Nico lang, welcome to Writer's Voice. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. You write that you wanted to find the universal in the anecdotal and the anecdotal in the universal. So tell us what you mean by that. Say more about your approach to this book. Sure. You know, when we were pitching this book around to potential publishers, it seemed like people really wanted me to flatten the stories of these kids and kind of make an argument for why like all trans kids are the same or like present one kind of trans teen. And it's just like, I've been a reporter for a really long time, you know, working with these families, and I know they're all so different. So to me, it seemed like the only approach was to let these kids be as like special and unique and idiosyncratic and interesting as possible, and let that sort of difference shine through. I also thought that for the reader, it just makes a more interesting experience that rather than getting the same story seven times over and over again, you're getting these stories that take you to really like unexpected places, these like places you didn't think you would go in a book like this. And I really relished in that opportunity to let each of these stories be just like as singular as they were, rather than ever trying to like, draw false parallels or make an argument that all these kids are the same. To me, the particularity of these stories is what makes them universal. I was reading a lot of John Steinbeck when I was writing this book, and I think that sometimes you can sort of see that maybe a little too much in the prose. But what I love about Steinbeck is that we often call his writing really universal because it feels like it speaks to these universalities of human experience, but he's actually writing about these really insular communities in California and Salinas Valley. And I thought, you know, here, why couldn't it be the same? Why couldn't we see a greater truth of human experience by focusing on the really singular, unique experiences of these particular kids? And when you said that it brought you to some places that you didn't expect, could you give us an example of that? Oh, no. I meant for the reader. Because I think there are lots of things in this book that a reader maybe wouldn't anticipate the book talking about. There's a fun little digression where Jack in Florida, she's a trans 19-year-old girl there. We just stand on the balcony for an hour debating Kierkegaard. And I loved keeping that in. As soon as we were having that conversation, it was like, oh, this has got to go in the book. And I loved keeping that in because it was the kind of way in which trans kids, I feel like, never get to see themselves being portrayed. It's having a kind of mundane human moment in which we're just both talking about a book that we've read. I mean, I feel like cis kids and straight people have gotten those kinds of experiences and that kind of representation in books and literature and film and media for as long as those forms have existed. But I don't think that trans kids have gotten to see themselves that way very often. And just those mundane little details that make up a day. I really wanted to populate this book with as much of them as possible because then you get the sense that these kids are moving about the world in the same way that you do, which seems like it's kind of a duh thing, but I think a lot of people are still getting there. They treat these kids like they're monsters and aliens rather than human beings who have the same kinds of human being experiences that they do. And I just wanted to show people that. This is a very show, don't tell book. And I hope that by spending a day with these kids and seeing life through their eyes, that you end up learning a lot from it. Oh, absolutely. And they really do come forward as individuals, but all of them do face a pretty horrific landscape that is not getting any better, at least not so far. And so let's just spend a little bit of time orienting our listeners to that landscape. So you talk about kids who have had a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Tell us what that is, because I think people have, you know, in general have an idea of it, but there are a lot of misconceptions, I think, that come with that diagnosis. Sure. I think I'll take it out of like the science doctory realm, because that's just not my like, that's not really my bag. But you know, I think what these kids are experiencing that's important is an incongruence with the gender that they were assigned, or the sex rather, that they were assigned at birth. So let's say that you're me, you were assigned male at birth, and it doesn't comport with who you are, like the fullness of your identity, you might come to understand who you are differently from that gender that you were assigned at birth. Some people call that gender dysphoria, but really, you know, it's just the experience of what it means to be trans, or in my case specifically, what it means to be non-binary. I'm somebody who doesn't identify as male or female, and I don't really identify as something in between either. There are people who sort of see themselves along a gender spectrum, whereas I just kind of, like one of the kids in the book actually, I just don't identify with like the concept at all. Everyone has a really particular experience of gender, and I think that comes through in this book, that for