Catherine Chidgey - THE BOOK OF GUILT

[00:10] Cindy: Welcome to Thoughts from a Page. A member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network, I'm Cindy Burnett, and I am so glad you're here. I personally select and read every book featured on the show so I can bring you thoughtful spoiler-free author interviews.

[00:23] Whether you're deciding what to read next or looking for deeper insight after finishing a book, you're in the right place. I hope these conversations will enrich your reading life.

[00:32] In addition to the podcast, I write a monthly column, Buzz Reads, featuring my top five picks for each month, which is linked in the Show Notes. If you're looking for the best books to read this summer, don't miss my summer reading guide, also linked in the Show Notes.

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[00:58] It takes a long time to grow a show and I continue to find a larger audience thanks to you, my loyal listeners. I am so grateful.

[01:06] Today, Catherine Chidgey joins me to chat about The Book of Guilt. The Book of Guilt is one of those books that grabs ahold of you and does not let go until the very last page.

[01:16] There's this constant feeling of dread as you're reading,

[01:19] wondering what is happening. Everything's a little off kilter, and as you slowly come to understand what's happening, it's a tad bit horrifying.

[01:27] I highly, highly recommend it. It's one of my September Buzz Reads picks, and it is well worth the read. Catherine's novels have been published to international acclaim.

[01:37] She has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize,

[01:44] among many other awards and recognitions.

[01:47] She lives in Cambridge, New Zealand, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

[01:57] Welcome Catherine, how are you today?

[01:59] Catherine: Oh thanks. It's really lovely to be here. I'm pretty good joining you from New Zealand where it's 9am on Thursday morning.

[02:06] Cindy: It was interesting setting up a recording time because it's 5pm for me Eastern time in the US so. So you are far ahead. Timing wise.

[02:14] Catherine: I am joining you from the future. It's true. Exactly.

[02:18] Cindy: My parents lived in Australia for four years in the late 90s and it was interesting trying to be able to communicate with them. And that was before everybody had all these cell phone technology.

[02:27] Catherine: Yeah, yeah, right.

[02:29] Cindy: Well, I Loved The Book of Guilt. I just can't even tell you what a thought provoking and engaging book this is. I just have thought so much about it ever since I finished reading it.

[02:40] Catherine: Thank you so much. It was a really satisfying one to write.

[02:45] Cindy: You have an amazing Kirkus review, a starred review, which had to make you so happy. And then Publishers Weekly has a great review too, but they give too much away. When I was reading it, I was like, oh, I wanted to send them a note and be like, you need to remove this part.

[02:58] So I want to tell readers that this book is best read. Going in totally cold. We'll have a conversation today, but we will not engage in any kind of spoiler activity or anything that would ruin the read that I had when I read it.

[03:11] Catherine: Yeah, I agree. It's best to go in with very little knowledge of the story and it's a hard one to talk about in interviews because I have to sort of say so many times.

[03:24] Cindy: We will tread the line and make sure we do not go into spoiler territory. But I have so many questions, so why don't we dive into them? Will you give me a quick synopsis of the Book of Guilt before we get started?

[03:34] Catherine: Sure. So The Book of Guilt is the story of identical triplet brothers Vincent, Lawrence and William, who are growing up in a virgin of England in 1979 in a boy's home in the New Forest.

[03:48] And this is one of several homes scattered throughout the country, the Sycamore Homes. And they were established after the war by a man called Dr. Roach. Dr. Roach comes to visit the boys once every couple of months.

[04:02] He makes sure that they're taking their medicine to protect them from a mysterious illness that the boys call the bug.

[04:10] And the bug takes many different forms in different children.

[04:13] Lots of children before the triplets have died from the bug.

[04:18] Some have recovered. If they recover, they get to go and live in Margate, which is a seaside resort where they can eat candy, floss all day and swim in the sea and visit Dreamland, the amusement park, and basically live a dream life.

[04:34] So this is what every child living in these homes wants.

[04:38] They're cared for by three mothers, known as Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon and Mother Night. And the boys origins are kind of shadowy to them,

[04:47] but they don't really question them until the day comes when the new government announces they are going to disestablish the remaining children's homes and release the children into the community.

[04:59] And this is making the community quite nervous and the boys don't know why this would be.

[05:05] So gradually the boys lives intersect with that of the Minister of Loneliness, who is the woman tasked with closing the homes down. And also with another 13 year old child,

[05:17] a girl called Nancy, who lives with her parents in Exeter and who has never been allowed to leave the family home. So the story's told from three points of view.

