New York Times bestselling author Allison Pataki joins Zibby (for the fourth time!!) to discuss FINDING MARGARET FULLER, a skillfully rendered and soul-stirring novel about the trailblazing 19th-century transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller. Allison describes how Fuller remains relatively unknown today, despite her accomplishments: being the first woman to study at Harvard; writing foundational documents for the women’s rights movement; and being a central figure among renowned thinkers like Hawthorne and Thoreau. She also delves into Fuller’s complex relationships, radical ideas on marriage and women’s education, untimely death, and enduring influence on feminist history.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Alison. Thank you for coming back on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books for what, like the fourth time, fifth time? I don't even know. You're too prolific to talk now. 

Allison: I was wondering, I was trying to think. I don't know what time. I know last time I think we said I was the three peat because you had had a few three peats. So this must be the fourth.

I don't know if you have a word for that. 

Zibby: I think you're one of the, that must be one of the most ever frequent flyer pass, you know. We go way back, Zippy. We go way back. When we get to five, I'll, I don't know, maybe give out prizes or something. We should give you prizes. No, no, no. Okay. And for anyone listening, by the way, Alison is wearing a perfectly matched shade of green to the skirt on the cover of Finding Margaret Fuller, which is a gorgeous color, and it just is the type of detail and thought that Ali puts into all of her work.

So there you go. Okay, tell listeners what Finding Margaret Fuller is about, please. 

Allison: Absolutely. So Finding Margaret Fuller is a biographical historical fiction inspired by America's forgotten leading lady. So we all grow up. reading the canon of great American letters, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.

Of course, we read Ralph Waldo Emerson, we read Henry David Thoreau. I would reckon to say that there are quite a few people out there who don't realize that all of these great thinkers and writers, were living together. They were falling in and out of friendship. They were falling in and out of flirtation and drama in this one moment in time in this genius cluster in Concord, Massachusetts.

And Margaret Fuller was the leading lady at the center of it all. Margaret Fuller was who Emerson described as the radiant genius and fiery heart at the center of them. And she was Nathaniel Hawthorne's inspiration in writing the character of Hester Prynne. She was a. Role model to Louisa May Alcott, a mentor to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an idol of sorts to Susan B.

Anthony. So, I could go on enlisting her accolades and the details of her life, but the main point here is, why don't we know her name? Why don't we know about everything she's done? And so this is a biographical historical fiction to pull Margaret from the footnotes. from the supporting cast and put her center stage with this sweeping, iconic legacy that we should know more about.

But why? Why don't we know more? I think there are, I think there are a few huge pieces there. I think number one, she was a woman in a man's world maybe more than a century ahead of her time. This was the mid 19th century, so she broke down barriers for women to be sure. First woman to study at Harvard, first woman to write what is considered the founding document of the women's rights movement, woman in the 19th century was considered by Lucretia Mott, Susan B.

Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton to be their founding document. But in spite of that, the tragedy here, and this isn't a spoiler because it's in the prologue, she died too young. She had this really tragic. End of life experience, which you have to read about to know more about. But I think it cut her voice out of the conversation decades too soon, tragically so.

And so I think in the shipwreck in which she lost her life, she also lost what she considered her greatest written work. And I think that we, we can only imagine and conjecture, wistfully so, how it might have been different had that not been the case, but just like an interesting morsel here, she was on her way back to America, Margaret Fuller, in the summer of 1850, and she had been offered the role of president to And she run the convention when the National Women's Rights Movement convened for the first time that October in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Instead, the convention opened with a moment of silence in her honor. And to me, that says it all. That speaks volumes or quite literally the opposite about the way her voice was silenced too soon. And so, you know, Yeah. So now people have to read this book and figure out every, all the amazing things she did because it's a, it's a travesty.

We don't know it. 

Zibby: And you said in the book too, that she used to have nightmares her whole life about the water. 

Allison: It's true. It's true. Crazy. So Margaret had this phobia of water and drowning. She would have nightmares that she was, would wake up soaking wet. She had a few crazy experiences on the water in her life.

And interestingly, her count, her Italian lover, the man with whom she slept. sparked an international scandal, which you can read about and see why she was the character of Hester Prynne in real life. He had a prophecy in his family, because he was from this Italian noble family, that if they ever left Rome, they would perish at sea.

