>> for a firsthand account of how innovation is taking place e in cities across the country. booktv in prime time starts tonight at 6:30 p.m. eastern here on c-span2. check your program guide for more information. >> jaquira diaz with us today court i of david and noel ray and -- [inaudible] ms. diaz was born in puerto rico. her work has been published in "rolling stone," "the guardian," long reads and,, the, "the new york times" style magazine, and included in the best american essays 2016. she is the recipient of two push

cart prizes, an elizabeth george foundation grant and fellowships from the mcdowell colony, the tunyan review and the wisconsin state for creative -- site for creative writing. she lives in miami beach with her partner. please give a warm savannah well only to jaquira diaz. ms. -- [applause] >> hi. thank you so much. i'm so happy to be here. and it's wonderful to see all you book lovers here, and thank you, savannah, for your southern hospitality. i also want to thank the savannah book festival and everyone who made this event possiblene including sponsors, bookellers. let's give -- booksellers. let's give it up for the indie booksellers in the room. i love y'all. thank you for all you do, for

loving books, for supporting "ordinary girls." because of you i'm here, so thank you. i want to open with just a little piece that opens the book, "ordinary girls." it functions kind of like a prologue but not really. it's just a very short. girlhood. we were the girls who strolled onto the blacktop on long summer days, dribbling past the boys on the court. we were the girls on the merry go round, laughing and laughing and letting the world spin while holding on for our lives. the girls on the swings throwing our heads back, the wind in our hair. we were the loud moms, the troublemakers, the practical jokers. we were the party girls, hitting the clubs in booty shorts and high-top jordans, smoking blunts on the beach. we were the wild girls who loved

music and dancing, girls who were black and brown and poor and queer, girls who loved each other. i have been those girls on a greyhound bus, homeless and on the run, a girl sleeping on lifeguard stands behind a bus stop,, on bench, a hood blum girl throwing down with boys and girls and their older sisters and even the cops, suspended every year for fighting on the first day of school. kicked off the music class for throwing a chair at the math teacher's son. kicked off two different school buses, a girl who got slammed onto a police car by two cops in front of the whole school after a brawl with six other girls. and i have been other girls, girls standing before a judge, girl on a dock the morning after a hurricane looking out at the bay like it's the end of the world, girlrl on a rooftop, girl

on a ledge, girl plummeting through the air. and years later, a woman writing letters to a prisoner if on death row. this is the opening of my book, and i'll talk a little bit about the inspiration and why i wrote it. this book took about 12 years to write, and it is without a doubt my life's work. "ordinary girls" is about my girlhood and adolescence in puerto rico and miami beach, about growing up queer and closeted, about surviving depression and violence. it's about love and friendship and family, about our parents and how their actions shape us, about losing the people we love, about how we're not defined by the worst thing we've ever done. and it's about my relationship with my mother. growing up i was a juvenile offend ifer who spent most of her time on the streets. at 11 i attempted suicide for

the first time. then a few months after that i ran away from home for the first time. and then i started getting arrested. i dropped out of high school, kept running away, kept getting arrested, kept fighting in the streets, kept trying to die. i was also in the middle of a is sexual awakening and would later, finally, come out as gay. but i couldn't talk about that, note to anyone, not in the early '90s, not in my neighborhood which was marked by homophobe what and transphobia and targeted attacks on gay people. and certainly not to my mother. i spent much of my child and adolescence pretending to be i someone else, especially when it seemed like the whole world was trying to erase us. i spent a lot of that time hiding in books, looking for myself in stories. and after i became a writer, i

decidedoo that i would write abt people like me. girls and women who were black and brown and poor and queer and unmothered, about women like my mother, a white puerto rican woman who didn't know how to raise or protect her black children, who would spend her entire life struggling with mental illness and addiction. my mother was and is a complicated woman. she was loving and abusive. she held me one minute, then kicked my ass, then hell me again. she was and -- then held me again. shee was and is flawed and vulnerable and confident and strong and lost. my mother was and is deeply, deeply homophobic. when i first started writing "ordinary girls," my mother was a ghost. she rarely showed up in its pages, so i wrote around her, avoiding the truth. the truth was painful. the truth was that my mother

