Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 98—Lisa Romeo on Her Memoir “Starting with Goodbye” and the Power of Paper Habits
136 Plays7 years ago
"I think it's important to get perspectives from people who don't write exactly what you write," says Lisa Romeo. You know the drill…It’s the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with leaders in the field of nonfiction about telling true stories, narrative journalists, doc film makers, essayists, memoirists, and radio producers to tease out tactics, habits, and routines, so you can apply those tools to your own work. If you don’t already subscribe to the show, do it on Apple Podcasts. Google Play Music, Stitcher, and very soon, Spotify. If the episode or episodes strike a chord, share it with your friends. You are the social network, not those other goons. Episode 98 feature Lisa Romeo (@lisaromeo on twitter), whose memoir Starting with Goodby: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss” tells the story of her late father and the continued relationship Lisa has with him in memory. It’s not a downer. Lisa writes it with such great tact that you never feel weighed down. Quite the opposite, really. She talks about: Brain dumps Writing right away as a form of note taking even while close to the trauma Getting perspectives from people outside your genre And the Power of Paper Habits Head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly reading list newsletter. Operative word monthly. I send out my reading recs along with what you might have missed ffrom the world of the podcast. You can even ask for my new CNF Pod Zine! Issue No. 1 is out. Also, if you leave an honest review on iTunes and send me a screeshot of it, I’ll coach up a piece of your writing of up to 10 pages or about 2,000 words. That’s not reserved for five-star reviewers. You can leave a two-star review and I’ll still honor the deal, though if you made it this far you likely think the show has more than two stars worth of value, but whatever. These are things that move the meter in the podcastosphere, so those are deeply appreciated.
Recommended
Transcript
Debating Podcast Growth Strategies
00:00:00
Speaker
There's a fundamental disagreement going on in the house these days over whether I should be spending my time on two episodes a week or doing other things to grow the podcast. I figured two a week features more creators of non-fiction while possibly reaching twice the audience. The Missus thinks I should be spending time on different kinds of promotion, advertising, etc. so that this thing can sustain itself.
00:00:29
Speaker
At the moment, we'll agree to disagree. Though she's probably right, she most likely is, she always is, but to her credit, she loves the riff. Seriously, I'm not even making that up. I even asked her when I bought this song, you don't think it's too heavy, do you? Should I use more like AC, DC song? Kind of like the one you hear at the end of the show. And she was like, no, I like the heavy one. No, so there you go.
00:00:58
Speaker
Hey, you know the drill. It's the creative non-fiction podcast, the show.
00:01:02
Speaker
where I speak with leaders in the field of non-fiction about telling true stories, narrative journalists, doc filmmakers, essayists, memoirists, and radio producers to tease out tactics, habits, and routines so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work.
Lisa Romeo and 'Starting with Goodbye'
00:01:19
Speaker
I am Brendan O'Mara. If you don't already subscribe to the show, do it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Stitcher, and very soon Spotify.
00:01:29
Speaker
If the episode or episode strike a chord, share it with your friends. You are the social network, not those other goons. Episode 98 features Lisa Romeo at Lisa Romeo on Twitter, whose memoir starting with Goodbye. A daughter's memoir of love after loss tells the story of her late father and the continued relationship Lisa has with him in memory. It's not a downer.
00:01:56
Speaker
Lisa writes it with such great tact that you never feel weighed down.
Writing Process and Genre Perspectives
00:02:01
Speaker
Quite the opposite, really. She talks about, in this episode, brain dumps, writing right away as a form of note taking, even while close to the traumatic event.
00:02:12
Speaker
getting perspectives from people outside your genre and the power of paper habits. It's pretty cool. Stay tuned to the end of the show for some incentivized call to action. Is that a word? Incentivized calls to action. There you go. For now, let's hear from Lisa Romeo.
Early Writing and Horse Magazine Inspiration
00:02:33
Speaker
This is kind of a it's kind of cool that we have a connection over over horses.
00:02:38
Speaker
Yeah, that's where I started writing because when I was a little girl, I wanted my father to buy me a pony, and then I grew too tall for a pony, so then of course I wanted a horse, but I kept writing all these stories about a little girl who finally got her horse, and it worked. I got the horse when I was 14, and then I went on and wrote for horse magazines, and that's how I got my start.
00:03:02
Speaker
Well, what do you think it is about the horse that elicits such almost like this primal need for storytelling? It really lends itself, that animal lends itself to story in a lot of ways. Oh, absolutely. I don't know what it is and I'm not sure I want to know what it is. I think it's something a little mystical and mysterious and it just...
00:03:26
Speaker
I always thought it was limited to little girls. And then, of course, I grew up and found out, no, it's not little girls. It's grown up people, too, who yearn to tell stories about horses. I don't know, but it's wonderful. And I hope I don't ever outgrow it.
00:03:40
Speaker
Yeah, they're just, they're so supremely athletic and you know, they're the biggest, the biggest and sort of fastest animal for how big they are in the world. One of them for sure. I'm sure there are some others that are as big and as fast, but the sort of the grace and the athleticism of them is like unmatched really. And it's just that you can see it in any, any discipline, whether it's hunter jumpers or on the racetrack.
00:04:07
Speaker
And that partnership, I mean, you can share in that. You can ride the horses and be with them and live with them and take care of them. And they take care of us in a lot of emotional ways, I think, when you are involved with horses.
00:04:20
Speaker
And when my sister was little, I want to say maybe a preteen or so, she used to help take care of a friend's horse and she would ride the horse, exercise it. And I guess she was riding along a creek one time and she got thrown from the horse and fell into the creek. And she was underwater and partially unconscious, kind of woozy. And then she felt herself getting pulled out of the water.
00:04:45
Speaker
And it was her horse pulling her out of the water who effectively saved her life. Oh, I love that story. Yeah. So you talk about that kinship. It truly goes both ways. Absolutely. Yeah, I miss them. It's been a long time since I've written, and I do miss it.
00:05:04
Speaker
And so with respect to horses, clearly they kind of gave you the writing bug, so to speak. When you were little, was writing something you always wanted to aspire to?
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, I grew up in the 1960s in suburban New Jersey. And I guess at that time, nursery school was sort of a novel thing. It wasn't an expected thing that every toddler went off to nursery school. And I begged and begged. I wanted to go to school because my brother was eight years older than me. My sister was 12 years older than me. So I saw them going off to school all the time. And I just begged, please send me to nursery school. And my parents wouldn't.
