brad lay down, the blanket

around himself and nodded off. i looked at my mother-in-law and there were tears in her eyes . he looksso safe. i feel like i'm looking into the future she shivered . i saw her point.

he was pale, gaunt, a harbinger of the worsttimes to come . brad's oncologist was of the old-fashioned type and seemed unsettled when we pushed back on the rex not do anything bad . he finally reluctantlyoffered a plan for chemo with the second line treatment . she denied the claim on the grounds. brad and i had many agonized conversations about that and i just potentially paying for it out-of-pocket even though nobody was convinced it would be effective . we asked for a second opinion at stanford. brad didn't quite fit their special but they were interested in his case . we were learning unlucky patients whom doctor after doctor was saying we've really never seen this before . stanford wanted to run additional tests including running camera into brad's lungs to see why you might be coughing so much . back it's unclear why nobody ever suggested a pet scan.

the brad was known to have tumors on her jawline and abdomen . if i'd known then what i know now as a character i have fought to dale for a test which i have had to do on occasion since that but i'm not yet accustomed to acting as a patient advocate so we waited. i remember brad coughing increase that spring . trepidations about whether we should fall travel far we took the girls to hawaii on springbreak trip we plan for rats died . they later told me when we saw her pictures on facebook she wondered if it's the kind of trip youtake when everything is about to change . we haven't planned it that way but it was absolutely that kind of trip and that friend who asked me that was in fact ray so i will turn it back over to her >> i was listening to you and

thinking about it's been so long now and yet it's been both an infinity oftime and it's gone by a second . i can't believe it's over six years ago,going on seven years ago this fall . >> yes. >> i've had the pleasure of seeing the pieces of this book come to be over many years now and i have had the distinct pleasure of watching them transform from and the moment material to retrospective and reflective material to arguments and i don't know that necessarily intimate relationship manuscripts as they are

becoming and think about the kinds of questions we could talk about that would be interesting to folks who haven't read the book who may know you personally, or have a particular interest don't necessarily have the same breath or perspective on the manuscript that i do. this is a wonderful sohappy to be participating in this . i want to start by talking about how the writing of this book was smart because i know i remember so well that like so many books that i have watched being written over time, it was actually born out of an active reading and out of rereading. that was really so much, i wanted to see if you would talk about what it was had to do with setting this one in

motion for you. >> i'd love to talk about that for you and for those who may not know, ray is a writing teacher and workshop reader so i worked out sections of this book in her workshop and was in it at the time of brad's illness so that she came to see a lot of for so intimately. one of the ways it did unfold and i should clarify i was a writer before i was a caregiver and i'll keep being a writer for my whole life and i've also been a reader for my whole life and a passionate reader and during the real intensity of brad's illness i found myself going back to comfort reads, things i loved as a child. women and of green gables series, victorian novels in graduate to revisit so that felt like solis and there's a

strong literary thread that runs through this book that i had written because what happened when i returned to those classics and old favorites was i started to notice caregiving figures in the shadows and i had never really thought about caregiving in classic literature even there and particularly in the victorian period most people were caring for family members at home. that shows up in books in jane eyre, intimately there's a will trapped in the attic and being cared for by a pair paid caregiver and in middlemarch there are instances where make the choices about how their other characters so as i kept rereading those, different

elements of the plots and characters around caregiving spoke to my own experience which at the time i was feeling quite isolated and was feeling like i didn't have a lot of points of connection with other caregivers. certainly there are a lot of resources online and i have your friends who i met through caregiving became important tones. it's very lonely work a lot of the time. a lot of caregiving takes place behind closed doors in private and reading does to and reading into situations of caregiving was an experience that kind of turned me to my list material that has made its way into the was considerations of caregiving i was reading about in literature in stolen

moments. it wasn't like i had a lot of time to hang around and read but reading i was doing i was starting to see that theme in places and i had never really noticed it before. >> i'll note here in case anyone's curious i happen to know a good number of those essays are all linked on your website . so if anyone would like to read them they are there for the finding and they are all gems. let's do a little vocabulary lesson. i'm assuming since the book just came out this week it's possible i'm the only one here besides you who has read the entire thing. brad of course is read the entire thing. idon't know if anyone else has . but as we continue to talk, some of the terms come into the air are unfamiliar to people or it would be useful