broke me, and she was the single most difficult subject to write about. so i wrote about other mothers. my abuela, a back puerto rican woman who carried me my whole life, carries me still. who taught me to pray and cook and chain smoke, taught me to keep house, taught me everything i know about forgiveness. and i wrote about a miami beach woman who tortured and murdered her 3-year-old son and dumped his body in a neighborhood close to where i grew up and spent most of her life on death row. and l i wrote about my mother's mother, my grandmother mercy, a white woman who hated the fact that my mother fell in love with and married a black man, that she'd had his children, that her grandchildren were black. she would later die by suicide. and i wrote about a mythical

woman, the legending who took her children from their beds at night, carried them to a nearby river, held h them underwater until they drowned. and thenoo drowned herself. and now her ghost haunts bodies of wart looking for her -- water looking for her ghost children. wrote about all these other mothers, every mother, any mother except my own until a friend read the manuscript and, after reading about five chapters, where is yours mother? how come you never mention her? and i had to sit down with the book, take a hard, honest look at the pages, examine my life and all the reasons i had been avoiding writing about my mother. the truth is my mother broke me, and the truth is i was afraid to look, to admit, to see how much she'dlo broken, how hard it had been to find my way back to myself. how easily i could be broken

again. but iai finally decided to ask e question, and more than that, to ask the question for myself, to answer it, where is my mother? to write about her, to examine our relationship in a way that was honest, that acknowledged all the ways she was real. the writing from beginning to end took about 12 years. i had to step away if the book several years, and there were the many different versions. to see that the writing -- to say that the writing of this book drained me, wrecked me would be an understatement. i gaped weight, i lost weight, my hair started falling out, i had the worst insomnia i've had in my life. during those 12 years, i lost relationships, friendships, and then my grandmother died by suicide. i often needed time away from the book in order to take care of myself and to make sense of what i was doing, to interrogate different partsth of the book, o examine my life as i was living it. writing nonfiction, for me, has

never been cathartic. quite the opposite. writing this book is the hardest thing i've ever done. what kept me going? sorry. what kept me going? i wanted to write about people who rarely had a home in the literary landscape. i wanted to write about growing up poor in miami and in one of puerto rico's -- [speaking spanish] , about all the ways queer puerto rican girls are invisible and hyper-visible, and i wanted to write about my community without losing sight of the fact that the people i was writing about were real, that they existed, that they lived and loved even if the rest of the world didn't see them. when i started writing this book, i thought not just with about how to write my if story, but how my story was and is connected to a larger world and what my places in that world might be. i'm here because i found that place thanks to a group of

friends who saved me. i was struggling as a girl, as a woman andnd later as a writer, struggling with how to write about sexual violence in a way that was honest and is so artful. in a way that wasn't just about my experience, but that spoke to something larger about girls, about how complicated family lives andnd fights and loves, ad i wanted the write it without pity or glory or anger. but also, more so than any of my girl, i'm someone who's had access to education, to an interfaith program in creative writing. it's taken a lot of hard work, but that doesn't erase the fact that i've had accesses to all of this and that most of the girls in my community haven't. the world isn't kind to black and brown girls. and the world isn't kind to black and brown women.

especially when they come from working class communities or from poverty. these ordinary girls taught me that it's possible to make our own families, to make our own way. they helped me believe in love and friendship and hope. but more than anything, after they had girls of their own, it was their girls who taught me the most important lessons i needed to learn in order to write this book. they helped me to see the girl i'd been. they helped me remember that there are girls out there who are just like i was, that my story wasn't unique. all girls, no matter our circumstance, are vulnerable. this is something we share, something that transcends

borders and ethnicity and race and class. somewhere there's a teenage girl whose mother suffers from mental illness and addiction just trying to get through the day. ndtrying to come to terms with r sexuality. i like to imagine that maybe, seeing herself in this book will make her life just a little bit easier. some of the other things that i talk about in the book are also things that were very important to me, things that made me a writer. my father love books. he, he was a poet who stopped writing poetry, and one of my earliest memories was of my father. he took me to the funeral of juan antonio -- [inaudible] who was a puerto rican protester. and when i saw everybody

gathered and celebrating his life, people who had read his book, i thought that poets were important and that they could change the world. and i thought, i want that. i also wanted this book to say something about access and who gets access to this world, right? to publishing. who gets to be up here and talk about books. and it was important to me because coming from where i came from, i always felt like i didn't have enough. so it was important to me to and also about puerto rican history, about puerto rico's history of colonialism and its relationship to the united states. and i started thinking about how to include our history in a memoir, something that wasn't a