00:05:56
Speaker
And my sister taught me to read and write when I was about four and a half, five years old. And that was it. That just opened the world to me. And from then on, all I wanted to do was read and write. And I was, I got a little typewriter when I was five and that was it. I was, uh, books were everything. I just would come home with piles of books. We had this tiny little library in my little suburb. And I remember putting a pile of books on the counter.
00:06:24
Speaker
And the woman behind the counter would say, you can't read all those in two weeks, dear.
00:06:29
Speaker
And I just say, yeah, well, that's okay. Please. Can I have them? And I'd go home and read them all. And my father was always reading. He read two or three newspapers a day. My mother read magazines and she wrote letters. My mother wrote every night. She would sit at the dining room table and she would write letters to friends and relatives who had moved all over the world. And to me, words were everything. They were how you communicated and told stories and
00:06:58
Speaker
So that's when it bit me, I guess, very young.
00:07:01
Speaker
And given how much older or how much younger you were than your siblings, writing and writing stories is probably a way for you to almost find some kinship with the language because they have their friends and everything and they're probably weren't super willing to grab Lisa and tug her along. You probably found a kinship with the stories because they were off doing their own thing, I imagine.
00:07:31
Speaker
Well, my brother certainly didn't want me tagging along, even though I did. But my sister, she was like a second mother to me. She just did everything with me, took me everywhere, let me go with her. And she coddled me and we had this great bond right from the beginning. And when she went off to college, I was only five and a half just going into
Career Aspirations and Transition to PR
00:07:56
Speaker
kindergarten and I was
00:07:58
Speaker
completely devastated that she left and so I'd sit at the dining room table next to my mother at night in this little typewriter and type her letters almost every night and my mother would mail them off to her. And so when you were in a development coming up through say high school and college did you still want to what like what kind of a writer did you want to be at that point?
00:08:22
Speaker
I wanted to be a sports writer when I was in high school. My big dream was to be a sports writer for the New York Times. My brother and my father had season tickets to the New York Giants and to the New York Rangers. So from a young age, I was going to professional football games, professional hockey games. And I remember very clearly there was a woman, well, I didn't know she was a woman, there was a writer for the New York Times named Robin Herman who covered the Rangers.
00:08:51
Speaker
And in high school, my journalism class took a field trip to the New York Times building. And they were taking us through the building. And I saw the sports department off in the distance. And we weren't really going to go there. So I broke away with my friend. She and I were like, Lucy and Ethel. So we broke away from the trip and we went to find the sports department. And it was so exciting. We walked in and there was red Smith.
00:09:15
Speaker
all these other people. And I said to someone, I want to meet Robin Herman. Where's Robin Herman? And someone pointed to a desk, and there was a woman sitting there. And it didn't occur to me. She was a woman. And to me, that just opened all the floodgates. I thought, oh, my gosh, I could be a sports writer. So that's what I wanted to be through most of high school, probably all of high school and part of college.
00:09:38
Speaker
And I did write some sports, hockey and some other things. And of course, all the equestrian sports. But then as I went through college, I realized, well, maybe I don't want to be a full-time sports writer at a major newspaper. But it was a lovely dream for a while. So what was that maybe a moment or an inflection point where that change where you pivoted from wanting to be a, you know, sort of a beat sports writer to something else?
00:10:06
Speaker
Well, I think the next thing that occurred to me was to write about horses, because I had horses by then. I had a couple of horses by then, and I wanted to go out on the horse show circuit right after college for a couple of years and just concentrate on my riding and competing. And one way to do that, I thought, was to write for all the equestrian magazines as a freelancer.
00:10:30
Speaker
Of course, dad was paying the bills for the horses. There was no way I could have paid those kinds of bills for the training and the transportation and the horse show fees and veterinary bills. But I was working for all the equestrian magazines, and then I started doing publicity for equestrian events. So I was buying my food and my clothing and putting gas in a car and things like that, which you could do in the early 80s on freelance income.
00:10:57
Speaker
I'm not sure you could do it today. But so that was, you know, I wanted to write for the Chronicle of the Horse was my big dream for a while. And I was a regular columnist there. So for about three, four years, I traveled around on the Horseshoe Circuit, first on the West Coast, then back on the East Coast. And that's what I did. And that was and then I translate translated that into my first full time job away from the Horseshoe Circuit.
00:11:24
Speaker
was working for a public relations firm. It was 1984. The Olympics were coming up in Los Angeles. And this firm's client, Purina, was sponsoring the equestrian team. And they needed somebody who spoke the language. So I was very lucky to get that job and started working in PR.
00:11:44
Speaker
Did working in PR feel kind of like weird and disjointed after having done having kind of been on sort of the other side of the fence doing some journalism that was the what was that like? Well, for the first year, I was mostly working on that equestrian campaign, so it didn't feel like that big of a switch. I was talking to the same editors, interviewing the same writers and whatnot. But then, of course, I had to work on other
00:12:12
Speaker
PR accounts for the agency. So then I was working on things like sharp electronics and other consumer manufacturing goods and whatnot. And that's when I started to feel like, yeah, but you know what? This isn't really writing. This isn't really journalism. But it paid really well. And when you're in your mid 20s, you want to start making some money. And I thought, OK, I could go back to pure writing one day.
00:12:38
Speaker
I think I stayed in PR about 10 years. First I worked for two different agencies and then I had my own small PR business. By the time I had my own small PR business, I had decided I just wanted to work for nonprofit organizations, which I did. And then eventually I wanted to just get back to the pure writing.
00:12:58
Speaker
That must have been neat for your father to hear like when you kind of struck out on your own because he had not after reading the book, you know, you know, he had like an entrepreneurial bent and you know, running that polyester fabric business and being a very successful business owner. And so when you hung up your own PR shingle, he must have been pretty proud at that moment. I think he was. Yeah, yeah, I really do think so. And he
00:13:27
Speaker
often would when we'd have you know they lived far away from me of course by then they were living in Las Vegas by then I was still in New Jersey but when we did see each other one of the first things he would ask me about is got any new clients and and then of course he knew no boundaries when it came to asking questions so he would say and how much are you charging them and are you sure you're charging them enough and don't you think you should raise your prices
00:13:53
Speaker
And so on the one hand, that was great. He was such a great cheerleader. And on the other hand, I thought, you know, I can't be always answering to you about the money and all of that. And, you know, partly his was a scrappier industry where they, you know, made deals on handshakes and winks of the eye and whatnot. And, you know, PR isn't like that. You write a whole prospectus for your client about how you're going to implement their program.
