Community Reads: Tilt

0:00 Pate captures the emotional complexities of survival and connection, self-preservation and community responsibility. Emma Pate is a climate journalist and fiction writer who has written about climate change for the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian and more. In 2021, she coined the term "climate shadow" to describe an individual's potential impact on climate change. Emma's fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Idaho Review, New Orleans Review,

0:54 Word Magazine, Citron Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Fort Vancouver Regional Library too. Her debut novel, Tilt, from March 2025 is a New York Times book review editor's choice, a USA Today bestseller, a best book of 2025 for Vogue, an NPR favorite fiction read of 2025, and named by Time as one of the 14 best books of 2025 so far. That's pretty incredible. Now, you've all read the book, right? That's why you're here. You all loved the book, right? That's why you're here. But guess what? You get to hear from the author right now.

1:41 Please welcome Emma Pante. Hi everyone. Oh my goodness. This is so wonderful because for many, many years I lived right down the street from here, and so I have spent so much time in this library looking at books, hoping to one day have written a book, sort of dreaming that my book might one day be in a library, and it's just completely surreal to be back here, thankfully not with my children, at this library. So I think I will read a little bit, and then I'm going to talk a bit about the idea for

2:37 the book, and sort of what it taught me, and then I'll open it up to questions. Okay. I like to do a little bit of a reader poll, an audience poll on what to read. Would you guys prefer, we're going to do show of hands, would you guys prefer pregnant at IKEA or depressing earthquake class? Okay, pregnant at IKEA. Depressing earthquake class, okay. Okay, we're doing pregnant at IKEA. Nobody wants to talk about the depressing earthquake. We will have time for that later. We will leave time to talk about the earthquake. Okay. So this is just the first two pages of the book. So here we are, 37 weeks pregnant at IKEA. Picture me being, if you can picture anything inside of there, my belly distended, a blimp exiting sideways out of my body.

3:36 I walk in stiff little jerky motions like a stork, grip onto stair railings. Every few minutes I have to press my hands against my lower back to stop my spine from breaking in half. I look so disturbing that I make the other shoppers nervous. They watch me from the corner of their eyes to see what I'll do next. They stop me to say things like, "Bet you're ready for this to be over," or "You look like you're about to pop." And IKEA, on a weekday, dear God, another reminder that I'm officially unimportant. Only the old people and college students and bartenders shop for furniture on a Monday. And of course the other pregnant ladies, milling in the crib section like hungry alligators. I'm wearing a lavender linen romper and Birkenstocks, the kind of thing I would see pregnant women on Instagram wearing and think over my dead body. The kind of outfit that takes the edge off, that says, "I am now a mother.

4:36 Please speak to me only in high pitches." But it turns out being that maternity clothes cost just as much as real clothes, and we still haven't paid off the bill that the clinic sent me for my last ultrasound. So now I wear whatever hand-me-down maternity outfit I can get at the thrift store. Today, the lavender romper. I've been standing in the kids' section for at least an hour, trying to decide between the different crib mattresses, because of course a crib does not come with a mattress. What was I thinking? That you were going to sleep directly on the wood? So now I'm Googling the difference between a spring mattress and a foam mattress, and Google tells me that it can be worth it to spend the extra money on an organic crib mattress because toxins cause cancer. And if you're going to get a foam mattress, make sure it's made without polyurethane. But of course IKEA does not list on their website what kind of foam their crib mattresses are made of, or if they do, I can't find it, and I'm looking for somebody in a yellow shirt

5:34 to help me, but they've all vanished. Your father and I sleep on a mattress we got on Craigslist, a mattress we dragged together through the dingy hallway of a dingy apartment building in North Portland, after handing some creepy guy $80 in cash. In bed for my queen, your father said, when we finally managed to squeeze it into the back of our car. It's not just our shitty mattress, Bean, it's everything. Your father, Dom, is 38, still trying to get that big role, still standing in line to audition, still sending his headshots to casting agents, still picking up shifts at the cafe that he's worked at since we first met. Your mother, Annie, speaking, thought she was destined to be the next Tennessee Williams, the millennial Beckett, wasted hours practicing that big sweeping bow she'd do under those