history book and how my story is connected to that story. being puerto rican, i think most of us who come from puerto rico feel a connection to the island even after we've left it even if we've never been there, which is the truth. there's a saying that a lot of puerto a ricans know, a phrase called -- [speaking spanish] which comes from a poem by -- oh, i've forgotten his name. but it comes from a poem, and it means that i would be puerto rican even if i was born on the moon. so i wanted, i wanted to reach people who would never read about puerto ricans or people who wouldn't pick up a listsly book, or people -- history book, or people who did not have access to that history for whatever reason and make some of that history accessible to the general reader, a reader who picks up a memoir about girlhood. so so i tried to talk about the

part of puerto rican history and colonialism that shaped me as a woman and as a human being and as a writer. and a lot of this influenced the kind of writer i became. and i was always thinking of, always, always thinking about who i was writing for. in so many ways i felt like this book, even though i intended it to be as open and honest and i intend it to be vulnerable, i wanted it to be in conversation with a very specific group of people, girls who were like i was, certainly puerto ricans, black puerto ricans, girls who grew up in poverty, and for them to understand that i wasn't just writing about them. i was writing for them. something that i mention in the book is i was a kid who loved to read. and i didn't have money for books, so i went to the library

and asked librarians to give me books. and i read everything they put in my hands. and everything they put in my hands weree books that were written about white people and for white people, and i thought that to be a writer, you needed to be white. and is so i wanted them to understand and to see that wasn't real, that we exist, that this is possible. there were other parts of this book that kind of shaped me that at the time i thought about while i was writing how they would make sense to the story. one of them was the babe by lollipops murder that i talk about which happened in 1990. there was a toddler found in our neighborhood in miami beach, and at the time they didn't, they

didn't really know where the toddler came from, just that he'd found his body and that he'd been tortured. and so i saw this story on the news. and it took over the 24-hour news cycle, and at the time i was, i mean, i was 11. i was a kid. but because it was on the news, and it was on the newspaper and everybody in my neighborhood was talking about, we all kind of obsessed about this. and i already imagined myself a writer, and so so i took notes and i thought this a lot. and for weeks i thought about this until they discovered, they found the baby's mother, and the story came out on the news that they had found his mother and her partner and that they had dumped his body and fled. and part of, part of the narrative at the time was part of what was very important to the narrative at the time, the news made it sound like this woman and her partner, these two

he is beans, killed this -- lesbians, killed this baby and ran away. and they very much made it sound like being a lesbian was part of the crime. and the people who talked about this in my neighborhood, including teachers and school security and librarians, always talked about this with either implicit or explicit homophobia. and so i kept thinking about this story and thinking about it. and then 20 years later i who an essay of being this little girl when thishi story broke, and the essay was published in a magazine called "the sun." a woman who had been at the time working as an anti-death penalty activist who visited prisoners on death row read it and e-mailed me. and she said i know this woman that you wrote about.

i've been visiting her in prison. she's been on death row since 1992. and so i wrote back to her and asked her if she could put us in touch, if we could start a correspondence. and she did. and eventually i wrote to anna cardona, and i told her that i'd written about her, or that i'd written a story about discovering her story on the news. and she, she wrote back. she wrote me letters. and her first letter was, she was kind of livid. she was upthat i'd written -- upset that i'd written about her, and he said you didn't know me, you didn't know my son, what gives you the right to even write about me? and so i wrote back, and i wrote back and told her my story and told her who i was and why i'd written about it and how i wrote roabout discovering her story on the news andd sort of following along with it and that i was a child at the time. and i told her that i would like to hear her story.