00:14:22
Speaker
and it's X number of dollars per month based on X number of hours. And so, you know, there was always this little tug between us like, well, you don't really understand my business. And, you know, but he was always in my corner in that way. And I learned so many things just from having listened to him over the years talk about how he would negotiate and how he would approach a client and, you know, figuring out what's the sweet spot with this particular,
00:14:50
Speaker
And then I carried that over later, of course, when I was doing so much freelancing for, you know, dealing with editors and whatnot. Yeah, that dovetails. That segues perfectly into what I wanted to ask you next. Like, being a freelancer, it's a lot of people, artists or writers tend to want to be more on the generative sort of creative side of things and often neglect.
00:15:17
Speaker
or just turn to blind eye because they don't want to really face the business administration part of it. When you're a freelancer, you're the CEO and the foot soldier at the same time. What did having an entrepreneurial spirit and father, what did you learn business-wise that you were able to translate into your freelancing?
00:15:44
Speaker
The primary thing I suppose is that to remember always that your time and your output, your product has a value. So not to want something so much that you're willing to give it away. Now, this is a funny and interesting thing because, of course, in the creative writing world,
00:16:06
Speaker
especially if we're talking about literary journals and that sort of thing, we're often not getting paid for some of the work we're giving away. There's reasons for that. You know, maybe you're building toward a book and so you're writing essays in the meantime for literary journals. And there's a reason and it makes sense to you to have it appear in those pages and be read by those people who read those kinds of things.
00:16:30
Speaker
Um, but on the flip side, if you're working for magazines and newspapers and websites that are, you know, selling advertising against their editorial content, then you want to be paid for your work. And so I always have that in the back of my head from my father, like make sure they pay you what you're worth. And, you know, you don't always have a lot of negotiating room today. I find contracts now are very restrictive and they want all the rights to everything forever.
00:17:00
Speaker
You know, they're written by lawyers, these contracts. And sometimes, I mean, my father used to tell me sometimes, just cross the thing out on the contract. No one will ever notice, you know, this is when we had paper contracts. Just draw a line through it and put your initial in the margin and chances are they won't notice and then that's legally binding. He was right. But you can't always do that, you know, today on the electronic contracts and they do notice.
00:17:22
Speaker
your work does have value.
Valuing Creative Work
00:17:24
Speaker
And I guess you have to decide for yourself first, what am I doing this particular piece for? Is this particular piece to earn a paycheck? Or is this particular piece going to serve me in some other way in pursuit of some other literary goal? And then it's perhaps worth not having a paycheck.
00:17:45
Speaker
You almost have to hold a board meeting inside your head and be like, alright guys, let's set up a pros and cons list. What are we gonna do here? What's the value, like you were saying?
00:17:56
Speaker
Oh, that's exactly it. I never heard it put that way. You hold a board meeting inside your head, right? In terms of some crafty type things and how you approach the work at hand, I wonder when do you tend to get going in terms of the morning routine and how do you set up your day and check in with yourself so you can have what you deem a productive and successful day at the ledger, so to speak?
00:18:26
Speaker
Well, it varies a lot because I do teach in an MFA program, which is an all online MFA program at Bay Path University. And I also sometimes teach at local colleges on campus. So it kind of depends what each semester looks like. But because I have teaching obligations and I very often have editing clients where I'm editing either their whole manuscript or just short pieces,
00:18:55
Speaker
The day really starts with checking in, are any students looking for me? Does anybody have a question? Have I gotten submissions in from students or clients overnight that I need to then read or print out and look at and make notes on and give them electronic feedback on their document?
00:19:14
Speaker
So most days, the early part of the day, up till noon at least, is devoted to paid work. Just like anybody else, I have a job, several jobs. And then of course, if I have any articles that I've been asked to write, I have deadlines coming up, those have to be done first. Anything that's related to a paycheck has to get done first. I have two kids in college.
00:19:40
Speaker
And my husband's self-employed as well. So that has to be attended to first. That's the day job. And then there's the personal writing and I have to fit it in just like anybody else who has a job. Now I'm lucky because most of the time I get to work at home.
00:19:57
Speaker
which means I can move things around in my day. And now that our children are older, we don't have to have set dinner time at 5.30. And so I can say, hey, I'm going to work till 9 o'clock tonight and the household can go on without me. And I tend to like that. I like to spread out throughout the day.
00:20:18
Speaker
and not feel like 5.30, everything has to end. So I will work in blocks. I'll do three or four hours of student work or three or four hours of client work, and then three or four hours, hopefully, of my own creative work.
00:20:33
Speaker
It doesn't always happen every day. But I do have that ability because I can sort of manipulate my own schedule where there are days where I say, okay, today's just a writing day. Everything else has to wait till tomorrow.
00:20:49
Speaker
How do you keep your energy level as such a way that you can maintain a certain level of focus to give each of those tasks the energy it deserves? I don't know. I don't sleep a lot. So you can find me sometimes at the keyboard at 2 AM and I'm awake.
00:21:13
Speaker
So I don't know if that's a curse or a blessing. Most of the time I think it's a blessing. And I'm also sort of boring. I don't have a lot of hobbies and things like that. So I don't need to spend the whole weekend playing tennis or tending to the garden. I'm just here in the office. I don't know. I'm not a yoga person. So I can't say, oh, my yoga keeps me energized or that sort of thing. I just thrive on work.
00:21:39
Speaker
And what do you feel most engaged in, the writing part or the editing and rewriting part? Of my own work, I mean. Yeah. Well, first of all, I love the phase where I just call like a brain dump, you know, where I just get everything out of my head and onto the document on my computer screen or in a notebook.
00:22:02
Speaker
get it all out, all the stray thoughts I have on this topic that I'm going to write about, just dump it all out. And it's totally messy, a horrible crappy. It's not even a draft at that point. It might just look like a list. But I really like that moment because I feel like, OK, now I'm going to start on something now because it's been like accumulating or simmering in my head or in my writer's notebook before then. And so then when I reach the point where I think, ah, OK, I think I'm going to have something here.
