Power of Community: Summer of Friendship #8
8/21/20 - We often see people don’t have time for friends as life gets busier: Hint hint, it’s capitalism and patriarchy making you feel that way. And we interview author Mia Birdsong on building the communities and relationships we actually want, rather than those we’ve been told to want.
Transcript below.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Spotify.
CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community
HARDCOVER
Bookshop.org | Indiebound | Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Books A Million
AUDIOBOOK
Read by the authors! Listen to a sample here. Buy from: Libro.fm | Apple | Kobo | Audible | Downpour | Audiobooks.com | Chirp
E-BOOK
Nook | Kobo | Amazon | Apple Books | Google Play | Books A Million
Big Friendship is also out now in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada:
UNITED KINGDOM
Waterstones | Hive | Foyle’s | Amazon UK | Blackwell’s | The Book Depository
CANADA
AUSTRALIA
Booktopia | Dymock’s | The Nile | QBD
NEW ZEALAND
TRANSCRIPT: BREAKDOWNS: SUMMER OF FRIENDSHIP #7
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Hi Ann Friedman.
Ann: Hello.
Aminatou: How's it going?
Ann: You know, doing all right. I'm here. I'm a little sweaty in my closet, I won't lie to you. It's pretty hot.
Aminatou: Oh my gosh. I'm sorry summer is tough on every single level. Let's get you out of that closet ASAP.
Ann: [Laughs] Move it along.
Aminatou: Let's move it along. What are we talking about today?
Ann: Ugh, I am very excited about today's episode because one of the questions that we address near the end of the book is why do people say that they have no time for friendship at certain points in their life, right? Like why is it that in the priority list of family and career and health and all the obligations that we have that friendship is the thing that always seems to slide to the bottom of the obligation list? Or the thing that you feel most empowered to kind of let slide to get through to other stuff that's happening.
Aminatou: Because society really reinforces that in order to be a healthy, successful adult the markers that matter are mostly around family and property and work and not necessarily around relationship.
Ann: Ugh, it's true. And I think we do an okay job of challenging that and saying in maybe a couple of paragraphs here's why we don't think that that's the way things should be. But when it comes to really presenting a deep and robust vision for how the world would look if friendship were prioritized, like truly, truly prioritized as something that is living alongside these other values we've all been taught to make time for, what would that look like? And the answer is Mia Birdsong wrote that book. We didn't have to write that book. [Laughs]
[Theme Song]
(2:25)
Aminatou: Ugh, I'm so -- I still remember when you told me to read that book and also friend-of-the-podcast Samin Nosrat literally pressed it into my hand basically and was like "You have to buy and read this book." It makes me really happy to be in conversation with other people who are thinking about this stuff at every different level, and Mia Birdsong's book, it is so concrete in what it is asking you to do and what the possibilities are for how we can live life and I was so happy to read it when I read it.
Ann: Yeah. And so I guess you can kind of think of this episode as the where does friendship fit into the puzzle that is the rest of your life? If you pull out the lens from how are you doing friendship from within it which is frankly most of our book and look at where does it fit in the bigger picture, yeah, this book is incredible. It's called How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community and Mia Birdsong identifies herself as a pathfinder, community curator, and a storyteller. Yeah, and as previously mentioned she's connected to some women who we absolutely love who repped her book to us. On my end Courtney Martin, Samin on your end, and then of course we ended up talking about it to each other because wow, two great endorsements.
Aminatou: I know. What a great book to read right now when the sense of community is just really challenged and everyone is feeling so stretched to really imagine what life looks like. I'm excited to listen to this interview Ann. I love it when you do the interview.
Ann: Ugh, I actually really . . . this was a really incredible interview to do on a personal development level. You know how some interviews you're like this is super interesting and I love it and other interviews feel like you are getting free consulting or therapy? This was one of the latter. [Laughs]
Aminatou: 100 percent. Ugh, Mia Birdsong. I can't wait to hear it.
[Interview Starts]
Mia: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Ann: I have to say that your book has fully rocked my world. Like that's such a '90s phrase I feel like but I mean that in the truest sense which is to say that I think you have done some incredible work in putting words to a full conceptual re-framing of the things that are most important in life and I just want to say thank you off the bat.