not what the newspapers said or what was on the news or what people said, but the truth. and i include this in the book because i think it's, it's important, it's important for readers to see, i think, a writer when writing a memoir to see the writer implicate themselves and talk about how they're complicit in certain violations. and when i asked her to tell me her story, she wrote back and said e this is not a story, this is my life. and she, she put me in my place, right? and i deserved it. and at that moment i really started thinking about why i was writing and why i was writing it this way. and. i went back to the beginnig of the book, and i started interrogating myself and interrogating why i was telling this story and if i had a right the tell this story considering

that i wasn't really a resident of -- [speaking spanish] anymore and that i hadn't had access to all these things that ii was in graduate school and te people i was writing about didn't have is access to any of that. but she really got me to think about seeing all the women i'm writing about and thinking about the fact that i'm writing about real people. there's another woman that i mention in the book whose name i didn't even know who died by suicide. and i also thought about her a lot, and i included her in the .book because i thought about hr in the same way. at the time i was someone who was suffering from major depression and ptsd and anxiety and suicidal ideation and thinking a about taking my life. and thinking of this woman as a

story, as a legend. and i also wanted to include in the book how, how i caught myself thinking this way and to remind the readers, right, that these aren't just stories, that these are real people. and that she was a real woman. in 2017 anna maria cardona got a new trial, and i was corresponding with her for several years. i wasn't writing her all the time, but i would send an to occasional letter, and then she'd write back or she'd write two or three letters, and then i'd write back. and one of the things that she asked for after, you know, she let me have it because i wrote about her, then she did want me

to write about her except there became very clear that she wanted to control the narrative. and she wanted me to go to her retrial, and i did. so she was being tried for murder again, but this time the death penalty was off the table. and as i sat in the trial after having this correspondence with her and feeling like there was enough evidence to prove that someone else was partially responsible, another womaned had confessed, i realized that she was lying. she got caught lying on the stand by the prosecutors three separate times. and i included a little bit of that too. because iat really wanted the reader to think about this idea of her that i had constructed in my head and how that sort of fell apart because i wasn't really thinking of her as a

woman. i had been thinking of this as a story that i was following as a journalist. and so there are these other moments in the book where where i thought were important to kind of call myself out. i talk about writing about puerto rico, and one of the things that i've done over the years has been to visit puerto rico and to go back almost every summer, spend time with family. i still have most of my family there. and to drive around. and so i drove to san juan one afternoon, is and if any of you have been to puerto rico, there's this building in san juanld called the puerto rico tourism company which used to be a prison. it used to be a prison where puerto ricans were tortured and murdered.

and somehow the billing was purchased, and now it's the puerto rico tourism company, and it's a place where you can get trolley maps, and there's a gallery and a grand piano, and people take selfies and, you know? the building still has two jail cells in their original condition where people stop and takee photos. and when i went back to visit this building after having written most of this book, almost all of it, and i was thinking i knew the history of this h place, and i went intendg to see it for what it had been, a prison where people were tortured and where people lost their lives. and yet when i got there and saw families and tourists, a woman asked me -- she handed me her phone, and shed asked me to take a photo of her with her and her

two children. and i took her phone, and i took a picture of them. and then i asked her to do the same, to take a picture of me in front of this jail cell. and it's a moment that even at the time i knew what i was doing. it's a moment that now fills me with because it was like -- shame because it was like i was trying to forget, and i was complicit in this erase sure. i needed to talk about it in the book, to call myself out and talk openly about how the desire to erase history and to erase violence and who is complicit. something that also is in the book, i mean, a lot of people is have said that miami is kind of like another character. congress it's true, but miami is -- i don't think it's p true, but miami is a setting for part of the book and its atmosphere and its historical marker and a cultural marker.

i tried to capture or what was for me the real miami, not the miami that i saw over and over on tv in movies is and in music videos. iin tried to write about this miami that was kind of invisible in everything i consumed either on tv, in music videos, in books which was this working class miami beach that was just four blocks away from ocean drive where people live in poverty e and people had rats in their apartments. and people sometimes didn't have electricity because the power got cut off. and this was very real when i was growing up in miami where we would have this building that was kind of falling apart that was crumbleing, and a block away we had a building that had been bought and renovated and was

beautiful, and people with a lot of money lived there drove mercedes is and bmws, and we all lived in the same neighborhood. and it sort of felt like this strange liminal space, to live in a place that didn't want you there with people who didn't really want to see you. and to be s slowly pushed out. and i wanted to kind of have the miami beach of this time be very present in the book because i wanted it to say something about how t a place can be beautiful d ugly, how a place can be glamorous and brutal at the same time. to say something about the duality of the immigrant and the migrant experience, how people are more than what you see on the surface. most of the people that lived in

