TISSUE WARNING: this episode might make you cry. I got teary while recording it.
Today I’m talking with author Laura Bradbury about her memoirs, her new novella project, and her liver transplant. I met Laura at the Surrey International Writer’s Conference in British Columbia, Canada, several years ago when they had me as an international guest. Laura had just published her first memoir, My Grape Escape, and was honored with an award during the conference. Her speech was incredibly memorable and inspiring.
At the time, she was hoping for a transplant, and as she tells us during the interview, her view on life, and her view of her own fears changed drastically when she was told she had a vicious, incurable autoimmune disorder. She lost her fear of writing, and wrote that first memoir. Then she wrote another, and another. Now she has a series – the Grape series – chronicling her life from her decision to be an exchange student to France at age 17, and how her story changed drastically after that.
We talk about overcoming fear, having the courage to write, and what it means to write down your own history, and your own romance. Her memoirs are very much romances with her husband, but also with language, food, and of course wine. We also talk about her liver transplant, and how her life has changed in the year since she received a new liver from a living donor.
As Laura puts it, “There is so much heroism and good in people.”
This week was my birthday, and I turned 43. I love this conversation because every day is a gift, not just for Laura, but for me, and for you, too. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did, and that it helps you take another look at whatever fears may be holding you back.
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Here are the books we discuss in this podcast:
You can find Laura Bradbury on her website, and on Instagram – definitely check out her photographs, as they are beautiful.
We also mentioned:
- PSC – Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis
- PSC Partners
- SIWC – the Surrey International Writers Conference
Wanna be an organ donor?
In the US, you can register in your state.
Curious about living donation?
You can learn more about how to become an organ donor, and learn more about living donation.
Other ways to help?
Register for Bone Marrow donation at Be The Match.org. Individuals from minority groups are desperately needed for those awaiting bone marrow transplants. And if you’ve heard scary things about marrow donation, read on – it’s not anything like that.
Curious about Foreign Exchange?
There are many ways to become a foreign exchange student. Some programs include ASSE, YFU, EF, and AFS. Local Rotary options with scholarships are also often available for study abroad. And if you have a program suggestion, please let me know in the comments!
The Romance GenreCon at MCPL in Kansas City, MO, is happening August 3 &4, 2018, and you can find out more at mymcpl.org/Romance.
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This Episode's Music
Our music is provided by Sassy Outwater.
This is The Shadow Orchestra’s Matilda Reprise, from their EP Remaker.
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Podcast Sponsor
This episode is brought to you by Whiskey Sharp: Torn, by Lauren Dane.
Beau Petty has been searching his whole life. Searching for a place that fills all the empty spaces in him. Searching for a way to tame the restlessness. Searching for answers to the secret he’s never stopped trying to solve.
What he wasn’t searching for was a woman to claim all of him, but when Cora Silvera walks back into his life, he’s ready to search out all the ways he can make her his.
Cora has spent her life as the family nurturer, taking care of others. But now she’s ready to pass that job on to someone else. It’s time to make some changes and live for herself. It’s in that moment that her former teenage crush reappears and the draw and the heat of their instant connection is like nothing either of them has experienced. He craves being around her. She accepts him, dark corners and all.
Beau thinks Cora’s had enough drama in her life. He wants to protect her from the secrets of his past, even if it means holding back the last pieces of himself. But Cora is no pushover and she means to claim all those pieces. Because Sometimes what you find isn’t what you were searching for.
Whiskey Sharp: Torn by Lauren Dane is on sale June 26 and available for pre-order wherever books are sold.
Transcript
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[music]
Sarah Wendell: Hello, and welcome to episode number 303 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. With me today is author and memoirist Laura Bradbury. I’m going to give you a tissue warning, because this episode might make you cry a little bit. I was definitely teary while I was recording it. Laura Bradbury is the author of several memoirs, and she’s working on a new romance novella. She’s also received a liver transplant in the past year. Now, I met Laura at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference in British Columbia, Canada, which is a wonderful writers’ conference, and I met her several years ago when they had me as an international guest. Laura had just published her first memoir, My Grape Escape, and she was honored with an award during the conference, and her speech was incredibly moving and very inspiring. Now, at the time – this was several years ago – she was hoping for a transplant, and as she tells me during the interview, her life and her view on her own fears changed drastically when she was told she had a vicious and incurable autoimmune disorder that was destroying her liver. She lost her fear of writing and wrote that first memoir, and then she wrote another, and then she wrote another. Now she has a series, The Grape Series, which chronicles her life from her decision to be an exchange student to France at the age of seventeen and how her story changed drastically after that. We talk about overcoming fear, about having the courage to write, and what it means to write down your own history and your own romance. Her memoirs are very much about her romance with her husband, but also with language and food and, of course, because it’s France, wine. We also talk about her liver transplant and how her life has changed in the year since she received a new liver from a living donor. As Laura puts it, there is so much heroism and good in people. Now, this week was my birthday, and I turned forty-three, and I love this conversation because every day is a gift, and not just for Laura or for me but also for you, so I hope that you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and that it helps you take another look at whatever fears might be holding you back.
This podcast is brought to you by Whiskey Sharp: Torn by Lauren Dane. Beau Petty has been searching his whole life: searching for a place that fills all the empty spaces, searching for a way to tame his restlessness, searching for answers to a secret he has never stopped trying to solve. What he was not searching for was a woman to claim all of him, but when Cora Silvera walks back into his life, he’s ready to search out all the ways that he can make her his. Cora has spent her life as the family nurturer, taking care of others, but now she’s ready to pass that job on to someone else. It is time to make changes and live for herself. It is in that moment that her former teenage crush reappears, and the draw and heat of their instant connection is like nothing either of them has experienced. He craves being around her. She accepts him, dark corners and all. But Beau thinks that Cora has had enough drama in her life, and he wants to protect her from the secrets of his past, even if it means holding back the last pieces of himself. But Cora is no pushover, and she means to claim all of those pieces, because sometimes what you find is not what you were searching for. Whiskey Sharp: Torn by Lauren Dane is on sale June 26th and is available for preorder wherever books are sold.
Every episode of this podcast receives a full transcript, handcrafted by garlicknitter. Thank you, garlicknitter! This week’s episode transcript is brought to you by you! Everyone who has supported the podcast Patreon helps make sure that every episode forward and backward in the archives receives a written transcript. The transcript makes sure that the show is accessible to everyone, including those who cannot or do not wish to listen, and it ensures that everyone who wants to participate in the show is included, so thank you for your support.
If you would like to sponsor an episode or sponsor a transcript, you can totally do that! Email me at [email protected].
I do have a compliment this week. I love doing this.
To Amanda M.: All squirrels put aside a few nuts in case you stop by for a visit, because you are one of their heroes. You are fearless, and you don’t ever stop doing what needs to be done.
As I mentioned, the support of the Patreon community helps me commission transcripts and maintain the equipment I use for live shows, and I am planning another one, so if you’re going to RWA in Denver, heads up, I will be planning a live show for the conference, so stay tuned for the details. I also collaborate with the Patreon community to develop questions and help me suggest guests, so if you would like to be part of all the goofy fun, for as little as one dollar a month, you can join our silly group of Patreon podcast supporters, and you can help the show. Just go to patreon.com/SmartBitches.