Mia: Oh my gosh, thank you.
(4:45)
Ann: Ugh. You framed the book at the outset in terms of this concept, in terms of what most of us have been raised and cultured to want for our lives at least here in the United States of America which you kind of shorthanded the American Dream model. And I'm wondering if you can explain a little bit about what that conventional, dominant model looks like and what its affect has been on people who both do and don't live up to it.
Mia: Yeah. So, you know, the American Dream is kind of my shorthand for patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.
Ann: That stew.
Mia: [Laughs] Exactly, that intersectional clusterfuck of garbage. And, you know, on its face it is often this really beautiful idea that with a little hard work and grit that anyone can make it and the idea of making it is also defined in a very particular way. So it's not just that, you know, the idea that anybody can make it is a lie; who gets to make it is largely predicated on how close you can conform to a kind of straight, white male standard of everything.
(6:00)
But even the idea of how success is and happiness is defined by the American Dream is really about insularity. It is about individualism. It is about a kind of, you know, show of macho strength and capability that not only is problematic for all of the oppressive reasons but really is just fundamentally inhuman. We as people are meant to -- you know, we all have feelings and emotions and we're meant to be in relationship with each other in ways that are deeply interdependent.
Obviously for those of us who are systemically excluded from the American Dream part of the damage that's done is not only the kind of oppression we face but we're kept from systems that allow us to live. But even the people who succeed, and I feel like this was a harder thing for me to understand, but over the years as I have had lots of conversations with people who would be considered successful what I see is a tremendous amount of loneliness and disconnection and longing for something that they don't quite understand and either, you know, buy a lot of stuff to try to find or go on trips to Bouton or Bali to figure out. When in fact what they need to do is be vulnerable in the relationships that they have and have real connection with the people around them.
And kind of, you know, in a weird but totally understandable reversal I've found that the people who are actually best at building really deep, expansive, inclusive, loving, caring models of family and friendship and community are the people who have been excluded from the American Dream.
Ann: Right. And I think one thing I really appreciated about your book is you also present some of these models that show us that another way of living in community is possible. You know, communities rooted in blackness, queerness. I'm wondering what are some of the models that you have either found or always known about that really kind of present the oh, there's another way to do this, like the American Dream is not the only option.
(8:20)
Mia: I mean partly it's how I grew up. I was raised by a single mother and she was disowned from her biological family and then she and my dad got divorced so she was really by herself in a lot of ways and raising me and created family for us out of her friends. You know, I have this trio of aunties that were her best friends that really helped her raise me.
Ann: I would love to hear more about these aunties. I know you mentioned them in the book but I almost pictured them like in a Disney cartoon appearing or in some kind of, I don't know . . .
Mia: Yes, like all together in the same outfit but different colors. [Laughs]
Ann: 100 percent. And maybe you can just go a little deeper on that experience and talk about that because I'm very interested.
Mia: Yeah, so there was Melanie, Dorothy and Lisa [Laughs] and a couple of them were married at some point during my childhood but were divorced. Some of them were never partnered. And, you know, I called them. Melanie was Auntie Mel, like that's how I referred to her. So I don't know how conscious I was of thinking of them as family but I feel like what that modeled for me was both that . . . you can't raise children with one or two people, that's not a thing. So I knew that.
Ann: [Laughs] That is more work than two people can handle for sure, yeah.
(9:50)
Mia: And I think the people who know that are unpartnered parents, not people like -- you know, I'm married to a man. We have kids. The people who are married and trying to partner with one other person, it doesn't dawn on them that the reason it's so hard is because they don't have enough people. But I think the other thing that that modeled for me was this way of creating family with your friends. You know, I'm an only child and I think that's something I did. Even as a teenager I feel like I did that. There was a way in which I kind of invited my friends into my life that felt familial and has been so sustaining for me, I mean always. I appreciate how my mother and her friends -- her girlfriends -- really modeled that for me because I think that even though, you know, and it wasn't explicit at all. My mom wasn't saying to me that that's a thing that you do. But I think that that through line, even as I was socialized to believe that going to college and falling in love and getting married and having biological children was supposed to be a thing I was doing, there were these ways in which what I was shown as a child allowed me to kind of poke some holes in that and really question things to some extent for myself. And that really exploded for me as an adult.
