Here's Where It Gets Interesting - How Far to the Promised Land with Esau McCaulley
Episode Date: September 1, 2023In today’s episode, Sharon is joined by Esau McCaulley for a powerful conversation about his new book, How Far to the Promised Land. In his memoir, he took the story of his family and showed the str...uggles of Black people in America intergenerationally. Esau shares how it’s vital to understand how the stories of our ancestors – though they might seem insignificant – impact and shape generations to come. In a country that highly values “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” and the underdog, Esau questions the narrative that we achieve entirely on our own, and asks why our society requires exceptionalism from Black people. Special thanks to our guest, Esau McCaulley, for joining us today. Host/Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Guest: Esau McCaulley Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hello, friends. Welcome. As always, delighted that you're joining me. My guest today has
written an absolutely beautiful book that I found so moving. I told him that I was tearing
up in the first few pages, and I just cannot wait to share this conversation with Esau McCauley. So let's dive in.
I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.
I am really excited to be chatting with Esau today. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me on the podcast.
I read your book. I was very moved by it. I thought to myself as I was reading it,
this man is a fantastic writer. And it took the story of your family, who I don't know
anything about them. And I just really wanted to find out what happened. I was emotionally invested
in the outcome of your family's story. And I just really, really enjoyed it. I think it took me like just a
couple hours to read the whole thing. Like that's how compelling I found it. So congrats on an
amazing job, Will. Thank you. It's an honor to have anybody read my family story and to think
that someone who never met me might be interested in my cousins and aunties and uncles and my
grandparents and great grandparents and great-grandparents
and all those other people that you meet in the story. I love them. They are people who are really
important to me and they made me into the person that I am. And so I wanted people to see them.
And by seeing them, see the South. And by seeing the South, see Black people in America. And so
the whole goal of the book is the people who you don't think are important have lives that are significant and they shouldn't be tossed to the side.
I love that.
Do you ever think about this?
Do you ever think about like, if my ancestors could see me now?
You know, like the people from 200 years ago, 150 years ago of like, look at him, college professor, New York Times writer, writing books, being interviewed on
all kinds of shows in the podcast. Like if they could see me now, think of how proud they are of
you in this moment. There is a moment in the book where I talk about the land that my great
grandmother had, and then she lost it. And I've considered going back to buy it
to kind of close that circle. And I don't know if I think about people being proud of me.
I think about being responsible. In other words, I don't see myself as the climax of their story.
I see myself as a chapter in their story. And that it's my job to not actually
make the story simply about me and what I accomplished, but about the lives that preceded
mine. Because you all know about me because apparently I put words together pretty well
and you care about them. But I want to use that not to say turn the attention towards me,
but turn the attention towards my ancestors that came before me. And like the struggle, in other words, there is a beauty that exists in life.
And sometimes it takes literary forms for people to be able to see. And so what you all see in my
words, the reader sees in my words, I saw in actual lives. And so I've succeeded if my parents and grandparents look at the book and say, that is us.
The real goal was to say, these stories matter.
There's one story.
I'll talk about the land again.
My great-grandmother worked on a tenant farm.
It's amazing for me to even think about this.
My great-grandmother, who I knew, worked on an actual tenant farm, saved up, worked extra jobs, cleaned houses, did all of these
things in the 1920s and 30s during Jim Crow, saved up enough money to buy her own plot of land.
But because she was illiterate, that land was initially stolen from her because she kind of
signed this tricky deed and she lost that land. But that moment, that struggle that she had
of working the land and finding her way and finding an illiterate black woman buys a piece of property.
That is a magnificent accomplishment. And I want people to see that accomplishment.
And that accomplishment is just as important in its own way as what I did as New York Times university professor.
aren't separate, that what she instilled in our family generations ago is bearing fruit in me and my children and my siblings. That's right. And you talk about how important education was to
your mother and how she was at the school all the time. And there's a whole story about your mom,
I won't give away, but she does get a brain tumor and undergoes a lot of physical hardship, but also a lot of
other types of hardship. And I love ruminating on this idea that who we are today is no accident,
and it is the result of our ancestors' progress made on our behalf.
