Love Lives - Author Ela Lee: ‘We need to start taking blackout sex seriously’

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

This week on Love Lives, we’re joined by author Ela Lee to discuss her hotly anticipated novel, Jaded, which tells the story of a young lawyer who wakes up the morning after a work event with no memory of how she got home.We chat with Ela about the confronting aftermath of “blackout sex”, the grey area of consent, and why we need to debunk the ‘nice guy’ myth to tackle rape culture.Catch Love Lives on Independent TV and YouTube, as well as all major social and podcast platforms.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton.

Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. I think if you asked a lot of men, they would probably say like, oh, I would never assault someone and I don't know anyone who would. Like none of my friends would do that. But then one in three women have been assaulted and a huge majority of that, the perpetrator is known to the victim. None of my friends would do that. But then one in three women have been assaulted.

And a huge majority of that, the perpetrator is known to the victim. So someone is doing it. And someone we know is doing it. Hello and welcome to Love Lives, a podcast from The Independent where I, Olivia Petter, speak to different guests about the different loves of their lives. Today I am so excited to be joined by debut author Ella Lee to discuss her book, Shaded. So welcome Ella. Hi, thank you so much for having me. So as I mentioned in the intro, you started writing this book in the middle of the pandemic,

like zero book experience prior to that. You working in a law firm presumably incredibly busy by that so what was it that led you to decide to like you know use the little spare time I presume you had to write a novel um well the story was like percolating in my head for a really long time and I'd been sort of percolating in my head for a really long time and I'd been sort of ruminating on all of these like anecdotes and conversations and whispers and experiences that you know you just get kind of really really small snapshots of but you'd never get the chance to properly linger on and then the pandemic hit and you know I was kind of alone for the first time with like the culmination of all of these things and for the first time considered them in the round and altogether they just seemed so egregious that I like needed an outlet for it um and I kind of didn't really expect to write a

whole novel I just wrote that first opening scene um at the work party and that scene has kind of remained like pretty much largely unchanged from like the very first day I wrote it um and from there I just couldn't I just couldn't stop and in terms of sort of working around law I I was writing it in secret so no one knew um and I was just doing it in my evenings and weekends and just kind of just I get I got a bit obsessive about it which I wouldn't recommend to anyone who is trying to write a book but that was kind of how I got it done in the end and so you wrote the first draft in how long did that take you to do about I want to say like a month it's kind of like a really like fuzzy period but yeah

around a month yeah wow that's so interesting and so and so after that at what point did you decide this is something that I actually want to put out there and get published or was that kind of always the intention it wasn't always the intention mainly because as you said I just had no understanding of how like publishing worked so I just had no idea if that was even like possible but I think as it started to take shape and as I started to kind of create something out of it and create you know form Jade a bit more and sort of her character I was a bit like what am I going to do with this what is the purpose of this and that's when I kind of thought okay like maybe I should at least just try putting it out there with kind of low expectations so I sent the first query email

to agents in the morning of my wedding because I was just like oh I can't get any more stressed so I'm just gonna like do this and then just like hope for the best and then just kind of forgot about it until I very very happily heard back and then yeah it just kind of went from there. Amazing and so tell us the story of Jaded I know we got a kind of flavor of it from the prologue but who is Jade and what is that first kind of work scene that you briefly mentioned that takes us on this journey? So Jade is a 20-something lawyer who kind of seemingly has kind of what she's always wanted, you know, her life centers around her quite, you know, career that's going quite well, her really long-term relationship and her family. And then something, you know, quite life-changing

happens to her right at the start of the book and that acts as the catalyst for her to kind of unpick this life that she's she's thought was perfect and in parallel with her coming to the realization that she has been assaulted she almost has this like parallel realization that she really hasn't belonged in this life that she so carefully created for herself it's really interesting putting those two things next to one another and seeing the way that the book unravels from from that initial assault um it's also just so wild because i know we've spoken about this before but like we have both i've covered a similar sort of conversation in my novel that hasn't come out yet but it's interesting that this is something that isn't really talked about that much yeah um given