these kids, there's no one way to be trans or non-binary. They all have very contrasting opinions about what it means to be trans and what their gender means to them. And I'm so glad that the book was this way, because I think it really does a good job of getting past the idea that there's any singular definition of this stuff. It's just the definition is, or the answer is, whatever way brings these kids comfort in their daily lives, whatever feels true to them, whatever feels like it will be a light for them along their journey, you know, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, that's what their gender is. And would you say that then it also differs when they begin to question or begin to have that gender dysphoria? Because I know with a lot of kids who do think of themselves who are, in fact, a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth, that it often happens at a very young age. Has that been your experience, or do you think that's a necessary thing, or is that just more fluid? I mean, I honestly don't really know. And I always hate, you know, painting with too broad of a brush. So here's what I'll say, that I'm always really in awe of those kids who are able to come out at such young ages and who know themselves so well, because when I was really young, like I didn't even have words like non-binary, right? Like I was born in 1988. So when I was five or six, you know, this is like the early 90s, like words like that weren't available to me. They weren't available to me until college, right? So I didn't even know that that was a possibility of something that I could be. And you know, when you don't have those kinds of identities or those kinds of options presented to you, it can be really difficult to figure out who you are, because you're sort of fumbling around in the dark. So adults who come out much later in life, do you go on this journey of kind of making up for lost time, you know, having these like, you know, teenage experiences or young adult experiences that you didn't get at the time, like a girlhood or a boyhood or a transhood that you didn't have access to, or you didn't get to experience. And that can be really hard. It sometimes feels like you're like, immeasurably behind everyone else. But for these kids who come out at such a young age and come to know themselves so well, so young, they don't have to do that. They get to have that childhood in an ideal world. I think one of the conflicts of this book that we explore is that so many of these kids, even though they did come to know themselves at really young ages, don't get the experience of enjoying their childhood because they spend so much of it fighting anti-trans legislation. They spend so much of it trying to educate these anti-trans lawmakers who are still going to do whatever they want anyway. And it's profoundly defeating for some of these kids to think that they're never really going to experience what it feels like to be a kid. And I hope with this book that in some small way it returns that to them, that experience of kidness. And I hope it envisions a world where at some point they don't have to deal with this anymore. Well, let's talk about one of those kids to start with, Micah, who's in Charleston, West Virginia because this is a kid who is fighting anti-trans laws in West Virginia. Tell us about Micah. Yeah, so Micah at the time was 18. They are a black gender fluid kiddo who lives, as you say, in the suburbs of Charleston, West Virginia with their mom, who is a white lesbian. She sort of came out later in life. So she's had to do her own journey in terms of not only coming to terms with who she is, but coming to terms with who Micah is and using the right language and trying to better understand what it means to be gender fluid. So their family's already sort of navigating a lot. And then you do that in West Virginia, which can be quite conservative. I really like West Virginia. I've been several times. I always love going. I love the people there. But it can be a hard fight politically. Micah, in the early days when I'm there, goes to the legislature with a bunch of their friends from summer camp and tries to fight this anti-trans bill that's being put forward. And a Republican lobbyist stands up in front of the group and tells all of these kids that it doesn't matter how many of them protest this bill, that lawmakers are going to do it anyway because it's West Virginia, and the GOP controls like 80 to 90 percent of the legislature, and they can do whatever they want. And that was so heartbreaking and devastating to these kids who really put themselves on the line to do this. Like, it takes a lot of vulnerability and bravery to put yourself out there that way, to beg these lawmakers not to discriminate against you and discriminate against your friends. Like, many of the speakers that day worried that their friends would die if an anti-trans law were to be passed. And it was horrible to witness that. But you have this kid in Micah who's trying to sort of persist anyway. Micah is larger than life, I think is the best way to put it. There are these people that you meet sometimes in life where they sort of sear themselves into your brain and you could never forget them even if you tried. And Micah was like that to me. I met them for the first time at a queer summer camp for youth in West Virginia in rural Appalachia. And they were just like the queen bee of the camp, this