So it's interesting to see both of those tie ins and how it plays out. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. 

I am one of the. You know, a bazillion people who did not know anything about Margaret Fuller, and I didn't realize that all these different historical figures were just like hanging out and saying hello and like, you know, frolicking on a hill and taking walks and that David, Henry David Thoreau was Ralph Waldo Emerson's handyman?

What? 

Allison: True story! He was living in the Emerson house rent free, and then when he moved out to that famous one room cabin on Walden Pond and wrote a book that a few of us have read, that was also Emerson's property, and he put in the Hawthorne's vegetable garden as a wedding gift to them from the Emerson.

So Margaret was interacting and exchanging with all these people. It's like the prequel to Friends, like the first season of Friends. Americana style. 

Zibby: Totally. I think we forget when we read About people like so prestigious and so famous that they were kind of young and maybe cute and that they were like They're in their 20s and 30s like that's not that old like to me in my head They all have white long beard or you know, but no you you captured them all I mean Louise May Alcott is like, you know has Ribbon sort of falling out of her hair.

And it's like, you know, her dad's all annoyed with her. And I'm like, she's the little kid who goes on to write Little Women? It's crazy. 

Allison: She's the little kid who had a childhood crush on Henry David Thoreau who was her tutor who would take her into the woods to, you know, look for butterflies and fox kits.

And she's like, She really looked up to Margaret Fuller, who was a woman in her 20s and 30s, the ripe old age, and she would come to write Little Women and change the name of the eldest sister from Anna, which was what it was in real life, to Margaret, to Margaret, her hero, her heroine, Margaret Fuller, and she would, she would loosely embase some of her strong female protagonists on her childhood heroine, Margaret Fuller.

And, and to your point that they, they were just people. They were flawed people having drama, living together, coming and going in each other's lives. And That was what I really wanted to get at with this book and what I, what I initially found to be the hook, so juicy to me, was we know their stories that they wrote, I'm interested in the stories behind the stories, and that these people had their own lives and drama and backstories, and Margaret's was the most compelling of them all, I would argue, and so that's what I'm trying to do here is tell the story of just these people as characters. 

Zibby: Yeah, I didn't even know that Ralph Waldo Emerson went by Waldo.

Allison: Yeah, Waldo's went by Waldo. 

Zibby: Or that Thoreau had like, you know, really hairy hands. I mean, all these details you put in, it's like, huh, okay, now, and like his hair was all wild. Just even the way you describe them physically, like, I just don't think of them in my head as people with physical attributes. It sounds so silly when I say it out loud, but it's amazing.

Allison: It's so true. It's so true. They have become just the legends that we study in classrooms. And as you said, We think of them with white beards. Margaret did not have a white beard, but she had great long flowing brunette hair. And we all know the scene in the Scarlet Letter where Hester lets her hair down and she embraces her wild self in the woods and the red flowers.

And, you know, she sort of eschews the, the damning label of adulterous and embraces, you know, the wild, the wildness of the woods. And that was Margaret. That was, um, they were transcendentalist. They were seeking these rapturous transcendent experiences where the soul came out of the body and, you know, God wasn't some, you know, judgmental, white bearded figure in a cold church pew.

God was the flowers, God was the birds, God was the sun warmed grass. And Margaret was, like, the leading lady of this movement. She was the editor of their magazine. She was the muse. So, it's, it's a really beautiful moment in time. 

Zibby: And Margaret has very clear ideas on marriage, which she talks about in the book.

And how, you know, Waldo, I'm going to go by his first, you know, Waldo is, you know, talking about how she, she views it as entrapment and how love versus law factor into relationships. And she is just, she's like, I'm not going to say never, but this doesn't seem like it. This makes any sense that this whole institution of marriage, which to question at that time is a huge deal.

Allison: Exactly a century ahead of her time, arguably more. She said she couldn't enter willingly into an institution that would become for in so many ways for a woman as a state, a status of lesser than or bondage where your property becomes your husband's, your children become your husband's, your home becomes your husband's, your Your right to your own thoughts, in many cases, became your husband's.

And she, that was really huge for her in starting her conversations. Her, it wasn't a lecture series because she didn't want to stand up and lecture. She said, I know how to read and come up with an argument and state my case and stick to my case. I don't want to just lecture women. I want other women to learn how to do that.