how common an experience it is and and i don't just mean sexual assault i mean this concept this thing that I'm gonna call blackout sex yeah which is not remembering sleeping with someone for you know various reasons usually alcohol or drug related and it's interesting because I think that in popular culture that is something that is often used as like comedy fodder so it's sort of like oh lol you woke up next to someone you can't remember yeah I'm such a mess yeah like I'm such a hot mess and so it's you know I'm just in my slutty era or whatever it's kind of like funny and and it's it's like particularly if you're a man it's kind of like a you know it heightens your masculinity in some way but I want to ask you what was it that drew you to writing about that subject in particular as opposed to another form of sexual assault I suppose and

like really zoning in on that and how did you kind of how did you weave that into Jade's story while also protecting yourself because that is a difficult thing to write about and I can say that with experience yeah 100% I I always knew I wanted to write about assault and as you say there are so many kind of ways in which assault can manifest um but I landed on Blackout Sex because I ultimately wanted to get under the skin of a reader's like unconscious bias towards victim blaming. Back to when I first started drinking and alcohol first started becoming like a part of my life. There was like so much messaging around like, you know, never leave your drink unatt unattended always keep the top of your drink covered never let like a strange man buy you a drink and you know this is just created this

sort of like onus on you to be really really vigilant on your own about your own safety and ultimately if you find yourself in an unsafe situation, the implication of all of that messaging is, well, how did you get yourself into that scenario? um it takes survivors you know it comes back to them either in fragments or in snapshots or it takes you know months or weeks to for that to come back to them if ever um and that was something i really wanted to explore through jade and through you know the sort of pacing of the novel that sort of really like slow horrifying realization of what's happened to you um and it's something that's just used to discredit survivors all the time like that like you know how are we meant to believe if you don't even remember it yourself kind of thing um so i just really wanted to challenge a reader in how they feel about those kind of things and kind of create as much conflict as

possible for them as they're reading it as to how they're seeing this all play out and and what was it like for you to to write all of that and to kind of protect yourself while doing that because it is a very difficult kind of psychological space to step into a hundred percent it i don't i probably didn't safeguard myself that much i think i i was so i felt this enormous like burden and like responsibility to portray it like as fairly and as honestly as posh as possible that I probably yeah wasn't too I like lost myself in it a bit I guess um which again I wouldn't I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone do um but yeah that's kind of how I ended up with it but I think that sort of quite like pent-up energy does come across in Jaded as a result yeah i think it does i think you

really get that sense in the character because and i can understand why it's something that you wrote so quickly because i feel like it's such it's subject matter that is so difficult to talk about with friends and talk about with family and kind of have those very difficult very exposing conversations it's almost sometimes easier to just kind of like get it all down yeah and just kind of get it out there and yeah it does really come across in the character um one of the things that you um i think touch on really well is um the kind of like nice guy myth where it's something that you know emerald finnell talked about in promising young women where you know she right which is a film about sexual violence and she was very careful to employ actors who we kind of know mostly associated with those like very kind of kind charismatic kind of

soft male characters so people like adam brody who was obviously most known for playing seth cohen in the oc he was like a totally harmless character and she would cast these men as rapists which I think was a really clever move that kind of subverted our expectations of these guys and showed that anyone is capable of rape and I think that's what you've done with this book with the character of Josh, because at the start, that kind of first scene, there is this kind of creepy older like boss who is kind of predatory and seems like the obvious predator. But it's not him. It's not him. So tell me about that decision and how you came about creating the character of Josh and what you're kind of

consciously trying to convey there yeah so in my experience of just having these conversations with people you know around me I think when people hear the word rape or specifically the label rapist they like want to believe that it's something really far away like they want to believe that only somebody so monstrous and so evil would do something like that and if I believe that then I don't need to meaningfully examine the people that are in my immediate circle um and I think if you asked a lot of men, they would probably say like, oh, I would never assault someone and I don't know anyone who would. Like none of my friends would do that. But then one in three women have been assaulted and a huge majority of that, the perpetrator is known to the victim.