for themto hear you talk about them through caregiving specifically . burnout . a word that is in the title of the book. how would you describe burnout? >> the reason burnout is in the title is because, among caregivers and it's something that happens when people are taxed so far in particular in my framing in their capacity to care for other people that it just fizzles out their ability to have guys. their ability to continue. burnout really robs people of the emotional capacity to keep going. it's a state being already toast as is in the title and i should explain that title comes from taking a quiz caregiver burnout, this story is told at the beginning of the i came home from a tough

doctors appointment and resources found a quiz on caregiver burnout and when i checked all the boxes at the end this result popped up that was like you are already toast with a piece of bread kind of lively, telling me that i was passed where i could continue effectively to care for somebody. >> second term, invisible labor. >> this is a big broad one that i thought a lot aboutand i think it's a hot topic these days . it can encompass everything from the mental load of running a home, childcare, domestic work. i've seen the termemotional labor used for this a lot . memory work, fostering social connection. it's a hot gender set of rules that make up invisible labor. i chose invisible labor in hopes it would incorporate

all of those things, not just the emotional piece or the work of picking up the pot when nobody is noticing or weeding out the thing from the clutter from people's houses to donate. it can be all of those things . all those tasks, any one of them doesn't seem very big but together they make a huge load of work. >> third one, i imagine we all have our own relationship with this term by now i feel like you say some interesting things about it in the book that are particular to your perspective. self-care. >> yes, that is a term that has gotten a lot of currency during the pandemic and before . it has become commodified in

a lot of ways and it started out with radical roots where self-care was missionary which i would never claim to be and protest audrey lord at sit ins. the idea of tending to your self and making space to continue to flourish for yourself. and as many things do in our capitalist society got picked up and commodified and now sold back to us as manicures and buying robot merchandise or something like that and i think it's important to think carefully about what we're asking and prescribing with the notion of self-care. i think the truth for most people lies somewhere in between . for me as a caregiver was spending a lot of time on caring for other people, i

found being told to focus on self-care really challenging because it felt like a to do list item. i've been caring for other people and i did not have time to care for myself. i also think that self-care is often prescribed when what we all need is community care or societal level care and one of the things that was important for me to incorporate in the book was a broad systemic critique of how caregiving and big family caregiving in particular operates in our culture and while we're on the theme of definition, when i'm talking about caregiving it can have a lot of meaning for me specifically applying it to caring for a family member or friend, usually an adult. >> last one, vicarious trauma

. >> this is an interesting term that comes from medical care and trauma work and i adopted it and talk about it some in the book and in the context of posttraumatic stress. caregivers are not being directly traumatized but can pick up a lot of vicarious trauma, traumatized by him in this difficult, painful stressful situations and went having that reverberate through and after the experience so i've done some research showing that the trauma of caregiving can linger. can cause ongoing symptoms. that's of course very true for the ill person who is being cared for as well.

there's tremendous trauma and strain associated with that and research now showing that can carry over to the caregiver as well . >> thank you. so one of the things that i think is a really valuable message in the book is just how the cost of caregiving can default and change for the caregiver over time. of course, as you're telling the story of the particular situation from diagnosis through treatment and on into recovery and the new normal for youandy for your family , you narrow your progression from an acute emergency to caregiving over the long

term. and one of the things i feel like i learned a lot about from the book is about how it is that a role that can initially seem quite clear can gain or lose definition in different ways over time one of the things the book makes me think about , and i was wondering if you would like to talk about how it is that you would describe the cost to the caregiver being different over time from the beginning to the ending of a caregiving site. and what you would say about coping and about methods for coping and for managing burnout. >> that's a big question i think it's multi prong to think about the cost of caregiving as you suggest.

i will bracket and setaside because i think we may touch on this as well . there's economic costs. one of the things i covered in my research is caregiving can really be a huge financial hit to caregivers and families and i'll bracket that and talk a little bit more about the emotional costs and kinds of caregiving . there can be the short sharp shock of being lunged into an emergency situation which you know, is very challenging but also comes with a kind of adrenaline burst that i think a lot of caregivers going for the early stages. then can be kind of a deflating or difficult experience when ends. many many people and up being in caregiving roles for years or decades.