ebullient, effervescent, sometimes over-the-top person who was just so full of joy. But when I was there, I really saw the way that West Virginia and these conservative places can sometimes crush that joy. How hard it can be to be yourself in a place that doesn't always have a lot of space for you. And I hope that for kids who read this book and who see what Micah's going through and what they're navigating, that it helps them to know that they're not alone, that they're not doing this by themselves. Because I think that's one of the things that's difficult for Micah. As a black biracial person, there aren't a lot of people of color in West Virginia. I think it's the third least diverse state in the country. And they often lack queer community because it can be really hard to access in a state that's so mountainous. So it can feel profoundly lonely. They can feel so alone in West Virginia. So for other kids who are experiencing the same thing, I hope they know they're not the only ones. Another kid who is dealing with the impact of a conservative legislature is Rydian from Birmingham, Alabama. Tell us about Rydian and how SB 184, the law in Alabama, impacted him. Tell his story and his intersection, you know, his confrontation with the law and the legislature. Rydian's kind of a unique case in this book, and that he's one of the kids who seems to have a lot going for him. He goes to the school called the Magic City Acceptance Academy. It is one of a few LGBTQ plus affirming schools in the entire country, like explicitly LGBTQ plus affirming. So something like 70% of the kids who go to his school are queer. And it's this like Wizard of Oz kind of place where when you, you know, you step inside and it's like stepping from black and white into technicolor. Like there's just so much freedom of expression there. You know, these kids wear like every kind of clothing that you can think of, like all these like colors popping everywhere, this like fabulous hair and every shade and hue you can imagine. It's such an incredible place to be. And Rhydian there is kind of like the most popular kid in school. Like he's very much like that like John Hughes style prom king that you would imagine. All of these kids sort of group around him in every class. He's always the person that everybody wants to talk to or sit near. He's always sort of the leader in every class that he's in, like the first person to raise his hand for a question. And he always just has this confidence about him that really makes people drawn to him. And as a writer, I thought it was important to contrast that with the experience of being a queer person in Alabama because that kind of acceptance can be quite rare. I think that people sometimes overgeneralize with the South in that there are places where you can find affirmation and acceptance and where you can be loved for who you are. But it can be difficult. You know, it can be a quite conservative place sometimes. And the way he's experienced it, the experience of being in Alabama, hasn't always been the easiest. When he was, I believe, 18, I sometimes get confused on kid ages because they are always growing. But I believe when he was 18, his top surgery was delayed by the passage of an anti-trans law in Alabama that placed a ban on receiving gender-affirming care for youth until you were 19 years old. And his top surgery had been scheduled, but the doctor wasn't super clear on the parameters of the law, assuming that it only went to 18. So for Rydian, who was over 18, it had to be bumped, and it had been delayed several times due to the rush of anti-trans legislation in the state and just how much chaos all of that caused. There had been all of these hoops and hurdles that he'd had to jump through, and here was yet another one. And for a kid as self-assured as Rydian was, that was a really difficult thing to think that the person he wants to be in this world and the way that he wants to see his body, he was going to have to wait a little bit longer to realize that. And Rydian just felt like he didn't know when that was going to end. And I think for a lot of kids, that was a bit of an open question in terms of how far the state legislatures would go to ban gender-affirming care. Would they stop at 18? Would they stop at 19? Would they stop at 25? Like some lawmakers have pushed bills that would ban gender-affirming care all the way to the age of 25. Some states are trying to ban it altogether. So you have these kids who are forced into the middle of that. And it's just so difficult when you're just trying to live your life and grow up and figure out who you're going to be in this world. You're then battling all of this politically motivated hatred. And it's just overwhelming. Like all of these kids end up doing this incredible activism and advocacy work. I think being in this book is activism and advocacy work, but they just shouldn't have to do it. You should have never had to deal with this at such a young age, you should just get to be a kid. Yeah. And also he faced at a certain point there was medication that was he was kind of in the midst of doing some puberty blocking. No, he was his was all about surgery. So what happened, though, there was one point in which he missed a medication, a dose of his medication, and it took a couple of weeks, I think, to get it refilled. And during that, it's sort of like he saw himself very like being de-transitioned for like half a