6:28 big Broadway lights, and is now 35 and spends her days staring at spreadsheets on a computer screen on the 22nd floor of a glass building, pressing buttons with her fingers. Last I checked, your father and I have $836 in a checking account at Wells Fargo, a Subaru with 160,000 miles on it, and a two bedroom apartment by Mount Tabor we can only afford because the landlord feels too guilty to raise our rent or kick us out. And here I am, 37 weeks pregnant at Ikea on a Monday. With a credit card, I'll probably die before I pay off. What I'm trying to say is that nothing, nothing about the first year of your life will look like the years that come after. So enjoy your toxin free mattress while you can. We'll end there. [applause] Is that, am I too close to the mic? Is that about? Okay.

7:28 Well, it is an incredible honor to have been chosen as the FVRL reads of the year, just sort of hard to overstate how enormous that feels to me. Like I already said, I've spent so much time at this library and it just means so much. I'm from Portland and it means so much to sort of have recognition locally by people who actually could read the book and say like, "That street is wrong," by people who actually know what I'm talking about. So it's an enormous honor and I want to give a big thank you to the Vancouver Community Library Friends and the FVRL Foundation and everyone who's worked behind the scenes to make this happen. I know it was a really enormous effort. So my story starts in 2019. I live right near here and I'm pregnant and I'm completely terrified and I'm not terrified

8:27 of giving birth and I'm not terrified of the fact that I am a freelancer. So I have no actual money for maternity leave. I am terrified of the earthquake and I had learned... How many of you guys read that 2015 article in The New Yorker about... Oh, not that many. Okay. So in 2015, this article was written about the massive Cascadia earthquake and it was called the really, really big one and everyone who read it just got completely terrified for like one week. And then we all just completely forgot about it and moved on with our lives because kind of what else are you going to do? And that was me. I read it. I completely forgot about it and then I got pregnant and I remembered it and I started to completely spiral about it again. And I had a really bad insomnia when I was pregnant and so I would just lie awake at

9:24 night and in my sort of just fear fantasies of it, it was like I was alone, the earthquake had happened and all my neighbors were like at my door banging. They were like a mob of zombies at my door and they were coming to take my water and they were sort of coming to hurt me. It was me against everyone else. And so I started to research how do you keep yourself safe and what happens when there's lawlessness and mobs? And then one day I am at Ikea and I am seven months pregnant and that actually is the day that someone said to me, "Oh, are you having twins?" I was like, "Nope, I'm not, thank you. I hope you die in an earthquake in this warehouse."

10:17 And I was shopping for something for my unborn kiddo and the building started to shake and I thought, "Oh my God, it's the big one, it's the big earthquake and I'm going to be squished here." And I was just completely paralyzed with panic and then of course the shaking stopped and it ended up being a really large, like the semis that have all the furniture in them back up to the loading dock and it will shake the building. And so at the point that I realized this, the idea for this book had kind of completely landed in my head, this long walk home, being very pregnant and this kind of central question of like what would you have to do to survive and what wouldn't we do to sort of protect ourselves or protect an unborn child? And on the drive home I called my writing coach at the time and I said, "I've had this idea for a book and I'm going to write it."

11:16 And she was like, "Emma, you're seven months pregnant. Do you really think you should be focused right now on writing a book?" But I was fixated on it and I started writing it when my kiddo was about eight weeks old and I wrote the first draft of it during my maternity leave. And because I already was very terrified of the earthquake and kind of in this mindset of like Mad Max, everyone trying to steal from each other, that really was the version of the book that I wrote. The first draft came out very dark. Annie was like against everyone, people trying to hurt her, everyone sort of stealing from her and for a couple of years that was the version of the book that existed. And then in 2022 I was pregnant again and my husband and I decided that we needed a bigger house.

