Trailer: Susan Cain on the bittersweet & introducing How We Live Now
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Susan Cain on the bittersweet & introducing How We Live Now
———
Susan Cain’s groundbreaking book, Quiet, taught a generation of readers to perceive and value their introvert qualities. Her latest book, Bittersweet is a song to the complex space between happiness and sadness. In this episode, Katherine talks to Susan about how she came to move so comfortably in the understated parts of life, and why the minor key is so beautiful.
While we’ve been away, The Wintering Sessions have been undergoing a metamorphosis. Katherine talks us through the process of becoming How We Live Now, and offers us a peek at the season to come.
Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing to my Patreon where you’ll get episodes a day early (and always ad free) along with bonus episodes and more!
Listen to the Episode
-
[00:00:00] Katherine May: Hello, I'm Katherine May and welcome to a very special in between episode of my podcast today. I've got a really brilliant interview with the author Susan Cain for you. She's one of my heroes. But there's a slight problem with it. Our recording cut out halfway through and we've done everything we can to rescue it, but we couldn't.
[00:00:40] Katherine May: So I'm gonna offer you two things today: 50% of an interview with Susan Cain, which is still good. Very good cuz she's amazing and only I will know what's left unsaid and Susan, but I hope you'll enjoy that. But before then, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the way that The Wintering Sessions is about to transform.
[00:01:10] Katherine May: Over the last few months, it's been undergoing a process of metamorphosis, a little wintering of its own, if you like, because it was time for it to change a bit. I began The Wintering Sessions in the middle of a lockdown. Feeling isolated and feeling like I was really missing those rich meandering conversations that I so often had with other creative people in the before times.
[00:01:45] Katherine May: And so I set up the podcast to do just that, to have those chats, to meet like-minded writers and to really get down and dirty. With the topic of what it's like to live in this very complicated, difficult world, and I think partly I feel like the Wintering Sessions has done all it needs to do and it's time for it to transform, but I also wanted to be able to ask bigger questions, and so that's why I'm here to tell you that in this stream, you'll start getting a podcast with a different name that has a lot in common with The Wintering Sessions. It'll be called How We Live Now. And it's a podcast that's about finding pathways. Through this post everything world - there goes the dog
[00:02:49] Katherine May: So much has happened to us over the last three years, five years, ten years, and I feel like we are all reeling. We're all trying [00:03:00] to make sense of how we think about life now and how we act in the world, and so How We Live Now will come in a series of mini seasons. I'm gonna call them drops of about six episodes where I asked the same question to a variety of people from different perspectives.
[00:03:23] Katherine May: For example, the first mini season that you've got coming soon will ask, how can we come back together again? And I'm gonna be inviting some spiritual perspectives on that, some sociological perspectives, some political perspectives, and some very practical ones too. As well as bringing the arts and folklore into the mix.
[00:03:49] Katherine May: For me, that's how we need to approach these big questions. Not through one method, but through many to pull out the complexity, the texture, the uncertainty. And so my aim for these conversations is that they are just that they're a two-way process. They're an exploration. They're not about any one person telling you that they've got it all figured out because I think if we haven't learnt by now that those people are the last people we should listen to, then we never will.
[00:04:27] Katherine May: I also want to find better ways to integrate your voices into the podcast. So from now on, there'll be opportunities to feed in your answers to the questions that we are talking about, your responses, your further questions, your knowledge, your understanding, your queries. I hope you're as excited about it as I am.
[00:04:54] Katherine May: I've been working really hard on it, and you'll be able to see today the fantastic new artwork that accompanies the podcast. Anyway, that'll be coming to you in a couple of weeks time. I hope you enjoy it. I'll still be taking you on little walks with me and maybe other adventures too at the beginning and end of every.
[00:05:18] Katherine May: So it won't stray too far away from The Wintering Sessions. So here we are in something in between the last of The Wintering Sessions and perhaps a gateway into How We Live Now with my interview with Susan Cain. Enjoy all curtailed, glory of it, and I'm gonna see you very soon. Bye.
[00:05:48] Katherine May: Susan, I'm thrilled to have you on here, and I need to start
by telling you if this won't embarrass you horribly. That Quiet had, I mean, a really, very significant role in my life because, I read it before my autism diagnosis and realized for the first time that I was an introvert and not an extrovert, which is exactly what I thought I'd been like.