[05:27] Vincent, who's one of the triplets, and Nancy and then the Minister of Loneliness.

[05:33] Cindy: How did you come up with the ideas for this one? I cannot wait to hear.

[05:37] Catherine: There were a few different sources.

[05:39] One primary spark was reading a news story a few years ago about a Japanese politician who held the role of Minister of Loneliness. And as soon as I heard that I thought, oh, that belongs in my writing somehow in a really important way.

[05:56] And I'm not sure how, but I'm going to file it away and get it out again when I know how I need to use it. And weirdly, while I was writing the book, that same position was established in the UK.

[06:08] One of those strange things that happens sometimes when art starts to imitate life or life starts to imitate art.

[06:17] And another spark was thinking about the huge amount of research that I'd done for two earlier novels which were set in World War II Germany. A book called The Wish Child and then a book called Remote Sympathy.

[06:30] And with the research I'd done for those books,

[06:34] I just kept coming back to that really impossible and terrible question of what should we do, if anything,

[06:42] with the research that was carried out in the camps during the war. And is there ever a place where it's okay morally to use that?

[06:53] I mean, a lot of it was pseudoscience anyway.

[06:56] But that sort of unanswerable question informed some of the ethical thinking at the heart of the story. And that's probably as much as I should say about that.

[07:06] There was just one other spark, which was decades ago, in the 1990s, I visited the New Forest in England with my mother. We had family friends who lived there and mum and I went and stayed with them.

[07:22] And I saw the New Forest ponies.

[07:25] That is this kind of this magical presence in the villages in the New Forest. And they seem wild. They seem like wild horses just wandering around, wandering down the streets in the villages, wandering through people's gardens.

[07:39] They're not in fact wild, they are owned, but they have particular arrangements whereby they are allowed to roam fairly freely. And when I was thinking about where to set the book and knowing that I wanted it to be somewhere in England and somewhere sort of away from the big cities,

[07:57] I thought again about the New Forest ponies and what a fantastic presence they could be to haunt the margins of the stories and to be present in a story that talks about freedom and the opposite of freedom and coercion and control and the illusion of freedom.

[08:15] So that's why I settled on the setting and why the ponies make cameo appearances in the book.

[08:21] Cindy: Will you touch on many things that I have questions about, so we'll begin working our way through them. The first is the setting. So you set it in England in an alternative reality where no one won World War II and Hitler was assassinated in 1943.

[08:35] Can we talk a little bit about how and why you decided on that?

[08:38] Catherine: Yeah. I did want history to depart from what we know.

[08:44] And I did decide that the jumping off point would be a different ending to World War II. But I didn't want to tread that fairly well trodden path of exploring what a German victory would have looked like.

[08:58] I wanted to be a bit more nuanced than that and to think about how would things have looked, particularly in England, if a truce had to be reached, if a treaty had to be signed, that meant difficult concessions needed to be made and sacrifices needed to be made.

[09:18] So not a victory on either side, no clear winner on either side, but rather this uncomfortable truce.

[09:25] And that played in quite nicely to the moral questions that I raise in the story,

[09:32] which I can't really talk about in detail.

[09:36] Cindy: Yes, please do not, as we were talking about, because I don't want any spoilers for people, because it's just so wonderful to have all of that unspooling as you read.

[09:45] Catherine: And I guess I didn't really want to do a whole lot of setup in terms of, you know, how this world is different from ours and exactly what the historical differences are.

[09:56] But rather just to drop a few hints as the reader is going along that they might even read over.

[10:02] So things like, for instance, the boys are out in the garden and they're looking up at the moon at one point and they're imagining the flags that are fluttering up there, the German, the American,

[10:14] and the English (the British) flags. And that's all I say about the moon landing, really, that it happened earlier, that these were the parties involved. And that's the kind of small detail that you could just read over, or you might stumble on it and you might think,

[10:28] wait a second, that doesn't seem quite right. That's not how it happened, is it? So I kind of want the reader to be almost questioning themselves or feeling slightly unsettled.

[10:39] Right from the start,

[10:40] it was important to me in this book to gradually turn up that dial on the reader's sense of unease and discomfort for the boys as well.

[10:51] Cindy: So you lead me perfectly into my next question, which was, I had this feeling of dread the entire time I was reading the book. And it ramps up as you're learning more and more.