second. And because of that, it made him have some experience or some understanding of what it would mean to have his medication taken away altogether. So let me let me ask that in a different way then, because a lot of these kids now are going to face being unable to access medically appropriate care for gender dysphoria, which means puberty blockers in many cases. Talk a little bit about the experience of, first of all, why a kid would want to take puberty blockers. I mean, what that feels like to a kid and what it feels like to then not be able to do that. What are some of the issues that they deal with when they can't access those, or if they can for up to a certain point and then it's taken away? Sure. I think I'll just try to speak from the experiences of the kids in this book, just because I want to keep it as focused on that as possible. But puberty blockers really just pause puberty and give parents time and kids decide to decide whether transitioning is right for them. Because it's a big decision that no one takes lightly. It's not one that kids take lightly, that their parents take lightly. It's not one that doctors take lightly. So for those children who just need that extra time to decide who they want to be in the world, what do they think that their path is? So it's a tremendously useful tool to these families to just buy them a little extra time. And the way it's been politicized is wild, considering that kids who experience precocious puberty get puberty blockers all the time. This is a medication that's been used for years, decades. So we've just only decided to politicize its use in the past couple of years. But for these kids, I think you can see how hard it is to have their medication taken away from them or to not have access to that medication to begin with. So in Florida, I spent time with two trans siblings there, Jack, who is 19 years old, and her younger sibling, Augie, who is 16 years old. And Jack, when she was 17, was detransitioned by the state of Florida when they decided that kids could no longer get their gender-affirming care covered through Medicaid. So if you'd been on that program, you were kicked off and you just had no way of getting your medication. And for Jack, that meant that she had to wait five months in order to get her medication again. And during that time, she had to watch this body that she fought so hard for slip away. And there was nothing she could do about it. She had no control over what was happening to her. And it was tremendously, like a tremendously difficult time. She would sit in the dark every day in her room and refuse to go out because she was so worried about catching a glimpse of her arm or seeing herself in the mirror. She stopped eating and she got so skinny that her mom would sit beside her every night because she worried about her daughter's heart stopping in her sleep. And I think about this all the time, that nothing like this should ever happen to any person, like any American citizen. This girl was tortured. She was tortured by her own state. But then on top of that, it should definitely not happen to a child, to a 17-year-old girl. I think about when I was 17, how hard it was, not any of this, but just how hard it is to be a 17-year-old. It's difficult. Being a teen is hard. I think I'd forgotten that until I wrote this book, how difficult it is to be a young person and to do the work of figuring out who you're going to be, what you want to do with the rest of your life. Answering these really big questions at such a young age, and then you throw being tortured on top of it by your own state, and I still don't really know how she made it through. I'm really proud of her because Jack is in a pretty good place now. She moved to a different state. She's got a boyfriend, and that seems to be going okay. We've got his eyes on him, but he seems to be all right. She's got a job that she doesn't really care about, but she's working, and she's thinking about going back to school, and she'd never talked about that before with me. Every time I would try to ask her about the future, she would always say that too much optimism had plagued her life, and she didn't even want to think about it. That broke my heart because who wants to hear a kid who just is so beaten down by the world that they don't even know if there is a future for them, so they refuse to even think about it. I would go from that to this girl who seems bubbly and happy, and like she's doing okay. I'm happy that she's happy. I didn't think we'd get here, but I also know it shouldn't have been this hard, and it shouldn't be this hard for so many of these families to be happy and healthy and thriving, because so many of them are doing pretty well despite everything, but it shouldn't have had to be this difficult to get there. Let's talk a little bit about actually some of the more positive experiences some of these kids have. You know, religion is often, especially, let's say, very devout Christians, very devout Muslims. We have an idea that they're very rejecting of transgender people, of the whole notion of transgender. But you have a number of kids who actually have a very positive experience in their religious community. I wonder if you can tell us about Clint. Yeah. You know, what I wanted to show in this book, as I mentioned before, is a real diversity of experiences. Right. So you have these kids who do face religious rejection in their backgrounds, like