Transcript for Writing Your Resilience Episode Forty-Nine
The Power of Micro Memoir with Amy Lin

How do you dive into the marrow of an experience we’ll all one day share, yet so many of us struggle to talk about? And how do you write into a topic so widely covered that it feels impossible to say something new? Today, I’m joined by Amy Lin, author of the stunning micro memoir Here After, as we tackle these questions head-on.   

Together, we’ll explore the raw realities of grief, how Amy’s memoir acts as a powerful container for this universal experience, the magic of the micro form, and what it takes to create something experimental. Plus, I’ll share a transformative tool to expand how you see your stories—and uncover the truths hiding within them. Get ready to reflect, learn, and, most importantly, write your way through.   Let’s dive in!

Lisa [0:00]:
 Amy, I am so glad to have you on the podcast today, and the reason I am so excited about our conversation is because four people wrote to me personally and said, Amy Lin has to be on your show.

Amy [0:16]:
 That's so kind. Thank you so much for having me and thank you to the four people who connected me with you. I think it's so cool when art of any kind—be it podcasts, writing, or even just the art of feeling—connects people. You know, I have been connected in that way, and I'm really grateful and honestly always moved by the ways in which Curtis and our life together continue to connect me with people.

Lisa [0:44]:
 That is one of the beautiful things about writing about these profoundly difficult experiences. It gives you a chance to say Curtis's name again and again, which is so important when we’ve lost people who mean so much to us.

Amy [0:58]:
 Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s really the lodestar of the book. It’s Curtis—the kind of man he was, and the way he moved through the world. I remember very early on when the book sold, my agent encouraged me to define, before anybody else defined it for me, what success looked like for the book.

That differs for everybody. I naively assumed that most of our lists would look the same. But every person I asked had different things in their top three lists of what success meant. For me, my guiding light of success has always been that Here After would introduce as many people as possible to the man Curtis was, so he could continue to be known by people far beyond just my small sphere.

The book has really done that, and that feels like such a gift. I think that’s the gift art offers us in so many ways.

Lisa [2:08]:
 Absolutely. And I’m going to hold up a copy of the book—it’s so beautiful. If you’re on YouTube, you’re seeing this. If you’re listening, go to your favorite place to buy books and look it up. And not only look it up—buy your copy if you haven’t already—because it’s a gorgeous book. The cover is amazing, and everything inside it is just exquisitely rendered.

We’re going to talk about what’s inside it, but I always like to give authors the first chance to tell us what the book is about, or what you’d like us to know about it.

Amy [2:41]:
 Thank you. Here After is really a book that came from pain. It was important to me that it reflect the realities of my grief.

That’s to say, my grief is just one woman’s grief. There are so many different kinds of people and so many different kinds of grief. It was never intended to be some kind of monolithic idea of what grief looks like.

One thing I knew was that a lot of people, regardless of the kind of grief they’re in, feel like they should be in less pain. I wanted the book to be a place where people could meet their pain and draw others into it. Maybe their pain isn’t exactly like mine, but it might feel something like it.

I wanted to give people a physical object they could offer others to help communicate the texture of their lived experience. That felt really important to me. It’s also a book about love—the kind of radical love Curtis lived as his highest good. That love has left fingerprints all over my life. I want people to know it changes us in profound ways.

Lisa [4:35]:
 I love that it cracked that open for you. As someone who’s also experienced sudden loss, though a different one—my brother Joe died by suicide nearly 30 years ago—your book really connected with me.

Reading it, I felt nurtured in a way that brought me back to the rawness of early grief. When I was at that stage, I didn’t have words. Your book articulates the experience of pain and validates its importance.

You know, I’ve been thinking about something Yishun Lai said. She’s a writer and fantastic on TikTok—so authentically herself. She talked about how we often give people a break when they express discomfort. I’ll share her TikTok in the show notes.

For years, when I told someone I’d lost my brother, and they said, “I’m sorry,” I’d reply, “It’s okay.” But it’s not okay. We armor up—to protect ourselves and to shield others from their discomfort.