12:13 And so we moved to a house in Northeast Portland and we moved in next to this guy named Ethan. And Ethan was a very interesting guy. Right away it was clear he was a prepper. Like you would look in his backyard, he had a structure and I say structure and not shed because he immediately said to us, this is not a shed, this structure will survive any disaster that could happen. And it had these like big doors and in his backyard he had sort of like every possible tool and device and technology and he said that like one of his hobbies was like mock flying planes, like flight simulation and his other hobby was ham radio and he had a generator. And so it was just like very clear that Ethan was really into being a survivalist. And I want to say that that felt reassuring but I actually think I found it kind of scary.

13:10 You know I figured oh this is like kind of another person that would you know even more likely to kill us. The preppers of course are all you know out for themselves. And then about six months after we moved in there was that really big ice storm. And you know no one could drive anywhere. I don't know if you guys remember this, it was like a couple of years ago. And I will say do not repeat this ever but I will say that Vancouver is so much better at navigating ice and snow than Portland is. So maybe for you guys it was just like another spring day. For us we were immobilized four days. But so it was you know power was out and my kiddo was like mom come to the window there's a construction worker in the street. I'm like that's strange. And I go to the window and there's Ethan and he's wearing this safety vest and he's wearing this construction helmet and he is putting orange cones around an electric line that has fallen into the street and is sparking.

14:07 And we sat in our cold and dark house that day and we watched Ethan. And what I saw is that Ethan had heat. Ethan was going door to door to check on every single neighbor. Ethan had hot chocolate. He was making soup. Then I saw Ethan put his crampons on and walk in the ice to Popeyes to get enough fried chicken to feed like the entire block. And then I saw Ethan go next door and there was this very this elderly couple that had some mobility issues and he helped them move them from their house to his house so that they could be warm so they could have food and be comfortable. He came to our house. He said does the baby need anything? Do you guys need anything? You're welcome to come over. He had like the fires going.

14:51 And that night lying in bed I had this kind of like realization. And that night you know I was lying in bed and I had this kind of thought like oh is it possible that after the earthquake that in times of disaster we don't all immediately turn into zombies. That was a completely new thought for me but I started to research how people handle disasters. And what emerged is that in times of disaster people actually do become much more altruistic and people do help other people. They become more generous and they're more likely to help strangers. There's a book that kind of explores this. So the phenomenon is called Catastrophe Compassion and this book that explores it is called Paradise Built in Hell. I don't know if you guys have heard of it by Rebecca Solnit, really incredible writer

15:51 and thinker. And Paradise Built in Hell is sort of an examination of this, of how people, Solnit goes and she interviews all these people that have survived really, really horrible things and what she sort of finds emerging is that they will report that they've had incredible meaning come from it and that when they look back on their lives they remember some of those times as sort of like the most vivid and the most connected. And this quote from the book is, "Horrible in itself, disaster is sometimes a door back into paradise, the paradise at least in which we are who we hope to be, do the work we desire and are each our sister's and brother's keeper." So it's very taken with this idea of the paradise in which we are who we hope to be and partly that's because Annie, my protagonist at the beginning of the book, is really not the person that she hopes to be. Like she's very stuck, she's very isolated, she's grieving, she's so frustrated with her

16:50 life and I think most importantly she's so obsessed with what could have been and what she thinks should have been that she cannot in any way appreciate what actually is or what still sort of could be. And so I started to wonder could this massive earthquake be the thing that lets Annie become the person that she wants to be and could I use this to sort of change her life for the better? And out of that I was really led to this idea of flash points. I started reading a lot of narratives coming out of 9/11 and over and over I would read this narrative of the person kind of walking home, the long walk and maybe not a person who was injured or in a life or death scenario but a person that's very shaken up and all of a sudden, you know, it seemed like everyone would say that this happened on the Brooklyn Bridge and I don't know if that's just because memory really like puts you on the Brooklyn Bridge for a big moment or if the Brooklyn Bridge really does bring a big mental shift

17:48 but it was these stories of people on the Brooklyn Bridge thinking like oh I'm quitting my job, I'm moving to Paris, I'm getting a divorce. Like people sort of finding so much clarity and the kind of noise of everyday life had fallen aside and what was left was understanding like what really mattered to them. So I was very taken that Annie would have this idea that, you know, that this fame that she's sort of longing for and the keeping up with the Joneses that she's very stuck in, that she can kind of see beyond that and find sort of a deeper meaning. And then I started thinking that Annie kind of needs one more ingredient, like she's had a disaster and she's having this really intense flashpoint about what matters but I think what Annie also really needed is connection. Annie is incredibly isolated. In the book, she does not mention a single friend.