Ann: I'm wondering about people who find themselves on the path towards this American Dream model and kind of . . . or maybe even find themselves partnered up romantically with one other person, married, kids, living on their own. You know, maybe far from biological family or maybe just lacking the kind of auntie trio that you benefited from in your childhood. And thinking about your advice to them in terms of deepening relationships with people that they have to strengthen those bonds and to maybe not undo the model writ large but remove the model and its effect on their day-to-day life. Where to even begin?
(11:55)
Mia: That's a great question and, you know, that's where I am. I am in many ways living the kind of quintessential American Dream. I'm married to a man. We have biological children. We own our home. We earn enough money to go on vacation occasionally. But I think for both of us part of it is about how we think about the role that our marriage plays in our lives and I think that we've been very clear from the beginning that the other person was not -- you know, there's this idea of marriage in America and maybe other western countries that this person is going to be, you know, the person who you're romantically involved with. You're going to have sex with them. You're going to run a household together. You're going to coparent. You're going to manage finances. They're going to be your best friend. You're going to travel with them. Like all of these things that we're meant to get from one person and were meant to be able to do -- like both of us are supposed to be able to do that for the other person.
And that's nonsense. That's just too many things. You can't function that way. And so I think for both of us we have other people in our lives who play really significant roles in how we get by. There's the people who . . . you know, I have other friends we travel with. We're not parenting our children by ourselves. They have a deep bench mostly of aunties. There are other people in my life who I lean on for all kinds of emotional support, for kind of partnering with me in my personal growth. Other people who I collaborate with.
(13:50)
So I feel like part of it is about moving away from the idea that the person that you are romantically partnered with, if you're romantically partnered, is going to be all these things for you. And that means you have to cultivate and then tend to the other relationships. And I think that there's this way in which I've tried to squash the hierarchy of the relationships in my life and it's not about kind of lowering the status of my marriage but it really is about elevating the status of my other relationships.
And I think we're in this really interesting moment right now where we really need other people and we can't physically be with them. And what I keep kind of coming back to is this form of generosity that is not just about the generosity of kind of giving and what we are doing for other people but it's also the generosity of receiving by which I mean that we have to recognize that allowing our loved ones to show up for us and to offer support and help in whatever form that is, like accepting that offer is an act of generosity because when we're able to do things for the people we love there's something restorative about that. There's something that reminds us that we are connected and we are in a kind of, you know, this circle of love between us and other people. And being kind of in the era of COVID has really brought that home for me in some really unexpected ways.
Ann: And I find myself wondering if these are conversations that you had with your husband from the beginning or that the people who are like family member figures to your kids, if that's something that you just were sort of naturally values-aligned about or whether you have had to have explicit conversations that are like hey, we aren't going to try to be everything to each other or hey, I do want you to function like a family member in terms of my child's life.
(16:05)
Mia: It's been both. I don't know that we had . . . my husband and I had these conversations in the beginning but we certainly have. We've been together for almost 20 years so we certainly have over the course of our relationship. So with my best friend from childhood, Kat, she's been my children's auntie from the beginning. I didn't have to have a conversation with her about that. That was just how it was.
But with my friend Mariah for example that was a specific request. [Laughs] She was my daughter's kindergarten and first grade teacher and when my daughter kind of approached the end of first grade I was like oh, I love this person and I want her to be in my child's life but I want her to be in my life also. So I actually went up to her and I was like "Will you be Stella's auntie and can we be friends?" and she said yes. [Laughter] It was like a very specific invitation. I think actually in my adult life in the last ten years there have been many people where I've just been like "Can we be friends?" and even beyond that had conversations about what our friendship is and what role we play for each other. So I think the way we have those conversations in our romantic relationships where like what is this and what's our commitment to each other and like . . .
Ann: What are we doing here? Yeah.
Mia: Yes, exactly. I've had some of those conversations with friends and largely I think what it does for the friendship is it just makes explicit our commitment to each other but it also creates intimacy because it allows us to . . . it feels very vulnerable to talk to your friend about what they mean to you. You know, because there's all the like "Do I love them more than they love me?" stuff that comes up. And I just think it allows us to be more known to each other. There's something just really powerful about the conversations I've had with friends where we have made a commitment to each other. It feels like such a deep relief and I think it's partly because it is outside of the context of a romantic relationship and we just don't have a lot of public models for that.