Amy [6:17]:
 Yeah, exactly. I think we’re socialized to do that. Most of us want others not to suffer. It’s a good and human instinct, but when grievers and non-grievers enter a conversation, both want to help the other person.

What happens, though, is the griever pretends their pain isn’t so bad, and the other person tries to cheer them up. But neither of those things truly helps. There’s no way to “cheer up” a grieving person.

Grief is pain. It doesn’t just go away. Some days, it might feel different, but it’s always there. The burden of love is that we grieve those we care about. That’s the beautiful, brutal responsibility of love.

Part of what I wanted Here After to do was offer a space where people could be honest—where they could say, “I see how much pain you’re in,” or “Thank you for being here.” That’s when we’re truly good to one another.

Lisa [8:47]:
We aren’t taught how to deal with these things. One thing you talk about in your book is the “good signs”—how Grievers try to offer them and how others look for them. Could you share what the good signs were for you?

Amy [9:16]:
 For me, the good signs rarely reflected my true feelings. For instance, I always wore makeup—it’s a habit of mine—but it didn’t mean I wanted to live more.

People often conflate external appearances with internal realities. That’s another layer of grief that grievers might not be equipped to handle. It’s important to ask how they’re really doing. If we allowed greater complexity in our conversations about grief, we’d all treat one another more tenderly.

Lisa [11:26]:
 Absolutely. I think that we get caught up in what I'll call the performance of grief, you know? When people are performing grief—which is often what happens at a funeral: the crying, the sadness, or certain kinds of expressions—even though we all grieve differently, we don’t want to say, oh, there’s only one way to grieve, and that performance is legitimate while others are not, because it’s not true. But there’s a difference between the performance of grief and the realities of grief.

The realities of grief are that you carry it with you wherever you go—it’s there whether you’re performing it or not. Whether you have on the “good look” or not. You know, your hair is done, your makeup is on—it doesn’t matter.

Amy [12:14]:
 The performance of grief is just the vision or view of grief that we’re used to seeing. It’s still so much a part of it. If your nose is running while you cry, that’s so legitimate. Of course, I cried. I cry so much—I still cry all the time. But, as you said, there are so many other shades, representations, and faces of grief that we see less often.

I think we don’t have a curriculum for grief. We aren’t educated to understand that, for some people, they won’t cry for years because their version of grief is very different from the traditional one we expect to see. But that doesn’t mean that person is any less devastated by their feelings. They’re just expressing them differently, and that’s okay.

Lisa [12:57]:
 I think there are cultural components around what grief looks like based on where you come from and what you’ve been taught. Some grief is very quiet.

Amy [13:11]:
 And some grief is really ritualized and loud. There are cultures with open mourning ceremonies, rituals around loss—and all of that informs how you grieve. Who your ancestors are, who your parents are, even the neighborhood you grew up in as a child—all of it informs what comes to the surface in grief. And grief has this way of bringing everything to the surface.

Lisa [13:37]:
 One of the teaching moments in your book that blew my mind—though I already knew it—is how we’ve used the stages of grief and what they were really meant for.

Amy [13:55]:
 It is mind-blowing. I learned about it, and I continue to talk about it, but it’s still so shocking. Most of us go through life thinking, oh, there are five stages of grief, and that’s what grief is. Then you learn, as I did, that the stages were intended for people processing their own mortality.

The study focused on people who were terminally ill, who knew they were dying soon. The five stages arose from their experiences as they wrestled with their impending mortality. These stages were never meant to apply to other kinds of bereavement.

Somewhere along the way, we lost that distinction. Now, the stages are applied universally, despite the growing body of knowledge showing that grief isn’t staged. Grief doesn’t have predictable outcomes. It isn’t finite.

There’s no phase you pass through and then leave behind. Grief is a lifelong process of integrating the loss and the love you experienced when someone dies. That’s well-established in grief studies, but it hasn’t rocked the bedrock belief in the five stages.