since the book came out i've heard from many caregivers and i'm sure there are many of you in the audience as well who have been in caregiving situations with people in very long-term illness, long-term decline, this could particularly be the case with dementia caregiving and that slow grind of that as a long-term cost and it's really important to guard what time or what space you can as a caregiver. i think the longer the experience goes on, the more and more challenging that is and i'm really wary of at the same time saying well, take breaks because that is obviously not always accessible. and one of the reasons i wrote the book is to make the kind of systemic critique of why aren't those things accessible? why are there such severe

economic costs families and caregivers are trying to do the best they can for their loved ones? why is there not a broader system making that possible? why is it up to us as individuals to look out for our interests and find time to take a walk or get the night away? that is something that society needs to step up and offer to keep those costs lower because it can, it leads quickly i think the burnout and another thing i wanted to call attention to in terms of long-term emotional cost is i was very fortunate that my caregiving situation which has very much eased as my husband has regained functional independence so he's still chronically ill, for many many people a long and draining caregiving journey

then ends in grief. and that can be really hard to come back from. you've plunged into mourning and grief especially after a long and difficult experience with caring for the person and i think it can be hard to process that is often insane is to move past a really hard experience. i wanted to point that out and unfortunately it was not my experience in caregiving but it can be an extra strain on the individual. >> we got together last week. we had seen each other since the beginning of the pandemic how many times? maybe three times.

when we saw each other last week we got to talking about again, about the evolution of the book and about the shape that it's come to now as a kind of hybrid memoir and work of cultural criticism, sociocultural criticism and we also talked about some of the particular challenges of writing a story that is not a unique story and what it feels like and what it means when you get to the point where you realize the story you are telling is so much bound up in your individual experience connects you to many many others. i wanted to talk about that, about what it's like to write a book that reaches in that

way. bridges between those two kinds of writing or those two kinds of discourse and just what your thoughts are on it now now that it's out. >> that's a great question because it was really important to me that this book not just be a memoir strictly of my own caregiving experience. i don't that with that much anybody who was not a caregiver in similar circumstances. one of the things i learned in my research is aarp does a lot of demographic research on caregivers and their most in recent survey concluded that 53 million americans caring for an adult or family member who needs assistance to so there's 53 million other people out there with a story if not the same as

analogous to mine and there are many many more grueling caregiving tail out there. i'm sure many of you in the audience family experience with challenging, the challenges of caring for somebody you love and what i started thinking about was this tension between the individual and broader society that i think in the united states our culture leans toward individualistic explanations of everything. problems are the individuals to solve. a family care crisis is the families who work out and not towards bigger systemic solutions and i wanted my book in some ways to be a protest against that.

that will show how we need to integrate as systemic analysis as well as an individual story . my story, what i hope it will do in the book is straight the urgency just in one small way of a bigger problem and i should also say that i felt like i was a very privileged caregiver . my in-laws were with us a long time providing assistance. i would probably have drowned without that. i have friends, many of you in the audience who dropped off meals and offered to run errands. the community did step up and help me. and i think that on a broad social level we need to replicate that act to help all caregivers so i wanted the narratives of my book to

bring all of those strands together and try to make that argument in a broader way that spunout from my own individual experience . >> you just started in the direction that i was going to ask about which is what if anything you were particularly surprised to learn about caregiving statistically or otherwise either in the united states or globally during the days of writing, that had you broadening into research and thinking from a more systemic perspective . >> i'll start by saying the thing i was most surprised by as an individual caregiver and get a couple ofstatistics and bigger facts that surprised me . i was most surprised by as an individual caregiver was just how much medical work the

medical system expected me to do at home almost 0training . there were things where it was like, she he's coming home on iv antibiotics so you'll belearning in the next 50 toadminister those . are you kidding me ? i don't know how to do that and it was terrifying . it needed to go in a central line and that's a fairly low level task compared to what many many family caregivers are asked to provide to their lovedones every day . and to provide you really vulnerable people and so i was really shocked at the care gap that familymembers were expected to fill up . and that was something that i'm actually seeing some nods as i talked about that in the audience so i sense that many