Yes, that's it.
I guess one of the things I was struggling with,
and I'm glad that you said the nice things about me,
university professor, New York Times writer,
all of those things.
There's a temptation when you have that background.
You grew up in poverty, you overcome these things,
and you make it to what society considers success.
And you make the story about
you, how brave you were and how you overcame these traumas because you were special. And what I really
wanted to remind people of is that it wasn't just me who was special. It was my family. And it was
like my mother. How does a single black mother in the 80s and the 90s, making like less than $22,000 a year, instill in her children this idea that becomes almost this unshakable confidence that I can go to college to become whatever it is that I want to be?
Like, how does she do that?
And to me, trying to get at that alchemy is important because that's really what the story is.
It was how does she see something for her children that she never had herself?
And how am I responsible to tell that story now that I'm there?
Because if I tell it in a way that only I'm exceptional,
well, then how does that help some kid who's trying to make it,
who was in a similar situation than I was? It has to be something that's broader than just unique individuals. We highly value this bootstrapping story, the underdog story of, look at Esau.
His mother was disabled.
She was by and large a single woman.
He lived in poverty.
His great grandmother was a sharecropper.
Look at what he's overcome and look at where he is today.
And that is not at all to diminish your accomplishments, which are significant.
There's no shade on anything you have accomplished.
But I do think that that is a very uniquely American perspective of like, he did it alone.
He did it.
And I love that this book is more than just look at what I did.
It is the sum total of everyone that came before.
Because what is actually required, and I don't want to say anything negative about any book or
any narrative of overcoming, because those narratives are true and I don't want to
diminish what those people accomplished. But one of the things that I noticed is I sat down to write
this story and I began to think about memoirs that are like this, and what do they actually do
to the reader? And there's a sense in which the outcome is predetermined because you know that the hero lives because the hero is writing
the memoir. And so what is required of the reader in that context? Well, you just have to cheer on
the protagonist and you know, oh, how are they going to overcome this? And especially in a Black
narrative, your job is to kind of boo the racist and cheer the Black protagonist on. And then if
the person gets through it, there's this assumption that, okay, America puts black people through it, but it's survivable.
And so it leaves the system intact. And the idea, because we just need more exceptional
black people to get justice and equality. And I wanted to say, no, no, no. Why do we require
that kind of exceptionalism from black people? And this is no shade.
I love my university, but I never forget when I first got to college, I thought everybody
had crawled through the mud like I did.
And I didn't know about legacy admissions.
And there were people in college who got like C's in high school and their parents had enough
money to just pay for tuition.
And they were just at college having a good time. And I was like, hold on. This is everything to me. This is my entire family's
future. I'm the first one in my generation to go. I have to succeed. And they're just at the
fraternity house getting drunk because no matter what happens, they have a job with mom and dad
at the business after it's over. And I was like, hold on. Why can't you have ordinary black people
like that who kind of meander around during their
teen years and then find themselves? We had to like walk this razor's edge to just get through
high school and go to college and other people who got to college because it's just what they
did next. And so I began to redefine my definition of justice. And for me, justice was ordinary black people being able to
flourish. Ordinary black children having the opportunity and time to find themselves so that
you don't have to have this heroic focus from the age of like 12 to escape where you came from to
get to college. And so I did want to question why exceptionalism is the norm for what we think
about escaping poverty. It should be more reasonable or easier. We ought to create a
society where there's more paths towards success and flourishing. Yeah. Because really, when you're
asking the question, why can't just ordinary Black people just be like, I got C's in school,
and you know what? I ended up in college, and I turned out okay. And it ended up being fine, which is the privilege
that is afforded to mediocre white people every day. Why must everybody be exceptional? Why is
no one allowed to just be like, yeah, I'm finding myself. One of the things that I tried to do in the form
of a narrative in the book is to talk about education in particular. So one of the biggest
predictors of whether or not you're going to get a college degree is the education and financial
background of your parents. Every single study shows this, right? This is just facts one-on-one.