Wyatt, who's our first kid in South Dakota. He had to leave his church when he came out as trans because he went to this relatively conservative Baptist church that sort of gave his family a choice that Wyatt could either come to church as a girl and deny who he is, or they could leave. And in order to support their kid, they left. And that's the story of a lot of queer folks in religion. That's the story of like my story of religious faith, at least traditionally, I went to also a Baptist church when I was in high school. And when I came out as queer, everybody was pretty cool about it, except for our head pastor who told me that God was waiting for me with a sniper rifle and that he would cut me down, which really led to a lot of questions for me. Is it like open carry in heaven? Does God need a permit for that? It really just opened up a real rhetorical can of worms there. But of course I left because I just knew that even if everybody else was okay with it and loved me and accepted me for who I was and affirmed me for who I was, that it mattered what this one guy thought of me because he was the spiritual director of our church. It's hard to feel like there's space for you if the person who's determining what the space is thinks that God wants to kill you. So it's tough. It took years for me to get to a good space with religion, like I now identify as a Buddhist, which people debate whether it's a religion or not, or whether it's a religion, a faith tradition, or spirituality, or just a philosophical tradition. And I feel such comfort where I'm at. I love going to my temple every week. I've been traveling so much to promote this book that I felt a little crazy not going. And when I got back the first day, I was so excited to be there that I could barely meditate because I was just so amped up. I was just really on high. And so many of these kids will never get that experience, to have a place or a faith tradition where they feel affirmed, or just a safe place where it feels like they can be themselves without scrutiny. So for Clint to have that in Islam, I felt like was really powerful, especially to have that in this religion where I think a lot of people think that you can't, right? Because we have this idea of Islam being this uniform thing and not this religion that over a billion people practice. And I imagine a lot of them practice it in very different ways. So I was really glad to give kids this look into Clint's life and show the world through his eyes because I want people to see that that's possible because we need to know that that's out there. We need to know that you can have families like Clint's who are devout Muslims and still love him exactly for who he is. Because I think that queer people, we know that that's out there probably somewhere, but we rarely ever hear about it. And because we rarely ever think about it, you maybe then start to get that thing in the back of your mind where you go like, oh, can people love me? Can they affirm me? Can they see me for who I am? And the answer is yes, but I think we need to be told that more often. So with Clint being able to see this, it's just, it was just such a gift. It was a gift that he gave to all of us. And I'm glad that I just got to be the messenger of that present. Now there are other kids we haven't talked about, but we are, we're running a little bit out of, a little short on time here. And I know that you recently actually published an article in Them, you talked to some legal experts about the Trump anti-LGBTQ attacks, their agenda. And I can't help, after reading this book and caring about these kids, learning about them and caring about them, wanting to know what you see ahead. I think a lot of us focus on what Trump threatens to do, but what are some of the ways that his agenda can be fought back against? Yeah, what I like to stress to folks is that we don't really know yet what's going to happen. We know what he's told us he said that he's going to do, but we don't really know how that's going to play out. We don't know how that'll play out in Congress. We don't know what executive orders will look like. We don't know how it'll play out in the courts. So we still have at this point a tremendous number of questions that remain unanswered. But here's what he said he's going to do. He has said that he will introduce or fight for, rather, a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care for kids. So that would be all 50 states. So even if you live in a liberal place like California, which is where I live and which is where Kylie's family lives, that would still impact you. But the question is, you know, a couple of things. Is there enough political will in Congress to do something like that? Do they have the votes to do something like that? And then on top of it, like, how will states fight back against it? Because in California, Gavin Newsom has started to sort of like try to Trump proof the state for like four years of another Trump administration. And it remains to be seen like how these things will play out in these clashes between states and the federal government. But then you also have this moment where it feels like a lot of Democrats are backing off from being trans allies, that these Democrats who had been really vocally supportive of the LGBTQ plus community for a long time, have decided that trans people are politically unpopular. So they've backed off, even though that's not