18:48 It's not clear that Annie has a single friend, you know, she had her mother and her mother is gone and she's in so many ways just completely alone even to the point that she's at IKEA alone and nobody knows that she's there. So years ago I had written this story for the New York Times about how to make closer friendships and a psychologist that I interviewed told me if you want someone to be your close friend, get in a minor car accident with them. So I was so taken with that, right, like, you know, it is disturbing when you first think about it. I read this at an event once and somebody was like, yeah, but what if you mean for it to be minor and then it becomes major? And I was like, oh, no, no, you're not supposed to set it up. It just has to happen organically. So what I wanted to give for Annie was this human connection and I knew that the only way that that could happen for her is in this kind of terrifying life or death moment.

19:42 And there's this famous story, I'm sure you guys have all heard of it, from 9/11, of this guy who's going down one of the towers, the South Tower, and he hears someone calling for help and he goes and helps him. Everyone else leaves and he goes and helps him. And they become friends for their entire lives. And he has this quote that I kept written above my desk, the most powerful act of survival is sometimes choosing not to save only yourself. And so many people think that like the love story in this book or the central question of this book is about Annie and her husband and is her husband going to make it? Are they going to stay together? Are they happy? Are they not happy? But that's actually not the book that I wrote. The book that I wrote is about a love story between two women. It's about these two mothers who would never have otherwise connected with each other and who actually hours before are in a conflict with each other and then manage to find this

20:41 incredibly intimate, incredibly deep connection by the end of the book. So I don't know that I succeeded in giving Annie a second chance. That's for you guys to decide. That's not for me to decide. And if you have something to say about that, please feel free to go to Goodreads where everyone has something to say about it. But I want to talk a little bit about how writing this narrative, having this incredible narrative shift, it really changed my life. And I think that reading about people after disasters changed my life. I did believe in Mad Max. I did believe that in hard times we would all turn on each other. And then I had my mind changed. And my neighbor Ethan really changed me. I started to question my own sort of narratives around what it means to be prepared, what a prepper means, sort of why I would have this initial judgment of this man and then be proven so wrong. And I started thinking about-- I'd been so worried for years about having enough food

21:41 and water for myself, about people taking my food and water. I never once thought, do I have enough for the people on my block who are vulnerable? Do I even know the people on my block who are vulnerable? That was an entirely new lens that I had never looked through. And this book allowed me to look through it. And I hear from a lot of people who will send me late night messages on Instagram. And they will say, I have just finished your book, and I cannot sleep. And I have to know, how do you sleep at night? And I always say, I sleep well at night because I took my worst nightmare and I shared it with you. No, I don't-- I say, no refunds. No, I take that question really seriously because for months and months and months, I lay awake at night. I don't think it's-- and usually these people are parents. And they live in this area where we are waiting on a massive earthquake.

22:39 And I don't take that kind of anxiety and fear lightly because I've lived it. But the truth really is that I actually sleep well at night because I have come to understand that if the earthquake did happen in my lifetime, I might have an opportunity to show up for my community, to find really incredible meaning, like what else am I doing in my day-to-day life that has more meaning than the opportunity to actually show up, to actually-- the most powerful act of survival is sometimes choosing not to survive alone. So I think I'll end it there and turn it over to Q&A. Thank you guys so much.