I also want to thank some of the Patreon folks personally, so to Rachel, Lennea, Maggie, Elizabeth M, and Elizabeth H. – all the Elizabeths – thank you for being part of the Patreon.
I will have information at the end of the show about the music, I will be telling you what’s coming up on Smart Bitches the website, I have some cool news about an upcoming conference, and I have a terrible joke, but for now, let’s do this podcast. On with the interview with Laura Bradbury.
[music]
Laura Bradbury: My name is Laura Bradbury, and I just published my fifth memoir about my life in France. It’s called My Grape Paris, and I’m starting to write my first fiction, which is actually a romance that’s set in, set in Burgundy, but it’s, it is, I’m writing fiction instead of, I’m flipping over from memoir for a little bit of a break and, and writing a romance, and I’m an avid romance reader as well.
Sarah: Wonderful. Okay, ‘cause I want to hear all about that.
Laura: Yes!
Sarah: You started writing a memoir series about your life – hence the word “memoir” – and also about your romance with your husband, and also with food and with wine.
Laura: Yes, yes.
Sarah: It’s like a multilayered romance, these memoirs. How did these memoirs came, come about?
Laura: Well, I was, I always wanted to be a writer, and I had been writing, starting novels but never finishing anything for about ten years prior to beginning writing my first memoir, and I think, now I look back on it, I was just scared to ever take anything kind of beyond sort of seventy, seventy-five percent completion, because then you can be judged on it, and that prospect was terrifying, because for me writing was always the one thing that I really held close to my heart, and it was very, very important to me, and so it was really fear of judgment and fear of failure that was blocking me, and then just before I turned forty, I was, totally out of the blue, diagnosed with a genetic, very rare, incurable, autoimmune liver and bile duct disease called PSC. I was all of a sudden facing possible death, and that fear completely, completely made the fear of failure and the fear of being judged for my writing, it made it, it made it completely obsolete. And so I sat down the next morning after being diagnosed, and I started writing my first memoir, which is My Grape Escape, and I didn’t finish until, until I published it about ten months later, and it was in 2013, I believe, and that was a really great time to get into self-publishing, because there wasn’t a lot of other books on the market, and it immediately became a bestseller.
Sarah: Yay!
Laura: Shortly afterwards, I had to go on disability because of my disease, and, and writing was really a, a lifeline for me, and it was wonderful for me to be able to, in writing the memoirs, go back and remind myself of all the wonderful experiences I had, and then also it was, because I wasn’t sure I was going to be around anymore for my three daughters with facing this disease, and I really wanted to leave a record of all the, of where they came from, that they came from a place of such love and sort of little lessons that I could embed in the memoirs that they could choose to access at any point if they wanted to if I was no longer around.
Sarah: I remember hearing you speak about your memoirs when I first met you at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference.
Laura: That’s right.
Sarah: And you, I believe you received an award, and forgive me for not remembering exactly what, what award it was, but I remember you telling everyone, as we’re all crying –
Laura: [Laughs]
Sarah: – because at that point, at that point, you were maybe a year or two post diagnosis, and we’re like –
Laura: Yes, and it’s a very scary time.
Sarah: Yeah, your, your liver was not your friend.
Laura: No.
Sarah: You put a Post-it note on your laptop; I remember you talking about that.
Laura: Yes, I, I forgot that part of the story, but that’s true. I, I, so I woke up the next morning after being diagnosed, and all of a sudden my whole life had just turned on its axis in a minute, and I’d never had health problems up to this point in my life, been an extremely luckily healthy person, and all of a sudden I was facing the prospect of a terminal illness. And so the next morning I was obviously consumed by dread and everything when I woke up, but I got up and went downstairs, kind of almost not knowing what I was doing, and I opened my laptop, wrote on a Post-it note, fuck you; I’m not dead yet. Don’t know if I’m allowed to say that on here. [Laughs]
Sarah: Oh, you can curse all you want. All the cursing is welcome.
Laura: [Laughs more] And stuck it on my computer, laptop, and then I started writing, because the fear of being judged, of not being a good writer, all of a sudden the fear of dying with the words left inside me was so much stronger than that. That was the only fear I had, and I just was determined to, to finish, to become a finisher, to finish this thing and to, to share it with others and to have it out in the world.
Sarah: Now, your condition – CPD, is that right?
Laura: No, it’s PSC. It’s a real mouthful. It –
Sarah: PSC.
Laura: The, the long term is primary sclerosing cholangitis, and it is a real mouthful.
Sarah: That is a bit.
Laura: Yes.
Sarah: What, what are the symptoms? What, what, what were the symptoms that led you to getting this diagnosis?
Laura: Well, actually, the surprising thing is I didn’t have any, hardly any symptoms. There was a few random things that I had that kind of felt off in a few ways, but nothing significant to lead me to even to go to the doctor. In fact, I was feeling so healthy, I was running 10 Ks, my husband and I were juicing kale we grew in the garden, and I, we had reapplied for disability and to extend our life insurance because we’d had our third daughter and we’d moved back to Canada from France, and we were feeling so incredibly healthy that we thought that would be a good time to do that, and it was in the life insurance and disability insurance blood testing that they saw my liver enzymes were through the roof, and, and then that led to a series of other tests, MRI, liver biopsy, and they, they quite quickly diagnosed me within about a month and a half, so it was –
Sarah: Holy smoke!
Laura: – really completely out of the blue. Yeah, and then afterwards, very quickly I did become ill, so it was good that I was diagnosed, that we knew what we were dealing with. I began to develop infections in, in my liver and my bile ducts that basically were permanent, and so I would be, have to go for frequent hospitalizations where I was on IV antibiotics and very, several times I went septic, and I was always dealing more or less with a barely controlled case of, of sepsis, and, and I became very jaundiced, exhausted. By the last year and a half prior to my transplant last year, I basically spent most of my time on the couch. I could barely get up from the couch, but I somehow managed to, writing was really a lifeline for me during that time.
Sarah: There are a number of romance writers I know who decided, all right, that’s it, I’m going to do it, whether it was a life change or a life threat or in some cases being on bed rest with a difficult pregnancy.
Laura: Mm-hmm.
Sarah: Like, all I can do is sit here; I’m going to sit here and write.
Laura: Exactly.
Sarah: I don’t, I don’t necessarily recommend life-threatening illness as a way to inspire writing.
Laura: [Laughs]
Sarah: From an objective standpoint, it seems somewhat difficult? But it also sounds like once you overcame the fear of worrying about what people were going to think of your writing, you just went for it! And the detail in your memoirs is considerable; like, you remembered so much of the experiences and the food. I confess I’m reading them out of order; I know you, you published My Grape Escape, which is about chucking law school and renovating homes in, in Beaune, right?
Laura: In Burgundy, yeah, in the vineyards of –
Sarah: In Burgundy.
Laura: – Burgundy, just outside of Beaune.
Sarah: And then the one where you were an exchange student is My Grape Year.
Laura: That’s, yes, and that’s – so I did write them out of order. I just write whichever book is, whatever story, whatever period of my life is kind of yelling at me the loudest, that’s the one I write.
Sarah: [Laughs]
Laura: So I have written them out of order. There’s five now, and I’ve written them completely out of order, which the readers are like, what? I don’t understand! But, but if, you can still, they can be read as, as standalone books, definitely.