Perhaps that’s because of our human desire not to be in pain. It’s appealing to believe we could leave grief behind. I know that next week marks four years since Curtis died. Some days, I feel like I’m back in those early days of grief. It doesn’t ever leave—it just becomes less frequent. But some days, it’s like I’m right back there.

Lisa [16:12]:
 Absolutely, and my heart is connecting to yours. I just want to say I’ll be thinking about you next week as you hold space for that anniversary. They’re always interesting, complicated, wonderful, and unpredictable.

Sometimes, the week or month leading up to it is incredibly hard, and then the day itself is a relief. Other times, it surprises you. That happened to me this year. In February, I was at the AWP conference. I was going to speak that afternoon, but that morning was the anniversary of my brother’s loss.

It had been 27 years, and you’d think, That’s a long time, right? But I found myself sobbing uncontrollably over my eggs. Yet, a part of me wasn’t shocked. I thought, Yeah, I know.

I love what you said about grief always being soon. It’s so true. I’d call your grief young grief.

Amy [18:07]:
 Yeah, me too. It’s toddler grief.

Lisa [18:09]
Exactly. Mine is older. The difference between young and older grief is recognizing it happens and accepting it. Like, oh, I’m crying over my eggs. Of course I am. I’ll go back to my hotel room, have a breakdown, put on my makeup, and participate on my panel.

Amy [18:34]:
 Exactly. A poet once gave me a beautiful gift around the second anniversary of Curtis’s death. I was in line at a residency dinner, and she asked about the book I was working on. I said, Yeah, the two-year anniversary is in a few weeks.

She said, That’s soon. I immediately started crying. She saw the full breadth of my pain, and it was a relief. Grief therapy taught me that the first five years are acute. Later, I spoke to a man whose son died 20 years ago. I told him, that must feel soon some days. He cried and said, yes, some days it’s like he might just come back.

Lisa [20:30]:
 And year two is often worse than year one.

Amy [20:34]:
 Worse—brutal for me.

Lisa [20:39]
It was for me, too. In American society, we’re expected to be done after a year. But as you said, some days it feels so soon. Grief is love looking for a place to go.

Amy [21:13]: 
Grief is the final form of love, and it is the final place, the final way that love manifests itself as we move through the world. And certainly for me, when Curtis and I got married, we were young, and we thought that time was going to be gentle. I never really thought about how far love would take us. And in my case, it took me all the way to the crematorium.

That wasn’t a place I thought about when I imagined the end of love. I didn’t think about a crematorium, but it is a part of the journey. Even though, yes, it felt sacred to me, that was as far as I could go. And then I went a little bit further when I wrote the book. I’ve always been grateful for that—that love has allowed me to continue its journey with Curtis, even though Curtis has gone beyond me.

Lisa [22:09]: 
I’m just sitting with all that for a second. So, if you’re listening to the podcast, that is the silence because this is such a love story.

The people who wrote to me—one person I’m thinking about—I don’t know if she wants her name on air, so I’m not going to say it. But you know who you are. This is a person who holds a lot of grief in her life about a variety of things. Your book is both a grief and a love story. It’s both/and, and it’s written in this unique way.

You’ve embraced this micro form that’s very nonlinear, moving back and forth a lot, not necessarily with strict logic, as some books do. In that way, it mirrors grief. How did you know this was the right structure for the book, and what did this structure teach you about writing—and about writing about grief?

Amy [23:10]: 
Such a good question.

I chose the structure because it was essential to me that the book mirror the experience of grief as I was experiencing it. I find that grief shatters time. It shatters the illusion that we, in any way, can control time. It shattered the illusion of a past and a present for me because my past lived at the same frequency, sometimes even more intensely, than what was happening to me.

My life with Curtis felt more real to me than the realities of grieving him. Grief puts us in this liminal space where there isn’t any time. It puts us in a space where we’re trying to catch up to a reality we have absolutely no way of grasping.