[00:06:21] Katherine May: If you'd have asked me, I'd have said, yeah, I love parties, I love other people. Yeah, I'm so energized by working in a team. And I read your book and had this, I mean, not to put it too delicately, like almost this like, oh fuck moment of I am not what I thought I was at all. And I went and spoke to a colleague about it and he said, yeah, you're a total extrovert.
[00:06:42] Katherine May: I can just see the energy draining out of you as we sit in a meeting every time. And I was like, what? Seriously? And if I hadn't, That revelation, I would not have been able to get my autism diagnosis because it was like the beginning of the dominoes falling. It was like the beginning of me realizing that I had told myself a story about myself that wasn't true and that I could never cope with, but I'd found like a different way to explain every different time that I couldn't.
[00:07:11] Katherine May: and there's a bit in The Electricity of Every Living Thing, which is my memoir about that journey where a friend, after I told her I was autistic, a friend said to me, that's why you disappear at parties every time. And I was like, what? And she said, every single time we have been to an event together, you have vanished halfway through the evening, and I realized that, yeah I was totally doing that and I'd, every time I'd said to myself, like, oh, I had a headache, or, oh, I just didn't get on with that person, and I would literally go and hide under the coats in the bedroom, or like lock myself in the bathroom.
[00:07:45] Katherine May: And so yeah, it was, I'm sure people tell you this all the time, but it was, it's a, it was a cultural moment I think. Is that true for you? Do you feel that love ?
[00:07:55] Susan Cain: Yeah. I mean, thank you so much for sharing your story and yeah, I guess I do hear stories like that a lot, and the amazing thing to me is how could it be that's so many.
[00:08:10] Susan Cain: Thousands or probably millions of people go around feeling like they are the only ones who feel this way or like in your case, constructed a whole alternate reality. So harder to not whole universe in order to not feel that way. Like how could it be that everybody I know when there are so many of us, That's the really striking thing to me.
[00:08:29] Susan Cain: You know it. Like we know from the statistics that it's, yeah, a third to a half of us who are introverted, but I also now know, from the heart, like by which I mean like all the letters I get and the stories that people tell me. Just so many countless people who are all walking around, like at parties, going to the bathroom and thinking they were the only ones.
[00:08:49] Susan Cain: And I'm sure you've the experience... and locking the door. And have you had the experience since then of like, now you probably go to parties and you're like, oh yeah, there's that person like on the side of the room looking. The books in the bookshelf, having the deep conversation with just one other person over there on the sofa, and now you see it everywhere.
[00:09:06] Katherine May: I've made great friends that way.
[00:09:07] Susan Cain: Oh, absolutely, those are my favorite parties.
[00:09:10] Katherine May: It's really nice. I mean, I was a publishing event a couple of years ago and I realized that I did not want to be in the crowd, and so I stood at the back and got chatting to this wonderful woman, and we are still friends now, and I kind of, it makes me sad, I guess. I mean, it makes me feel massively sad that I couldn't address my own needs for the longest time, and that's maybe a bigger story than just not enjoying social events. But what makes me sad is that the message I heard all through my life is, it's good to be somebody who. Works in a team, like it's good to be somebody who is stimulated by loads of people and being busy and rush and hurry and noise. And it's not only good to be that's just not the truth. And I could have spent some time working on my personal, skills and aptitudes, which is burrowing into deep thought and deep research. And that's what I'm good at.
[00:10:05] Susan Cain: I know. And but really for so long, the only message really was that this is the only way, to be good and powerful and sociable and loving and productive and successful and all the rest of it, all through this one, one mode of being as opposed to recognizing many different modes of being, all those things.
[00:10:26] Katherine May: Did you always know that was the way that you preferred to do things? Like did you have a better awareness of your preferences?
[00:10:33] Susan Cain: I think I was aware of my preferences, yes. But I didn't feel good about them. I was always questioning them and thinking that I should be a different, it would be better if I were a different type of person.
[00:10:46] Susan Cain: Yeah. Yeah, I knew what the preferences were but it would've been better not to have them . It was something like that. They weren't welcome. Yeah. Going through all of that thing that so many introverts do of trying to turn yourself inside out, to be, yeah. To be more, extroverted and more out there than really came naturally to me.