00:22:32
Speaker
I love that moment. And then the rest is like torture. Until I get to where I have what I think is a pretty solid first draft, and it may have taken, you know, 10 tries from that moment of brain dump. But then when I have something that feels kind of solid,
00:22:52
Speaker
Then I start revisions and I'm one of these weird people who really love revision because to me that's where the work actually comes alive is in revision. That's where I figure out what it is that I'm actually trying to say. So I love that phase.
00:23:10
Speaker
I love taking the chainsaw to it and just blasting off pages at a time. I love at that point you've got the sort of the ore and then you just start lopping off. I love just deleting five pages and seeing if it still reads the same and be like, oh, it's the best. Oh, exactly. And I love paper, so I love to print things out.
00:23:32
Speaker
And then I get that red pen and just start drawing X's through things. It's so liberating. It's so, I think, Lisa, what you were saying there with paper and the red marker, I think that's so important because you need to see where the deletions are happening.
00:23:51
Speaker
With deleting things through Microsoft Word or Scrivener or whatever program people use, it's just when it's gone, it's gone. It's like putting a to-do list on a dry erase board and then you erase it. It's like you can't see that it was done. You don't know it was there. That's right. You have to see the line through that thing on the to-do list. I love printing things out. Yeah.
00:24:14
Speaker
I think that's so important because it does show what was previously there and when you do that you won't make the same mistake again and you can actually see that work was done and not just believe that it was done because you put some time in. I don't know. I believe that you really kind of need to see it.
00:24:33
Speaker
Well, not only that, but when it only exists on your computer screen, you're sort of carrying it around in your head. It's like a mental load, too. Whereas once you print it out, it exists as its own entity, so to speak. And I love to take the pages off the printer and then get the hell out of the office and go sit on the patio or at the dining room table or something with a cup of tea and try and engage with what I've written
00:25:02
Speaker
It's hard because you can't be objective. It's your own work. But as much as you can try to engage as a reader, you know, like, does this make any sense? Would anyone want to read this? And that's where you see those problems that you do have to just X out. But the other great advantage of having it on paper is when we're talking about a big work, you know, a very, very long essay or short story or something or a book manuscript.
00:25:29
Speaker
If you can clear a spot on the hugest table you can possibly find, or you can sit on the floor, let's say, and spread things all out around you, either sections or chapters or whatever, then you can start physically moving them around, and you can really play with and get a sense of, what's a good order here? Should I move the story from chapter five up to the beginning?
00:25:55
Speaker
And that makes for a lot of creative breakthroughs. And I find that that's being lost on a lot of younger writers who don't have that paper habit. They just, for whatever reason, I mean,
00:26:10
Speaker
I have a kid in college who tells me, mom, if I had to print everything out, I'd be constantly running over to the print center, and you're only allowed 100 pages per semester, and then they start charging you for it. So that's awful, I think. So that's why we bought him a printer to have in his room. He said, you're going to have a printer in your room, and you're going to print your work out. I think it's being lost, and that's really too bad. And I encourage everyone I work with to print their work out.
00:26:40
Speaker
that with respect to some longer essays, maybe even the book you just wrote, did you employ that of printing out these massive amounts of pages and then laying them out and seeing where you can sort of massage the story and move things around? Like, did you have that experience recently?
From Essays to Memoir: Organizing with Color Codes
00:27:00
Speaker
Absolutely. I did that many, many times. In fact, there's a picture over on my website of the stack of manuscripts, and I started printing them out in different colors for every version. I think there's 10 or 11 drafts in that photograph, and there's a purple stack, a yellow stack, a pink stack. Yeah, I did that a lot, and I think it helped me a tremendous amount.
00:27:26
Speaker
What were some of those early manifestations of that and how did it change and how did it, how helpful was it to, I don't know, just to see those changes over time? You know, what did it look like before and then maybe what was its transitionary phases like?
00:27:43
Speaker
Well, the genesis of this book is that it started out as a whole bunch of essays. I was writing all these essays about grief and my father and my life at the time, and they were getting published. And at first I thought, oh, this is going to be like a linked themed essay collection. And so I put them all together in what I thought was a pleasing order.
00:28:03
Speaker
But the feedback I got, both from publishers and from some respected authors who I asked to read, it was, you know what, these are all fine on their own, but it would be better if you tried this as a traditional linear manuscript memoir. And I was very resistant to that. I didn't want to do that. I thought, I know best. But I also didn't know if I could.
00:28:25
Speaker
Part of it was a little bit of fear, like, can I write that more traditional full narrative arc from beginning to end? 80,000 words, I'm not sure. So the first thing I did when I decided to do that was I took all the essays, I printed them all out, and I sat down on the floor, and I had maybe five different color highlighter pens.
00:28:49
Speaker
And I went through them all and I assigned each different color like a theme. You know, these are dad's younger life. Yellow is dad's younger life. And pink is my life as a child and teenager. And green is when I was an adult and had my own children and was interacting with my father. So I highlighted these parts of all these essays.
00:29:11
Speaker
And then I did what we did when I was in college and went to journalism school. I got a pair of scissors and a big roll of tape and I started cutting them up. So I cut them all up and I stacked all the green highlighted stuff here and all the pink highlighted stuff here. And then I started taping everything together in what seemed like a pleasing sensible order.
00:29:36
Speaker
So I taped all that stuff together and some weren't together. Some had to be in different places because they had to do with different timeframes or whatever. And so at the end, I had this enormous roll. It was all one piece and it was rolled up.
00:29:55
Speaker
And I lived with that for a couple of weeks to try and figure out what I could learn from that and, you know, what that was trying to tell me and whether it made sense or not. So by then, you know, all the essays were in shreds and I started thinking of it more like, you know, kindling. And then the thing that kind of pushed me over the edge that I thought, okay, now I can do this was
00:30:21
Speaker
I came up with a bookend, a beginning and the end of the chronology of what the book would cover. And once I decided on that, I decided I would start two or three months before dad died when he had a stroke in the summer. And then it would end about two and a half to three years after he died. So once I knew that, that's when everything seemed to suggest that it would fall into place, that I knew
00:30:50
Speaker
how I could progress and could draw that narrative arc. And there's a lot of moving around in the book. There's, as you know, you know, we move around in time here and there, and there's a bunch of flashbacks and whatnot. But we're basically progressing over that two and a half to three year period. And that was the tipping point for me. Once I figured out, okay, that's the bookends, now I can put everything inside of that. And then I wrote a tremendous amount of
00:31:16
Speaker
connecting material between all of those pieces I had salvaged from the essays. The sooner you can figure out your ending, I think the stronger the longer pieces will be because I kind of equate it to being a
00:31:36
Speaker
like a lighthouse in the distance, like you have a target that you can then sort of right towards or sail towards. And at what point did the ending become very apparent to you in this process? And you kind of alluded to it already, but how much easier did that make the actual writing process once you had a target to aim at?