What we do understand is the beloved. They feel more real. Yes, they actually are real. The only way I could replicate that in writing was to use the present tense—so everything, even things that happened in the past, still happens actively. I also moved in and out of what is past and what is present.

Those moments lived exactly beside each other because, when you’re in grief, you’re living outside of time. Those moments are happening to you, just like everything else is happening to you. So, it was important to me to mirror that.

It’s funny—writing in that way revealed to me the power of our lived experience. People often say, “You remember so much about Curtis and his life.” Part of that is because I was obsessed with Curtis and wanted to know everything about him. The other part is because grief heightens what we remember.

Grief makes everything feel Technicolor. Memories flood back, almost as if they’re returning to us before they leave. During that time, I acutely felt the need to hold on to as much as I could because I knew, as is the nature of life, I would lose it. I wanted to pin down as many butterflies as I could.

I didn’t get all of them, and a book can’t hold all of them, but I got a lot of them. I’m grateful for that. I needed Here After to be a place for grief—but also for Curtis. I wanted to preserve as much of the lived details of him as I could.

In terms of what this taught me about writing, an unexpected lesson was realizing I wrote something experimental. That wasn’t my intention. I set out to write something true to my experience. But grief bent me out of shape. How could I write about it in a narrative container obedient to the tyranny of time?

This structure does not obey the traditional narrative arc or the idea of time in a memoir. That’s because grief doesn’t answer to traditional containers. I wanted to make space for grief to live as it is.

Lisa [27:31]: 
I love the answer you just gave because, with the microform, we can hold space for that experience.

For people who have experienced profound loss—which we all will at some point—the experimental form mirrors grief. People who’ve grieved will get it. They’ll say, “Oh yeah, this is what it’s like for me to go back and forth in time.”

I’ve worked with authors who’ve experienced deep grief. Sometimes, they need to write a linear story to tame the chaos—that’s an important piece of their process. But trying to emulate that back-and-forth in a linear story often doesn’t work.

If you’d written this as a linear, three-act hero’s journey, all that back-and-forth would have lost people. For me, I was never lost. I felt held. I felt seen in my own experiences of grief.

Amy [28:53]: 
I’m so glad to hear that. As a writer, I’m grateful I followed what felt true to my experience. It brought me into experimental territory, but I didn’t set out to do that.

If I’d set out to write something experimental, I would’ve written something untrue to my experience. Grief requires us to reach for things we’ve never reached for before.

Lisa [29:50]: 
And that’s even more magnified when grieving someone young. It disrupts everything we consider part of the natural cycle of life.

Amy [30:24]: 
Yes. They call those “out-of-time deaths,” which is such a remarkable phrase. It implies we’re owed a certain amount of time, but I don’t think we’re owed anything—not even time.

It’s painful that Curtis loved living so much and had so little time to do it. But he made something beautiful out of it.

Lisa [31:47]: 
He really did.

Amy [31:48]: 
Would that we all be so lucky to make something as beautiful as Curtis did.

Lisa [31:56]: 
You made me fall in love with him. I really wanted to spend time with him, and you gave me that opportunity.

Amy [32:13]:
Thank you. Anytime people witness Curtis and our story, it’s a gift. It really is.

Lisa [32:27]:
It's another chance for his name to be said. Yeah, exactly. So, I want to reiterate some of the things you said, and then go in an experimental direction, which we talked about a little bit beforehand. So, one of the things that I want new writers to hear is that there's, there's two pieces. So, one, Amy followed her heart. She followed the journey of writing that she needed to go on. She didn't think in the beginning about structure in the sense of I'm writing this, or I'm writing that. She just wrote, and that helped her figure out what it was. It was the process of writing. There was this evolution. And sometimes I'll hear people say, I want to write a fancy book, and that's why I call it the fancy book. You know, I'm going to write a patchwork quilt of stories, or I'm going to write a spiral structure. You've probably heard people say these things, and those are elegant structures when they work, but understanding how stories work so that you can move through the meaning-making process is important. But we all come to it in different ways. And so, what I always tell people when they come to me for writing advice is, I say, well, it depends. And here are some invitations. Your job as the writer is to figure out which invitation speaks to you, but to always have an openness to what it could be, because the story is being birthed inside you and through you as you show up to it. Now let’s get to our activity, which I learned from the storyteller and story producer Lily B. Here are the questions I’d like you to answer: What’s a noun and a feeling you’d associate with your book? 