Ann: Let's take a quick break.
(18:45)
Mia: I mean I'm so curious about kind of the conversations that you and Aminatou have had about your relationship and your commitment to each other.
Ann: Yeah. I think that we didn't start having them at the outset but then as different things happened that challenged or changed our friendship we were forced to articulate them, that commitment. So when I moved far away and we had to transition our friendship to being long-distance I think there was explicit commitment that we are going to stay close to each other. We are going to keep making this work. But I also think there are times when we have not been great about that very much to the detriment of our friendship. And, you know, also I find myself thinking a lot about my friendships in this particular moment of pandemic as I hear you tell these beautiful stories about your own friendships and making things explicit because I do not have children. I see my friends who are parents struggling mightily in this moment and it's one of those things where I have, you know, time and a body and some hands that could be helpful. [Laughs] And also even though these are people I'm very close to I find myself hesitant to sort of say like "Okay, I'm going to suggest that we pod up because I would like to help you care for your kid at least through this period of intensity."
(20:10)
You know, the kind of meta thing happening in my brain as I listen to you talk is why haven't I explicitly extended that? And so I think for as good as I am in some friendships and in some ways there is almost this family Rubicon -- I don't know what to call it -- there is some invisible line where I'm like oh, I've really internalized family business is family business and if you ask for my help I'll extend it but I don't want to offer and be seen as getting up in your own way of doing things.
Mia: Yes! And this is the other thing I feel like I have been trying to figure out and pushing myself around because there is this way in which -- I love that, the family Rubicon -- this boundary that you're not supposed to cross.
Ann: Yeah.
Mia: And I think part of what I'm discovering is that we have to have the courage to push into each other's business.
Ann: Yes. [Laughs]
Mia: And in ways that are about what you're articulating which is really about offering specific support, right? It's not saying like "Let me know if you need anything." It's saying "I see you. I can see that this is hard and I am able to -- I could do something that would bring ease to you. Here is my suggestion. Do you want to do this?" And I think no one's going to ask you to do that. No one's going to be like "Hey, will you follow all these rules so you can pod up with me to help me take care of my kid?" Because that's just a kind of calculus that it's hard to know whether or not someone's going to do that. But if we can extend ourselves to make each other our business and kind of cross some of those boundaries I feel like that, again, it builds a certain kind of intimacy that we wouldn't have otherwise. And it does, it creates kinship with people who previous may have -- people we thought of as good friends.
(22:10)
And I feel like in this moment right now, I mean we always do, but right now especially we so very desperately need that kind of intimacy and we need to be seen in those ways. And part of it I think for parents too, I'll just say this, I remember a point -- like Mariah would have Stella over for sleepovers and I would work up the courage to ask her to do that. And at some point I was like oh, I think of it as like the burden of childcare whereas Mariah loves hanging out with my kid. She loves my child so she's not doing me a favor, right?
So part of it is about, I think for parents, when it comes to other people supporting us or raising our children or caring for our kids that we often think of it as burden whereas other people are like I would love to have a relationship with this young person who is super cool.
Ann: Fully. I mean many of the child-free people in my community, myself among them, still really love spending time with kids, you know what I mean?
Mia: Yeah.
Ann: Or still really like -- I mean maybe not 100 percent but many of the children in their lives, right?
Mia: Yes, some of them are assholes but some are cool.
Ann: So it's like any -- yeah, when people are like I love kids I'm like hmm, all kids? That's being like I love everyone. Yeah.
Mia: I actually do not like children as a demographic. I like my kids and some of their friends are okay but some of them? I don't want to hang out with them.
(23:40)
Ann: Right. But it is interesting, I also find myself thinking about a lot of questions Aminatou and I have gotten about being friends who work together because that's another one of those boundaries of like we're supposed to keep everything separate. You're supposed to have your work life and you're supposed to have your family and you're supposed to have your friends and you're supposed to have yourself or personal development and those are all separate.
Mia: Right.