Sarah: So My Grape Year is your story of becoming an exchange student to France as a seventeen-year-old or an eighteen-year-old, and I –
Laura: I was seventeen, actually, when I went over there. Yeah.
Sarah: I confess that this is my favorite, because I had a very similar experience: when I was fifteen, I studied abroad in Spain, and I had, like you, very little command of the language. I was placed with a family that did not speak English, and I went to a private high school. I failed all my classes except for English ‘cause I knew how to speak that –
Laura: [Laughs]
Sarah: – and so I’m reading this, and I’m like, oh my gosh, I, this, this is, this is a very parallel experience for me. And the thing I love about reading your memoir is that I have very specific memories of some of the food that I ate, but you remember so many of the meals and the, and so much of the wine, even though you weren’t supposed to drink!
Laura: Oh, but I, it was funny because it was the, the, the, the club who sponsored me in Canada, who I changed the name in the book because I didn’t want any lawsuits or anything like that – [laughs] –
Sarah: Right.
Laura: – but they, when they sent me, they, no drinking was the law, but as soon as I got to Burgundy, everybody was like, oh my God, you’re – and everyone there who was hosting me was like, oh my God, you have to drink wine; you have to taste our local wine. Of course, you’re in Burgundy; of course you’re going to drink wine, so. [Laughs] As far as memory, like, I, I have a really crazy, elephant-like long-term memory. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. My short-term memory is terrible; you can ask anyone in my family. I mean, I can never, I always lose my keys; I can, I’m always double-booking myself; I, you know, but as far as what happened twenty, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago, I can totally remember that verbatim.
[Laughter]
Laura: So funny. It, it’s interesting you say about the exchange, because there’s a lot of people who have had that ex-pat experience who are just like, oh my God, like, I, I just completely can relate to, to that experience. There’s, it’s such an amazing kind of once-in-a-lifetime experience to, to study abroad, and there’s so many parallel experiences that I, that I feel people who have, who have had that have been through that are just crazy and, and do really build you as a person, I believe.
Sarah: Oh, absolutely. And one of the things that resonated with me is the idea that when you’re a teenager and you think you know everything –
Laura: Of course.
Sarah: – we deliberately placed ourselves in situations where we couldn’t talk –
Laura: I know.
Sarah: – except in the present tense, and then, like, like, five words. Like, I knew how to say absolutely nothing, and by the time I left six months later, I was dreaming in Spanish, and –
Laura: I know.
Sarah: – it’s all, the way that your brain absorbs a second language is fascinating. There’s –
Laura: Don’t you find it’s kind of magical almost? And –
Sarah: Oh my God.
Laura: – I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t learn a foreign – like, I, my brain just wasn’t adapted to learning a foreign language at school, like in my high school classes, but the immersion was a completely different experience.
Sarah: Oh yes. Last year I was in Paris, and I was having dinner with my husband, and I’m trying to learn French, and my brain is like, listen, you get two. You don’t get three.
Laura: Yeah! [Laughs]
Sarah: You get two languages. A third is, like, really a challenge, ‘cause I’ll go for a French word, and my brain’s like, oh, the thing that’s not English? Here is Spanish; this is what you get.
Laura: Yeah, exactly. [Laughs]
Sarah: But I was sitting next to this couple, and I, and I’m a horrible person, and I have no manners, but I couldn’t help but notice they were talking in American English, Spanish – Spain Spanish – and French, like, in and out of all three languages –
Laura: Wow.
Sarah: – and I was like, I am so sorry, but that’s amazing, and I was talking to them about learning multiple languages and how they fluidly move from one to the other, and I remember something that the, the wife said. She said, when you learn another language and then you learn another language after that, you learn how much you don’t know, and it makes you very humble.
Laura: Yes.
Sarah: And I was like, yes! That is it, ‘cause you get a massive dose of humility as a teenager when you think you know everything, and suddenly you can’t even talk.
Laura: Well, and you have this identity as a teenager. You, you’re, you know, you’re pretty confident you know who you are and you’re known as, like, a funny person with, like, a wry sense of humor and –
Sarah: Yes!
Laura: – all these things that you’re known of, and all of a sudden without words it’s like, you know, the Little Mermaid. You’re, you’re stripped of that and –
Sarah: Yep.
Laura: – you have to figure out who you are without that, and I think it’s a very character-building experience.
Sarah: It really is. The thing that I always found so horrible when I met you and you were going through gradual and terminal liver failure at that time –
Laura: Yeah.
Sarah: – was that you’re married to a French dude and you own property in France, and you could not drink wine.
Laura: Seriously. Someone up there in the sky, when –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Laura: – when I was diagnosed, because before – so my husband and I had developed for, we lived in France for – well, I’ve lived in France quite a few times over my lifetime, but my husband is from Burgundy, from the vineyards in Burgundy. All our friends, all his family are winemakers or involved in the winemaking trade somehow. His parents used to own vineyards, and it’s just so entrenched in, in life there. We went over, back there for five years with our two, our two oldest daughters and actually had, our third daughter is born in Beaune, and we developed four vacation rentals that cater to clients who are interested in coming to France and wine tasting, visiting the vineyards, and I’ve always loved wine tasting. I’ve obviously been privileged to taste some amazing wines, and then I was diagnosed with a liver disease that had nothing to do with drinking, that was an autoimmune liver disease, and the morning I was diagnosed I was, I kind of looked up at the ceiling of the doctor’s office, and I was like, seriously? Seriously?
[Laughter]
Sarah: Really?!
Laura: Of all the ironies, it was, it was – and I was even thinking of going back to France at some time and doing this, this sort of professional wine tasting marketing course; it’s offered by the –
Sarah: Mm-hmm?
Laura: – wine institute there, and, yeah, I was just like, really? Really?
[Laughter]
Laura: Life’s great ironies. Oh man, I just felt like it was some sort of sick joke, in more ways than one.
Sarah: Now, your story has a very happy, very happy ending. You had a liver transplant from a living donor.
Laura: I did. It was a very arduous journey. Anyone who’s been through a transplant, I think, can tell you it’s one of the toughest things that you go through in life. There’s a real shortage of organ donors in North America, and our systems are opt-in, and just because of the power of inertia, there are so many people who would be organ donors but just have never actually made, you know, done that, made that leap to, to sign up, and, and so I’ve had, I had many doctors be totally blunt with me and said, you know, if you – given the nature of your, of PSC and the way that it develops and the way it’s developing in you, you’ll be dead before you ever get an organ from a deceased, deceased donor. There’s just not enough organs out there, and the way that they’re prioritized, people with PSC are at a disadvantage, and other diseases, people who have cirrhosis from drinking or drug abuse or other diseases like hepatitis, they’re prioritized first, and they said to me, you’ll, you’ll never get a, you’ll never get a deceased-donor organ, so you have to look for a living donor. And a lot of people aren’t aware of this, but livers regenerate, and so –
Sarah: Yes!
