave a family friend who's involved administratively and so we just got put on the invite list for this.
19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: We were not able to go, but we ended up receiving their newsletters.
19:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And I read the newsletters.
19:46
[SPEAKER_00]: They were profiling some of these teachers that worked at the halfway house and they were fascinating profiles and some of those teachers had their own criminal past.
19:56
[SPEAKER_00]: and their background of being incarcerated inspired them when they got out to become teachers and help people transition after they were incarcerated back into society and to give them a leg.
20:09
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how I created April, the main character for my new book, Such Good People.
20:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, all right, she's got to have a childhood friend who inspired this.
20:18
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened to that child and friend?
20:20
[SPEAKER_00]: What happened between that?
20:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about the links that you go to for the people that you love.
20:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It impacts her kids at school, it impacts her husband, and she is then torn between showing up for her best friend who risked and sacrificed so much for her, and this beautiful life that she created in Chicago and her husband needs her at home.
20:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It's part of the story.
20:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, right, of course is more in there.
20:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember when you and I were first talking about doing an episode and we were sort of playing around with the idea of royalties and I'm even thinking way back to your first book and your actual real life experience and that is hard when your friends need you like your parents and their friends the way they showed up for your family.
20:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I try to advise people through that sometimes you just have to choose and someone's going to be disappointed.
21:01
[SPEAKER_01]: The family's going to be disappointed or the friends are going to be disappointed because we talk a lot of
21:06
[SPEAKER_01]: on the show about showing up and showing up and showing up.
21:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can't actually show up for everything.
21:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And then if you care a lot about being a good friend, I mean, that eats away at us, too.
21:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep, absolutely.
21:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's tough.
21:16
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of gray areas.
21:17
[SPEAKER_00]: There's these dual loyal things.
21:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And you just do the best you can.
21:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Even in happy times, there's hands when more some of my twenties, I remember, but there'd be a friend's wedding.
21:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Look, good, really good friend.
21:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And a cousin's wedding.
21:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Same weekend.
21:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Try to please everybody.
21:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It says no, it's work.
21:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Can't be in two places.
21:33
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the essence of the book, but it's similar and insert it to the cast in the sense that it's based on the childhood friendship.
21:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about that commitment to these people who mean so much and what do you do?
21:44
[SPEAKER_01]: My final question and then we'll wrap up is how are readers responding to both books to people and to telling you about their friendships?
21:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they picking up on the huge friendship part of this story or do they want to talk more about the cancer parts or the criminal justice part for the new book?
22:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The greatest compliment for me is that if people say it's thought or okay.
22:03
[SPEAKER_00]: People are having different reactions.
22:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Some people are gravitating toward the social justice and the criminal justice part of it.
22:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Some people are really moved by the friendship and their heart is breaking.
22:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I think friendship is really at the heart of my books because it's so important to me.
22:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It was such a formative
22:20
[SPEAKER_00]: part of my childhood and my life, my friends are so important to me and they have been forever because of that model that was set for me.
22:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I really got to see the importance and the good in people and I think it's also a part of just going through these life cycles.
22:34
[SPEAKER_00]: You see people in times of celebration.
22:37
[SPEAKER_00]: You see them at their worst moments and it's the ones that stick by you and that you're there for and you want to be there for the mean the most and that's what it's all about.
22:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Beautiful.
22:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a perfect place to end.
22:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone, you can find the cast and such good people.
22:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Anywhere you buy books, but I'll have direct links in the show notes too.
22:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Amy, thank you so much for being here and sharing your experience with us.
22:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad you are healthy and thank God for all those amazing doctors and teams.
23:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for having me.
23:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I love that listeners come back next week when our friendships are going well.
23:07
[SPEAKER_01]: We are happier all around.