[00:11:05] Susan Cain: I mean, I did. I did. I did. And I do come from a family that is all introverts. I'm probably the most extroverted person in my family of origin. I did grow up with many positive role model examples of, yeah, introverts, like my father was a really great doctor and medical school professor, and he was the one, he was a gastroenterologist and he was the one you would go to if you couldn't figure out the diagnosis.
[00:11:32] Susan Cain: He often could. And it was very clear to me that the reason he was so good at what he did was because he would come home every day after work and pour over medical journals for hours. Right. He'd go to the medical conferences and sit in the front row with a tape recorder and get everything down and then listen to it over and over until he had absorbed everything.
[00:11:52] Susan Cain: And, so it was this like real orientation of serious scholarly study often done in solitude and so it, it was like super clear to me that connection. Yeah. And my grandfather, who's a rabbi, he was so incredibly wonderful and beloved within a community, which is a pretty extroverted role.
[00:12:12] Susan Cain: But he was very quiet and softspoken and gentle. Right. That was just his way of being in the world. So I did I had all these role models, but I think it took me a long time to put two and two together. Yeah. Between, to realize it was a thing. Really. Like a something that united you. Yeah.
[00:12:30] Susan Cain: Yeah.
[00:12:30] Katherine May: I always laugh about this in my family because I think we are split pretty much down the middle. Like my grandma was very introverted, but my granddad was a total social butterfly, and he used to get so desperate for social contact that he would literally stand outside on the pavement and talk to people that walked past
[00:12:50] Susan Cain: Wow.
[00:12:50] Katherine May: Because he was so desperate. And he'd stand at the bus stop and just help people off the bus with their bags and their prams. Just for a chat. And he would go and stand in the local kind of mini market and and load people's carrier bags. Cause he just was like, he was sick of our nonsense of all our reading.
[00:13:09] Susan Cain: Oh my gosh. That is so fascinating. But he know what, you know what's so funny about that? Just today, like literally, I think just before we got on this call, I was reflecting about the following thing that we have two kids. They're 12 and 14 and they just went off to summer camp for the first time. And it's this thing in the US I don't know if you have it in the UK, but like where they go for seven weeks.
[00:13:33] Katherine May: Oh, wow. Big thing. Yeah. We see about your summer camps. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's massive. Yeah.
[00:13:38] Katherine May: Yeah. So this is their first time. So we've literally like never been away from them for more than like a night or two if they have a school trip or something. But, they're off and the way these camps work, you can't really communicate with them. So it's like they've disappeared into some other dimension. Wow. And so it's just my husband and me now, and I just came back from playing tennis right before we talked, and my husband was there when I got in and we chatted about something or other, and I was reflecting of like, oh my gosh, like, what if he weren't here either?
[00:14:06] Katherine May: For a really long time even, I like, I'm the biggest introvert, and I need so much solitude, but even I would get to the point where I would be like, your, was it your grandfather? Like helping people off the bus. Like I, I would go and just like walk around until I found someone to chat with. Even for me, that would happen. So that makes me like able, I guess, to understand what it must be like for somebody like him who just feels that way all the time.
[00:14:30] Katherine May: Yeah, absolutely. And. I mean, he was just the most kind of lively, friendly person and just loved people. Whereas, we, like the other half of the family are the ones that when the phone rings, we're all like, who the hell is that? What can they possibly want from us? It's really. It's a very marked difference. And so actually it makes me really curious to know how was the deep part of the pandemic for you? How was, how were like lockdowns and self isolations?
[00:14:57] Susan Cain: I mean, I guess because of, yeah, I thought about everything we just said. I thought about it in that context too , because I was locked down with my husband and my kids, I kind of felt like my social needs were met. I mean, the thing I minded the most was of all my life, or not all my life, but since my thirties I've gone pretty much every single day to a cafe. And I sit in a sunny cafe window with my laptop and my latte and write or do my work or whatever.
[00:15:24] Susan Cain: And it really is kind of like my favorite thing that I do all day. Yeah. And and I stopped doing that. And had to switch to working at home and that was a gigantic adjustment, though, obviously a very minor one in all things considered. But anyway, all of that's to say like, I did not really mind the disappearance of social life, because I happened to be living in a family unit at the time. But I was thinking, had I been in my twenties and single or in my, seventies and widowed or something like that, I think it would've been incredibly difficult. And, I lost my father and my brother to Covid, so that was like a whole other separate thing.