Laura: – somebody can donate a part of their liver, and it would regenerate in the recipient, so me, and it re-regenerates in them, so it becomes a full size in the, in the recipient, and it, and in the donor it grows back to a full size. So, so pretty early on in the game, I start, well, I was always very open about my, the, about PSC and about my journey towards liver transplant because I just felt that it really helped raise awareness for a little-known disease, and it really, hopefully, if even, like, one or two people signed up to become an organ donor because of my own journey, then I felt that that was worth it, and so I put the news out, you know, pretty early on that I was going to need to have to probably look for a, a living donor, if the disease didn’t kill me first, and that was a big if, because there was many things that any of these episodes of sepsis, they could have offed me pretty quickly. There was a big risk of bile duct cancer. I was being monitored for all these things all the time, and that’s the knife edge of organ transplant is you have to be sick enough to warrant a transplant, but you can’t be too sick to receive that transplant, and it, it is really balancing on a, on a knife edge. Finally, about two and a half years ago I was accepted into the transplant program at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and they really specialize in, in live donor transplants, which is why I went there. I had a high school friend who came forward and wanted to donate, and he was, he was considered a match, and we even had an OR date that was set, like, two weeks from, from that point, and then one of the surgeons said that he had an extra bile duct and it wouldn’t work for us to, to link up well in the surgery, and it would create more complications for me, so that was called off at the last minute, so that was very devastating, because at this point I was getting very, very sick, and death was a kind of constant companion in my life, and I could feel my body shutting down. I was extremely yellow, had no energy. It was terribly nauseous all the time, and honestly, death started to look like not such a bad –
Sarah: Ugh.
Laura: – alternative to living in so much pain and so much angst and so much worry, and, but there was a second person who came forward and was tested and was approved, and then their husband got cold feet and didn’t want his wife to donate, was worried about the risk, and so that, she was approved, and then she pulled out, which is totally, people, I believe donors should completely be able to pull out right until they’re put under the anesthetic. I think that should, you know, that’s part of the process, that it happens ethically, and I completely understood –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Laura: – where she was coming from and where he was coming from, but it was completely devastating, because at that point I really was very close to, to death, and, and then, third time lucky: my wonderful friend Nissa, who actually, we met, she was my, my youngest daughter’s Sparks leader, she said, “I’m, I really want to be tested; I really want to do this,” and she made sure to make sure, talked to her husband, talked to her family, talked to, talked through it with everybody before even going ahead with the testing, and so she went to Edmonton, she did the testing, and then the last day of testing, I was kind of expecting a phone call from her to figure, find out whether she was a match or not, and she called, and she said, “So what are you doing next Thursday?” and it was, like, Friday, I think, and I said, “I, I don’t know! I don’t know what I’m doing. I hadn’t, hadn’t thought that far ahead.” And she said, “Well, how ‘bout you come to Edmonton, and I give you a piece of my liver?” So –
Sarah: Ohhh!
Laura: – [laughs] – and it was amazing. So we had five days. I had to, to get my kids cared for and, and her too, and so they booked the OR date five days after the day she was approved, so –
Sarah: Wow.
Laura: – yeah, it was incredible, and she’s an incredibly healthy – she’s just a hero. I, I just can’t say, you know, it’s, we live in polarizing times, and often all you hear is, about is the bad, negative side of humanity, but there’s so much good there, that somebody would do that. She has two young children of her own, a husband, she’s a, has a Ph.D. in Botany; she works as a professional botanist for the government. You know, that somebody would make that sacrifice and take that risk to save my life is – and it was a true honor to go through this experience with her. We, before we were rolled into the ORs we were holding hands in our stretchers with our crazy surgery caps on and crying, and we had recovery rooms in the transplant wing side by side, and she’s done incredibly well. She’s very, got a very strong constitution, and, and she’s done incredibly well, and I’ve done incredibly well. Her liver is just beautiful, golden; it’s working wonderfully in me, and I just, you know, I just want people to know that there are people like Nissa out there, that there’s so much hero-, heroism and good in people.
Sarah: That’s really lovely.
Laura: Yeah.
Sarah: What has, what has post-operative life been like for her and for you? I imagine, you know, having a piece of your liver taken out and then having – your liver, was, was it removed and then replaced? Or did they leave some of yours in to sort of, like, trick your immune system, like, oh no, it’s totally been there all along?
Laura: No, mine was –
Sarah: Come on, nonono, it’s fine!
Laura: – mine was so diseased, they had to get, they even had to cut out the bile ducts, like, right – and actually, when they did take out my liver I had a, one of the hepatologists come by in the days after the transplant when they did the, they do an autopsy, basically, on the old, my old liver, and –
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
Laura: – and the, he said, you know, you probably, maximum, you had three months left before you died.
Sarah: Holy moly!
Laura: Yeah, he said maximum. He said, thank God you did it when you, you had this done when you did, because, he said, I, I don’t think you would have lasted longer than three months. And actually, I have Nissa’s, they gave me her entire right lobe of her liver, and they, I actually have bile ducts donated from an anonymous donor that they used to attach her liver to my, ‘cause they cut everything right down to the root for me, and then they, so, I, I’m alive because of Nissa’s liver, an anonymous donor’s ducts and vessels that they used to reattach them, and I also received five pints of donated blood during the surgery to keep me alive, so I’m walking because of, I walk here alive, walking, living my life because of other people’s goodness, and I never forget that for a moment. And Nissa has, she, the, the recovery is pretty brutal. Like, Nissa did very well, but she had a few days of really severe nausea and stomach upset and stuff because all of a sudden her liver went from full size to just her left lobe and the time that it was regrowing, and you definitely have to really rest it for, like, three months. You have, you’re very tired, and your body is, is healing for three months. I had, I went through a pretty serious bout of rejection immediately after I received the liver, and I was given some pretty heavy-duty IV meds and steroids and stuff for that, and that wasn’t particularly fun, but all the doctors now seem to say that that was a good thing and that that was my body recalibrating with the new liver and, and that it was good. So I was a month in the hospital, she was about a week in the hospital, and she flew back home to Victoria after two weeks, and I, I had to spend, I was in Edmonton for three months, ‘cause it’s a lot more complex for the recipient as far as, as far as the rejection medication and balancing all that, and there’s, because we have so many different pieces all of a sudden inside us, there’s been so much rewiring, they want to, they want us to be close around for about three months afterwards.
Sarah: Wow.
Laura: Yeah.
Sarah: And both of you are doing okay now.
Laura: We’re doing great! Yeah, I just had, we both just had our year checkups at the end of March, and, yeah, they’re, they, they just say, you know, you’re doing beautifully. Like, it’s great, and my liver numbers are fantastic. For me, PSC can come back at any point, and in about twenty-five to fifty percent of cases it does come back. Sometimes it’s within six months, sometimes eighteen years, or, but they’re doing research, and it’s a very underfunded disease, PSC, because it is an orphan disease, but there’s a great organization called PSC Partners, and they collect a bunch of money and do research grants, and actually, there is some promising treatments that are on the forefront, and, and then there’s also a chance that it won’t come back for me, so I’m just enjoying every healthy day that I have, and, you know, I’ve been around a whole year now more than I would have been, and I’ve been around to parent my children and be a wife to my husband and write and go for walks on the beach and spend time with our dog and, you know, so I’m just grateful for every second. It totally changes your perspective.
Sarah: Just a little.
Laura: Yeah! [Laughs] It just flips everything on its head, and I just, yeah. Yeah, I look at life completely differently. I, I think I take a much – I’m not scared of so many of the things that I was scared of before. Like, for example, embarking on a fiction project where, you know, I, I’m well known for my memoirs now, and those aren’t easy – I don’t think writing any book is easy, ever, but I know the, I know how to write those. I feel pretty confident I know how to write them.