[11:01] I just thought you did such a great job with that overarching tension that never goes away till you get to the end. And then the character names which you mentioned earlier, Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon, Mother Night.

[11:12] It's always just sort of creepy,

[11:15] sort of making you worry something's not right. I just loved that you did that beautifully.

[11:21] Catherine: I was so pleased to cause you a feeling of dread.

[11:24] Cindy: Thank you. Like I don't already have so many feelings of dread. But yes, reading this book was nice to have this kind of dread.

[11:31] Catherine: I guess one of the things I was doing with that was because most of it is told from the point of view of Vincent,

[11:38] who does not have the knowledge about his background that other characters in the story have.

[11:45] You know, this idea of knowledge or lack of knowledge or dawning knowledge is something that develops throughout the story.

[11:52] So the only books that the boys have access to and the only books they've ever read are eight volumes of an outdated set of children's encyclopedias called the Book of Knowledge.

[12:03] And the mothers take all the boys lessons from this book,

[12:07] from these books. And the boys believe that all the knowledge in the world, everything you could ever need to know, is contained within those pages, which of course isn't true.

[12:16] So the book is divided into three sections related to three books that appear in the story. And the first section is the Book of Dreams, which refers to this ledger that the mothers studiously recall every dream the boys have in,

[12:33] day in, day out.

[12:35] And the boys never really question why this is necessary and why the mothers are particularly interested in the details of any nightmares that they have.

[12:44] But that first section, the Book of Dreams, also refers to the boys state at the start of the story, which is kind of dreamy unawareness. They don't really know what's going on beyond the walls of the Sycamore home where they live, and they really don't question it.

[13:02] Then the second section is called the Book of Knowledge. And yes, it relates to that actual set of encyclopedias, but it also relates to their gradual dawning knowledge as they begin to find out certain things about who they are and what the world is like.

[13:18] And the reader finds that out at the same time as the boys and then the third section is the Book of Guilt, which refers to another ledger that the mothers religiously keep in which they note down any misdemeanor that the boys commit.

[13:34] But it also refers to this abiding guilt that will stay with the characters throughout their lives. And I really liked the kind of solidity of that structure, that trio of books.

[13:45] And the way that it allowed me to talk about the boys development and the way that it allowed me to talk about this gradual arrival of knowledge from the adult world, really.

[13:57] You know, they're 13,

[13:59] they still have a foot in childhood, but they're looking towards adulthood. So as much as anything else, the book is a coming of age story, I suppose.

[14:08] Cindy: I liked the way you had divided it into three sections with the three books that are relevant to them. And the Book of Knowledge is a little dated, right? I mean, this is taking place in the late 1970s, but the book of Knowledge is from earlier.

[14:19] Catherine: Yeah, the Book of Knowledge is from the early 1950s. And it definitely speaks in that outmoded voice, you know, that British voice of empire that pretends to all knowledge. And that is kind of disembodied and authoritative and that will accept no questioning.

[14:38] Cindy: And it's so dated as a result. So that also puts the boys at a disadvantage when they're interacting with others because their knowledge is a little old.

[14:46] Catherine: Yeah, exactly.

[14:48] Speaking of interacting with others, in preparation for their release into the community, they have these get togethers with girls from one of the other homes. These awful awkward socialization days which brings three girls to the boys home to practice dancing and conversation with them.

[15:06] And in those moments I really wanted to inject some lightness and some humor into the story. So in some ways they're just ordinary teenagers figuring out how to talk to the opposite sex and how to socialize in other ways.

[15:22] You know, there's a much darker undercurrent to those socialization days. But although the Book of Guilt does tell quite a dark story, I think there's a lot of opportunity for humor in there as well.

[15:35] I hope there is.

[15:36] Cindy: Absolutely. I just loved it and I don't like really dark things, so. No, it was wonderful.

[15:41] And you mentioned earlier that three people tell the story, the Minister of Loneliness, Vincent and Nancy. How did you come to have the three of them be the narrators?

[15:50] Catherine: I needed the Minister of Loneliness because I needed that outside perspective and I guess that perspective of the state on this state run, state sanctioned program.

[16:02] It was really challenging figuring out how to write the scenes from her perspective without giving too Much away.

[16:10] So especially the first scene that she appears in quite early in the book is a television interview that she's giving about the closure of the homes.