my community were latinos and haitian and immigrants and my grants, and most of them -- migrants, and most of them had educations anded had professions back home and then came to miami and drove taxis and had to go back to school. brought their families and loved in poverty. weed that -- i remember my fathered had friends who were taxi drivers who had been doctors and engineers but had to come and start or from scratch because they had to learn the language.. and we're struggling in other ways too. but i wanted that present in the book, because that was real. that was the reality we lived in. something else that's in the book before i talk about how i became a writer is mental illness. my mother suffered from,

continues to suffer, actually, from mental illness. and it was, it was very clear when we were, when we were kids that something was wrong. but my mother went undiagnosed until we moved to miami beach from puerto rico. and years later it became year to me that she was, she had been undiagnosed for years and that -- and also that because we were poor, we didn't really have adequate medical care, and she didn'tad really have adequate health care. and it was clear that it would have been different if we'd had money,e that she might have been diagnosed if we'd had resources, that her life would have, might have been different. i also talk a little bit about my maternal grandmother's mental

thillness and her suicidal ideation. she eventually did die by suicide in 2011 which is something that is present in the book, but it was also, it was also, for me, it was present my whole life growing up because my grandmother talked about this so off, he threateninged often. she was also suffering from mental illness and depression and took a lot of medication. anduf when i was a kid, i also s suffering from depression, ptsd and anxiety, and i was undiagnosed for years. ybut i thought that this seemed like ap easy way out at the time. i don't know how else to describebe it. but it seems much easier than living. how i became a writer is also

something that i touch on in the book. when i was 16, i dropped out of high school, and then i got my ged, and then i started taking classes in a community college. andco for a brief period -- i enlisted in the military for a brief period. i was in the navy. and then this was also in the middle, right in the middle of don't ask, don't tell. and so the navy, the military became a place -- when i first got there, it was a place that filled me with hope, ironically, even though w it was right in te middle of don't ask, don't tell because it was the first time that people expected me to succeed. i felt like i could start fresh in a place where no one knew me and reinvent myself and that i could work hard and have a future. it was the first time that i thought i could have a future, that a real life was possible.

and then the navy became unbearable because i was bullied for being gay. i had a relationship with a woman while i was in there, and someone found out, and it spread, the rumors spread. and eventually, don't ask, don't tell became my nickname. i left the military, and it's not something that i talk about extensive hi in the book, it's just -- t extensively in the bo, it's just one chapter. but i do mention it because it became sort of like a bridge, right? a way for me think -- to think of a life worth living. after leaving the military, i went back to college and i took classes again. and end this i did very well. m i went to grad school, and i decided that i would be a writer. that b even if i had to work otr jobs, that i would be a writer. that it was possible even if no one published my books, i would

write. and then after graduate school, i got this fellowship to wisconsin institute for creative writing because i applied. i mean, i applied fellowships and scholarships and everything, every single opportunity. if i could afford it, i would apply for it. so i applied for this fellowship, and suddenly one day i got a phone call, and they told me that got it. and so i moved to wisconsin -- [laughter] it was cold and there was a lot of cheese -- [laughter] but it was great. [laughter] i have a dairy allergy. [laughter] so it was also difficult. but then i started teaching, and slowly things started falling into place. it was a lot of hard work and

teaching and years when i just worked odd jobs and kept trying to write this book and would take a break and step away from it, and then went back to it when i could. and then abandoned it and start trying to write it as a novel because it didn't feel possible to admit all these things to people. and then i decided to actually go through with it and write this book because i thought it was important that i tell the truth. and writing itht as fiction, evn if i didn't change a word, felt like lying. i'd like to possibly take questions, maybe something lighter -- [laughter] but before i do that, i also

wanted to read you a very short, short section because this is what i think at the core of the book. the book is also about girlhood and about navigating a certain kind of girlhood in puerto rico and in miami beach. and i was talking about not just myself navigating this girlhood myself, but about these other girls who were my lifeline. and so i'm going to read you this one paragraph which is really at the core of a what this book is. we wore short shorts and crop tops, baggy jeans and basketball jerseys, big hoop earrings. and no matter what, everybody had opinions about how we dressed, called us fast girls. our shorts were too short, our