have experienced this until it's put on you, it doesn't really, it didn't really occur to me and i thought well, they willsend a nurse . they will not send a nurse. you become the nurse. and in terms of bigger surprises for things that i learned , some of the economic statistics shocked me particularly the impact on women caregivers and i should say my book takes a deliberately feminist analysis, feminist lens on the problem. depending on the analysis 51 to 75 percent of family caregivers are women so i'm not trying to discount the contribution of men which is again but it is disproportionately female and i would argue that the devaluing of care and undervaluing of care generally is connected with

its connection withfemininity . with women's labor is kind of expected to be free and these situations. and that has negative effects for both female and male characters. and an immensely high proportion of the family caregivers have to reduce their hours or leave their work entirely. women who have been family caregivers and had to reduce their work hours are to what five times more likely to live in poverty in old age. and there appears who were not family caregivers that was one statistic that really left left out at me because it's not just oh, you lack a few years income. it's losing out on pensions and salary increases and it's a lifetime economic effect.

it can kind of rob whole families of the opportunity to build wealth. >> so leaving into the future , i was going to ask the question where do the solutions lie? >> not enough words for the question that i feel like i should ask but that's the best version of it that i could bring into focus this afternoon when i was rereading the book and preparing for this conversation. where do the solutions live, and what direction dothey live ? >> i think you could look at it in. a culture policy change as needing some policy change and drag along kicking its screening into a better way of treating people and i tend to think especially right now with the pandemic issues of

care are such prominent issues that we have a window of opportunity for some of the policy change that would really support caregivers. and support other people besides just caregivers. i look at really three particular areas. the most obvious is something that is unbelievably overdue and it is shameful we do not have is universal paid leave for family caregivers and before this as well but the fact that the united states does not have paid leave and we essentially made no federal progress on this issue since the 90s and the clinton era and the passage of unpaid family is pretty shameful and we should really be changing. there was originally paid leave in the coronavirus relief bill and it fell out

unfortunately but that's the policy provision that would make a world of difference to people because it would rent the employment and offer other protections along those lines. i think that some form of economic compensation for caregivers is really important. that exists in patchwork and through medicaid for caregivers who are more economically challenged. it's not really so much for middle-class caregivers but there are proposals or tax credits. i personally would love to see some kind of direct pay program which i favor over tax credits because it doesn't require you to have income the claimant but i think anything would be a step in the right direction and i would also point to forms of universal basic income to be helpful here.

i mentioned in the book towards the end there was an experiment with ubi just down the road or us in stockton california at some of the results have just come in and some of the results really point to peoples seeing and being better able to take care of their loved ones with that extra margin. in the case of stockton it was $500 per month and people were spending it on family care and ways of making their lives better and ways of making the lives of their ill family members better and i would also say, this is where talking pipedreams here so these are big big things but universal healthcare. in the us without universal healthcare families are vulnerable. caregivers send an inordinate amount of time just arranging for care and it makes for a

lot of vulnerability and instability for people who are ill, or people caring for them. it leads to worse outcomes so that's a broader look at health and i also think that if there were universal care there would be fewer of those care gaps that i talked about earlier . more integrated care, more possibilities for getting people when they need it. this does not 100 percent rely on us, just caregivers filling in the gaps. i saw a question pop up and it's a good one that i'll address that are there models for this in other countries and the answer is yes . >> i wanted to ask that one to. >> other countries are looking at this, tackling it better. some states are bringing in new policy changes. washington has passed some measures that are relief.

japan is an interesting example in that it's had to contend with the aging population much earlier and then we have to and they piloted some really innovative programs including a system of caregiver credits where people can help people and swap them for their own loved ones that they don't live near. i talk about this in the conclusion to my book but there are also all of the countries with a social safety net are doing some version of some of the things that i just spoke about. >> sarah peterson asks to have a copy of already toast sent to the white house. >> not that i know of but i will tell my publicist . >> there's a question from

esther chapman. can you talk more about what you learned as a caregiver about advocating in the healthcare system and how can caregivers learn that skill besides learningthe hard way ? >> i definitely learned the hard way . i really try to go in there and look professional. if not professional, at least put together and to be somebody who is trustworthy and have my notebooks and try to get that respect so i would seem like a partner to the physicians and not seem like some lady whose along for the ride because i think there's a lot of -- for me, i encountered a lot of being taken for granted. you're here to do the things that need to be done, we're going to tell you what those things are and you should do them and that was unstated