[16:18] And the interviewer is wanting her to address the community's concerns. And so the interviewer knows the truth about the homes, the minister knows the truth about the homes, the viewers know the truth, but the reader doesn't.

[16:32] And I don't want the reader to at that point.

[16:35] So that was very much a juggling act.

[16:37] And I thought,

[16:38] well, actually,

[16:40] in those sorts of situations, a politician will often obfuscate and talk around the edges of the truth. And so that's what I'll do. That's what I'll do to kind of keep the facts that I don't want the reader to know,

[16:55] to just keep them a little bit veiled. Still, at that point,

[16:59] I really loved writing the minister.

[17:02] She goes through quite a change in her outlook over the course of the book, and I loved putting her through those paces and seeing her come to the realizations that she does about the kind of person that she wants to be.

[17:16] And I guess in those characters, the same as with some of the characters in my Nazi Germany books, I want the reader to be asking themselves, well, what would I do in this situation if I had that knowledge, what would I do?

[17:31] Would I speak up? Or would I turn the other way and pretend that I don't know the full truth? Then with Nancy, who's 13,

[17:38] I wanted to explore a character who has only ever known a very, very limited world.

[17:46] So no one even knows that Nancy exists. Whenever a tradesperson has to come to the house, for instance,

[17:53] her parents make her go and sit inside her wardrobe and play with her Spirograph set, you know, and all those wonderful 1970s toys.

[18:01] So she has a very limited notion of what the world is like, and that is based on the television shows that she watches. So obviously completely artificial and completely out of touch with the real world.

[18:15] And she too, does not know the truth of her origins. And I really loved the thought of how I would take her outside those really strict parameters that are everything that she's ever known.

[18:32] Cindy: I could not figure out where her story was going. Every time I would read her perspective, I was trying madly to figure it all out, and I never did. That was so well done, too.

[18:42] It was so much fun because I was like, what is happening here?

[18:46] Catherine: I'm so pleased you didn't figure it out.

[18:48] Cindy: Yes. And you mentioned the 1970s. That part was really fun. Reflecting back on things when I was Young was the 1970s. So it was fun to see some of those things included Mork and Mindy.

[18:58] You mentioned the Spirograph. Just different things like that. Did you have to do a lot of research for that?

[19:03] Catherine: Well, I'm a child of the 1970s, so I didn't really.

[19:07] I was drawing on, you know, those elements of my childhood that loomed really large and that were common to New Zealand and Britain.

[19:15] Thinking about, you know, I don't know if the pianist Richard Claydeman was really big in the us. I think he probably was.

[19:20] I think he was this global superstar, this, you know, sultry, very beautiful, pretty boy French classical pianist who my mother absolutely adored. And so in the book, the mothers listen to the records of Richard Claydeman, but also the Irish Rovers and Glen Campbell, which were all, you know, the kinds of music that my parents were listening to and the things that I was exposed to to when I was growing up.

[19:45] So, you know, even though this is an alternate reality, I wanted to map it very closely and detail by detail to the real 1979 in order to, I guess get the reader to buy the world that I'm selling and for that slightly off kilter world to seem real to the reader.

[20:07] Cindy: That makes sense. Well, you definitely did a wonderful job of bringing that time period to life.

[20:13] The interesting part though is While it is 1970s Britain, there is a lot that seems very timely. Can you speak to that? I mean, you touched on that a little bit with the Minister of Loneliness, but over and over again I keep thinking, hmm, while this is said a while ago,

[20:29] many themes resonate today.

[20:32] Catherine: Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, unfortunately we still seem to have that human capacity to engage in willful ignorance, you know, to look the other way from the suffering of others or to think, well, I don't want to get involved in that.

[20:50] That's nothing to do with me, it's not my problem.

[20:52] Or I'm too scared to get involved because I'm terrified of what the ramifications might be for me or for my own family.

[21:00] So I will stay quiet,

[21:02] I will just get on with my own life and stay in my own lane. I'm really interested in that very natural human reaction and in thinking for myself about how I would react in those circumstances and not really being able to answer that and not being able to say with 100% certainty that I would be on the right side of history.

[21:25] So there's that.

[21:26] There's also, you know, thinking about this ongoing issue of some lives being valued less than other lives.

[21:35] And how we come up with that obscene ranking system that we do and what it means if we devalue a certain set of the population,

[21:48] what that means for us as humans. It's really difficult to talk about this, but generally,

[21:55] yeah, those are the issues that still seem painfully relevant today.