23:28 [ Inaudible Remark ] >> What happened? We had a baby in Mount Tabor Park and then it was over. So did she go home and find that jerk of a husband waiting for her or did she roll down the hill and crush the baby? We don't know. >> So good. Thank you for that question. Yeah, you know, I get-- I also get a lot of late night Instagram messages about the ending

24:27 of the book and, you know, and I think my impulse for that is that I-- every time is that I am just so incredibly grateful that someone got to the end of my book. You know, there's just so many-- there's so many books that I don't finish and like this idea that like a complete-- it still shocks me. That probably, to be honest, I probably heard from hundreds of people about the ending of the book and it's still every time is like this complete stranger took all this time to read my book and get to the end of it and it is-- it sort of-- it does sort of fill me with gratitude. I'm going to let him speak. We'll see what he says about the ending. Yeah, you know, I could say a couple of things and I'll say them kind of quickly but, you know, I think that on a social science note, you know, I'm a climate journalist.

25:20 I report a lot on disasters and here that often looks like wildfires and what that has really taught me is this sort of central feature of disaster is not knowing what would happen to people that you care about and that really is the reality. Like in Portland, that's the reality. If you're across the river from someone that you love or even someone you don't love, that you will not know what's happened to them for, you know, it could be days and so for me it was really important like, of course, there was a version of the book where, you know, he's waiting at home and their home is fine and she's famous. They have money and, you know, and for many years that was the ending of the book because that was sort of all that I could bear and then I just, the more I worked on this book, the more I felt this kind of like ethical weight of the actual lived experience of all

26:19 of us after the earthquake and the more like I really wanted to honor that and I would say on a personal note, you know, my writing teacher sort of always says that you know a book is done when the question you set out to ask you have answered and that's a deeply personal question, I don't know that the question I set out to ask other people necessarily even get from this book, but I will say that the question that I set out to ask was very much about what it means to kind of love a mortal child, I'm going to pick my words carefully because my mortal children are in this room, but what it sort of means to love a child that one day even in the best case scenario is going to DIE and that was sort of the central question for me of pregnancy, of becoming a mother and so the book, you know, I really,

27:17 when that question got answered for me, the book was over for me and yes, and I will say that I completely support all the different reactions to the ending, I even had a book club reach out to me and say we have a member who is so angry about the ending of the book that she is like refusing to, I don't know if she was like refusing to come to the meeting, she was somehow, it was causing disruption in the book club and it's her birthday, will you for her birthday write her and explain why you ended the book the way you ended, so I went back and I found an earlier draft where she does get a happy ending and I printed it out and I put in a birthday card and I said happy birthday, there's a, okay, yeah. Since your book sort of morphed over the years, I'm wondering if this question is even relevant

28:13 but in writing out your characters, their dialogue and their decisions, did your characters ever surprise you and do something you weren't planning when you first started? >> Oh, it's really great, yeah, you know, I think I will say that the choice I struggled with the most was about Annie assaulting Taylor in the beginning of the book and it's been really funny to travel the country and talk about this book because a lot of people don't have as much of a problem with that, a lot of places but I'm like, oh no, no, like we are from the Pacific Northwest, like nobody, there is no angry pregnant woman alive who is going to assault an Ikea worker in this region and so it's like hard to explain like, oh no, we are like a deeply passive and friendly people, like you are not going to have that

29:08 happen and so, you know, and of course like Boston's like, no, it's great, get her. So I think that was a decision that I struggled with. I think a decision that I really struggled with that I still don't even feel clear on is about there is a scene where Annie is offered a ride in a van and she has to decide if she should get in the van or not and I think that decision felt so, you know, it's over the past five years sort of I'm writing this book during Me Too, I'm writing this book during Epstein, I'm writing this book during, you know, the man versus bear debate and I think so much of just like the cultural energy around, you know, around the fact that women's danger around men, even after an earthquake which is actually, the biggest danger to her is actually a man on the street.

30:05 So yes, I do think they both, you know, I think Dom's decision to go to the audition surprised me, that came very late in writing it and I think that surprised me and then of course, the funny thing about writing is that you're surprised, it sort of comes out of nowhere, the oh, of course, but then as soon as you think it, you're like, oh of course and so, you know, it's strange like that because it's almost like another person has whispered the idea to you, but it's just kind of your own subconscious, thank you. First thanks a lot for writing this book, so the question I have is in a sense of your writing style, so you chose to kind of bifurcate the book in which one part they were moving towards, time was moving towards each other sort of and I wonder how you got to thinking about it like that and how you use that to help tell us the story.