00:31:59
Speaker
Oh, oh, absolutely. I sat down and it was in January of 2016. I had taken myself to a very remote part of Bain, to a bed and breakfast that was very inexpensive and nobody goes there in January, 17 degrees below zero most days. I was there because my son was doing an internship up there at the National Weather Service and I wanted to be nearby for a week
00:32:27
Speaker
And I was between semesters, so I thought, great, this is going to be like a self-imposed writing retreat for myself anyway. So that's when I figured out the chronology and I wrote the ending right away. That was probably the first thing I wrote was I knew exactly what scene I wanted to end on. And that helped a lot to know I was writing toward that. Yeah.
00:32:50
Speaker
That's perfect. Is that something that through now having experienced the power of that, do you lay that in front of your students too and be like, not that I want to impose too much, but if you can figure out your ending, the sooner the better, right?
Knowing Your Story's Ending
00:33:06
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Even if it turns out later on that it's not the actual ending, maybe it's just going to be a placeholder ending, it gives people some confidence that they're actually going to finish because the biggest problem I see with students I work with, no matter what the skill level,
00:33:26
Speaker
no matter what they're writing is that they worry they won't finish it and very often they don't finish. So it's such an important skill and experience for a writer to know that they will finish, that they're going to write something and finish it. That doesn't mean it's fabulous, but it does mean that they went through the entire experience
00:33:53
Speaker
of writing beginning, middle, end, and finishing it. So very often I will say to a student, just write two paragraphs that you think could be the last paragraphs of this piece. Where do you want a reader to end? With your thinking right now, having not written the whole thing yet, where do you think you could end? And that becomes very helpful to some students.
00:34:14
Speaker
in given that uh... the nature of of memoirs it sometimes people want to something happen something traumatic happens in there isn't it turn urge to to write about it and try to make something out of it when years too close to ground zero and i wonder with with this particular story that you wrote about uh... with your father passing away
00:34:41
Speaker
When did you finally feel ready to tackle a bigger project in the after that had gestated long enough you know how are you processing that. You know this is a question I actually have trouble with because I feel two ways about this number one.
00:35:02
Speaker
I began writing about the experience of the grief and my father dying the week he died. I mean, as soon as I flew out to my mother's house, I was there within less than 24 or 36 hours after he had passed away.
00:35:17
Speaker
And that night I was in my bedroom, you know, in my notebook writing. So now that's not necessarily writing that's going to be published, but I started right away. So I think there's a value in capturing the feeling, the intensity of the emotion as it's happening. Um, but then of course I'm a much bigger fan of letting time go by and processing something and then writing about it with
00:35:46
Speaker
some maturity and some perspective. So really, you know, I think if you could do both, if you can do some of the writing while something's happening, but maybe not rush that out to be published, maybe just let that sit and, you know, exist for you and maybe you'll use some of it eventually and maybe you won't.
00:36:09
Speaker
So I don't think there's a hard and fast rule about that and every time I do, I violate it myself. I think that's a really great approach is that even if something of this nature or anything that's just traumatic and feels important to the beholder that maybe even right in the mix of it,
00:36:30
Speaker
at least taking those notes or journaling on it just to have a record of it so that maybe in a year or two years or five years down the road you can then reference that because your memory is gonna things are gonna change and the way you see or the way you remember it will certainly change but if you have a record from early on you can you can play those two off each other how you're feeling then how you're feeling now but then you will have like a concrete record of it earlier so it's like you know you're
00:37:00
Speaker
Planting seeds of research like on day zero that you're going to use on day 1000 or something. Absolutely. You said it so exactly. There's a tiny little example when I was sitting with my father in the hospital.
00:37:16
Speaker
and he was dozing on and off. I was taking some notes and I kept writing down that the nurses kept walking in and they all had different color crocs on. I don't know if you remember those sort of plastic clogs. This was 10, 11 years ago. And after a while, I didn't even have to glance up. I could just know that the yellow crocs walked in, so that was nurse so-and-so. And I never wound up using that in anything I wrote, but I remember going back and finding that in my notes
00:37:44
Speaker
And just that visual and the sound I had described that the Crocs made on the linoleum floor, just that kind of transported me back to being in that room at that time. So notes when something's happening can help you in a way you have no way of predicting down the line.
00:38:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great exercise that I had used in college when I had the great Madeline Blaze as a teacher in a memoir class. She had us lay out a timeline and just putting little memories along that timeline.
00:38:26
Speaker
It's overwhelming to look at it first, but then when you put down one little thing, that is a lead domino that leads to another memory. Then maybe you go then and do some research and go talk to those people involved. Then all of a sudden, this thing starts filling out. It's like the Crocs thing, but you didn't use it. Maybe that was a domino that led to something else that made its way into the book. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It did. Capturing those details in the moment,
00:38:53
Speaker
might help you down the line when you're writing, who knows what.
Connecting Memoir Stories
00:38:57
Speaker
And so after you had taped together all these highlighted pages, and how did you go about filling in the connective tissue between them so it did feel seamless instead of kind of chunky, if that makes any sense? Well, one thing I did was go back to my writer's notebooks. I always have just a plain sheep spiral notebook going that I write in longhand.
00:39:22
Speaker
And so it had been almost eight or ten years, I guess eight or years or so between the time my father died and when I was actually writing the manuscript that now became the book.
00:39:35
Speaker
I had been writing in my notebook for years on related topics and themes. And sometimes it was just a paragraph. Sometimes it was four or five pages of handwriting. I never knew where it was going to go, but I knew it was connected to my father's story. So the first thing I did was went through all these notebooks to find all the stuff I had written over the years. And a lot of that found its way into the book.