Amy [35:22]:
 Wow, I love that. Do you go first, or do I go first?

Lisa [35:26]: 
Either one is fine with me. 

Amy [35:29]: 

Oh, you go first. 

Lisa [35:32]: 

Okay, so I was thinking about this earlier today, and this is a story of love. It is also a story of grief, and it's a story of a body that breaks down in response to grief. I was thinking about how Curtis died. It was so sudden. As I was thinking about the noun and feeling your book lives at the intersection of it’s on the corner of body and abandonment. That's where it fell for me. And I'm curious to know where it fell for you.

Amy [35:59]: 
Wow, that's so beautiful. I think we’re similar in terms of the noun. I would say this story lives at the corner of the marrow and the pain.  

Lisa [36:20]: 
Wow! I really like yours. Marrow is so deep.

Amy [36:24]:
Yeah, that's what I love, that you picked the body, because I was also moving to the body, but I wanted to go even more granular, because I think some of it—especially those very condensed paragraphs, it is very granular in a lot of ways. And the thing about marrow is that it's essential to the body. You can't actually exist without marrow, but it is incredibly hard to access and incredibly painful to access. If you need some of it, it's very, very painful, and yet it is so essential, we're all walking around with it, and we don't really think about it until we're somebody who needs it. And I think grief and the book live at that intersection. We might not think about some of the things that Here After holds until we know somebody who's in it, or until we ourselves are in it.

Lisa [37:26]: 
Absolutely, and that was such a beautiful way to talk about it. And what I like about it is when I think about it, and I might be getting this wrong. So, if somebody hears this and they're like, your biology is wrong, Lisa, feel free to correct me. I'm totally fine with that. But I believe that your marrow, it's related to your immune system, and I think it creates your red blood cells.

Amy [37:52]:
 I believe it does. I was that because I wasn't sure, but yeah, I think it does too. 

Lisa [37:58]: 
Well, I will say that's the case. Your red blood cells are the part of you that holds your oxygen, and that's what allows the body to function. So, I think that's just such a beautiful way to think about this, in that the marrow is nourishing us, it is helping us function, and yet it is hard to access, and it is what we gain access to through grief.

Amy [38:25]: 
Yeah, it is. I think grief, for me, certainly exposed what the marrow of my life was. As I continued to ask myself why I should continue to exist in the wake of Curtis's death, it forced me to consider what my marrow was, and what I was going to get on with living for. And I think that's a really intense and large thing to confront, especially as you said, when you're not the age that other people are. For some other people, that is obvious. They have different contexts and different things in their life. For me, being so young, for a while that I couldn't see what those things were.

Lisa [39:13]:
So what is the marrow that you have discovered?

Amy [39:17]: 
For me, it's writing, and I always thought it was very romantic, bordering on silly, when I would have writers tell me, there will be a time in your life where writing will save your life. I thought, okay, we're not curing cancer, we're writing books, you know. And then a time came in my life where writing did save my life. It was the only thing I could do. I physically was so ill, I couldn't do anything else, and it was the only thing I was able to show up for. And in turn, it showed up for me. And the other thing, the other marrow, was love. Yeah, Curtis saved my life because he loved me. And because when he died, I had to accept that fact. Yeah, I had to accept that he saw a version of me that was lovable. And it's so painful to accept the version of ourselves that the people who love us say we are. Often, they offer us tenderness that we don't actually want to give to ourselves.