[00:15:59] Susan Cain: But I'm just talking about the social isolation aspect.
[00:16:01] Katherine May: Yeah.
[00:16:02] Susan Cain: What about you?
[00:16:02] Katherine May: Yeah I think very much like you, I actually felt like a huge sense of relief about all of the things that I didn't have to go out and do, to be honest. But I mean, two observations, I think come to mind. One is that my husband, who is, has never been a talker, got really desperate for social contact during lockdown, and there was this moment of mismatch where I was like, don't you talk a lot? I mean, we've been together for 26 years, I've never had more than 10 words out of him on a single day before,
[00:16:33] Susan Cain: wow
[00:16:34] Katherine May: Yeah, it was so interesting to see him get to the point where he was just desperate for conversation and I was like, still not ready for it. But I did reach my limit later on and it was, do you know what it was about casual social contact that I missed the most? Just the kind of quick conversations at the school gate or, bumping into a friend and saying, do you want a quick coffee? Like, I didn't miss the big events, but I missed the small moments. Yeah. Contact, I guess, and that for me had really big creative implications. That was where I felt the pain, I guess, was like that, the absence of that flow of ideas between different people and not in any directive way, but more in the sense that ideas just spark when you have that kind of randomness coming into your daily life.
[00:17:24] Susan Cain: Oh my gosh, that makes such total sense to me. And I so agree with you. I don't really care for like, the big social events. I think they could go away forever and I'd be really happy. Yeah, and I love the casual social encounters. I completely agree with you, I understand it.
[00:17:39] Katherine May: So maybe we are both people that would wait at a bus stop and help people off the bus after all.
[00:17:43] Katherine May: Maybe that's what we both need.
[00:17:45] Susan Cain: But I don't know that doesn't even seem like a casual encounter. Actually, it's more I like the, I think there's something about, oh, I don't know, like the cafe or the chatting as you said, like at the school gates where, it's short-lived, you're free to go, but you're really enjoying it in that moment.
[00:18:02] Katherine May: Yeah.
[00:18:02] Susan Cain: And I think for me, that's often the problem with more formal socializing in general, that it usually just lasts too long. Like, I usually really enjoy it. Like, we'll, going out to dinner, let's say, like, I'll yeah, deeply enjoy it for the hour and 15 minutes, or hour and a half or whatever it is, and then suddenly there's a feeling of like, it's going on too long and you can't make... and there's nothing to be done.
[00:18:23] Katherine May: Yeah. No I totally agree. And I, and for me, that's often about understanding the boundaries of what's gonna happen. Like there's this real fear that drops into me that this could possibly go on forever and I'll never escape. Whereas I love those invitations that say, I dunno if you've ever seen this. I don't know if this is a British thing, but posh people in Britain will always tell you when to go home on their invitation and it will say "carriages at 10:30". It's such a funny thing.
[00:18:50] Susan Cain: Oh my gosh. Interesting. Wait carriages at 10: 30, that means time to leave at 10: 30?
[00:18:54] Katherine May: Off you pop at 10 :30. Bye. Oh, so have your carriage come. I mean, it's, as I say, it's deeply posh old fashioned, but you still see it sometimes.
[00:19:03] Susan Cain: That's so fascinating.
[00:19:05] Katherine May: I'm so grateful for that. I always think - excellent, I know when I'm arriving, I know when I'm going home. I understand the scope of this thing. I know it's not gonna go until three in the morning. I'm all for reintroducing "carriages at"; is what I'm saying.
[00:19:18] Susan Cain: Oh, I have never heard that before and it is fabulous. I'm completely picking that up and no one will know what I'm talking about over here, but that's okay.
[00:19:26] Katherine May: I think we start here and I like, if I hand out an invitation now I just do a time scale. I say 7:30 to 10:30 and hope that people pay full attention to the 10:30 there. Because I'm going to bed.
[00:19:39] Susan Cain: Do you find that they...