Ann: Don't slop one over into the other, you know? And it's funny because it's so natural to us that working together has made sense.
Mia: Totally. Well I think people think of those kinds of boundaries as being tidy in some way and that you're being sloppy or messy if you allow them to overlap. And I'm like no, you're being integrated. Because the fact is the idea of those things as being separate even outside of the relationships is just false, right? Like my -- who I am as a person and the work that I do in the world and who my family, all those things are part of me and my life so the idea that we would have people who we collaborate with in multiple places in our life just makes a lot of sense to me.
It opens up new kind of again areas for intimacy and being known and understanding who the other person is when I think is just -- I mean I'm just super curious about the people who I love so the idea of collaborating with them can be just another opportunity for me to get to know them well. And like sometimes it sucks and you don't want to do it anymore and you're like oh, we're not people who should do this together.
Ann: Hmm.
(25:05)
Mia: But I think, you know, as you're talking it sounds like what you have is such a natural thing and it works well so of course you should do that because it just means you get to spend time doing work with someone who you love.
Ann: Right, and someone who I share values with because I think when I think about mixing up all these areas of life so much strife that I felt in my life related to work or family of origin or in some cases even my romantic relationships is a lack of values alignment. And I also think about being able to bust up some of these divides as being about -- not just being I can't remember if you use the word integrated but not just being a person who is thriving but also someone who's able to live their values more fully because the people who you are doing all these different things with are sharing them.
Mia: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I love that.
(26:00)
Ann: I feel like our books -- so our book being zeroed in on friendship and your book about how friendship fits into this kind of bigger framework is one thing that made me so excited for our conversation in large part for this reason right? A lot of people are like oh, it sounds so great to prioritize friendship but when you zoom the lens out who has the time? And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about -- I mean you have such a great vocabulary in this book for different ways of thinking about friendship and prioritizing it. I keep thinking about the anecdote that you included about friendship permaculture and your post-it note.
Mia: [Laughs]
Ann: I wonder if you can explain the significance of the post-it note.
Mia: Totally. Yes. So friendship permaculture was an idea I learned about from this writer Lawrence Barriner II. So permaculture, and I didn't really, despite the fact I'm totally a gardener, I did not really understand kind of this aspect of permaculture but it really is about creating a kind of efficiency in your garden or your farm where the things that need a lot of water would be closest to your water source and kind of like that. I'm paraphrasing it and there might be people who know more about it who are going to be mortified by how I'm describing it but that's kind of how I thought of it. It's about this efficiency of resources and energy in growing things.
So there are these zones. So he applied this zone idea to his relationships and I think it was -- it kind of came out of this thing that I certainly have experienced where I don't think about my time with other people in a way that is . . . it's not very thoughtful. So if somebody reaches out to me who I barely know but don't hate I might spend time with them and then I don't have time for other people who actually are more important to me.
(27:50)
So he had this zone thing that he came up with where zone one was really the people he's closest to and zone five was I think people he doesn't even know exists. [Laughter] So I read this and I just thought about who are the people who I feel like I really want to be investing most of my time in? And I put their names on a post-it note that I'm even looking at right now. There's Kat and Mariah and Sabrina and Liz and Aisha. And it changes a little bit, like I'll revisit it if it feels like . . . like right now the people who live geographically far away from me are not people who I'm spending as much time focused on because I actually think that even though I can't physically see people I actually am showing up and leaving food for people or we're just aware of where each other are geographically because I'm a little apocalyptic and I feel like if shit goes down I need to know where my folks are.
Ann: You need to know who you're running with, right? Yeah. Or bunkering with, yeah.
Mia: Exactly. Exactly. You know, and I made this list and partly it was a way to remind myself -- you know, I work at home and it's really easy for me to kind of not see or be in touch with people for long periods of time. So I made the list in part to just remind myself that oh, I haven't heard from Dana in a while. I should reach out to her. And part of me felt like an asshole, like having to write this down, that I need to write down the people who I love so I don't forget to reach out to them.