00:40:01
Speaker
had been collecting stuff I had torn out of magazines and books where I had sticky notes all over the place that raised thoughts or ideas and themes I wanted to explore in the book. So that was helpful. I started, you know, looking through all those and thinking about how is this connected to my story and why they tear this out and oh yeah, this makes me think I want to write about X.
00:40:29
Speaker
So that was really helpful. I had like those bins you put your Christmas decorations in in your attic. I had one of those bins filled with stuff. So it had been percolating a long time. And I guess I knew someday I would do something with all of this material. And so then I started to do something with it. And the rest of it was just very patiently going through and looking for opportunities to tell more small stories
00:40:59
Speaker
and explore more ways in which this narrator went through this experience that hadn't already been explored in what was already there. And in a way that was wonderful because it let me tell some stories I hadn't even thought of telling that really brought my father to life.
00:41:20
Speaker
from his earlier days and from when I was younger that had never made their way into any of the original essays. So that was kind of fun, actually.
00:41:30
Speaker
How did you keep all the research straight and organized, and how were you able to access it so you could write about it and not be scrambling all over the place? Where was that piece of paper or that interview or that anecdote? What makes you think I wasn't scrambling all over the place?
00:41:53
Speaker
Actually, if you were sitting in my office right now with me, you'd see that original bin still under my writing table. I would go through fits and starts where I'd get very organized and I'd get out the file folders and I'd start labeling everything and putting things together, grouping things together.
00:42:13
Speaker
And that would last a little while and then I would just go back to the big heap of stuff. So it really depended, I don't know, on my mood or how much time I had available. But I guess, you know, at least I like develop a sense of I know where that is. It's just going to take me a minute to find it.
00:42:35
Speaker
And there it was. I tend to be a pack rat. So if I've printed something out or I've torn something out of a newspaper or magazine or whatever, I still have it. It sounds like you were able to apply a certain journalistic sense or taste or approach to telling this story. Like you had certain stories and you were able to kind of
00:43:03
Speaker
For lack of a better term, sort of like dispassionately go back to the source material and maybe interview people and try to build that scene up, build scenes up the way a reporter would. And how important is that for someone writing a personal story to try to be detached in a sense and be a reporter on their own life?
00:43:27
Speaker
Well, I think you have to be able to look at parts of what you're writing, parts of the story, and ask yourself, well, what is that really about? I mean, sometimes there's charming little stories we have about our life or about another person in our life.
00:43:42
Speaker
Um, but they're really only good for, you know, the dining room table after Thanksgiving dinner. They don't really translate into, you know, the piece of memoir. So you kind of really have to look at it and say, well, is that just lovely or funny or horrible sounding to me because I, because it happened to me and I was there, or does it have any value for a reader? So you have to figure out what's it really about? What's the underlying theme? What's the message here?
00:44:11
Speaker
And sometimes you write some of that stuff because you think, yes, this is important, and this shows a certain quality of my father, or it shows a certain dynamic in our family, and it's really gonna get the point across, and you write it all up, and you're trying to put it into the memoir, and then after a while you think, you know what? It's too thin, or it's too idiosyncratic. I'd have to do so much backstory to make it make any sense, and so then you dump it.
00:44:40
Speaker
So you don't always know when you're in the midst of writing it, which is why, as we talked before, you wind up with red X's through a lot of stuff. But you have to go through that. You have to write all that stuff to figure out which is the material that's going to make the cut. As far as researching in terms of talking to other people,
00:45:06
Speaker
I would talk to my sister. My sister being so much older than me, 12 years older than me, she really grew up in a different family. What's that expression? Every sibling grows up in a different family. My parents' financial situation was so different when she was growing up. They were struggling. They were living in a two-family house on reduced rent because it was his sister's house.
00:45:31
Speaker
And then right along when I was born was my father's fortunes exploded. And so we moved to a house in the suburbs and, you know, he was just starting to really make money. And by that time, you know, my sister's in high school and then college and she didn't really reap a lot of that where I did. I had the horses and the travel and all of that. So it was really, it was important at various points along the way that I go to my sister and say,
00:45:58
Speaker
You know, here I'm writing about when mommy and daddy were younger and what do you think? Have I got it right? Do you remember any of this? And she was invaluable for fact checking that sort of thing. Was there any resentment between her and you because you grew up with different, essentially different childhoods and different parents and circumstances? Oh, yeah, I think so.
00:46:24
Speaker
I mean, not now, of course, we're all we're old and mature now, but I kind of remember.
00:46:31
Speaker
feeling that way when I was, especially when I was in my early 20s and I was traveling on the horse show circuit and dad was paying all those travel and horse bills. And yeah, I was working and making paychecks, but I didn't have to have a full-time job and pay rent and that sort of thing. And, you know, she had gone to college, become a teacher, started teaching immediately right out of college and she was, she's always and still is a very independent person.
00:47:00
Speaker
And I think there was some resentment there when it looked easy for me. And it was. And then I transitioned into that PR job in Manhattan that paid well. And so I think there was a rocky period. We don't really talk about it now. I think there was a period where she thought, oh, sure, the golden child's getting everything she wants.
00:47:24
Speaker
And to a point you were making earlier about what to maybe leave in or leave out, who are you trusting with that material?
Feedback from Different Genres
00:47:34
Speaker
Because of course, you're a little close to it. So maybe something that feels important to you might not be germane to the story at large. So do you have a trusted reader that can say, oh, Lisa, this has to go or Lisa, this needs to be more inflated?
00:47:50
Speaker
A bunch of different people, actually. I know some writers will say, oh, there's one person who I always exchange work with, but I don't really have that particular situation. But there were a couple of people that I trusted. Christina Baker Klein, who's a New York Times bestselling novelist, she's a friend of mine. She lives nearby. She saw the manuscript at various stages, and she gave me lots of really great advice.
00:48:16
Speaker
Lorraine Herring, who is a novelist and runs a writing program at another college. She writes magical realism, and it was really fun. We exchanged manuscripts at one point, and I thought, okay, this is way out of your comfort zone. It's memoir.
00:48:33
Speaker
And she gave me her magical realism novel, and I thought, well, this isn't anything like I write. And it was so much fun to work on each other's manuscripts. And then, of course, I have all those quote unquote conversations with my father after he's dead. So Lorraine had a lot of fun telling me, what do you mean you don't write magical realism? But I think it's great to get perspective from people who don't write exactly what you write.