Sarah: You know what happened. Like, you know the story; you’re, you’re pretty sure you know what happened.
Laura: [Laughs] Yeah! But, but even, like, embarking on something new like fiction, and I’m, it’s a steep learning curve. Like, I’m having to learn how to write, you know, how to craft a romance, and, and there’s so much technical craft that, that comes into that. But, you know, I’m not scared, because in my mind, I should already be dead, so everything else is just bonus. It’s just fun playtime, so that’s sort of how I look at life.
Sarah: And writing, even when it’s scary, is still like playtime.
Laura: It is, and I think the, the fact that it’s scary keeps me engaged and interested, and the, and the feeling that I’m learning so much, like, I just, I’m constantly going to the library and checking out – I have this huge library, home library of craft books for writers, and right now I’m checking out all the craft books of, you know, a lot of my favorite romance writers have written, written craft books about how they, how they put together a romance and everything, so I’m kind of scouring that, and I love the, the feeling of learning and, and challenging myself and doing something different, and because I’m such a huge romance reader myself – I love romance, and romance has saved me during those six years of, of illness. They, they were, they, Regency romance, that was like my go-to comfort read, and, and they really, mentally, it was the place that I could escape to, so if I can provide that to somebody else, then I’m just absolutely thrilled.
Sarah: So you posted on Instagram recently a picture of the vineyards in Burgundy and talked about your novella. Can you tell me about what you’re writing? I don’t want to, you know, I don’t want to make it difficult for you to write if you talk about it too much, but I would really love to hear about the novella that you’re working on.
Laura: Yes, I, I think this is every author’s least favorite thing is trying to describe – [laughs] – what we’re working on, because it’s always such a –
Sarah: Tell me about your work! Oh God.
Laura: Yeah, no, for me, like, my, I, I write an epically crappy first draft, and that’s just my process. There’s no way I can get out anything on the page if I’m trying to do it in any sort of structured or neat fashion. I just kind of, it’s just like, bleah, you know, and then – but, so this one actually came out really fast. I had a friend – I was feeling really burnt out after publishing My Grape Paris, just because that whole book had been written through the transplant process, and it was just such an arduous two years, and I was so happy to complete it and get it out in the world, and it’s a book I’m very, very proud of, but it’s a large book, and I just was feeling really burnt out, and so no-, a novella, I just felt, I had a friend suggest that I write a novella, and I was like, that actually feels perfect right now! And then –
Sarah: [Laughs]
Laura: – sat down one morning, and I had, there’s a lot of inheritance issues with vineyards in Burgundy, and I had, there’s people who lease vineyards, and the lease lasts the lifetime of the owner of the vineyard, so this is a case where there’s a very hardworking female winemaker who actually lost her husband in a vineyard accident six years previously and has been working and developing the vineyards that were left to her by this lease that her husband enjoyed. The vineyard owner, who is also her mentor, passes away, and then there’s a, his, she actually co-inherits the vineyards with his grandson, who is this, like, playboy winemaker and basically the antithesis of everything that she stands for. She stands for grit and hard work and, and he’s all about publicity and marketing and, and the glam side of winemaking, and she’s the earthy, the earthy, working side, basically, and has really had to struggle to keep her family afloat by work-, by creating, by working in her vineyards and creating her wine, and so it’s their clash coming together when they, they end up co-inheriting this vineyard that is, that she has been working. The story could change, but that’s the basic premise of it.
Sarah: So you have two people with an internal conflict who approach life very differently, and then the external setting is also the conflict, plus, you know, making wine is super easy, and nothing ever goes wrong.
Laura: [Laughs] Oh, there’s so – yeah! I think, you know, some people, there’s so many people who, who, I don’t know, they look at winemaking as, like, a glamorous activity, but it’s basically –
Sarah: No! [Laughs]
Laura: – farming, you know. It’s farming, and so I’ve had my friends the last few years, not last year but the previous years before that, who had, like, seventy percent of their grapes wiped out by hailstorms just before the harvest. It was devastating! These are my friends who are living through, like, having no stocks of wine to sell, you know, and all their hard work of all those months gone in, in about a five-minute period when the hail just rains down and destroys all the, all the grapes.
Sarah: And that’s it.
Laura: Yeah, and that’s it. There’s no, there’s no grapes, there’s no wine you can make from them, so – and the friend whose, whose photo I posted, she’s one of, she grew up with, with my husband Frank in, in this little winemaking village in Burgundy where we have our rentals. She is the grittiest person that I have ever come across. She’s – [laughs] – she’s just, she’s just such a hard worker, and she’s so pragmatic about her work, but at the same time she’s a real artist. She creates these amazing wines, these pure, unfiltered, beautiful wines, getting the most out of, out of – and I just love that contrast in a, in a, in a person. One thing that’s, that’s, with my memoirs, I have, have felt frustrated from a marketing perspective, because they’re very romantic. Like, one reviewer said, these are the most romantic memoirs I’ve ever read. Like, the romance is front and center in all of the memoirs, and yet, you know, the way the categories happen on Amazon and stuff is, is that it’s hard to access fellow romance write-, romance readers like me, because they’re stuck in the memoir section, and people don’t tend to go there for, for romance, so I’m hoping this will be sort of a crossover book.
Sarah: I also agree that the approach of writing a novella seems a little bit less intimidating than writing a novel –
Laura: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm!
Sarah: – but I, I also did that; I wrote a Hanukkah novella –
Laura: Which I read, and I loved. [Laughs]
Sarah: Oh my gosh! You’ve read it? Oh my gosh!
Laura: Oh yes, I did after we, after we met; I totally read it. I bought it, and I read it –
Sarah: Thank you!
Laura: – and I reviewed it, and yeah, I loved it!
Sarah: Oh wow, thank you.
Laura: Yeah!
Sarah: And I remember very – oh, I’m, like, all embarrassed now –
[Laughter]
Sarah: I remember very clearly thinking, yeah, novel’s too hard; you could do that, you could, could do it. You can do this. A novella, yeah, you can do that. And then I think, of all the words that I’ve written on the website, that’s, like, nine novels.
Laura: Totally, totally!
Sarah: [Laughs] And of course, with the memoirs you’ve written five, easily, novels with, with each one. They are substantial. They’re substantial stories.
Laura: Yeah, that, the last one was, My Grape Paris was 122,000 words, so –
Sarah: That’s two novels!
Laura: – it’s big. It’s a big book, yeah.
Sarah: Yeah!
Laura: It’s a very big book. So I just – actually, for writing My Grape Paris, so I wrote before the transplant. I thought I had a rough draft before the transplant, but with really advanced liver disease like I had, you get something called hepatic encephalopathy, where your liver’s not processing anything really in your body anymore, so you have a buildup of ammonia in your blood, which causes –
Sarah: Oh, that’s never good!
Laura: – yeah, no – which mirrors dementia, basically. You have dementia symptoms from all this ammonia, and so I thought I’d written a rough draft of My Grape Paris prior to the transplant, and then I went back to it, to, to editing it a month after, a month to the day that I had my transplant, when I finally got out of the hospital. It was like Latvian; I don’t know what I’d written.