So someone is doing it and someone we know is doing it. So someone is doing it and someone we know is doing it. And I think that's a bit too close to home for a lot of people because I think engaging with that and those numbers inherently means coming face to face with the likelihood that either you or someone you immediately know has been assaulted or has assaulted somebody. you or someone you immediately know has been assaulted or has assaulted somebody and people that's just something so uncomfortable to sit with that I think people would much rather just say oh it's these horrible monsters who you know we would never come into contact with and it's not

the nice guys that we know it's not our friends and our brothers and our you know co-workers or whatever so I think I just wanted to just like turn that upside down a bit and just say like look like if so many women are being assaulted on a regular basis then someone in their lives are doing it yeah it's wild because we're you know what is it like six years on from me too now and I think that like you said there are some perpetrators that we are very happy to accept as perpetrators like someone like Harvey Weinstein and it's not just because he's you know in prison it's because he can't he looks like a Disney villain you know he looks like

like not gonna say a troll but he doesn't look like a good person I don't think he doesn't look like a kind of Prince Charming character to on the disney metaphor but what is interesting to me is like those prince charming characters are also out there sexually assaulting women because like you said do the math like one in three women have been raped every man you talk to you no i've never never well obviously you have but how does that work so i just wonder like now where what what difference has me too really made to the conversations that we're having because a part of me wants to you know obviously be like yes we've obviously made huge leaps and bounds and there's been so much progression but if anything a part of me also thinks that it's highlighted how far we still have to go 100 i agree i think me too was obviously like this enormous cultural

landslide right like like nothing quite to that scale had happened before um but i do think when you tend when you when you shine such a bright light on an issue like that particularly when it comes to misconduct and abuse it doesn't go away it just tends to shy away from the light and kind of operate now in the shadows a bit more um and what I've found quite sinister is that like particularly from like an institutional perspective they seem to have like really absorbed like the language of me too and the sort of like language of um safeguarding women and you know you know protecting women against violence and all this stuff but then like underneath that initial kind of vineyard like the actual system is still chugging

along it's just evolved and kind of mutated a bit um and that was something that i think i really wanted to explore through um the character of eve in jaded who gets embroiled in this sort of semi-relationship with this guy who is the head of her team and he's a lot more senior to her and um he sends out all these like international women to say emails and he's like let's break the glass ceiling guys but then behind closed doors is like really pressurizing her to be part of this relationship that she doesn't want to be a part of um and one thing that happened quite later on in the edits is i added like a line of eve saying well i can't say that I didn't consent. Like, I can't say that he forced me into it. I just felt so pressured and I feel like my hands are tied. So that's kind of what I mean when I say, like, the behavior is still there. It's just the lines have just become a bit more fuzzy and it's just become a lot harder to pin down on evidence, which, if anything, makes it, I think, maybe a bit more fuzzy and it's just become a lot harder to pin down on evidence which if anything makes

it I think maybe a bit more sinister it does and I also think a rapist is never gonna recognize themselves as a rapist no because of the connotations with that word and like you said because we just think of it as a really far away thing and I think unfortunately until that changes very little is going to change in terms of violence against women stats and how systemic this is um but one of the things that I think you touch on in the book that again is something that I don't read much about and it's it's not something that I've touched on in my novel because my main character is single she's not in a long-term relationship and I think it's so interesting reading about it happening to Jade who has a long-term boyfriend who you know you would think is her biggest support through

something as traumatizing as that and is her biggest kind of like emotional clutch for all of that but what is and weirdly I had this conversation with a friend the other day about how surprising it can be to experience the reactions of those closest to you when you talk about sexual violence. And particularly a male partner. And I think, and I've definitely had conversations with men in my life that have, their reaction to what I've told them has happened to me has really shocked me yeah um because I think you always think well they're the one person that I'm not going to have to justify myself to and is not going to make me feel like any shame for what I'm explaining to them but it just shows you how deeply entrenched all of this stuff really is so what was it that made you want to explore that and why do you think that

Jade's boyfriend does react the way that he does I I've had similar conversations um and it is quite surprising because I think a lot of these men are quite liberal and they would consider themselves very progressive and they would probably call themselves feminists, you know. But ultimately, when faced with the situation, just do not have the skills at all to be supportive or provide adequate support. I think it boils down to a real lack of understanding that manifests itself as a lack of empathy. When you think about depictions of assault in media and film and TV, it tends to be this one single event that's like suspended in this like vacuum and it's just like this like blip in the storyline and then