[22:01] One of the lessons that the boys have regularly with the mothers is a thing called Ethical Hour, where they're posed these ethical questions, like if a building is on fire and you can choose to save all the children inside, or you can choose to save one valuable painting inside,

[22:23] let the children in the building perish, but you can save one valuable painting inside that will, when it's sold, allow the saving of hundreds and hundreds of children's lives. You know, what do you do?

[22:35] And there's no answer to those questions. And you can sort of tie yourself up in knots trying to come up with the right answer when there is no right answer.

[22:44] And those were the kinds of questions that I wanted to keep turning over. Those things that we can't answer and those things that seemingly prove whether you are a good person or not, when in fact, you have to judge each question as it comes up in the real world on its own merits.

[23:03] Yeah, the boys can never answer those questions. I don't think the reader can ever answer those questions. And yet we seem to keep wanting to find a definitive answer to say, look, I know the answer to this question, therefore I am a good person.

[23:15] Cindy: Well, and it's so funny that they're having to engage in that activity as you learn more about them. It's just very ironic.

[23:21] Catherine: Yeah.

[23:22] Cindy: Well, what was the hardest part about writing this one?

[23:24] Catherine: The hardest part was making sure that the three strands would fit together,

[23:30] interlock in the way that I wanted them to,

[23:33] so that I was giving just enough information in a particular section before switching to another one. So leaving one point of view at just the right time before I jump into another person's skin and give a little bit, you know, drip feed a little bit more information from that point of view.

[23:52] And there's a point towards the end. How shall I talk about this? There's a point towards the end where one character keeps a really huge truth from another because they know if they tell that character the full truth at that point, then they won't be able to do the thing they need to do.

[24:08] Oh, sorry, that's just too hard to talk about. But, yeah, just that idea of the withholding of information until the exact right time was something that I played with a lot and made lots of graphs and lots of post it notes on the walls of my office and lots of charts and lots of timeline documents and all of those things just to make sure that I had that balance and that unfolding of information.

[24:32] Right.

[24:33] Cindy: I imagine that would be very difficult. You don't want too much information going out too early, but you also don't want to keep it too. Until too late either.

[24:40] Catherine: Exactly, yeah.

[24:42] Cindy: So one thing I love to talk about is covers. So I love your US cover. And I was looking at the other covers today and I was amazed to discover you have many covers.

[24:52] I am not sure I've seen that before. The New Zealand cover is different from the Australian cover, is different from the UK cover, which is different from the American cover.

[25:00] Catherine: Yeah. I have five different English language publishers around the world.

[25:04] I think the Canadian cover is very similar to the US cover, but otherwise each territory has put its own stamp on it. And I really love all of them and I love how different they are.

[25:15] I love the US cover with the boy kind of rolling down the hill with the house in the background.

[25:22] And in some ways it's quite a joyful image of liberation and abandon and just a kid playing. But in other ways it feels slightly unsettling and off and he's upside down and is he out of control?

[25:35] And. Yeah, I love the way that it's doing two things at once and there's.

[25:39] Cindy: Tears, you know, you can see the kind of. There's a little rip in several parts of it, so, you know, there's obviously something a little off.

[25:47] Catherine: Exactly, yeah. And on the back cover that's even more pronounced that this sort of, at first glance, idyllic image is being torn away.

[25:55] I really love the New Zealand cover,

[25:59] which uses an image that I found when I was researching the book. So it was when I was in Margate, the seaside resort, and I saw a reproduction of a vintage holiday poster advertising Margaret Margate as a seaside resort.

[26:14] And it's a. It's a 1950s image of a mother and a son holding hands at the beach and they're skipping along the sand and they're kind of weirdly levitating above the sand.

[26:25] It looks like they're caught mid leap and she's, you know, wearing pearls and makeup and quite a fancy dress for the beach. And it just has a really kind of dated, vintage look to it.

[26:38] And the skies are blue and the sea is perfect.

[26:41] And in the background there are two other boys. So I liked that there were three boys in this. And you can see the pier of Margate in the background, too.

[26:48] And I really liked the way that this sunny image works against the title, the Book of Guilt.

[26:56] So that's the New Zealand cover. The British cover takes the boy from that image and replicates him. So there are three boys, three identical boys on the COVID And the beach.

[27:06] And the background is very dark and the skies look quite thundery.

[27:10] And then the Australian cover is different again. It has this stylized black and white house and these symbols above it of the sun at different stages of the day to represent Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon, and.