Lisa [40:47]: 
That's beautiful. And what I remember from your book is that he truly believed in your ability to be a writer. He saw you as a writer. Even though he did not get to see and hold this book, he held space for what is true. And my heart is connecting to yours in the sense that there came a point in time in my life when my body was failing and writing was the only thing that I could show up for. And like you, it showed up for me, and it truly did save my life. And so, yeah, it does, and we don't think about that, and we don't value the role these things play in our lives, and that the alchemy and the healing that happens when we allow ourselves to open up to our stories and to who we truly are.

Amy [41:35]:
Exactly. That's what I didn't understand. When people would say that to me, I think, well, how can love save anyone and writing? But as you said, for some of us, maybe for all of us, but certainly, I think for writers, there is something that we can access when we are writing, and it's essential to how we process the world. And I was so grateful to have that. That was the thing that I had, and not everybody does. I've had other friends who grieve with different things, things that I don't have, but writing was what I had, and I am so grateful to have that and to be carried by it. And now, I join the ranks of people who say to writers, I hope that that time is a long way away, but probably there is a time when writing will carry you.

Lisa [42:27]:
 Well, I love how your writing is carrying all of us, and we've had such a rich conversation, and you have shared so many interesting bits of writing wisdom. As we begin to wrap up, do you have one last nugget of wisdom for us? 

Amy [42:48]:
 That's so generous. Your questions have been so incredible. Thank you. It's such an art to ask a beautiful question. You've asked so many. I think one thing that I'm really holding these days—it's really on my mind, just because the four years is next week—is I'm thinking a lot about love and what it asks of us, and how terrible it can be sometimes, and heavy. But alongside that, I've been really holding something that Curtis taught me. I've been thinking a lot about it. It's in the book, that moment where he fills his car so full of balloons for my birthday that he gets into a car accident because he can’t see out of his windows. And I just, I don't know, I think about that. I hope we all love someone so much that we just get into a little bit of trouble for them. It feels just like the most amazing thing to me.

Lisa [43:58]:
It truly is. And I'm glad that you've had that, and I wish that for every single person who's listening—and those who are not—that we all get that experience.

Amy [44:04]:
Yeah, me too.

Lisa [44:06]
So, you are in the middle of your book launch. Your book came out in March, and I talk to many writers who are in their book launch year. I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Ramani Durvasula. I don't know if you know who she is, but she was on the podcast, and oh my gosh, if you want to see someone work it during a book launch, she was working it so hard, and she continues to do that in so many incredible ways. I mean, she's just an amazing powerhouse. And so are you. How are you caring for yourself in what I call the publishing gauntlet of year one?

Amy [44:49]: 
It is such an amazing whirlwind to be in, but it is a whirlwind. For myself, I have scheduled breaks, so I had a very clear understanding going in of the months that I would be really packed with events. I made sure I slept really well, and I made sure I was eating really well. I just really ensured I was set up to constantly show up as vulnerably and as fully as I could for the book. And that's important to me. Whenever I do an event, and I do choose the ones that I do pretty carefully, I was really there. And then to compensate for that, I also blocked out large chunks of weeks where I wasn't doing events, and I was regulating by just returning to routine. I am, in some ways, not particularly flashy in that way, as I regulate in a boring routine, which is to say, I like to go to bed early, I like to get up at the same time, and I like to write. And so, I've had about a full month or two, maybe this summer, where I wasn't doing events, and I was consistently writing, and it returned me to baseline, which is important. I think it's important to spend time, even in grief, finding small ways to return to whatever baseline looks like for you in that moment, that you just are in the practice of going out and coming back to yourself. And grief really taught that to me in a way that I hadn't learned before, and I continue to practice it. And tending to grief in that way is so much about tending to yourself.

Lisa [46:33]:
Absolutely, and I love that you are so honest about the boring nature of self-care. I know people will ask about my life, and yes, of course, there are times when exciting things are happening, but, you know, 90 to 95% of the time—and I'm very happy about this—it's pretty boring.

Amy [46:43]:
It is.