jeans too tight, too baggy, our voices too loud. everybody wanted to control what we wore, what we did, who we did it with. we were not the girls they wanted us to be. we were not allowed to talk like this, to want like this. we're not supposed to feel the kind of desire you feel at 13, at 14. what kind of girl, they loved to say, what kind of girl even as they took what we gave, took what we tried to hold on to, our voices,, our bodies. we were trying to live, but the world was doing its best to kill us. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, i appreciate it. and thank you for, like,

powering through that. [laughter] in real life i'm very funny. [laughter] i promise. if you'd like to ask a question, we ask, just so that etch can hear you -- everyone can hear you, there's a mic in the middle, for you to step up to the mic, if you can. yes, go ahead. >> thank you. what an important story -- >> thank you. >> -- you shared with all of us. i have a light or a heavy question, your choice. light question would be what other writers or authors have inspired you. >> so w many. so many writers is the and authors have inspired me. i remember reading ez meal da santiago when i was a teenager, when i was 19. and i thought this is the first time that i read a book in english about puerto ricans who

were like me, like just normal people living their everyday lives. and i thought, we exist! and before that, like i said, most of the books that librarians put in my hands were written by white people, for white people, mostly written by white men who weren't around anymore. but also some who were. i read a lot of stephen king. [laughter] i also read toni morrison, and i thought, oh, my god, this is incredible. you can do this? and i thought, i will never be able to do this. i still think that. you should read everything toni morrison has written. everyone should. some writers writing today who inspire me today, i love carolina --

[inaudible] [speaking spanish] i love angie bruise, dominicana. -- angie bruce. natalie diaz's when my brother was an aztec. i could go on forever, but i won't. [laughter] do you i have another questionse did you or did someone else have a question? >> i have to call you out. i'm a resident of wisconsin, a lifelong -- [laughter] it's not that cold in madison. [laughter] >> it was cold for me. [laughter] >> just kidding. tell me about dance, the cans you and your girls did, how that functioned forhe you, was it catharsis? was it anger? tell us about that. >> so dancing and music in a lot of ways, i studied music when i

was a kid, but dancing was more, i think, the about performance and performing, for me specifically, performing a kind of strength. it was very often, very such -- very often in miami when i startedd going through puberty,i started feeling the up wanted attention from men -- unwanted attention. and i developed early, and i was getting all this attention that i wasn't interesting in. so i started dressing in boys' clothes, very baggy jeans, polo shirts, basketball jerseys, i dressed head to toe like a boy, and i didn't want to be looked at. and i think dancing was very much like that, pretending to be someone else, pretending to be stronger, pretending to be happy. but it was also, for me and my girls, dancing is, like, what we did just because we needed

something to do. we went to, like, bayside marketplace where you could pay $3 to get on a boat that had a dance floor, and music kind of got us through a lot. like, we needed to dance. especially during that time. we needed music. and so now when i look back at all, like, everything we lived through, it felt like dancing was not just performance, but dancing was resistance rain survival. thank you. other questions? you please talk about your editing process, how much of the book was edited and how did you

get with an editor and agent and publisher? >> my first book, even before the book was finished, i started submitting part of the book to agents that i found online. that was a mistake. don't do that. there's plenty of information out that's free on the internet. find out if you are interested in agent, what kind of books you're interested in writing and what are the books out there in the market that are like yours are like the books you want to write and who are the agents who represent the writers you love? or writers who are writing about something similar and do research on them. there's plenty of information, interviews and articles and profiles and all kinds of things, there's a lot of information out there.

i went and i submitted part of this book to an agent who was on a big house and had a lot of very big name authors. he read one chapter and she liked it and she offered me representation right away. i thought i made it, he hit the lottery. then i didn't hear from her. for very long time. she was a big agency and had big clients and i was a very little little fish. she didn't have time for me. so i kept writing and then i went to this writers conference and there was a writers conference and there is an agent there, michelle brower and i signed up for a scholars reading so i read from the book and she heard me read and she e-mailed

me, she got my e-mail and said would you submit some work to us? because i had this very powerful agent, i didn't send her anything. then she wrote me a year later and said i saw you published this other essay, if you have work, will you send me some work? i still didn't send her anything. by then i had already parted ways with my agent and then this third year, third year in a row around the same time, she wrote me again and asked if i would send her something. i decided, i thought what if i been waiting for? this agent has heard me read, read my work and other pieces and actually gets my fission and likes my writing. so i sent her work and i sent her about 100 pages that would eventually make it in this book. she asked if we could have a