[Laughter]
Laura: It was, I had to, I was, I was rereading it, and I’d think, this isn’t even English! I don’t even know what I wrote here! I was, you know, at the time, I was hang-, hanging on, trying to convince myself that I was functioning okay, but it made no sense, so I basically had to start right from the beginning again, so I basically wrote My Grape Paris twice. A novella just seemed really fun to kind of dip, dip my toe in the waters of romance writing and a little bit quicker gratification, which is always nice. Yeah, I just really wanted to learn how to write romance, ‘cause I love romance so much.
Sarah: Well, you know, I’ve seen many a person tell me how easy it is to write romance, so I’ll just –
Laura: [Laughs]
Sarah: – take a weekend someday and write one, and it is not easy! It is not easy at all.
Laura: Oh my gosh, no! Like, sex scenes are so hard to write.
Sarah: Very difficult.
Laura: There’s, well, there is so many well written ones out there, but there’s so many poorly written ones too, and –
Sarah: It’s difficult.
Laura: Yeah! I’ve written a few, and I, I know I’ve got to go back and re-write them, because it is really, really difficult, yeah!
Sarah: I, I chickened out. I decided that I would keep mine within the realm of YA, thinking that maybe there would be a sequel; maybe I would send copies to summer camps. I mean, they’re adults, and they acknowledge sexuality, and they talk about desire, but I was like, yeah, I, I can’t. I just chickened out, and I didn’t do it!
[Laughter]
Laura: Well, in my memoirs, like, as much as they’re very romantic, they’re definitely closed doors. Like, I make allusion to –
Sarah: Oh, of course!
Laura: You know, because I don’t have that much money to send my entire family to therapy to –
[Laughter]
Laura: – from now to eternity, so, so I was, you know, out of respect for my husband, who, who already is not crazy about the idea that I write about our lives and stuff, and, you know, I, I, I definitely kept it closed door, so the writing of full-on sex scenes is a new thing for me, and yeah, it’s, it, it requires a lot of skill, technique, and craft.
Sarah: It really does, and it is –
Laura: Yeah.
Sarah: – it is a very delicate process.
Laura: Yes.
Sarah: I also think that, for those of, people, for those people who aren’t fully fluent in what it means to read romance, you don’t understand the power of creating intimate arousal in a total stranger through the words you’re writing down. Like, that is a big deal!
Laura: Oh, yeah, yeah! Yeah, no, I know. It’s, it’s an, you know, I bow down to the people who, the writers who are really skilled at that.
Sarah: Yeah.
Laura: I think that is an amazing craft, and, you know, it, it is not easy, and I, I, I agree, it’s one of the hardest things to do, I think, in, in writing, writing a good sex scene.
Sarah: It really is.
Laura: And I’m realizing I’m making tons of double entendres with the word “hard,” but – [laughs].
Sarah: That’s all right! It is, it is a standard occurrence when you’re talking about romance sex scenes. You just have to, you just have to push through!
Laura: [Laughs]
Sarah: I keep, I’ve, I’ve done this for hours, yes.
[Laughter]
Sarah: It’s very difficult to talk about it without being like, oh yeah, that’s what she said!
Laura: Oh, that’s – [laughs] – they’re hard to talk about, too! They’re not only hard to write –
Sarah: Yes.
Laura: – they’re had to talk about.
Sarah: They’re very hard to talk about. So what are some of your favorite romances? If people ask you for recommendations, what are some of your favorites that you like to reread and recommend to people?
Laura: Well, I love Jo Beverly; I’m a huge Jo Beverley fan. Regency romance is really, like I said, like, in the years when I was sick, that was, like, my go-to comfort sort of fiction, so her whole Rogues series, I loved that, and the Mallorens, Mal-, I’m not sure how to pronounce that, ‘cause I just read it, but that, that whole series I loved of Jo Beverley’s, and yeah, I was very sorry when she passed away, because I really, really enjoyed reading her books. And Lisa Kleypas? Yeah, I really like her books. Jane Feather, really like her books. I found my favorite romance books, like, I loved Susan Wiggs’, I think it was maybe her first book, charm, The Charm School? That’s a, one of my favorite romances; I’ve read that a few times.
Contemporary romance, I really like Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me; that’s one of my favorites. She, I don’t know, she just does a great job of having a larger cast of characters, but they’re all really individual, and I, I’ve just, yeah, I thought that was very, very well done. And who else? I really like Bella Andre, who actually likes my books, and I’m super fangirling because I really love her books. Her Sullivan series, that’s contemporary, and I really like that series. So it’s, again, it’s, like, the interlinked family, and the same characters come back throughout the novels. I really like that.
And you know, it’s, this is not actually traditionally romance, but one book that I reread every year that I consider a romance is Annie Proulx’s the, The Shipping News? That’s one of my very favorite books, and the romance of this sort of quiet, slowly brewing romance between Quoyle, the main character, and the woman that he eventually ends up with in his sort of redemption and everything is, is, I find that very sweet and, and I, there’s just a lot I love about that book.
Sarah: I’ve read The Shipping News; I agree with you. There’s definitely a very strong romance in there –
Laura: Yeah!
Sarah: – especially because Quoyle is so self-conscious about what he looks like –
Laura: Yes.
Sarah: – and doesn’t see himself as heroic, and then embodies a hero in all of these little, subtle ways as the story progresses.
Laura: Totally. Yeah, yeah, and it just, you get, and just in the way that she describes the places so evocative that you can see him finally finding a place that he belongs and a life that he belongs in, and like you said, like, being able to show the best sides of himself and, and I just think that’s a very sweetly developing romance.
And then another really good one that’s a, that’s a, it’s a memoir, but it’s very romantic, is Samantha Vérant? It’s called Seven Letters from Paris?
Sarah: Ohhh?
Laura: And it’s about reconnecting with her old flame, who she met when she was on an exchange, years – like, I don’t know – decades later. She found the letters, and then she reconnected with him, and actually she ended up marrying him, and she’s living in France now! So that’s a very beautiful romance story.
Sarah: Ohhh!
Laura: Yeah!
Sarah: Now, I know you have a, I think you have a, a cover quote from Janice MacLeod, but you’ve read Paris Letters, yeah?
Laura: Yes, and, yeah, and I, I –
Sarah: Another romantic memoir.
Laura: Yes, and she, it’s just also, I, I almost consider her books pieces of art, they’re so beautiful? And there’s another writer, Vicki Le-, Lesage, who writes very sort of comic books about her love, life in France, and bringing up children in France and everything, and they’re very romantic as well.
Sarah: I love a good romantic memoir. That’s one of my favorite kinds, because you know it’s going to be happy!
Laura: Yeah! And, you know, there’s so much romance in real life that really is worthy of writing about that it’s hard to have that crossover with readers between romance and, and memoir, but there is so many romantic memoirs out there. A lot of them, too, are, like, romance with, people with themselves, like finding them true, their true selves by traveling or traveling somewhere and meeting somebody, or it’s, yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of these things that happen in real life. I’m amazed through writing my own memoir, people will email me with their own stories. I have one reader who is from Canada, and she met her husband, who is from Bali, and she’s now living in Bali and having her children. So many of these things that actually do happen, they’re, they’re interesting to read about as well.