So if then you put my grandfather through Jim Crow and you literally made it impossible for him to go to college, the society made it less likely that my mom was going to go to college.
And my mom, literally the first generation of people in my family who were post segregation, she started in first grade in integrated schools, the first generation to go through integrated schools.
I'm the first
child of a member of my family who had access to equal education. We're not actually going to talk
about the actual racialization of her integrated school, right? Whether or not those schools,
they were integrated, they were previously approached segregation, actually treated my mom
like a person who could think and learn. And so if this is the case,
that America, I'm generation one of integrated school children, that is a financial and economic
injustice that was done to my family whose legacy isn't over with. And so, yes, I overcame that
reality and I went to college. But for all of the people who are my age who didn't do that, is it not true that America bears some responsibility?
I know we're just like on the other end of the affirmative action laws, but this idea that you have one generation and everything is over seems to me to boggle the mind, especially when you arrive on campus.
boggle the mind, especially when you arrive on campus and you say, if it was illegal for my grandparents to go to the school, then I literally could not have been a legacy admission.
It was impossible. And so the economic privilege of having time to find yourself
is something that is often denied to significant portions. There's another story that I think about a lot that's in
the book about my grandfather, Theodore, who worked in the cotton fields. He worked in the
cotton fields for this family. And he started from the age of four all the way up through his teen
years. And during the high seasons, they would pull the black kids out of school to go and finish
picking the cotton.
And he didn't get paid a fair wage and all of those things. And he said he got like two pair of overalls and some used books for his clothes. But all of the money that he got from his labor
went to a white family that also had children his age who were then going to school. So there's
generational wealth that exists in one family due to my grandfather's
labor. And once again, those two families kind of made their way through the South.
And with my grandfather's resources and my grandfather's literally labor funding their
education. And so I just think that I just want black people to have space. And I know that every
single black person didn't grow up in poverty and that
everyone didn't experience what I experienced,
but it was a common enough experience with redlining and other things for us
to really think about what does it take for a black person in America to make
it to the promised land.
And the idea that, you know,
a lot of people give examples of things like segregation or they give examples
of things like redlining as evidence of
this sort of like system of oppression or a system of racism. Almost nobody ever talks about how the
average black school child in the early to mid 20th century only went to school for three to
four months a year, while their white counterparts were going to school for nine months.
And that is, it speaks exactly to what you're saying,
that your ancestors were pulled out of school to work
while everybody else kept going to school.
It's one thing to hear these narratives about tenant farming.
It's another thing for your grandfather to tell you these stories about tenant farming.
And so my grandfather was a good student.
He ends up starting his own business and he does things later on. But he gets to
eighth grade, I think it's eighth grade or ninth grade, and he's like 16 years old.
Not because he ever did poorly in school, but because he lost so much time to work in the farm
that he was 16. And he said, I'm going to be 20 by the time I graduate.
And he didn't have any money. And so he was working at the Coca-Cola plant for like 45 cents a day.
And he has to quit school and join the military so that he can get an education because working
on a tenant farm took away his childhood. So instead of being an eighth grader who's 12 years old, he's a grown man
through no fault of his own. And so he has to find another path towards education and success.
And yes, he does it. He does it. But that's not justice. And that's what I wanted people to see
in the narrative, is that these things that we read about as statistics are real people.
Hopefully I'm not repeating myself.
It's one thing to read, they made African-American tenant farmers during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
It's another thing for my grandfather to say, I was four years old and I got up and I had to pick cotton from that age.
And the people who raised him, at the end of every year, would tally up with the guy who owned the land. And no matter what they farmed, he always said, it looks like he just broke even.