00:49:01
Speaker
You know, yes, I have friends, lots of friends who write memoir and there were times at which I exchanged chapters or pieces of the book with some of them and that's wonderful. But I really think it's great to get perspective of people who write something else and have great sense of story and narrative. That's what I was looking for when I was trying to write the whole manuscript because I hadn't ever written something, I hadn't ever written
00:49:25
Speaker
a linear arc that 80,000 words yet. So I really wanted to hear from people who had done that a number of times. When you were writing the story and maybe just writing in general, what is your capacity for writing in a given time period? Or a better way of putting that is, how long in terms of time can you sit there and write before you get kind of tired and you have to quit?
00:49:55
Speaker
Well, I do usually don't get a chance to get to that point because something else has to be done. Yeah. So typically, I think any session doesn't go much beyond three and a half hours, something like that. However, I'm really great at sticking to something. And if I can block things out and, you know, and nothing else is due and no one's looking for me like I did in 2016 when I went up to Maine, I
00:50:25
Speaker
sat down at 637 in the morning and I did not get up and leave that project until probably 637 in the evening and I did that for seven days in a row. So I can do both. Preference of course is you know just a couple hours because especially with memoir if you're writing about anything that's bringing up
00:50:48
Speaker
you know, those family memories and if it borders on anything sad or whatever, you need a mental break. Was this book really hard for you to write? No, well, hard in a sense, like from a writing perspective, a writing challenge.
00:51:10
Speaker
yet took me like seven years to get to the point where I thought, okay, I'll try and do what everybody's telling me to do and write the normal traditional memoir. That was a big obstacle. I was very pigheaded about it. I feel like I'm an essayist at heart. And that's my big dream was the first book I wanted to be an essay collection. So it's hard to get over that fact.
00:51:34
Speaker
So getting to the point where I could say, okay, I'm going to tackle this particular writing challenge, that was the hard part. Once I started, then it wasn't hard anymore, then it was interesting and trying to figure out how to do it, because that's a great kind of a fun challenge. In terms of like the material, emotionally,
00:51:55
Speaker
I wouldn't say it was hard because, I mean, that's what I do. I write about, I try and untangle the emotions on the page. And to me, that's not hard. That's interesting.
00:52:07
Speaker
How did you approach the inevitable self-doubt in the middle of the process when maybe you're like, this is junk. No one's going to ever want to read this coupled with, I got to finish it. I like to call it the ugly middles of the drafts. So how did you process that while you were just wondering if it was even worth it? Well, I think I did a lot of that.
00:52:34
Speaker
In all the time I was procrastinating and avoiding writing that final linear manuscript, I think I got all that out of my system before that, because I sat down in January 2016 to do that. And at the end of April, I was done. And it had been read by other people, and I started sending it out. So it went very fast.
00:53:02
Speaker
at that point, four and a half, four months, four and a half months. But there were like, you know, five years before that of thinking it through. Thinking is undervalued in a sense. Like we don't, as writers, we don't really account for all the time that we think about a project while it's marinating on that back burner in our brain. And
00:53:26
Speaker
You know, if you're lucky and if you've paid enough attention to that, you've worked out so many narrative problems already just because you were thought about it deeply enough. What would you say that you learned about yourself as an artist and a writer over the course of writing the essays and then the book itself? Oh, boy.
00:53:55
Speaker
Well, I guess I learned that I could do a lot more things than I thought I could, so that was wonderful. It really stretched your boundaries in a sense. Yeah, yeah, that was great. I mean, to the point where now I think, you know, hmm, what shall I write next? And I feel like the options are totally open to me. Like, if I want to write a novel, maybe I can try that. And, you know, if I want to write a reported nonfiction book, maybe I can try that. I'm not saying I'm going to succeed at all of those things, but
00:54:24
Speaker
I think it moved me to a point where I have more confidence in my experience and in, you know, just knowing that I could tackle a project and see it through, even if it's not similar to what I've done before. And to me, that feels great, you know, as a writer to know that, you know,
00:54:47
Speaker
Okay, I did it and now what's next? I don't know what's next. It's a little scary not to know, but I'll figure it out. Would you have been happy or would it have been satisfying enough to merely have written this book for yourself, independent of it being published? Or did you need to see it published to get the greatest satisfaction out of having made the book?
00:55:16
Speaker
Nat, you know, I'm not one of those people who say, oh, it's okay if it stays in my computer or if I just have it in my office and no, I wrote it. No, I'm sorry. We write for readers. I mean, really, we want people to read what we wrote. That's how I feel. Well, that's what makes a writer tick to me anyway. Yeah, sure. There's plenty of stuff sitting here in my office. I don't care if anybody reads, there's poems and there's short stories that I don't feel real confident about. They were really fun to write.
00:55:45
Speaker
But this is something I wrote in order to see it as a book and have people hopefully read it and maybe hopefully get something from it. What was the process like of shopping your manuscript around?
Publishing Journey with University of Nevada Press
00:56:00
Speaker
And yeah, how many times was it rejected? And then what was that moment like when it was finally taken on? I didn't count the number of rejections. I'm sort of glad I didn't count.
00:56:13
Speaker
You know, I was sending it around. I did not have an agent. I was sending it around to traditional small literary presses that would work with authors who do not have agents. And that's kind of a slow process sometimes because these are small organizations with small staff. So it takes them a long time to to get through the submissions. But I had
00:56:38
Speaker
So from end of April, from May of 2016 through to like January, February of 2017. So for about six or seven months, it had been circulating around and four different publishers at that point were reading the full manuscript in February of 2017. So I was feeling good that, you know, maybe one of those four would turn into, cause you know, you submitted and you submit a query and then they say, oh, send a chapter or two,
00:57:06
Speaker
And then if they like that, oh, send the whole manuscript, which doesn't happen often. So it was out at four places then. And I went to AWP Writers' Conference in Washington, DC in February of 2017. I kind of went on a whim. I wasn't going to go. There was this big snowstorm. I live in New Jersey. And I noticed on Facebook all these writers were saying, oh, I'm not going. I had to cancel. My flight got canceled. And I thought, maybe I'll go.
00:57:35
Speaker
He just, I have four wheel drive. I used to live in Syracuse. I don't mind driving in the snow. It's only four hours to Washington. So I went down and I kind of didn't have this agenda in my head. Usually when I go to a conference, I have this list, this very rigid list of I must meet this person and I want to pitch this editor. And I just kind of went like, oh, let me just go see my writing friends and sit on, sit in and listen onto a few sessions.