Sarah: And when you frame the memoir in relocating to another place, especially another place where you don’t speak the language, you have to figure out the absolute essentials of who you are.
Laura: Yes.
Sarah: Because you can’t get around very easily or talk very easily. You have to really reduce everything to the absolute essential, including your personality and who you are and who you’re going to be in that moment.
Laura: Yes, yeah, and you become very, I think you become a lot more self-contained and self-reliant as well.
Sarah: Oh yes.
Laura: You really have time to spend with yourself, because for the first little while, anyway, you can’t, it’s very difficult to interact with the wider world, because the language barrier.
Sarah: When you remove yourself from everything that is your autopilot, that, everything that is familiar, it’s also very painful, because you have to confront all of the things about yourself that you use in your home, in your home life to distract yourself from things that you don’t necessarily enjoy about yourself. Like, you can’t hide from yourself when there’s no autopilot anywhere.
Laura: No, you’re so out of your comfort zone, and all those places that we kind of can duck into our comfort zone when we’re in our everyday life, all of that is stripped away from you. It’s amazing how you do have to spend time with yourself, and you really get to know yourself, what’s inside you, not the part of you that, that is extroverted and social, but the actual part of you, who you are when you’re alone by yourself, in yourself, and – and also, I think it, it makes, it’s hard, but it makes the reward when you are ultimately able to build up a semblance of a life in a new place, like be able to get by –
Sarah: Yes.
Laura: – with the language, even if it is, isn’t perfect, be able to make a few friends, to get to know the food, get to know your favorite restaurants. When you build, when you adapt to a new place, I find that gives you so much confidence going forward, and that experience –
Sarah: Yes.
Laura: – is just so valuable.
Sarah: It is. So the, the one question I always ask before I stop is what, what are you reading right now that you want to tell people about? Are you reading anything that you want to share?
Laura: I’m actually reading a Kate Morton; I’ve gotten onto her. So she’s reading, it’s actually, she, she writes these amazing kind of saga, intergenerational saga books. I’m reading The Lake House by her? And I just finished The Forgotten Garden. But they always do have a romance element to them. Really, any book that doesn’t, unless it’s, like, a science book or something, if books don’t have a romance element, there’s not a lot of books without a romance element that really capture my interest for very long. But her books are amazing. They’re these, like, epic, kind of historical fiction, but these, like, family mysteries that, that solve, but they, they always have really satisfying, good endings, and they’re just a really great read. Nice, thick, big read, yeah. So I’m on her second one, The Lake House, and I think she has one called The House at Riverton that I’m kind of looking for in the bookstores, and, and I think she has a new one that’s either just come out – The Clockmaker’s Daughter, or something to do with clocks, I think. And anyway, I’m really enjoying, really, really enjoying, enjoying her books. She was a great find.
Sarah: Saying that if you’re reading a book and there’s no romance, what’s the point? reminds me of, of one of the people in your memoir who when you first get to France is like, if the food isn’t good, like, what’s the point?
Laura: Yeah, yeah, if it doesn’t taste good – ‘cause I was brought up with North, North American, you know, where it has to be healthy, like steamed broccoli and, like, salmon fillet, but, like, totally bland, tasteless, like, blah, but it’s good for you, so you should eat it, and in France, they’re like, well, if the food doesn’t taste good then, like, don’t eat it. Why would you eat food that –
Sarah: Yeah.
Laura: Food is supposed to taste good. Like, that was, that was a revelation for me!
[Laughter]
Laura: It was something to be enjoyed, period. That’s it.
Sarah: Yeah! And if a book has no romance, there’s no point.
Laura: That’s, that’s what I’m like. I, if things don’t have a romantic story, then, you know, somewhere in the story, then, then, then I’m just, yeah, I’m really not that interested.
Sarah: So what happened to the Post-it note that you wrote? Did you frame it?
Laura: I, it’s actually still in my desk! It’s in my desk drawer!
[Laughter]
Laura: It’s this faded yellow, like, just your typical standard yellow, with the sticky strip on the back, yellow Post-it note, and I did, I’ve, I’ve kept it in my, I’ve kept it in my desk drawer, and I, and I do, I do, I still do the Post-it note thing where, you know, when I’m at that stage of editing where you just cannot wait to see the back end of your book and you just want to start something else, I just, I always put, like, just, just finish the, the F-er. [Laughs] I want to say, and I –
Sarah: Just finish the fucker.
Laura: – put it on my screen, and, yeah, I’m, I’m a big sort of Post-it note motivator. Yeah. When you want to give up, just finish, you know? [Laughs]
Sarah: Yep.
Laura: Just dig in and finish it. It takes a lot of grit to, to finish a book. It’s easy to start –
Sarah: Yes.
Laura: – and to get to, like, seventy percent, but it was – oh, I also love Liz Boyle, Elizabeth Boyle? I love her books as well, and I love her as a person as well. She’s, I’ve met her, and she said, you know, you learn more from finishing the last ten percent of your book than you do the other ninety percent, and that is so true. You learn more finishing a book than you do starting – you learn more finishing one book than you do starting ten.
Sarah: And that also fits your life, because you learned more when, with what you thought was the last ten percent of your life.
Laura: Yes! Oh, completely, and it’s completely transformed – I guess that was my midlife crisis! I, I kind of think, well, thank you, there was my midlife crisis served up on a platter, because it completely changed – you know, when that occurred I was working full-time in the family business. I was super stressed out; I was working with family but not – I love my family, but I didn’t enjoy working with them and, but not wanting to admit that to myself or to them. Was not taking care of myself, was, you know, just stressed, really wanted to write, to be creative, was a frustrated creative, basically, but didn’t feel brave enough to go ahead with that. There was so many things that I would worry about that now I don’t even, don’t even register with me. I think you lose, when you’re facing something, a terminal illness, you lose so much fear of, so many fears that you had about other things.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. I don’t want to forget to ask you, if someone is interested in learning about how to be a living donor, are there resources that you can suggest? And if there are not, I can easily find them and add them to the intro and the outro when I’m doing –
Laura: Yes. Well, I think it dep-, like, it seems to be every cent-, every transplant center – so if you have a, a hospital that does transplants near you, they’re the people to contact to ask if they have a living donor program, and, and you can ask, or if you have anyone in your life who needs a transplant or might potentially need a transplant, they would be the person to talk to about who to contact if you wanted to do a direct donation towards, towards anybody, and I would encourage everyone to sign up themselves to be an organ donor and vote for or support opt-out systems wherever they live, and also people can donate blood, which is, saved my life and saved so many lives, and that’s a pretty easy thing for many people to, to donate.
[music]
Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this episode. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. You can find Laura at her website, laurabradbury.com. I also recommend her Instagram; it is really beautiful. She’s a great photographer, and her Instagram handle is @laurabradburywriter. You can also find her newest memoir, My Grape Paris, wherever books are sold.