and pushing back was challenging. it's hard to push back against these big systems. brad was being treated in sacramento at uc davis medical center and that place is a bureaucratic maze. it's a teaching hospital which is great which provided us with a lot of access to amazing care and it was also incrediblyhard to figure out . who is the hospital list, what do they do mark turns out the hospitalist is the most important person to know because they decide who gets discharged when. there's all these critical things that for me, it was important to find a nurse or somebody who was friendly and get to like walk-through and try to figure it out. one of the things that i talk a little bit about in the book and that i think is that

we need more proactive caregiver education. there needs to be more social workers, more patient navigators, more people doing outreach to make that learning curve where new patients and new caregivers see because it's intimidating . you're entering into a vast unknown system and it can be really hard to get to the courage of speaking up. >> i'm just monitoring the chat. i saw a question from jana who would love to hear you talk about the process of weaving the research into your personal story. >> that's a great question. i had a big, i wish i could turn my monitor and show you

guys on the wall but i've taken it down. i have a huge wall size schedule for writing the book when i wrote it and when i did was i have a lot of personal writing that i had been doing through the most intense parts of the brad's illness, sometimes which were just diary entries. but before i ever wrote the book proposal, i had kind of the backbone of the memoir material and a lot of that was really rough. not something that i would have used in the book the way it was but it formed kind of an area art and when i sat down after the book was under contract and i was sitting down to produce the draft, i ended up getting all the pieces of writing that i had produced during all of brad's illness and the time leading

and i made a giant outline in like a folder tree form on my hard drive and for those are not interested in writing class, i'm sorry. i will gothrough this quickly . each chapter had a raw material folder that was sometimes just paragraphs and paragraphs that i was going to stitch together. and then i wrote the book in order chapter by chapter and outlined and put those pieces in together. some of the writing that i had from the early days was also based on a blog that brad and i originally jointly kept as soon as he got ill during his transplant. i was just keeping it and it was for committee getting with family and friends during the most intense arts of his illness because one piece of caregiver labor that i did not talk about before is a labor of keeping in touch with family and friends

and keeping them updated which is necessary but can be very time-consuming and also a draining part to restate things and answer questions so we kept a blog with the information and updates onhow he was doing . i had kind of a chronological chapter that came up and said it's exhausting. yes, emotionally exhausting for sure. so i have those writings, i had rants that i was working with and then i did the research as i went through the writing process and just tried to tie everything in together. i was doing it piece by piece as i went on different themes and trying to weave those in and out without keeping, so that each chapter had a balance of the personal and

the research material and kind of third strand as well which was the literary material and analysis and i didn't want anything to read like a chapter of my dissertation where it was all literature but i did want to have those strands threaded through. so it was kind of a just taking it chapter by chapter and trying to slot those together and there was a major revision after that first time so i got the second crack at it and the time to ceo, here's of the balance is way off because it goes on for pagesand pages about statistics . >> i noticed i think it's a good follow-up question in thechat . at what point during this journey did you decide to write a book? was it a way to process what

you were going through or did you always want to write an advocacy or policy book? >> i did not always know that . i think it evil of the writing that i was doing and i think it evil out of looking for a book like this. in some ways i wrote the book i needed to read when things were hard. i wrote the book that i hope will help other caregivers feel seem and help them feel validated especially in the hardened challenging emotions which are often kind of smooth over and glossed over in popular narratives around caregiving. if you think of movies about caregiving that come to a sentimental conclusion or something like that, there's this nobility and sense of you know, noble self sacrifice and that it's a virtue.

it absolutely can be a noble self sacrifice and it's also hard and people are going to experience negative emotions around something that can be such a draining role and i think that a lot of people need to feel seen in that and i also felt like i needed to look at why it was so hard and think about whether the ways that people are being supported and kind of ways for that as i started to emerge from the intensity of really difficult caregiving, i realized one of the reasons that this issue is a little bit under discussed and how very many people are caregivers is that they are largely too busy to make a big public advocacy statement about.