conversation. we had a conversation about an hour. we talked about this book and what else i wanted to do in the future about possibly a career, how i envisioned my career and eventually offered me representation but the book wasn't ready sent to editors to be published so she gave me extensive notes and said go back and write again. write the book so i went back with her notes and i wrote and i wrote and i wrote i think three years later, the book was ready. i just had the whole process, it was about 12 years. when she thought the book was ready, and polished enough, she sent it to several editors and got i want to say a couple authors right away and before the book went into action, we got a preemptive offer and had a

conversation with cassie, my agent and i really liked what she had to say about how she wanted to preserve my voice not turn it into some commercial book. she wanted me to tell her what i wanted to do and help me get there. that's what i wanted. on the other conversations with editors at big houses had been we can make this the next education. i haven't read educated but i'm pretty sure this is not that. [laughter] every conversation i had with editors was more about what they wanted me to do and kathy was more like i will work to help you get this to be the book you wanted to be so we went with kathy and i feel very lucky to have had her as an editor. i look back at the pages of what

this book looks like before, i can't even believe you kept reading after page two. i feel the process was very much a collaboration. i feel very lucky to have had her as an editor. >> has your brother mother write your book? has it changed your relationship? hasn't altered her in any way? >> my mother is not a reader. she doesn't read. but i talked with her extensively about the book. she knows i'm a writer, she knows what the book is about, she's a lot more interested in movie and who's going to play her. [laughter] y'all are laughing but i'm serious. my mom, i wrote a book.

[laughter] so if you read the book, you know about i was estranged from my mother about seven years, we didn't talk. i completely removed myself from her life and her family's life for my own mental health. then when my grandmother died, i felt like finally, i could reach out to my mother and start a relationship again. that took years though. my mother is clean now, in a assisted facility and we have conversations out and she calls me every day and sometimes three to four times a day just to say i found this link but it's difficult because my mother is an addict and even though she's clean, she still suffers from mental illness and often i don't know what to expect so seen her,

i visit her and seeing her requires me to do this kind of work that is harmful like i have to be willing to forgive her every single time i walk in there, every single time i pick up that phone. i have to be open to forgiveness. every single conversation, every single visit. otherwise i won't be able to have a relationship with her. won't be able to live with myself it's difficult but we do have a relationship. i just got engaged last year and my mom took a really long time to accept first that i am gay. then that i'm engaged to a person who's not a man and also things to do with gender. my partner is non- binary, trans masculine in my mother, for her, all of this seems like too much.

but i love her and almost every time i visit her, i have to say i love you and you love me and you are going to have to love me this way. it's been working. thank you so much. [applause] >> here's a look at some authors who have recently appeared or will be appearing soon on booktv's "after words," our weekly author interview program that includes best selling nonfiction books and guest

interviewers. last week washington times columnist cal thomas weighed in on whether the united states will remain a superpower. coming up, former deputy national security adviser kt mcfarlane. and this weekend on "after words," new america's senior fellow lee drut 'emman argues the way to save american democracy is to create more political parties. >> i think we had a multiparty democracy in the u.s. for a long time. contained within the two-party system, but i think what we had was much more akin to a bullty party -- multiparty system. i think the party of 2010 is the radical deviation. i also think if you look at what the framers were writing about -- and, again, they didn't like parties, but what they really didn't like was the two-party system -- you know, i read madison's federalist number ten which is, you know, the one

about factions counteracting factions which i read as saying, look, the key to a stable democracy is is fluid coalition, that you have different factions building different majorities on different issues, but you want to have a democracy so that no group feels like it's going to be in the permanent minority and, therefore, it doesn't see the system as legitimate and no group will be in the permanent majority. and that is fundamentally a vision of multiparty democracy. >> "after words" airs saturdays at 10 p.m. and sundays at 9 p.m. eastern and pacific on booktv on c-span2. all previous "after words" are available as podcasts and you can watch online at booktv.org. >> at the rancho mirage writers festival in california, karl rove and lynne cheney discussed their time in the george w. bush white house. here's a portion of their discussion. >> so it's june of 2000, and