I will also have links to many of the topics we discussed in this episode, including PSC, the Surrey International Writers’ Conference, and options to become an organ donor. Most likely, if you’re in the United States, you register in your state, typically when you renew your driver’s license. This past year I was able to renew my license and finally be an organ donor, because the last few times I tried to renew my license in another state, I was pregnant and was not permitted to sign up as an organ donor, so finally, finally, I have the sticker on my license. You can register at your state, become an organ donor at organdonor.gov/register. You can also find out about living donation at transplantliving.org, and I will have sources on the website smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast, should you be curious about giving blood or giving platelets or registering for the bone marrow database. If you’ve heard horror stories about donating bone marrow where someone has to, like, jam a needle in your hip bone, that is not how it happens. It’s actually pretty chill. It does take some time, but bone marrow is very much needed, especially if you are from a minority culture or group; bone marrow is desperately needed. So I will have links to find out about all of those things, and on a more fun note, I will have some links about foreign exchange, which, as you might imagine, I highly recommend doing if you can.
This podcast was brought to you by Whiskey Sharp: Torn by Lauren Dane. Beau Petty has been searching his whole life: searching for a place that fills the empty spaces, searching for a way to tame his restlessness, searching for answers to the secret he has never stopped trying to solve. What he was not searching for was Cora Silvera, who walks back into his life when he was least expecting it. Cora has spent her life as the family nurturer, taking care of others, but now she is ready to pass that job on to someone else and start living for herself. And that is when her former teenage crush reappears, and the draw and heat of their instant connection is like nothing either of them has experienced. Even though Beau thinks that Cora has had enough drama and tries to hold pieces of himself back from her, she is not having it. She is no pushover, and she means to claim every piece of him for herself, because sometimes what you find is not what you were searching for. Whiskey Sharp: Torn by Lauren Dane is on sale June 26th and is available for preorder wherever books are sold.
This week’s podcast transcript is brought to you by everyone who has supported the podcast Patreon. Thank you very much! Each transcript is hand-compiled by garlicknitter – thank you, garlicknitter! [You’re welcome! – gk] – and if you have supported the Patreon, you have helped make sure that each episode receives a full transcript so that people who cannot listen or do not wish to listen can still participate in all of the silly mayhem of the show. If you have a dollar that you would like to throw in the direction of this show, I would be so delighted to have it at patreon.com/SmartBitches.
I also want to thank some of the Patreon folks personally, so to Kathryn, Ellen, Sandra, Teresa, and Lara, thank you so very, very much for being part of our Patreon.
Are there other ways you can support the show? I am sure you know them already, but let’s sing along together! You can leave a review wherever and however you listen. You can tell a friend; you can subscribe; whatever works. Thank you for hanging out with me each week.
Ugh. And of course now Orville has joined me on the desk, and I have to move things out of the way before his gut lands across the desk. Are you, are you ready to sit? Are you just going to spin around? All right, so Orville has things to tell you. He would like you to know that I haven’t fed him in nine years, and he’s going to butt his head onto the sound box right now, which sounds really good, so if anyone out there is an audio engineer –
[Thunk]
Sarah: – yeah, there we go. If any of you are audio engineers, I apologize in advance. Actually, you know what, I don’t. Every podcast needs a cat, and I of course have one right here. So now that you’ve messed me up, Orville, are you going to help me do the narration? No? You going to help me do the outro? No? You’re just going to –
[Thunk]
Sarah: Okay, that’s fine. Thump his tail. Okay. [Clears throat] Where was I? Oh, I have a cool thing to tell you about! You ready? Orville and I both do. The Mid-Continent Public Library, which is a large library system located in Kansas City, Missouri, is having a very large event coming up in August, and I think you guys might want to hear about this if you’re in that area. On August 3rd and 4th, they will be hosting the Romance GenreCon, a free two-day romance convention featuring a terrific lineup of bestselling and award-winning authors, including Cherry Adair, Cathy Maxwell, Kerrelyn Sparks, and more. They are going to have panels –
Orville just redid my entire desktop. Gosh, I am just rocking professionalism today, bud. Thank you very much for interrupting all of my narration with your butt. What was I – where was I? Thank you. I’m going to hold the mouse now, because clearly you like it.
As I was saying, Romance GenreCon is going to have some bestselling authors leading a variety of panels and workshops for romance readers and writers. You can see the entire schedule of events at mymcpl.org/romance. I will have a link to this in the podcast entry/show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.
And it would be really great if my cat would stop screwing up my outro. Such a professional! I know, right? So professional. M’kay.
The music you are listening to was not provided by Orville, though he is trying. [Laughs] The music every week, as you know, is provided by Sassy Outwater, and you can find her @SassyOutwater. This is Shadow Orchestra; this track is called “Matilda Reprise,” and you can find it on their EP Remaker. You can find Shadow Orchestra on MySpace, and you can find their music on iTunes and on Amazon.
Coming up on Smart Bitches this week, we have many nifty things, including Hide Your Wallet, Part 2, better known as Book Beat. We are going to take a peek at some books that we’ve heard about and we want to read as soon as possible. We also have another Bachelorette recap coming up, reviews of some new books and some books from our library stacks, and a new edition of Unlocking Library Coolness, which is one of my favorite columns to write.
And as I mentioned, I will have links to all of the books we discussed, as well as links to ways to become an organ donor, ways to learn more about PSC, and if you’d like, ways to become a foreign exchange student – again, highly recommend it.
But as always, I end with a terrible joke, and this is pretty bad, so I’m really excited. Okay? All right.
What has two butts and kills people?
Orville does not know, and he’s very annoyed.
What has two butts and kills people?
Zeb: Bark!
Sarah: Zeb wants to know too; this is a great joke.
An assassin. [Snorts] Ass-ass-in!
[Laughs] That joke is from Lecrowing on Reddit, and it’s terrible, and so I love it dearly. What has two butts and kills people? An assassin! [Laughs] I love wordy nerd jokes; those are the best kind of jokes.
So on behalf of Orville, who is now occupying seventy-five percent of my desk, and Laura Bradbury and everyone here, we wish you the very, very best of reading. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we’ll see you back here next week.
[mellow music]
This podcast transcript was handcrafted with meticulous skill by Garlic Knitter. Many thanks.
Is there a problem with the podcast? It won’t download to my Android app? You are the way I know it’s Friday… I’ll miss you on my commute this morning! 🙂
OOPS. My fault! I typoed. It should be up now! Apologies and happy Friday!!
Happy Birthday, Sarah! You (& the other Smart Bitches) are the gift that keeps on giving, so I hope you get a ton of what you give right back at you (I think you get an antiquated Kodak camera, too).
This was so lovely. Now when I need to laugh I can picture the Post-it note. And Orville. Maybe Orville eating the Post-it note.
A very happy birthday to you, Sarah!
And thank you for a wonderful interview. Best wishes, Laura, for your continued good health. And all good wishes for Nissa; she sounds like a wonderful person.
Sarah, I want to thank you and the Smart Bitches again for having these transcripts! They make a world of difference to those of us who can’t hear, and I love being able to access author interviews! So thanks again for something that I know takes a considerable amount of planning and work. And Happy Birthday!
Hey Brandi! You are very, very welcome. I’m so pleased that you enjoy them and find them useful. And thank you for the birthday wishes!
This is great! I read a couple of Laura’s books shortly after I went to France for the first time, and I enjoyed them so much.
The podcast hasn’t updated on Stitcher since June 8th. Has anyone else had issues?
@Stephanie: I’m not sure why that is, but I am working on it. I’ve tried to update the feed and refresh my settings at Stitcher, but their server keeps timing out on me when I do. I’m sorry about this – I am working on it!