00:58:00
Speaker
And I was walking around what they call the book fair, which is where all the publishers and journals have their booths. And it was kind of maybe a half hour or so before closing up on the last day of the conference. And I started chatting with a guy who was packing books up at his booth. And I did not know who he was, didn't even notice what the booth was. We just were commiserating about how much our feet hurt and how tired we were and how glad we were that the conference was over.
00:58:29
Speaker
And as you do, of course, you start talking about, well, who are you and what do you do? And I started to tell him a little about my manuscript. And when I got to the point where I said half of the book takes place in Las Vegas, he said, I think you should send that to me. He said, do you know, you know, look up there. And he pointed up to the banner of his booth and it said University of Nevada Press. Wow.
00:58:52
Speaker
And of course, you know, I wanted to smack myself on the forehead like, you dummy, why haven't you sent it to them yet? And the truth was, I was just starting to send it out to university presses, and I just hadn't developed a good enough list yet. And it turned out that was Justin Race, who's the director of the press. And that was late February. And by late March, they made an offer, which was wonderful. Wow. And then they were able to turn it around in just over a year.
00:59:22
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I guess, you know, somewhat of what the process is with a university press. I mean, you sign a contract, but then they send your manuscript out to a bunch of peer reviewers who are other, in my case would have been other memoir authors, and they get all the feedback from them. You're presented with this feedback, and then you write a response letter that says, you know, yes, I'll make these revisions. No, I won't make those revisions.
00:59:51
Speaker
And then the editorial board of the press actually votes on whether they're going to continue to go forward with your manuscript and contract. So there's this like six, seven week period where you're sort of in limbo. It's like they say they want to publish your book, but you're waiting on all this feedback and approval. And so fortunately it went through no problem. But that's one of the unique things about working with the university press.
01:00:18
Speaker
,
01:00:37
Speaker
and you're now getting ready to share this story with the greater public.
Reader Feedback on Intimate Details
01:00:43
Speaker
What's it been like for you to bring this story back out from where it was on your hard drive and so forth to now talk about it with people like me and countless others? How have you been processing that?
01:00:45
Speaker
and
01:01:00
Speaker
It's very strange, I must say. And in fact, I even had a moment earlier in our discussion here where you mentioned something that you read in the book. And for a moment I had this flash in my mind of like, how does he know that?
01:01:17
Speaker
I'll tell you this funny little story. When I got a box of the advance reader copies back in December, which are the ones that they send out to reviewers and that sort of thing. It's your book bound, but of course it has mistakes in it and whatnot. Anyway, when I was opening the box of books, my son was standing there. He's 24. The first thing I said when I saw the book was, oh my gosh, my name's on the cover.
01:01:47
Speaker
stupidest thing to say, of course. But that's, I guess, just an example of how surreal the experience is, for me anyway, with the first book. I'm sure people who've published many, many books don't have that reaction, but it's a little odd to think that
01:02:07
Speaker
every once in a while somebody will say something to me about something they you know people who've Already read it because I you know give you know some of the advanced reader copies to some Some people and you know they would say they would tell me something about my father from the book and I think Did I really say that did I did I let that little secret out? And indeed I did
01:02:29
Speaker
Oh man, well it's great. I think it should be widely lauded as a great story, very touching and loving and the conversations that you had with your father and then the ongoing ones you have with this quote unquote ghost.
01:02:46
Speaker
Is a is is just a great testament to how when you know people when people pass they don't really die they they stay with us for forever when it is people that's pets that's ever that's anyone who's lost anyone who's important. They they stay with you and to.
01:03:03
Speaker
to read those conversations that you had and have is just a testament to how we process the loss of loved ones. And I think you've done a marvelous job here, and I can't wait. And I wish you great success with this book, Lisa. Oh, thank you so much, Brendan. That's very lovely. Thank you.
01:03:26
Speaker
Yeah, you're welcome. So where can people find the book and maybe get more familiar with you and your work? Well, if you want to go to my website, it's lisaromio.net.
01:03:41
Speaker
real easy to find and all the buy links are over there. You can get it at all of the major and minor online book retailers and I love IndieBound. I'll give a little plug for IndieBound. If you don't have a local independent bookstore near you but you like the idea of supporting independent bookstores, if you go to IndieBound and you put in the name of the book,
01:04:03
Speaker
It will route it to a local independent bookshop to sell it to you through. And it would be lovely if folks wanted to feel like doing this, if they went into their local bookstore and say, hey, I heard about this great book called Starting with Goodbye. Why don't you order some for the store? That would be really dandy. Nice. And where can people, are you on Twitter or Instagram, Facebook? I'm all over the place. Okay, great.
01:04:30
Speaker
I'm on Twitter at Lisa Romeo on Instagram at Lisa Romeo writer on Facebook. I have an author page on Facebook. It's called Lisa Romeo author. So and I love to connect with people love to hear from people. There's a there's a email contact form on my website and I read them every day. It's really fun. So I'd love to hear from folks.
01:04:54
Speaker
Awesome. All right. Well, Lisa, thank you so much for carving out some time in your morning here. Again, great, wonderful job with the book and I wish you continued success. So we'll be in touch. There it is. First week of two episodes in the bank and I'm still alive. Though just barely. Thank you for listening and thanks to Lisa for sharing her story and strategies. Head over to BrendanOmero.com.
01:05:22
Speaker
for show notes and to sign up for my monthly reading list newsletter. It's a growing list, pretty cool. Operative word is monthly. I send out my reading recs along with what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. You can even ask for my new CNF pod zine.
01:05:39
Speaker
issue number one is out as you can imagine the wife does not get it also if you leave an honest review on iTunes and send me a screenshot of it I will coach up a piece of your writing about 10 pages or about 2,000 words 10 double spaced pages
01:05:57
Speaker
Let's keep it reasonable, Times New Roman, no other funky fonts, that's not reserved for five star reviewers. You can leave a two star review and I'll still honor the deal. Though if you made it this far, you likely think the show has more than two stars worth of value, but whatever. These are the things that move the meter in the podcast of sphere.
01:06:17
Speaker
so those are deeply appreciated. I'm tired, and I gotta go to work. I'll see you next week, or you'll see my skeletal remains on the ground. See ya!
01:07:23
Speaker
you