Year after year, after year, after year. And the only reason they ever got out of the tenant farm,
they never made enough money doing that. My grandfather, his caregivers worked late at
nights cleaning homes and doing side jobs to save him enough money to eventually pay for a place in the city,
where he then goes to the city and his granddad ends up digging ditches for the city.
And with that digging ditches actually for the city gave him a steady check.
And that's what allowed us to have a little bit more stability.
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I bet you've heard this phrase a few million times in your life.
And I wonder what your response to it is, which is stop making everything about race.
Yeah.
Have you heard that before?
Has anyone ever mentioned that?
Yeah.
And so it's funny.
It's like the answer to the question is I get told this all of the time.
It's like the answer to the question is I get told this all of the time.
And the truth is when America stopped making it about race, I can stop making it about race.
And what I do actually in the narrative, which is really interesting, is that it's not about race.
The whole book isn't about here are all of the horrible things that were done to black people.
But you can't tell an authentic story without talking about race in America.
And so they are saying stop making everything about race.
What they really mean is completely eliminate race from the discourse. And I don't think you can tell a true account of an American family in the South going from the 1900s up through the 2000s and not mention race.
One of the hard things to do as a writer is to acknowledge that poor people can be mean, too.
Right. That, yes, we are victims of racism and injustice, but we're not just victims. We're also moral agents who make our
own decisions and actions. And so part of the book does examine what happens in society at the
societal level, but there's also the decisions that we make as individuals. And so you're right. The entire story of the black experience in America is not black resistance to racism. That's the key component of it. But there's also the actions, the decisions that individual black people make about their future.
things. It's not completely about race, but race is not absent. And so I guess I wish that I could live in a world where racism doesn't come up as often as it does. When somebody says stop making
everything about race, very often it's because in their own lives, things have never had to be
about race. And so they have the privilege of having the perspective of like, we don't need
to talk about this because it doesn't impact me. And I feel uncomfortable with the fact that you
continue to talk about it. That's really like what's underneath that. And I think it's easy
to isolate incidences when you don't experience them. In other words, there's not a set number
of racial incidents that can occur.
And then people will say racism is a problem in America. If something happens, there's a portion
of the population that is committed to seeing it as not a racial issue. And if it is a racial issue,
then it's an isolated incident. And so we keep these incidents disconnected because they serve
political and emotional purposes.
Because if these incidents are connected, then you've got to ask the question, well, what kind of society creates these things?
And so I'm pulled over by the police officer and the police officer calls me boy and does all of these things.
I'm sorry that happened to you. Maybe there's another explanation. It happens again and again and again.
There's a point in the book where I hope it's not redundant, but I tell like four or five of those stories in a row precisely so that people can understand.
It's not that there's one thing that happens to African-Americans and then we find that we believe there's racism in the world.
It's just that racism follows us around.
I really wanted to write a story so that people can see what this actually looks like in the lives of individuals.
Because I wanted them to feel what I feel.
So yes, I went to college and I learned a sophisticated analysis of race and politics in America.
But before I went to college and got all of the resources used to analyze race and injustice in America, I was actually a young black kid growing up in Hustle, Alabama, with people who were all around me.
In other words, when you think about the civil rights movement, most of the civil rights movement people who actually marched in the streets, they didn't read tons of works of philosophy.
They were just black people who were tired of being stepped on.
ton's of works of philosophy. They were just Black people who were tired of being stepped on.
And there is something that comes from living the thing itself in the South that gives you a disposition, an unshakable confidence that it doesn't have to be this way.
So I'm not trying to convince people in the sense that there's a hypothesis that I'm trying to test.
I'm saying I swam through the water of anti-Black racism in the South. And it's a fact.
It's just as real, Sharon, as me and you sitting here.
I know it's there because it was in my actual life, in my actual family.
And its legacy is still there.
And so I wanted people to see humans, not just arguments.
I love that.
I love that.