31:01 Yeah, thank you for that, it was very, very challenging actually, it took me a very long time to do, it was many years of trying to figure it out and for a long time, I sort of had it like I would, you know, I had it like based on the number of steps, I had this idea that she had a pedometer like a Fitbit watch and it was like the number of steps and she's sort of moving through the city and then I was like, oh, I'm tracking it to sort of the minute and it would kind of be like this minute by minute like fractured thing. And it was challenging because it's not natural that when you are moving through, you know, when you were scared and hungry and thirsty that you're like, but one time when I also was thirsty, you know, there is like, I remember like it was like at one point is walking and she sees a red car and it's like, speaking of red cars, my father had a red car and I was like, okay, this is, this is just so cheesy, this is not how, you know, this is not how we think and it was so important to me to honor the way that we, the way our stream of consciousness actually is, I was so fascinated by that and that was what I really wanted

31:57 to chase and so, you know, I was writing the book and writing the book and writing the book and sort of years had gone by and then I got an agent and I'm still, you know, she says like get this, you know, get this book as finished as you can and we'll send it out to publishers and I have this set amount of money, it's all the money left in my bank account and it is going to buy me a set amount of childcare, right? Like I have this, you know, I have someone to watch my baby and I, so I know I only have, you know, like six weeks of care, so I have six weeks to finish this book and like that's really it and I'm writing and writing and I cannot figure out how to structure the book and then it's like I have three weeks left and my writing teacher said to me, you know, I just like I can't figure this out, I don't know what to do and she said you have to put the book down, you have to stop writing, the problem is that you're working on it too much, you have to stop writing and you have to trust that the answer will come and I was

32:54 like I have three weeks of childcare left, like I'm running out of money, you know, I cannot possibly do that but I, you know, I listened to her and I put the book down and for days I just was sort of in agony and so confused and so upset about it and then on the fifth day I woke up in the middle of the night and I just understood, oh, of course it's flashbacks and the flashbacks are moving from way past up until the morning, so the very last flashback is the morning and then the book begins right after and they're sort of moving towards each other in time and writing is a strange subconscious work, I, you know, I am a very pragmatic person and I am always sort of trying to shove it into a more pragmatic process and it is just bizarrely subconscious, so the answer arrived right on time, yeah.

33:51 Yeah, in the pink. Yeah, thank you so much for coming. I thought Annie was really well written, like there's sometimes I found her very frustrating, like she was, she's very flawed but she's very compelling when you read her and it's funny because you mentioned you're more of the fear of the prepping but when you read the book it seems like it's her fear of her child, like her mortality and so for me at least one of the hardest pieces to read in the book is this public school scene, right, and you do have a mother who is facing her worst fear, I just, for you as a mom and also writing that what it was like trying to get that scene just right for the way that you wanted it in the book. Thank you, yeah, thank you for asking that, yeah, you know, that originally there was not going to be a school scene in the book, I didn't really know about the school since I started writing the book and then I learned about the schools and I was, you know, very, very shocked and I kind of thought like that just can't quite be right and, you know, I'm

34:50 a journalist so it's fairly easy for me to figure out if something like is pretty accurate and I started investigating it and it is, you know, it is a really, really dire situation. We in Portland, we have about 20 something schools that are completely unsafe to be in in case of an earthquake, some of them are so unsafe that they would, they could completely collapse not just in a large earthquake but in a small earthquake and so I started doing an investigative piece with Limit Week trying to get PPS to release some of those records, some of those seismic surveys of how stable these buildings were and that was years ago when I started that project and I worked on it for years and they sort of kept putting the article off like no one, does anyone really care about this and PPS sort of kept putting