[00:19:39] Katherine May: Yes, I think so, but also I think particularly the people who know me know that I just start to zone out after a certain amount of time and gather themselves up and go home. But before that, like maybe when we were younger and people used to try and hang out for longer, I used to just put myself to bed in the middle of parties. I mean, I honestly like, what else do you do? Again, my husband is a really late night person and likes that like long, slow contact, whereas I will do intense contact for a little while and then I'm exhausted and I used to just say, "Right, everyone, I'm off to bed, don't worry about going or anything, but I'm done now, night", not the world's greatest host. I thought I'd stunned Susan into silence, but I think she's dropped out.
[00:20:26] Susan Cain: Yes. Oh my gosh. You won't believe the boneheaded thing that I just did. Okay, so I'm sitting in front of my laptop and as I told you, I'm always doing these video interviews and I was so enjoying our conversation. I was like, I don't even wanna be looking at the screen. I just want, I want the screen to go away and just totally focus. So I closed my computer completely forgetting that would cut us off from our Zoom
[00:20:53] Katherine May: Introvert problems, I think. Make it all go away.
[00:20:57] Susan Cain: Exactly.
[00:20:58] Katherine May: That is so funny.
[00:21:00] Susan Cain: Sorry about that.
[00:21:02] Katherine May: That's okay. I totally understand the instinct and I would've done it myself. So I think probably what you just missed is just me like repeatedly heading off to bed and saying "Night! Don't worry about it, see you later, you just carry on without me. It's fine."
[00:21:17] Susan Cain: Yeah. And I have this one friend who I've noticed at every single party she will leave. After about an hour and a half she'll, she will just graciously take her leave. She'll ...she doesn't skulk away embarrassedly. She goes up to the host and says, "Thank you so much. It's been so lovely and now I have to go"
[00:21:37] Katherine May: Oh, that's brilliant.
[00:21:37] Susan Cain: Without a trace of embarrassment and it really works for her and she therefore says yes to every invitation instead of like trying to get out of them the way someone else might.
[00:21:46] Katherine May: That's so cool
[00:21:47] Susan Cain: Because she really like is respecting her own limits and I don't even think she thinks about it. This is just what she does naturally.
[00:21:53] Katherine May: It's just, it's a real skill and I'm trying to grow that skillset and I feel very disrupted by the pandemic. I'm getting into a lot of habits again, but one of the things I quite often say to people now is, thank you so much for the invitation. I love being invited, but this isn't the right thing for me and I won't be coming. And that is such a liberation for me after years of saying, yeah, of course I'll come. Yeah, no problem. I look forward to it. And then not turning up.
[00:22:20] Susan Cain: Yeah. Like it's, yeah.
[00:22:21] Katherine May: It's so much better.
[00:22:22] Susan Cain: It's so much better all around. And that's how, that sounds like a very gracious way to handle it. And your friends must know you and understand you, right?
[00:22:28] Katherine May: So that's right. And honestly, if people are gonna be offended by that, then may be not my friends. Like then I can't be friends with someone that wants me to do something that's gonna leave me deeply uncomfortable. Like it's, I guess we, we've gotta both be okay about that really. That sounds quite harsh,
[00:22:43] Susan Cain: But no, it makes sense. I mean, have you ever had anyone be offended by it? I would be surprised if you had. Someone who knew you well enough to be good friends with you, . Oh, okay.
[00:22:53] Katherine May: Yes, I have. Yep. But maybe after that I reflected that perhaps there were some other problems and imbalances with that friendship anyway, she says very delicately.
[00:23:00] Susan Cain: Yes. Yes. I do hear you like tiptoeing delicately down the road.
[00:23:05] Katherine May: Yeah. And I felt weirdly okay with that friendship ending, it was maybe the right thing to happen. Yeah, it's tricky. It is very tricky. Let's move on anyway, from my complete lack of social graces.
[00:23:19] Susan Cain: No, that actually sounded very graceful,
[00:23:20] Katherine May: I, I do my best, I would love to talk to you about Bittersweet, because when you've loved someone's previous book and you're like, oh God, I don't know how am I gonna feel about the new one? And within a few pages, I just thought, oh, she has hit again on exactly what we need to be talking about right now, which is this sense of I, maybe I'll get you to describe it rather than me make a hash of it. Tell us what bittersweet is and means.