necessarily true. It is a misreading polls. That's the sort of political calculus that they've made. So on top of a medical care ban, we're, we're possibly facing a don't say gay style ban on LGBT affirming education in schools. We're possibly seeing a trans youth sports ban. I'm targeting kids who play on sports teams in K through 12 and potentially college teams. And then on top of that, you know, if that's not nearly enough, they're also doing things like targeting bathrooms. Now we're seeing that in the federal legislature with what's happening with Sarah McBride. They have decided that the first trans Congresswoman cannot use a multi occupancy public bathrooms on in the U S Capitol. So if they're willing to do that to their own colleague, it makes me wonder what they're willing to do to trans kids that they don't even know in schools across the country. So again, there remain a lot of open questions here, but the thing that keeps me hopeful is that there are so many attorneys and advocates who are dedicated to fighting this and that you've got legal outfits like the ACLU, glad with one a who are going to expend every resource they have. I'm keeping this from happening to kids and to young people in this country. Like I talked to one of the attorneys from glad the other day, glad with one a, and I asked him, you know, what keeps him going right now? Like where does he find hope? And he said that he finds hope in the fact that he has a job to do. His job is to be an attorney, to be an advocate, to fight for people. And he knows what his role is. So you know, you can think about all the things you don't know about, or you know, stay up at night thinking about all the hypotheticals, or you can do your job and fight. And he's doing his job in fighting. Well that's great. And Nicolang, thank you so much for talking with us about this book, American Teenager. It's just great. Yeah, thank you. Lili Tuck, welcome to Writer's Voice. Thank you. Thank you very much. This novel, The Rest is Memory, is about a young Polish Catholic girl, a 14-year-old girl, who was sent to Auschwitz with her parents. Her father was separated. She's with her mother. First of all, I just want to ask you, what drew you to this story? Because this is a novel that is based on true events and even true people. I start out by saying that first, I always read the New York Times obituaries, and I just find them very, very interesting. I mean, just they're like little histories, I think, about art, economics, whatever. But 10 years ago, I read the obituary of someone called Wilhelm Bras. Wilhelm Bras turned out to be an official photographer at Auschwitz, and the obituary included three photographs that he'd taken. He took 40,000 photographs of the inmates who came to Auschwitz, and the photograph that he included, there's three because he always took three photographs straight on, sideways, and a three-quarter view, and the photographs he included, I'm repeating myself, was of Cecilia Wachowka. And I was so moved by the photographs, I mean, the very innocent, beautiful little face that I cut out the pictures, and this is 10 years ago, and put them in a box that I have where I keep things that might be of interest or are of interest. And when I finished my last novel and was looking around for something to do or something to write, rather, I went back to this box and found the photographs and decided that I would try and write about her. So tell us a little bit about Cecilia Wachowka and where she's from. She's from a town called, a village rather, it's a tiny village called Wolka Słodziecka, which is in southeast Poland, very close to the Ukrainian border, and close to a town called Samos, a beautiful, beautiful Renaissance style town. And I think, I really don't know very much about her life, except the people that lived in that area were farmers, and I think they were quite poor, and the land belonged to one of the biggest landholders in Poland, the Zamoyski family. They actually owned 500,000 acres of Poland, in Poland, they were the second largest landowners after the Radziwiłłs, so the farmers who, like Cieslawa's father and mother, they didn't actually own the land, it belonged to the Zamoyski family. And yeah, in a way, they were almost serfs, although I guess they didn't have to work for the landowner. But that landowner actually turned out to be a fairly decent person after the occupation of Poland by the Nazis, and this book is, of course, centered on that. So tell us a little bit more about Cieslawa, not as an actual person, but as a character. Well, I tried to be very respectful, and I didn't want to, you know, have her have sort of adventures or romances. I wanted to keep very much to sort of everyday things like she has a favorite chicken, her father makes her help him during the birth of calf, so very, very sort of ordinary tasks. I didn't want her to stand out in any way, although she does have a slight crush on a boy who takes her on a motorcycle ride, but that's just passing. I mean, it's hard to really describe what she was like. Very innocent, not ignorant, but the Germans had stopped all the schools and all the universities. They shut them all down. So for the last two years, Haslodwa had not gone to school. The Germans had decreed that it was good enough for the Polish children to know how to spell their name and to count up to 500. So you know, she certainly was not, I mean, sophisticated