But I was also like well this is just me being honest about how I am and me making a commitment to trying to do better with the people that I love. So it allowed me to be like oh, yeah, I'm looking at Allison's name on here. Allison just had a baby. It's been a few days since I heard from her. I know having a baby is a big deal. I should just reach out to her and check in and see how she's doing. And that's how it's worked and I feel like there's a way in which it helps me prioritize, you know, I don't reach out to the people who are not on the list as often. They may reach out to me. But I'm just more thoughtful about how I'm spending time with people. And I think that that prioritization of my time, because that is one of my resources, it is a kind of energy. It means if I'm prioritizing those people in terms of my time I'm also prioritizing them in terms of my energy so more is flowing from me to them. And that just feels more aligned with how I want to be in my relationships with people.
(30:25)
Ann: And the names on that list, if we sort of take the conventional or American Dream model, are those people who kind of have different labels? You know, friend, biological family, like work people. Or are they all . . . is it a mix? It's not just friends right?
Mia: So there's no . . . I didn't put people on here -- like I didn't put anybody in my household on here.
Ann: Got it, got it.
Mia: I don't need to reach out to them.
Ann: Fair. [Laughs]
Mia: I don't have my biological or legal family on here. I mean I think they're all friends but they're all kin in some way.
Ann: Of course.
Mia: They're people who I consider some kind of closer group of people. And it's funny, in the book I talk a little bit about the language that we have for labeling relationships. But I also think that largely for me the purpose of understanding there are actually all these rich . . . there is this rich language that exists outside of English for how we understand relationships. It wasn't so I could apply those things to my relationships but they were a signal that there are actually many kinds of friendships and I just need to recognize that each of my relationships is its own, you know, like my friendships have their own culture and kind of what exists inside of a relationship I have with somebody is something that the two of us get to determine and that we don't have to rely on the label of friendship to define what that is. And that's part of what was so life-giving about some of the conversations that I had with people in the book about friendship was the way it just kind of exploded all of the notions that we kind of grow up with about what friendship really is and the boundaries that exist around friendship. And I was like oh, I can throw those boundaries out and me and Sean and me and Erica can decide for ourselves what this relationship is and how we want to be in it with each other.
(32:25)
Ann: Ugh, which is a perfect lead-in to my last question for you which is about this detail in the chapter about friendship that in English the word friend and freedom have the same root.
Mia: Yes.
Ann: And I . . . hearing you talk about being able to determine the kinds of accountability you have to each other in each friendship really . . . I really feel that in my bones when I hear you talk about that. How do you see friendship expanding each of our chances of getting free?
Mia: [Laughs] I mean part of it is just like we can't do this alone. Even the insular nuclear family is a form of individualism right? It's this idea that the self-sufficient group of three or four people, two of whom are adults, is just going to do all these things ourselves. There's the piece I kind of talk about in the book about learning that friendship and freedom have the same root and that freedom, like the way that I think Americans understand it which is writ large right now by people refusing to wear masks, is this very like toxic, individualistic thing that kind of leads us towards hoarding and building walls and security forces because we have to protect our stuff.
(34:00)
But the original meaning of freedom was actually about how in a group, like you're part of a tribe, you're part of a group of people, and collectively you are all enabling the well-being of each other. You are making sure everybody has what they need. Everybody gets fed and clothed and sheltered and cared for when they're sick and loved. Everybody contributes in the way that they can. Everybody's valued because they exist. And I just think -- I'm like oh, of course, like we can't be free by ourselves. I think the most liberated self requires that we are in relationship with other people who are supporting our liberation and that we are in turn doing that with other people.
Ann: Ugh, I'm just going to end it right there because I cannot think of a better sentiment to conclude our conversation. Mia thank you so, so much for taking the time to be on the show.
Mia: Thank you so much for having me.
[Interview Ends]
Aminatou: Ann that was amazing!
Ann: The communities we actually want rather than those we've been told to want. Like wow. Thank you to Mia Birdsong for this book, How We Show Up. Go read it. It's the perfect follow-up book to Big Friendship quite frankly. And as always a quick reminder you can get Big Friendship anywhere you purchase books, ideally somewhere independent, and you can find all sorts of information about it at bigfriendship.com.
Aminatou: I hope that you can get out of the closet into the air conditioning. I will see you on the Internet boo-boo.
Ann: See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: Anyway, you can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favorite platforms. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back. You can leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf. Our producer is Jordan Bailey and this podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.