35:46 me off and, you know, we're working on it, it's almost done like and meanwhile I was writing this book and, you know, as I was writing the book, my kids were getting older which meant that I started to know kids in like every single PPS school and I started to realize that I had a really big ethical responsibility to show a scene at one of these schools that actually to write a book about the earthquake and not show a scene at a school would be unethical and would be just kind of incredibly dismissive of what really is one of the central problems of the earthquake as it relates to Portland and then of course I also, as I was writing this, realized that my best friend's kid was about to start school at the school that I show in the book. And so I ended up moving the school to a location that used to be a high school but is no longer

36:45 being used as a school and that was sort of the one factual change in the book, that's the one building in the book that's not accurate. And so then I started to realize kind of in slow motion like oh my god, this is my best friend, she's read every draft of this book, at one point I'm going to have to slide this book to her and say either I made this better than it's going to be because I don't want to upset anyone or oh I made this worse than it's going to be because I want to sell more books and I started to realize like oh I actually have to make this exactly how it's going to be, I have to really make sure this is as factually accurate as I possibly can. And so I basically approached it like a journalism problem, I went to earthquake drills, I met with Portland city officials, I met with people from our neighborhood emergency teams, I went to a training day where I saw firsthand how they triage, how they try to rescue people

37:44 from under rubble and then I actually met with some first responders who had been on site at earthquakes in China and in Nepal and who had actually gone into collapsed schools. And then I ended up bringing in people to actually like review that scene and read the scene so I worked with a professor at PSU and then I worked with a first responder here in Portland as well to make sure that it honored like Red Cross and FEMA guidelines. And yeah and that was really, really, that was really difficult work because at the time you know I, well first I had a baby and then I was pregnant again and then I had a second baby and so it was sort of like writing and writing and writing this scene while I was really sort of in the midst of you know a pretty intense postpartum hormone experience and for a long time that scene just had in red had these two lines that said I'm not

38:40 ready to write this, you know it'll be good, it'll be, you can't even imagine how good it's going to be but I'm not like, I'm not stable enough to write it and then you know I probably wrote that scene like 25 times and by the end of it I said oh I'll never, the last time I sent it off I said I'll never, I will never read it again and I really plan to honor that but then when the book came out actually the editor at Willamette Week reached out to me and said hey you know that story you've been working on for years and years and years that you know we didn't think anyone was interested in? Well your book's kind of causing a buzz and we now are interested in that and they ended up publishing that chapter from the school scene alongside this investigative piece I had done and to the state of the schools and they published those pieces together in the paper and it caused so much outrage.

39:37 I have to say I was pretty reluctant to do that because I thought it was a kind of sensationalist and I was a little bit afraid of the moms at school getting mad at me if I'm being honest. I was afraid of the daycare drop-off situation which rules quite a bit of my psyche and it caused a really big outroar and it happened to coincide with when Portland Public Schools was asking to pass a very large bond, our largest bond that we've ever tried to pass and basically all these parent groups said we will not vote yes on this bond unless you commit to fixing some of these schools and the board members filed an emergency resolution to fix ten of the most dangerous schools and then the bond passed like three days later and thank you. Thank you for asking that. It was difficult to write and so if I had to sort of suffer uncomfortably for it and everyone here in this room has to suffer through reading it I'm glad that at least something

40:37 meaningful could come from that. I had kind of an adjacent question about endings and closure in general and I found it really refreshing not getting the truth or the endings of a lot of different stories including Taylor's and everything that it doesn't happen so often in life that you always know how things end up and it made it hit so much harder and feel so much more real I was wondering you talked about how you have other versions of the book that do have these truths, was it difficult to step away from those concrete endings or did it feel more freeing to not have to decide

41:37 and put into paper like this is definitely what happened or was it kind of painful wanting to search for that and as kind of a side piece to that I found so much poetics in your writing style with repeated lines and pieces like that and I can't help but put those styles together and how we get so much less closure in poetry and pieces so I was wondering kind of I know those are a little different but they feel together in my head what your relationship is in a literary sense to endings and to poetics and more of a prose you know. Oh that's such a good question thank you yeah you know I did start out wanting to be a poet and it became really quickly clear that they do not make any money yeah if anyone here is considering it and I was not very good at it but no I mean and my friends who are poets it's interesting because I agree that when you read poetry you're sort of like trying