everyone moves on and the news cycle moves on and the plot moves on and just like no one seems to pay that much attention to the aftermath and how like the grief you feel when you've been assaulted and just the nitty-gritty day-to-day living with something like that happening to you and as a result there's no education about it and there's no way in which people know how to support them because we've been kind of taught it's just done like it's done kind of move on um and i think that's where like what i really wanted to do through the character of kit and their relation his relationship with jade was to take this one event and sort of like situate it within the context of an entire life because so rarely do we think

about the lives of the victims and how how they're going to continue on and how they move through their lives afterwards um and i think relationships is kind of like one of the sort of key vehicles that will probably be affected it's just something that isn't talked about in the way that it needs to be talked about and i think like you mentioned popular culture i think historically rape has kind of been used as shorthand for just like extreme violence rather than what it actually is and it's sort of like used for dramatic effect rather than exploring the kind of psychological emotional ramifications of it which is why I think books like this are so important and you know

hopefully do do a lot of work in terms of educating people more about the realities of it I want to ask what is it like for you now that the book is done presumably people have a lot of people have read it and given you feedback yeah what has that experience been like for you and talking about it and now putting it out there into the world because it is obviously such an intense subject matter to write about and now it's out there how how do you feel about it being you know being birthed I suppose um I feel like on the one hand very very vulnerable um just because it's it's I think whenever you talk about assault you're exposing yourself to people kind of projecting their idea onto you um and I know particularly as a debut author you should never do this but every now and then I'll

like kind of dip into the reviews and then very quickly dip back out again the few reviews that I have read like some of them are like wonderful beautiful like thoughtful and considered reviews but every now and then you know you read a review and you're like you've just validated why I felt like I had to write this book like really like one review was like um I don't know why it took Jade so long to face the obvious that she was raped and you're like this is this is why we we as a society just need to understand that it's it takes people sometimes like decades to like look back and think wow if that happened to me now I would so react so differently I feel kind of yeah just not justified but like validated in kind of the choices I made for the plot makes any sense yeah no it absolutely does I think the the not reporting um thing is is very much so

a big issue just societally but also something that i think the book really will help people understand as to why women don't come forward because the majority statistically don't and those who do statistically won't get a conviction because you know that that is the justice system that we operate within hey it's mitch from side note podcast and i'm here to tell you about the new Google Pixel 9 powered by Gemini. Anyone who knows me knows the Pixel has always been my favorite out of all the phones I've ever had. Now with Gemini built in, it's basically my personal AI assistant. Since I'm truly terrible at keeping up with emails, I use Gemini to give me summaries of my

inbox, which is a lifesaver. And if I'm feeling stuck creatively, I just ask Gemini for help and bam, instant inspiration. You can learn more about Google Pixel 9 at store.google.com. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. We'll see you next time. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca But let's move on to talk about the loves of your life. So your first one is a place. So tell me why you have chosen this. What is it that you've chosen to us? So I chose Seoul as my first love and I, well the context is I'm Korean and I grew up, I've never lived in Seoul but I went there quite a lot as a child, kind of pretty much every year and I have no family in the UK other than my immediate parents. other than my immediate parents um and so going to Seoul was like the only real time that I got to interact with you know my cousins and my aunts and you know just extended family um and it just

feels like kind of landing in Seoul feels to me just like a breath of fresh air like this whole sort of half of my identity that I quite rarely get to kind of explore when I'm here in London just it gets like unleashed the moment I get there and I get to like speak the language and have the food and just kind of really connect with it in a way that I I didn't I haven't I don't usually in my life here um and I find it quite funny because when I was growing up like when I was like six or seven you know I went to a new school and they say like tell me about yourself and I would say I'm Korean and people would genuinely be like where like people like where's that like is that Japan like all this stuff and like there was just such a like

monolithic view of like Asia as a whole um and I remember even like when was just such a like monolithic view of like asia as a whole um and i remember even like when i was at uni like going to seoul over some holiday over the summer holidays and someone was like but i don't understand like why would you go to korea and like you contrast that now with like k-beauty and you know k-dramas and k-pop and like korean culture has just like burst onto the scene which is obviously like amazing and really great for me to see but it's like this really like weird disconnect between like the experience that i have with being korean and then the career that's kind of like being presented to the world yeah it's interesting in the book