is just not even the right word at all. I mean, she was very, very, I don't want to say simple, but... Yeah, I think that's a good description, and there's nothing wrong with being simple, unless of course it's the result of not being able to have an education on purpose. So now this was a Polish Catholic family, Catholic village. She doesn't even know what Jews are. Most people think of the inmates at Auschwitz as being Jews, although there were of course many Russians and other Poles and gypsies and political prisoners. So why were these people sent to concentration camps? Well, after the Germans exterminated or imprisoned all the Jews in Poland, which they did early on in 1941, they went after the rest of the Polish population. Hitler decreed at one point that no Pole would remain in Poland, that the entire Poland would be completely repopulated with Germans. And they started this, to do this, in the first area where they started to do this was where Sreslawa lived, the Lublin province or the Samost area. And that's where they started their attempt to repopulate Poland with Germans. And so they wanted to get rid of all the Germans. Some of them they sent as slave laborers, some of them, particularly very small children who looked Aryan, they Germanized, and the rest of the people they sent to Auschwitz from the area, and there were about 1000 of them. And it's all documented in a book that I found at the Holocaust Library in Auschwitz and all their names, when they were sent to Auschwitz and when they died. And it was their policy. And Poland is 95% Catholic, the Jews were definitely a minority. And I would say that most farmers and people who lived in the area where Czesława lived were unaware of Jews. I mean, they had very little contact with them. The Jews lived in cities for the most part. They weren't farmers. So it was brutal. And also, I mean, it started earlier because the Russians had come in before World War II and gotten rid of a lot of the farmers and Poles and sent them to Siberia as slave laborers. And then the Germans came and got rid of them as well. So I mean, there were just 3 million Poles, civilian Poles, not Jews, died during World War II. And it was a fifth of the population. And I mean, I'm just quoting statistics now, but Poland was the country who suffered the most loss of population during World War II, more than any other European country. And we are talking with Lily Tuck about her latest novel, The Rest is Memory. You not only interweave historical events along with, you know, you have the references at the bottom of the page, but, you know, there are paragraphs in which you note the fate of certain people and certain things that happened. But you also move back and forth in time, often from paragraph to paragraph, and in a way that contrasts the life in Auschwitz, in the concentration camp, with the life that your characters had before. I found this a very powerful method, especially maybe now, but I am thinking a lot these days about the normal life that I'm living and how radically it can change or could change in the coming year or years because of our election, and how normal life could be so completely upended, and how many people already, their lives have been completely upended. So this contrast between, you know, the so-called daily life of Sesslowa before she was taken and after was particularly affecting. So I wonder if you could comment on your use of that. I think I, more and more, I tend to write in an anecdotal way. My last previous books, I write in small paragraphs with lots of white spaces, and I think that allows me to go back and forth, sort of, not randomly, certainly, I mean, I think about it, but it allows me the freedom to go into the past or into people's memories and then go forward into the future by using these very short paragraphs or fairly short paragraphs. I don't know if that answers your question, really. Well, that sounds good, I'm glad, yeah. So Lily Tuck, there are some other characters that I was so interested to learn about. Tell us about, and I don't have any idea if I'm pronouncing these names correctly, but Janusz Korczak, tell us about who he was and why you included him. He's an incredibly well-known Polish writer and he was a pediatrician and he ran an orphanage in Warsaw and he also wrote these children's books, the most famous, which is called Kayak, the Wizard, and it's very much sort of an early Harry Potter, because Kayak, the Wizard, can do all sorts of things, but he mainly creates havoc. But I have it be Saslawa's favorite book that she quotes from because she knows it so well and she's read it so many times that she knows passages by heart. But Janusz Korczak, there's a biography of him, and strangely enough, my editor said that was the first book he published was the biography of Janusz Korczak. But he's very, very well known, and he was very, very, very brave, because when the orphanage was filled with Jewish children and they had to live in a ghetto in Warsaw, and then eventually they all were sent to Treblinka, and people remember seeing Janusz Korczak leading the children to the train, two by two, they were all dressed in their best, holding their heads up and being so, so courageous as he was. So he's a very, very well-known figure in Poland, and of course the children died and he died as well. One source that you use a fair amount, and you mentioned in the Afterword, is Tadeusz