there are great organizations working in this space but most people who are caring for family members, especially the ones most burned out by it are not going to have time to organize a march on washington or call their congressperson every day or do other kinds of organizing that can affect policy change and i'm not an organizer but i can tell a story and that is what i tried to do to help give voice to this issue. >> i would argue telling a story is one way to think about organization. stories our organization. i'm just looking for more questions in the chat because we're getting close to 7:00 here .

could you talk about the language of illness and care? >> i see that's from my friend lisa jenkins in australia. >> lisa is zeroing in from the future, tomorrow. i think that i see lisa mentioned that the talk is a battle and i'll focus in on that because the military metaphors and the idea of the fight around care and illness can be damaging for people. i adopted a little bit in the book when i talk about collateral damage as a caregiver but i also tried to have some distance on that and critique that language a little bit at the same time because i think it is you know, it can be harmful or people to frame and illness

as a fight. it's not a fair fight. it's not a thing where you have an enemy that you can defeat if you just try hard enough and it does a disservice to people who are suffering from the condition to talk about them as if they lost a battle with cancer or it's not something you can win by trying harder. and you know, caregiving also is not something you can necessarily win by trying harder. i think there's a lot of things we can re-examine in language that we use casually around care and illness. i had a piece of a few weeks ago in "time magazine" talking about the language of positivity around care and illness. kind of the like you have to stay positive. everything happens for a reason. i don't know if any of you read kate folders great book called that, everything happens for a reason and the

subtitle is and other lies that nearly killed me. i don't think i'm quoting that right but there's a great scene where her husband comes to the door bringing a casserole and it's everything happens for a reason and the husband looks at whoever's bringing it and he says tell me the reason. what's the reason my wife appears to be dying. there's not a good reason. and i think that thinking critically about some of those language choices can be one way of affirming both caregivers and the ill. the ill or disabled people they are caring for. i have been corrected, and other lies i've loved . i conflated it with something else, my apologies. >> i see another question, do you think caregivers have

difficulty feeling entitled to help andwhy ? >> yes, that can be hard. it can be hard to accept help and it really was for me. that was an area i could have examined evenmore in the book . we do as i said before this individualistic culture where we're supposed to be standing on our own two feet and you know, doing things for ourselves and it can be hard to reframe that and accept community networks of help, to relinquish control and ask for what you need. it's not easy to reach out to somebody and be like, i need you to go to target and get me this sheets or whatever the example might be but sometimes you need a weird thing and you need help and now that i'm not in the most intense period, i want to provide help to people and give a little bit of solace

where i can. and it can be challenging because caregiving often seems like a closed system and also, if you've been entrusted with the knowledge base and specifics of medical care that i talked about earlier , that can feel really risky to relinquish or let that go as well. so i think there's a lot of challenges around that. >> heidi, do we have a link in the chat somewhere that will help people buy the book ? >> i put it earlier. i also have a winner. let me show you the right way to everybody.

the winner of the grubhub randomly selected by me by closing my eyes and scrolling is melanie maddox. so melanie, if you could privately message me on this chat your mailing address, i will pass that on to kate and then she will get your gift certificate. let me just verify that here. >> i wanted to if i could just answer one more question as i scrolled up in the chat and i saw a great question i would love to address from naomi williams is a sacramento author whose wonderful is if you talked about i acknowledge privilege in the book and talked some

about how the burdens of caregiving can fall disproportionately on women of color and more marginalized groups and i would love to address that because the research really shows that is very much the case and that can kind of fall in one of two ways for marginalized families. with less access to care and fewer resources, there disproportionately economically harmed by some of the really difficult challenges of caregiving. people in jobs where they have to be present and essential workers are much less likely to be able to juggle the demands of caregiving alongside their work life and thus are more likely to loseemployment because it . then also, paid care work we haven't really talked about tonight but is an important piece of the general problems

of undervaluing of care of all kinds professional kate paid care work in the home is often a really unstable employment. we employ care workers when brad needed 24 hour care and it was at home and it was not covered by insurance so we were paying out-of-pocket and those jobs tend to be disproportionately done by women of color, immigrant women, noncitizens and there are few employment protections for them so i wanted to address that question because i think it's a really critical piece of the general question of how care operates in our society. thank you for writing me. i will jump back on my soapbox. >> no problem.