42:34 to sort of connect the dots but I think when you ask a poet like oh are you unclear they're like oh no I said exactly I was being direct and it's like oh okay and so I and I guess like that that's probably what I would say about about my own writing but yeah you know of course it's always very hard to to make anything happen to a character that that you care about that's gonna that's gonna hurt them but I do think when you get very clear you know I really believe in intentionality in writing I really believe you know I knew that I was gonna have to go out in the world and explain why I had made the choices that I'd made and and and I knew that it would not sit right with me unless I understood the choices that I'd made so I really I went back and forth truly for years on the ending and I'll actually kind of tell you the story of how I how I came upon the ending and and I have to my my kid's dad is here so I'm I'm curious if he has a different memory but I don't know that he's heard me tell the story but in COVID our kiddo was like maybe nine

43:32 or ten months old and we went to Tahoe and we went on vacation to Tahoe and we were hiking and I was very very unsure about how it end the book and I was journaling a lot about it and I was you know I was just going back and forth constantly about how to end the book and and and then we're hiking in Tahoe and we are my my kid's dad has my little kiddo on his back and and we're walking on this like very thin narrow trail on this very steep mountain and and all of a sudden this guy comes coming comes towards us really quickly and he's like turn around turn around there's a big bear and it's been following me for a mile and it won't get off the trail and we have been hiking already for hours it's very hot we immediately turn around and this guy just like takes off so you know he has no time for us he's gone and I said to my to my kids dad I said you go ahead go ahead

44:31 as fast as you can and let me and I'll stay behind and that way if the bear is going to attack somebody it will attack me and and the baby will be safe and and he said bye hang in there no but it was this incredibly profound moment you know we were very new parents and this maybe was maybe the first moment that we had sort of encountered risk to our child like that you know direct risk and we just completely understood each other you know I remember I can still sort of picture this like incredible feeling of relief as I saw them kind of like round the corner ahead of me and it was just like oh my god my child is safe like my child is safe and and and we weren't performing you know I wasn't like choosing a moment to be a martyr he wasn't being like great let's get rid of her you know like we were both just immediately aligned in in like oh you protect your child over

45:25 everything nothing else matters and I remember after that very long day the the bear escapade went on for quite a while but when we finally got back to our car and had escaped the bear I remember pulling up into the hotel parking lot and realizing like oh I I understand now how my book ends and that's that's what the ending yeah means to me I think I have time for one more question yeah hi um one of the things that I really liked about the book was not just like the the supporting characters but all the characters even like the small interactions there are so many times when I think what I remember the most was the fitness instructor guy with the shoes every time I you brought in a new character it was like I have seen this person in Portland I've seen this person in Vancouver how did you come

46:21 up with what was your inspiration for not just like the side character but like how did you build the world and the characters out thanks for that yeah um I think you know I was very it was very important to me to make it very very realistic and when you read a lot of first-person accounts you will read someone saying like oh I passed this person and they were carrying their little tiny dog and I'll always remember the collar of the dog and then it said this on the collar and it's like the way that after that in moments like this we we live we're really really living we're really present and it was so clear to me that as we all move through our days like we're not really noticing anybody and and and then she's just having this this this moment where like each person is their own whole person their own whole world they have people they care about like they're having their own entire experience and and so um you know it took it took it took many many drafts each one of those characters started out being very cheesy um and then it and it

47:20 just kind of kept reworking it and reworking it and um and yeah you know I wanted to show this kind of like absurd almost hysterical moment between two women with this kind of ridiculous man and that you know and that they're just kind of like in this horrible moment howling with laughter um as you know as as people sometimes do like at funerals as people sometimes do in sort of these horrible moments that you just like the absurdity kind of takes you over over the edge yeah thank you okay well I um I'm gonna end there I'm happy to answer questions and sign books if you have other things you can feel free to come up and and chat with me and thank you guys so much for your time for this honor yeah it means so much to me.