Borowski. Again, I don't know if I pronounced his first name correctly. I knew his work, I knew his book about Auschwitz because, as some of my listeners know, I did a lot of research and wrote a book about the war. My father was involved in the Dutch Resistance, and there were people that he knew that ended up in Auschwitz. So I did a lot of reading about this, and I just wanted to say, when I read his work, I was so powerfully affected that I was traumatized, actually. And I just wondered, and when I say traumatized, I mean I felt physically ill. I had so much, I had to really struggle with reading about what happened in that camp. And your work also does not mince words about what happened, and I just wondered, how did you feel reading about the horrors of Auschwitz? You know, I mean, we all know about them for so long now, you know, that unless one particular incident stands out, it's not that we're inured, no, no, no, but it's not as raw or rough as it could be, I don't think. And the main trouble I had doing the research was looking at pictures, photographs of the children, you know, totally starving, undernourished children with legs and arms like sticks. And so I would put post-its over all the photographs so I wouldn't have to look at them. I also decided, you know, at one point, I thought, well, maybe I should go to Auschwitz and see things. But, you know, I know in my head, I can see the rooms full of hair and shoes and clothes and everything. I mean, I think we've all been exposed to all that already, you know. So, but back to Tadeusz Borowski, I mean, his short stories in This Way for the Gas Chamber, ladies and gentlemen, I mean, that's really shocking and the piece that I include where, you know, somebody grabs a woman by the hair and throws her in the truck because she's trying to escape her child so she won't go to the gas chamber. I mean, that stays in my head forever and ever. Yes, and we do know, and I've known since I was a child about these horrors and atrocities, and yet I still had that reaction because violence is violence that we feel. I mean, when we read about it and we hear about it, it affects us, and one of the things that struck me about this novel, The Rest is Memory, is that the violence isn't just from the Germans. The brutality comes from all sides, Russians, the Poles, Ukrainians, fathers, husbands, and I've been thinking a lot about violence lately, I think, because I can imagine that it's going to really accelerate. And so reading this novel now, for me, was entirely different than it would have been had I read it before the election. What about you? You wrote it before the election. What are your thoughts about that now? Well, you know, I'm horrified at what's happening, of course, of course, and I was so hopeful that Kamala Harris would win. I mean, I almost thought she might, I did think she might. Yeah, I don't know, my background is so, I'm not used to violence, but, you know, both my parents were German, they left Germany in 1933, for the obvious reasons, then they had to leave France, and they went to France, where I was born. And then from France, we had to leave, my father was interned by the French, not because he was Jewish, but because he was German, he ended up joining the French Foreign Legion, my mother and I went to South America, we spent the war in South America, then back to France and back to America. So I feel there wasn't any real violence there, but there was a lot of displacement, and so I think I've become a little bit tougher. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, you know, I hate to get into it, Trump has been compared to Hitler and everything, but I wasn't thinking about that when I was writing this, obviously, no. Yes, no, I would think so, but I think it does, because I think for so many of us, you know, we think of events like the ones in this novel, in the rest of this memory, as being, you know, as difficult as it may be to read about, or as sad as it is, we feel a little distance from it, and I feel less distance from that now, reading this book now. And I wanted to ask you about the title, The Rest is Memory. Talk about memory and trauma. Well, the title comes from the Louis Gluck poem called Nostos, and the line before it goes, we look at the world once in childhood, rest is memory. Yeah, I have many, many memories, and I'm 86 now, and I have a lot of memories, and I spend a lot of time remembering things, yeah, because my life is relatively quiet, so I don't have too many events besides this book going on, and that's large right now, but normally my life is very quiet. So I do spend a lot of time remembering, remembering my childhood, remembering Peru, remembering my parents, my grandmother, yeah. And of course remembering, I mean, remembering what has happened as this book does, I think is something that's so, it's just so fundamental to connecting ourselves as human beings in a human community to each other. You know, so much of our life these days, memory just seems to get shorter and shorter and shorter, and we seem to be doomed to repeating some of the worst mistakes of our kind. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's a beautiful book, it's quite short, it's a very powerful book to read. And Lily Tuck, I want to thank you so much for talking with us about The Rest is Memory. Thank you, Francesca, a pleasure, really, I feel very honored that you've had me. Thank you. Thank you.