I think you do that well in this book.
This is not an argument of like,
racism still exists, period. Here are four ways I've experienced it this week, period.
I've lost count of how many racial incidents there have been in the following week.
That's not what this book is. It's a beautifully written story of your family and using your
family as the vehicle, you are able to talk about many of these issues that
we're discussing today. And I think it's a really beautiful way of humanizing the story and helping
other people who are maybe, maybe they've experienced it and can experience solidarity
when reading it, or maybe they are outside of it entirely. They grow up next to Canada,
like the widest of white person possible.
And they're like, well, I just didn't know.
Like it can benefit so many different people from reading your book.
But here's the other thing, and I don't want to belabor this.
Why do you make everything about race issue?
That's actually an insecurity that attaches to Black people.
What I mean by that is I wish that I had the luxury to be able to just
ask questions. So if I apply for a job and I don't get the job, or someone's following me around a
store, or someone says something that's just awkward, and I'm always stuck asking the question,
is this about race? Or is this a normal, awkward human interaction? Am I failing because of the
decisions that I made? One of the things that's really odd is that I became a writer and people
know me for my writing. But no one said to me growing up, very few people said to me,
you should be a writer. No one saw in me this gift that I had. And I wonder, why was I not often put forward as a writer? Was
it because they just assumed that a black person couldn't be a writer? For the most part, people
just tossed me aside. I remember I had a teacher who said to me when I was in high school, I was a
football player. He said, you're not tall enough to get a scholarship playing football, and you're
not smart enough to get an academic scholarship, you're probably going
to end up dead and in jail. Oh, nice. That's good. I was told that in high school. And the petty part
of me wants to send him an email. I'm trying to be more mature. But that's the kind of story
that you're told over and over again, rather than this story that you can be whatever you want to
be. Yeah, right. His default assumption was, well, I see that you're not quote unquote good enough to be
a pro athlete.
So you're probably going to go to jail because the default assumption was a young black man.
He's an athlete or he's in prison.
That was his default assumption.
And you even mentioned this in your book too, that, you know, like everybody in my family is either a preacher or on streets. And that this idea that like, I'm going to get a PhD,
I'm going to be a writer, I'm going to be a professor. Like this was your first of your
family in terms of like choosing a different type of experience, different type of profession.
I had to put this footnote in here. My sister is the first one to graduate from college,
not me. She's two years older. My sister is the first one in our family to graduate. She actually goes and she gets a
medical degree. She's actually a pediatric cardiac intensivist. If you don't know what that is,
neither do I. But she does that. She's a doctor. So she always says, I'm the second. So I always
got to make sure. So I always have to say, we are the first ones. And it was. There was this idea
that you basically, you were an entertainer. It was music right but i had there was no singing god didn't
give me that opportunity so there was gonna be no singing and rapping i'm the defeat of every black
stereotype about being able to dance and sing because i couldn't catch a beat if he was laying
there i just can't like i clap and it's like where did the beat go anyway so why are you clapping on
the two and the two the three the four yeah like what do go? Anyway. Why are you clapping on the two and the three?
The two, the three, the four. What are you doing? I was like, sorry, this would be a super niche
thing. But if anybody ever goes to a black church, there's the two and the four, which I could kind
of do. I can do it. But then there's like a double tap that they do where you're doing like the
double tap on a beat. I was like, okay, when I'm doing a double tap on a certain, like I'm going to do at the wave or something. I don't know. So the idea though, is that we're
either going to be athletes, musicians, or preachers. And that was my perception,
but was possible because that's what you can see. And it's hard to dream of something
that you can't see. I didn't know any lawyers or doctors, definitely not writers.
There just wasn't a category for being a writer when I was growing up.
This sounds crazy.
Looking back on it, I had a friend who shall remain nameless.
We were seniors in high school and then our freshman year in college.