Lisa [46:44]: 
And I think about my earlier life, which was very chaotic, not boring at all, but also very taxing. It's a gift to be able to have a boring life that has a gentle routine, and the capacity to care for myself and return to myself. Because I think for all the trauma survivors who are listening—and that is a good portion of this audience—and some of them are dealing with grief, and they're dealing with other things... Boring is good. Your nervous system will tell you otherwise, but boring is good, because it's where you find yourself.

Amy [47:34]: 
It is. It's, in a lot of ways, very soothing. Yeah. Grief can be boring. The reality is that the rhythms of grief can be unpredictable, but they can also sometimes, you know, what you're going to expect, and finding, as you said, soft rituals and habits around that to hold that and to cultivate some of that sense of, "Well, I know what's happening," is very soothing. It's certainly soothing for my brain to feel like it knows what's happening. And in grief, a lot of the time, I felt like I didn't know what was happening, and I had to create structures around myself, and book tours like that... Yeah, wild. You have no idea day to day really, what it's going to be like, and rituals that you do know what they're like. So, for me, eating certain foods or getting up at a certain time are really important to me, because they help me feel grounded, and like, at least I know when I'm going to eat or how I'm going to wake up. And that's proved really important for me. But like I said, it's not a particularly sexy self-care.

Lisa [48:48]: 
But it's the most important. So maybe that does make it sexy. We just don't understand what sexy really is.

Amy [48:53]:
Yes, I'm going to reinvent how we're thinking about sexy self-care.

Lisa [48:58]: 
There you go! I love it, and I can't wait to see how this flourishes in all the things that you do. Well, I want everyone to buy your gorgeous book. I also want them to continue to connect with you and see what you're up to. So, what are the best ways for people to buy your book and to connect with you online?

Amy [49:19]:
The best ways to buy Here After is either your local library, where librarians often will have them on hold, or hopefully copies in store. I grew up a child of libraries, and it's an honor literally every time someone tags me in a picture with a library book, and I always encourage people to go, if possible, to their local bookstores and to support just the people that champion books. Here After would have reached nobody without booksellers. They are the heart of books. They, you know, booksellers connect writers like myself and everybody else together. And I’m also a reader, so I've been on the other side of that. Booksellers have connected me, the reader, to other writers, yes, and they're the connection point. And I think that can be lost sometimes in our instant-ship world, that people who can connect you with another person. So that's really important. And then bookshop.org online is obviously so great because it pulls from independent bookstores. And then, for me online, I talk about books and grief and a little bit about my life on Instagram @LiteraryAmy. And people often say, "I'm sure you get tons of messages," but people are always welcome to reach out. I can be really slow responding to message of any kind, but I always read them. I do get to them eventually. And then I also still write my Substack, At the Bottom of Everything, where I talk about living with big feelings. And yeah, that started... Well, it would have started four years ago when Curtis died, and I still write twice a month as a beautiful community, and people can connect with me there too. I'm sure there are other ways people could find me, but that's all I can think of right now.

Lisa [51:14]: 
Well, if you find something else, please send me the information, because all of this will show up in the show notes, so people can get in contact with you. And yeah, shout out to local libraries. You know, the great thing about ordering a book through the library is that you're not only getting access to the book, but you are giving someone else access to the book who may not be able to afford it. And so that is a gift that keeps on giving. And then, yes, your local bookstore is amazing. And wherever you buy it, be sure to write a five-star review and leave it on Amazon and Goodreads no matter where you bought it, and Barnes & Noble, because this is how we support authors.

Amy [51:55]: 
Make such a difference. I always really appreciate that.

Lisa [51:59]:
Well, Amy, thank you so, so much for being on the podcast. It was truly an honor.

Amy [52:04]:
Thank you so much for inviting me and for opening such a beautiful space for us to talk about the things that ultimately, we all share, and we all carry together. And I've just really appreciated our conversation. I'm really grateful.

Lisa [52:20]: 
I am grateful as well, and I'm going to be thinking about this one for a very long time.