bush is thinking about who his vice presidential running mate should be, and we're looking at nine people. and the head of the processes is richard cheney of dallas, texas. [laughter] and during the course of all of this, bush becomes convinced that cheney ought to be the guy. and he knows i'm against it. so he calls me up, he's in iowa, and he calls me up and says, okay, i'm coming home tonight, as you know, and he said i want you to be at the governor's mansion tomorrow at 10:00, and i want you to make the case why when i shouldn't go with dick cheney. i show up at the governor's mansion, and the governor's mansion in texas was built in 1854 when there were comanche indians 20 miles to the west, sost it's not very big. we're in the austin library which is maybe twice the side of this stage, and i'm sitting on one side of the room and governor bush is sitting about 4 feet away, and we're in comfortable chairs. okay, tell me why we shouldn't go with cheney. and i said, well, you know, number one, wyoming.

three electoral votes. haven't lost it since 1964, not worried about it. we need to go with somebody from a, from a battleground state. number two, cheney had his first heart attack at the age of 34 or so. i used to know the details of it. and i said i think he's has three since, he's working on perfecting the heart attack. people are going to say he's not going to last four years. [laughter] number three, conservative congressman from a conservative state 18 years ago, and every one of his stupid votes is going to be brought up, like the vote -- one of three members of congress to vote against the resolution calling on the appar to tide regime of south africa to move nelson mandela from the island prison where there's no doctor to the mainland prison where there was a doctor. three guys voted against it, he's one of them. we'll have those. number four, we've workedded very hard to identify you as your own man, so let's pick the guy who was the secretary of defense in a time of war for your father. that's going to era race that, you know?

people in the northwest and -- midwest and north east about you being an oilman? let's get the guy who runs halliburton. bush is not a monologue guy, is so this is like world wrestling federation. nobody's going to bring up that vote, you're ridiculous. this goes on for 30-35 minutes. at the end of it, i realize i've sweat through my shirt. he says, uh, got anything else? i said, no, no, that's it, sir. turns to the guy next to him and says, dick, got any questions for karl? cheney had been listening -- [laughter] as we're walking out of the room to me, i agree with some of what you had to say. that night bush calls me, and he says really good today. he was back on the road. he literally came, was there for 6 or 7 hours, met with the vice president, hen this left again. calls me that night about 10:00.

he says, really good today. reallied good. you outlined ten serious political problems. and i hadn't thought of some of them, and it was really good. so figure out what you're going to do about 'em because i'm going with cheney. [laughter] he said your job is politics. so these are all political problems, figure out what you're going to do about 'em. he said my job to figure out who would be the best partner to me in the oval office -- excuse me, in the oval office. and if something terrible happened to me, whom would the country have immediate confidence in, and that's dick, and i'm going with him. don't tell anybody i've made the decision or i'll kill ya -- [laughter] but figure out what you're goinged to do, and in a couple of days when i get back, i want you to be prepared to tell me how we can prepare for each one of these eventualities. >> karl -- >> and it was a testament to her husband. >> i just have to add, we're out

of time, was that dick was the other opponentof his being chosen and argued strenuously against it for many of the same reasons karl did. and the president finally leaned on him down in texas on the hot porch of the ranchhouse until, you know, dick was sweating and the president was sweating and finally dick said, okay, i'll do it. >> you know what? he never held my bluntness against me either. he could not have been a better colleague and, more importantly, a better mentor. >> to watch the rest of this program and find other eventses from the rancho mirage writers festival, visit our web site, booktv.org. click on the fairs and festivals tab near the top of the page. >> next on booktv, pulitzer prize-winning historian edward larson examines the relationship between george washington and benjamin franklin. then, author amy bradford will talk about the power and influence of the european union. and later, american enterprise

institute director levin will offer his thoughts on how americans could can rebuild commitment to their institutions. as a side note, mr. levin will be our guest live on "in depth" on sunday, april 5th. now here's a look at the relationship between george washington and benjamin franklin. >> good evening. welcome to the atlanta history center on this incredible wet night, and i really appreciate all of you coming out tonight and braving the weather to hear our author talk tonight by edward j. larson. now, this talk is being recorded by c-span, so be sure to silence your mobile telephonic devices. you don't want to be embarrassed on nationwide cable. this evening larson will discuss his newest book, "franklin and