We got really into the Harlem Renaissance and the
poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. And we were writing Black liberation poems and sending them
back and forth to each other because we didn't know what else to do with it. So we had this
passion within us, but nobody ever told us where to put it. There wasn't an outlet until one day
the New York Times called and said, Esau, do you want to do it? And I said, sure. And I shot my shot and I've been writing ever since.
So it wasn't until somebody else saw the potential in you that you embraced the
potential for yourself. Is that what you're saying?
I had to update my bio because people kept calling me a writer. And so, yeah, the story is there's a person
who works for the New York Times reached out to me and said, I've seen some of your writing in
smaller publications. Would you be interested in writing an opinion piece for us about reparations?
And actually at the time, I didn't feel comfortable. I had a friend of mine named
McKimney Uwan, an African-American woman who knew a lot about reparations. And I said, oh,
I can call McKimney and she could tell me what toations. And I said, oh, I can call a Kimony and she could
tell me what to write. Then I said, hold on, I can't steal from Black women. And so I told the
New York Times, no, I can't. You should call my friend, a Kimony. She might be able to help you
out. But they said, oh, you said no. I said, yeah. They said, but can we reach back out? I said,
yeah, we'll reach back out. And so a few months later, I wrote a piece that did well. And then
it reached out to me again, right around the time of the pandemic. And I wrote a piece about the pandemic right at the beginning. And then that summer was George Floyd, Ahmed Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. And I wrote about a lot of those incidents. And they just said, would you be a contributing opinion writer?
And before that, I never called myself a writer. I just said, I'm a professor. I'm an academic.
And then it was my agent who comes to me. Lori Liss says, I think you should write a memoir.
I think you have an interesting story. I said, nobody's going to like my story. Just write it and see what people think. And so it has been for the most part, other people who have recognized
that in me and encouraged me to do it. I think it's a testament. Of course,
you are talented and other people recognize your talent. But I also think it's a testament. Of course, you are talented and other people recognize your
talent. But I also think it's a testament to this idea that the words we speak have power.
And the words that we speak to other people about themselves have power. And that the idea that you
had to make a choice to ignore that coach who was like, you're going to be in jail because you're not good enough to do these other things.
And it took somebody else speaking that truth to you, that you are a writer people want
to read.
You should be.
You deserve this position as an opinion writer, as a memoirist, as an author, before you could
embrace that identity
for yourself. And I think there's a lot of ways that that idea can manifest itself in the lives
of people that we know. I will always love teachers. I had a teacher named Mrs. Bailey,
and I wrote a whole article about this. So people can Google it if they want to. But I was, I think I was a junior
in high school and they were sitting in AP class, AP U.S. History. And she said, you should take it.
And I didn't want to take it. And she convinced me to take it. And she said, you should take the
AP test. And I said, well, I can't afford it. You know, she said, I'll find a way to get the
funding for you to take the test. We're an inner city struggling school. We'd have these lunch
study sessions and we'd have these morning study sessions where we'd get together and we'd study for the test.
So we took the test. I'll never forget this. It's one of these moments that stick out,
changed my life. And the day that the test scores came back, she had them. And I don't know if she
put them in the envelopes, but in my brain, there's an envelope. And she comes up to me
and she says to me, you got a four. You have college credit as a junior in high school.
You can be whatever you want to be.
And my mama told me that a thousand times.
But there was something about the way that she said it on that day that kind of washed away the thing that the person that told into difficult places and instills hope in students,
they're worth, you couldn't measure it in gold. And I published that story in the New York Times
and she sees it and kind of reunited. And all of the other students who she'd helped throughout
the years started sharing this piece because it talks about the difference she made in their lives. And so I will always have a deep and abiding love for educators who take the time to see the people
whom everybody else pushes to the side and encourages them that they can be more than
they think they can be. I love that. I love that story. And I bet it was probably the pinnacle
of a very long career for her to read about her efforts in the New York Times.
It was funny because she's a Brown graduate and she went to Brown University.