[27:24] And Mother Knight. And it's quite mysterious and coded. So, yeah, really different covers. I think they're all really eye catching. And it's been so interesting for me to work with the different publishers and to get their take on what will work in their particular market and appeal to their particular readers.

[27:42] Cindy: Often when I see a variety of covers like that, I will have a favorite. But I really do think you're right. Each one is spectacular in its own way and its representation of the story.

[27:52] Catherine: Yeah, I agree. I can't choose a favorite. I guess the New Zealand one, because that was my idea. But I really love all of them.

[27:58] Cindy: And I was amazed to see that the UK cover had the same boy replicated. So I thought, okay, that's very clever too.

[28:04] Catherine: Yeah. They've just put the same boy in different swimming costumes because in the book, the boys wear different colors to differentiate who they are because they're so alike that no one can tell who they are unless

[28:17] they're wearing their trademark colors.

[28:19] Cindy: So the book comes out here on the 16th of September, but it's already out in the UK and Australia and New Zealand. So have readers responded to things that you didn't expect them to or notice things that surprise you?

[28:31] Has there been any of that?

[28:33] Catherine: The thing that I've really enjoyed reading in terms of reader response has been that they haven't guessed all the twists.

[28:41] You know, you never really know when you're setting those things up as a writer,

[28:45] how predictable they're going to be. And some of them probably are, but some of them aren't at all. I was hoping.

[28:53] So it's been really rewarding to hear from readers saying, I never guessed that XYZ was going to happen. Or, I thought you were taking me in this particular direction. And it turns out that you were taking me somewhere else entirely.

[29:04] So that's been really satisfying.

[29:06] Cindy: That's my favorite kind of book. And I think that's one reason that it resonated so much with me, because There were several times where there were things I totally didn't see coming.

[29:13] And I love that.

[29:15] Catherine: Excellent.

[29:17] Cindy: So before we wrap up, Catherine, what have you read recently that you really liked?

[29:20] Catherine: So I've read Stoneyard Devotional, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize by the Australian novelist Charlotte Wood. I really love Charlotte Wood. I love her writing on the craft of writing.

[29:32] This book is a really quiet novel and I think is appealing to a lot of readers in today's world because it tells the story of a woman who decides to remove herself from her everyday life and goes on this solitary retreat at a convent.

[29:49] She's an atheist, but she goes and lives with this group of nuns to remove herself from the stresses and pace of everyday life and really from her past. But you know, as usually happens, you can't outrun your past.

[30:03] And I really loved the tension in the story. Although it is a really quiet spot, slow paced story, I loved the tension between the stillness of the convent and the narrator's own past life starting to unravel.

[30:17] So it's, it's a really beautiful story of how memory and regret keep intruding no matter how far we try to remove ourselves from those elements of our lives.

[30:27] And then I guess, kind of an accidental companion to that book is the novel Haven by the Irish writer in Emma Donoghue, who is probably best known for her book Room.

[30:39] And this book, like Room, is the story of the removal of characters to a confined setting. But in this case it's 7th century Ireland where a priest takes two monks to this pretty much uninhabitable, rocky, tiny island to found a place of prayer.

[30:58] And like the island, the proses were really stripped back and quite austere. But despite that, I found it a really deeply affecting and moving read. And the tension in that story comes from the dynamic between the three men that sort of gradually develops into something possibly volatile.

[31:18] So it's a really beautiful story about faith and about survival and about human fragility.

[31:24] Cindy: I've only read her book the Wonder, but I always hear great things about her.

[31:28] Catherine: Oh, love the Wonder as well. Yeah, she's amazing.

[31:30] Cindy: Good. Well, Katherine, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. I think we did a great job of avoiding spoilers, but still being able to talk about your ideas and how you came up with them and interesting aspects that are contained in the book.

[31:42] Catherine: Thanks so much, Cindy. It's been my pleasure.

[31:47] Cindy: Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. I would love to connect with you on Instagram or Facebook where you can find me at @thoughtsfromapage.

[31:54] If you enjoy the show and have a moment to rate it or subscribe to it wherever you listen to your podcasts, I would really appreciate it. It makes a huge difference.

[32:03] And please tell all of your friends about Thoughts From a Page. Word of mouth does wonders to help the show grow.

[32:08] The book discussed in this episode can be purchased at my bookshop storefront and the link is in the show notes. I hope you'll tune in next.