[00:23:46] Susan Cain: I mean, bittersweetness itself is about a kind of I mean, it's certainly about bittersweet moments that we all know, like walking a child down the aisle or graduation or whatever it is. But more than that what I focus on in the book is bittersweetness as a way of being in the world. And it's a way of being that is deeply in touch with the way that joy and sorrow in this life must forever be paired and the way that everything is so impermanent and, everyone we love best and everything we love best will not be here forever. But what it's really about, in a way, is that the curious, piercing joy and beauty that comes from this apprehension from this understanding.
[00:24:30] Katherine May: Yeah.
[00:24:31] Susan Cain: And I first encountered this state again and again and again through music 'cause I mean, I love music of all kinds, but I've been drawn all my life to minor key kind of yearning pieces of music and songs and, and had been so struck all my life by how that kind of music leaves me feeling not sad at all, but rather uplifted and connected to humanity because it's like the music is expressing this state of yearning and like the sorrows that all humans have to pass through. And we wish it weren't but we're all in it together. And so there, there's just this kind of love that's unleashed by hearing that expressed and expressed so beautifully. But when I started to re-, so at first I was like just trying to figure out what's the deal with this kind of music? Why does it evoke these sensations? But then what I started to realize is that there's this whole kind of bittersweet tradition that has been with it, that people have been talking about and thinking about for centuries all over the world, and yet we don't talk about it at all in our culture, maybe in the UK and the, and in the US for different reasons, I mean, think in the US we don't talk about it because, everybody's just has to be so incredibly up, positive and upbeat and cheerful and smiling all the time. And I think in the UK there's a feeling of like, you shouldn't be too earnest, you should have a stiff upper lip.
[00:25:51] Susan Cain: I know, you could, you can tell me your take. You'll, you know no better than I do.
[00:25:54] Katherine May: No. I think you're, I think you're right. I mean, I think we're increasingly taking on the, you have to be up and [00:26:00] happy all the time thing, and I, I think that's coming through really strongly on the social media side. The- cheer up everyone. But yeah we do have that sense that you don't really express much emotion at all, which I'd like to say we've defeated in our culture, but I still think it's very much there. It's still uncomfortable to us to really emote in public. And I would add to that, that the reason happiness is therefore more acceptable is 'cause happiness is actually quite a flat emotion.
[00:26:29] Katherine May: It's actually not a very complex emotion at all, and it's easily faked. Whereas sadness has got so many layers and depths to it that it's much more challenging, culturally challenging to us. I think.
[00:26:45] Susan Cain: Yeah, that, that's such an interesting insight and that makes so much sense. But then, How did you get then all the, like the 19th Century romantic poets, talking about all these things? There is that space carved out.
[00:26:57] Katherine May: Yeah. I think it's more culturally recent that we have, I mean, like the stiff upper lip thing isn't absolute, but also those romantic poets were seen as quite rebellious at the time, like they were, they don't seem challenging at all to us now, but they were seen as challenging at the time and so I guess that's kind of in line with it.
[00:27:16] Katherine May: But I do think in some ways, some weird ways we've got worse rather than better. Cuz like the Victorians had this very fixed way of marking, mourning and of and actually of making space for mourning.
[00:27:28] Susan Cain: Right, right.
[00:27:29] Katherine May: I mean, I can't tell you how much that has got lost in our culture now. The sense that it's legitimate to grieve, it's vanished.
Show Notes
Susan Cain’s groundbreaking book, Quiet, taught a generation of readers to perceive and value their introvert qualities. Her latest book, Bittersweet is a song to the complex space between happiness and sadness. In this episode, Katherine talks to Susan about how she came to move so comfortably in the understated parts of life, and why the minor key is so beautiful.
While we’ve been away, The Wintering Sessions have been undergoing a metamorphosis. Katherine talks us through the process of becoming How We Live Now, and offers us a peek at the season to come.
References from this episode:
Susan’s latest book, Bittersweet
Susan’s Website
Susan’s Twitter
Susan’s Instagram
Other episodes you might enjoy:
Season 2: Josie George on the joy of small things
Season 3: Ross Gay on delight
Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing to my Patreon where you’ll get episodes a day early (and always ad free) along with bonus episodes and more!
To keep up to date with How We Live Now, follow Katherine on Instagram and Substack
———
Enchantment - Released March 2023
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