And she wanted me to go to Brown and I didn't go to Brown.
And I said to her, this is my apology.
I'm sorry I didn't go to Brown University, but here's your New York Times article.
I failed you in that regard, but hopefully this makes up for it. It was a bit of a flex, right? It was a bit of a flex to say, I'm sorry,
here's my apology in the New York Times. Who do you think this book is for? How far
did the promise land? Who is this book for? I think, first of all, it's for like little black boys and little black girls
who are trying to find their way in the world, you know, looking for some source of hope and
guidance. One of the things that you can do is, a child has an imagination and a well-written book can transcend any cultural boundaries and it can stick with you.
I remember reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and just loving it.
And there's tons of books that are just like different for me that I love.
But there's also something when you read the book and you see yourself.
And so I wanted to write a book that helped little black boys
and little black girls see themselves in the narrative.
The other thing that I wanted to do though,
and this may seem like a contradiction,
but it's related to what I said.
A truly good book touches everyone,
even for whom their experiences aren't universal.
And there are so many books that are kind of seen as the quintessential American story
that has kind of a white protagonist.
And I said, I wanted to make an American story that had a Black family at the center of it.
So it's a story about America, about what it means to try to survive in America,
that is not just for Black families, but it's for everyone. And so I think that I wanted to write something that was specific
enough to feel authentic to Southern Black boys and girls, universal enough to speak to the
humanist, because Black people are humans, right? We're not a different genre of being.
And so the Black struggle for meaning and purpose isn't separated from the human struggle
for meaning and purpose. And so I think that it is also a book that's going to help people ask
the same kinds of questions that I had to ask. How does my family and my history make me and shape
me into who I am? And so I wanted to write a particular book that was, because it was particular
and well done, was also universal. Because I wanted a universal black book. And it's arrogant
to say it that way, but you wanted to write something, and this may seem nerdy, and I would
have never had a chance to say this or a chance to admit this when I was younger. I just wanted
to write something beautiful. In a world that is so dark and broken, sometimes you just want to add beauty to it.
But the beauty can't be a lie. It can't be a beauty that doesn't have any pain in it,
because that's not true. So I wanted to write something that's both painful,
true, and beautiful. That was some of my goals. I love that. I think you achieved it. I think it
was all of those things. Sharon, you should be a writing coach. I've never been more encouraged by having...
I feel like I can conquer the world. You should just do affirmations. I would like on TikTok,
and I would just like reel that thing, and you just rake in the money. I feel so
encouraged right now. I'm going to go write another book.
Please do. Please do it. I'll read it and I'll say the same things about it.
I have a book coming out next year.
It's not a memoir, but I can understand the anxiety surrounding it where you're like,
dear God, you better like it.
I'm sure it'll be amazing.
You should just put all of the stuff you said about my book and just edit out each song,
put Sharon in it, and then it'll be great.
I'll send you one. I'll send you one.
I'll send you one when it comes out.
Send me a copy of it.
I will.
And we'll talk about it.
If I be back on the podcast, we'll talk about your book and I'll tell you how amazing it
is.
Oh, that's very, well, that's very kind.
Today I have Esau with me who's going to tell me everything he liked about my new book.
Yes, that's it.
That's not weird.
No, it's completely normal.
Or self-important.
No, no, completely normal, completely normal.
Well, I absolutely loved reading your book.
You really, and I'm not saying this,
like we talked about this earlier,
like we don't, we've never met each other.
I don't have any vested interest
in like blowing smoke in your ear.
Like I legitimately thought it
was a beautifully written book and I, it was very moving and I loved it. I appreciate that.
Thanks for being here today. That's very kind of you. You can buy Esau Macaulay's book,
How Far to the Promised Land, wherever you buy your books. It comes out on September 12th,
2023. The show is hosted and executive produced by me,
Sharon McMahon,
and our audio producer is Jenny Snyder.
And if you enjoyed today's episode,
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Thanks for being here today.