isn't there a moment when jade is asked where are you from and she says london and then say where are you really from uh yeah something something like that but she um there's kind of lots of like microaggressions like that sort of throughout the book um what when you find yourself in london kind of craving that sense of I guess belonging which is what it is that you're describing when you go back to Seoul even though you've never lived there if you have that do you have that London do you have that kind of sense of like displacement in London and if you have that what do you do to kind of remedy that because you can't just hop on a plane yeah I think this is something that's like so

inherent with being mixed race but also being like coming from like an immigrant family is that I don't I don't feel displaced in London I grew up in London and I London is my home but equally you know I don't feel like all of myself is represented in London and I don't feel like you know you go you go around London and you see like Korean inspired dishes or like gochujang inspired sauce and all the stuff and you feel like oh is it being tokenized to some extent now that it's popular back when when I was a child it was actually something that people kind of made fun of you for your second love is an animal or two animals tell us why you have chosen who are these animals tell us who they are and what they mean to you and also I should say I have a cat I'm very big into the animal thing very big

into the pet thing I totally get it so whatever you say it's not going to sound crazy I understand um so my animals are Lucy who was my childhood dog um and is the only reason I believe in an afterlife because I just hope that one day Lucy and I are reunited um and Bo is my current dog um and Lucy was this like two kilogram like untrainable feral like ball of yappiness basically but I just adored her like I just adored everything about her um and I was an only child or I am an only child. So I think I maybe just developed this, like, extremely close attachment to her. And I think, like, I don't know, pet loss and pet grief is something that, you know,

unless you've experienced that, you don't, I think you just don't, people maybe don't take it as seriously, but it does feel like you've lost, like, a family member't people maybe don't take it as seriously but it does feel like you've lost like a family member people really don't take it very seriously i remember i read a book about how to heal from heartbreak it's brilliant in the book i remember it's split into two and it's kind of half of it is about heartbreak from you know a breakup and the other half is heartbreak from losing an animal and i remember skipping over all of these bits being like i just don't get it like what why is this such a big deal now i have a cat oh my god i totally understand and i think it's a real like it's a real indictment to society that we can't talk about that more

openly and like with real empathy because it is obviously huge and it's you know those animals particularly a childhood animal you grow up with it becomes like a real lifeline and I imagine if you're an only child as well it becomes like almost like a kind of very little sibling yeah totally um yeah I don't know I get really like pre-emptive anxiety about losing Bo now um like I'll I don't know like if i don't know hypothetically i'm talking about like when i'm in my 40s i'll like like get really upset the notion that he's not going to be here i've been all the time literally all the time i'm like in my mind i'm like how old am i going to be when will she live till my cat's called blanche and i'm like when how old will i be when i have

blanche okay will i be able to cope with it then i don't know at what stage maybe i'll have a child by then maybe that'll help yeah no seriously it is it is like the attachment I feel and I also have this like horrible habit of like when my friends or former colleagues like talk about their babies I'll like join in the conversation and talk about my dog which is just like I need to stop doing that yeah I do that as well how how did Beau come into your life how long have you had Beau uh two years um he it was just kind of quite serendipitous because my partner um said we couldn't get a dog until the book thing was kind of off our plates because we were both working full-time jobs I was writing a book at the same time and I also really wanted a dog.

And he was like, no, this just can't happen. And then I got the book deal and then Beau became available and we brought him home probably like a week later. No one wanted him because he is an Aussie shepherd and he doesn't have the blue eyes. They're supposed to have blue eyes. They're supposed to have blue eyes.

And that's how we came to have him because no one else wanted him. Which obviously made me love him even more. That's so sweet. How do you split domestic responsibilities with your partner? Because having a dog is a big i will say he does most of the walking and definitely all of the like poop scooping and i do all the like um training and especially not so much anymore but right at the beginning there was like a lot of like teething and like training that needed to be done so i did all of that i like to think that i'm like the strategy person and he's like the execution person and I think the thing that I is always always strikes me about having an animal is how in tune they are with you emotionally and they can be such an emotional clutch and emotional support do you think can Bo tell when you're going through something so creepy really so if the like tone of my voice or the pitch of my voice like in

any way increases even if i'm like having like an animated conversation or if i'm like getting a bit stressed or a bit anxious he will literally put his entire body weight on me really like it's so weird he'll just like approach from like another room and just like launch on me and won't stop won't get off me until I like like go back to my normal tone of voice I don't know where he picked that up from but he just like tries to hug you basically yeah literally it's so it's amazing because it's like you know I don't know where he picked that up from but it's really helpful like really helpful does he do that with your partner as well no not at all but then we are i work from home now because i'm writing so i'm with him like pretty much all the time okay