you kate. that was really informative. i enjoyed it a lot to hear this. not only as a woman, i was, i have not had to be a caretaker other than a mom but my husband had to be a caretaker of me for a while there when i had a series of mercer infections that they kept coming more and more out and when you had mentioned that a lot of times caregivers suddenly become nurses and positions assistance and he found himself in that role of having to do stuff that no person should ever have to do with open wounds and all that . so i'm sure that he had a lot of that caregiver 50 and we are over that for now. but it's a very real thing for men and for women so i'm

glad you wrote this book about it. >> you so much. i'm so grateful to all of you for coming. it's great to see so many names and i'm sorry i didn't get to shout out everybody individually but i'm so touched that your youth all been here and asked such great questions and shown up on your saturday nights. thank you. >> congratulations kate. >> thank you. >> thank you ray for interviewing. i really enjoyed your very laid-back and comfortable style. >> you might be the first person to call me laid-back orcomfortable my entire life . all right. so if you happen to be from sacramento, hop on over to our store. even open pretty much since covid began but in a limited capacity and it's been nice

to see more sacramento and out and about now that we're in the rent here. we're still obviously acquiring masks in the store and we actually don't let any more people in and we have been since probably early summer, last summer but certainly enough people to shop the shelves and it's always fun to visit the store so if you're local, come onin . we'd love to meet you .that concludes our saturday evening. thank you guys for joining us . i'm really glad to see a nice crowd here for kate. >> anyone who would like their copy signed if they get one, if you're not, there are bookplate stickers i can drop in the mail for you which i would love to do. >> there are the cutest, they

have the little imprint on them. >> message me on social media or email or whatever. >> the copies that we get into the store, kate will be coming in to sign them. >> funding comes from these television companies who support c-span2 as a public service. >> book tv on c-span2 as top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. tonight at 9 pm eastern on "after words" in her book remember: the science of memory and art of getting lisa genova discusses how memory works. she's interviewed by author and the forgetting podcast

cohost david shank tonight at 11 pm eastern university of pennsylvania religion professor andrea butler argues racism as a focal and white evangelical religion from slavery to current day in her book white evangelical racism: the politics of morality in america. watch book tv this weekend and be sure to watch in depth in may with new york times columnist and author ross sounded on c-span2. during a virtual event hosted by mother jones magazine doctor seema yasmin discussed the dangers of misinformation about public health and medicine. here's a portion of that program. >> there was a big measles outbreak in romania and at the time the world health organization had treated something like worst measles outbreak in decades. don't worry, we are disseminating pamphlets. something along those lines.

and i'm like you kidding me? these movements and anti-vaccine messages and vaccine hesitancy, they're not disseminating pamphlets. they are sending videos of a mother crying to the camera and telling you because she's convinced her three-year-old became autistic after getting the mmr vaccine are you telling me with a video like that that some person telling a story aboutchild crying , super emotional, you're going to counter that with some bullet points? that does not meet people where they are so what frustrates me is i trade in medicine and medical school and we practice and evidence-based medicine but we don't practice evidence-based communication but we know that communication is a make or break when communication is

everything in academic response and pandemic response and yet there are stories over here who have decades of evidence for us about what works and what does not work and yet we just keep repeating what we think works even though the pamphlets, the facts delivered from us and delivered in a one-size-fits-all message, that's rubbish. it goes over the heads of so many people. it doesn't account for the fact that we in medicine are part of an establishment that has a bloodied and unethical history of experimentation on vulnerable people that even now this isn't just about history, medical racism is very much a thing now but if you talk to six people and people who are vaccine hesitant but they're more of a fringe, i think the majority of people are on the fence. i got my flu shot last year but not sure if i should get a vaccine this year. these people if you interview six of them have six different reasons, all of

that for being vaccine hesitant so we have to meet people where they are. we need to mobilize communications campaigns to. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website, booktv.org and look for trends and seema yasmin. >> we heard the news that martha mccallum, the talented anchor at fox news was possiblywriting a book . that fact caught our eyes because we are always on the lookout for authors on important new books can join us for our speaker series at the library needless to say we were really when we learned thatit was true . martha was in the thick of writing what was certain to be a best-selling book.