um so i think he's just a lot more like sensitive to me and i'm quite like a like a up and down person anyway yeah so yeah oh that sounds like the best and well this leads me on to your third love which is therapy. But you have said you have quite an on-off relationship with it, which is something I can totally relate to. I have been in and out of therapy since 2020, gone through maybe like six or seven different therapists. Very much an on-off thing. Tell me why you chose therapy and why it is so on off for you. My first ever experience with therapy was when I was at uni. And I was really, really lucky because it was I got a few sessions and it was paid for. The cost of it was covered by the uni.

And then sort of for the next three or four years, it was like really stop start. I was kind of like, I think when you're in your early 20s and you're living in London and you know all your friends are there there are so many more fun ways to dull your pain than going to therapy like therapy just felt like the path of most resistance so I just kept I just couldn't really make it stick and I kept treating it like a bit of like like a plaster so like I'd get into these like extremely um bad states of mind and I'd find a therapist and then see them for like four or five sessions and then kind of feel like I was like back on track again and then I drop it again yeah I wonder with that is it that

you think because obviously it's very appealing to have a couple sessions and think oh I'm fine now I'm totally fine I'm fixed thank you so much I'll see you later um do you think the point is when you get to that stage keep going? It is a hundred percent the point it's sort of like the first few sessions are sort of inherently cathartic because you're like meeting someone for the first time and you are telling them all this context that they need to know to be able to help you. But then, well, at least for me,

I felt like this sort of like pressure valve release once I'd kind of let it all out. And then I was like, oh, okay, I feel better now. And then it would just be dropped again um so it took quite a few years to like actually do it consistently and kind of actually commit the time and like the expense of it like it's not there's a huge kind of financial barrier to entry for that which also was a huge kind of mental block for me as well how do you think being in therapy has informed your writing because I always think that that's super interesting in terms of creating characters I am kind of thinking about their psychology a bit more and thinking about like their childhood trauma and how that has shaped who they are

is that informing like how you create characters in your work not really for jaded but for my second book for sure because my second book's all about mothers and like complicated relationships between mothers and daughters and it is biographically like so different from my life but a lot of the like learnings from that and just like family dynamics I think have informed my writing in that sense I actually listened to Candice Carty Williams on how to fail and she was saying that once she started going to therapy she was scared that like she'd addressed her trauma so much that like maybe she wouldn't be able to write anymore which I thought was like such an interesting like really funny take um but yeah I think it does it does help in terms of like character building and also just kind of creating

complex complex flawed characters um which are always more interesting to read you mentioned your second book so now obviously I want to ask you about that um tell me what so what can you tell us about that and what made you want to write about something that you say is so different to jaded and and how has that writing process been different for you as well um so I'm not sure how much I can say but it's set in 2008 um post the recession and a family's been hit really, really hard by it. And they have to like significantly downsize their entire life to be able to make ends meet. And as a result, kind of living on top of each other

and sort of chaos ensues. I always knew that this was gonna be my second book. It was the kind of story that I pitched when we were going out on submission to sell Jaded. I think I just wanted to write something really, really different because I almost, I feel like, you know, there's this kind of cliche of like your debut is like the culmination

of everything you've thought and felt in like this kind of cliche of like your debut is like the culmination of everything you've thought and felt in like one kind of product. And then your second book is kind of the book that you really think about and that you really kind of allow yourself the like headspace to write properly. And I really, I do kind of feel that way. I feel like Jaded was like just very, very deeply like emotional it was very important to me whereas the second book is a lot more like this is the book that i actually want to write yeah versus the book that i feel like i must write yeah and get yeah i totally know what you mean well i can't wait for it to be out into the world and for everyone to read it um if you haven't

already read it by the time this comes out it will be out so do go and read it now thank you so much thanks so much for having me and that's all we've got time for for today thank you so much for joining us if you are a fan of love lives you can catch up with the show on all major podcast platforms you can also watch us on independent tv and all social media platforms thank you so much and i will see you next time. Bye. Bye. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals.

No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.