And because they had been denied. education in so many instances where they had learned how to form their own thoughts and their own opinions. She wanted to offer that to women. So she was one of the first to offer the series, almost of like seminars, classes, where women would read the classics, Roman or Greek, the legends, or they would read politics.

And then they would come and they would argue and she would say, It's okay for you to disagree. We don't all have to end in this place of comfortable consensus where we're making sure everyone around us is comfortable. She said, we're allowed to have our own opinions. We're allowed to state our own case.

And that was really very dangerous and very progressive for her, for society at the time. The idea caught on. She soon was waitlist only. Women were willing to pay the high price to come to her classes and Margaret loved to empower others, especially women, in ways like this. Margaret was always looking for ways to encourage people to think freely and speak freely and question.

Molds and, and boundaries and barriers and, and she was always just breaking right through them. 

Zibby: And where did you stumble upon Margaret and this whole backstory and, I mean, I feel like it is a treasure trove. 

Allison: That was how I felt too. That's how I felt too. And I always like starting from a place exactly as you said, which is, I had no idea.

I didn't know anything about this. That's how I always begin my process. And so I love to start from that place with the reader as well. And how it happened for me was, A couple months after I had my third baby, I was stuck indoors. It was a rainy weekend. My mother in law was coming to visit. My in laws were coming to visit the baby and we couldn't do anything because the weather was horrible.

So my mother in law passed me this book that was a non fiction account called American Bloomsbury, which was about this genius cluster of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller was the one character in the book whose I'd never heard. I didn't know anything about her. And for me, She leapt off the page.

You know, I was an English major at Yale. I'd studied these people. I had willingly, voluntarily done, like the dorkiest walking tour of Concord, Massachusetts. I visited their homes. I considered myself as having known a fair bit about them and yet I'd never heard of Margaret Fuller. So that to me was that aha moment, which is like, I would want to read books about her, but there is not a historical fiction about her, so I'm gonna write the book about her.

And then for me, it really became about going to Concord and finding her, tracing her footsteps, immersing myself in the details, in the homes, in her world, and just learning as much as I could about the raw material. Because as you said, It was a treasure trove of just historical drama and fun facts. 

Zibby: How much of this, of Concord, Massachusetts, has been frozen in time?

I haven't been there. So like when you do a walking tour, like, because now I'm like, ooh, should I put that on my list? So what is that like? 

Allison: Yeah. You should absolutely put it on your list. It is so worth a visit. Concord is a town that adores its history and really honors it and still cherishes it, and so you really get the sense when you were there.

They had two really glorious moments. The shot heard round the world, which is the start of the American Revolution happened, you know, battles of Lexington and Concord. also on Emerson land. It was an Emerson pasture where that fight, you know, that showdown went between the Minutemen and the Redcoats. So they love their colonial history.

And then the other glory days for Concord was this transcendentalist genius cluster that was the mid 19th century. So You can visit Emerson House. You can visit Orchard House, which was Louisa May Alcott, Little Women. You can visit the Old Man's where Hawthorne and, and his bride lived. And you can see all the places where the scenes are from Finding Margaret Fuller.

And what I will say is you, you go there and streets are named after all of them. Their homes are still standing. You go to the cemetery, there's Author's Ridge. They're all buried together. I was like, gang is all here, except Margaret was always kind of an outsider. She left Concord. She said the problem with Concord is that it's lacking in discord.

And she wanted more than poetry. She wanted more than, you know, extra marital tension and philosophy and transcendentalism. She wanted to get her hands dirty in the gritty work of humanity. So she went to New York and then she went to Rome and London and Paris and it's all in there. Margaret saw this.

Sparked an international scandal. So Concord preserves it all, but Margaret is a bit of an outsider. But like, so, you know, you know, my coauthor on my children's books, Maria Myers, who also was my Yale roommate. We met for dinner at the Colonial Inn when I was in Concord researching cause she lives up there and we walked out and there's just a revolutionary era, fife and drums band in full costume playing revolutionary war marching music.

So to your point, Concord still honors its history, loves its history. Definitely worth, I would say, like, bring your kids and you can just totally dork out to all things American history. 

Zibby: You should do, like, a big tour. 

Like, I would want to go and have you, like, show us all the scenes and take us on the walk.

Allison: This is, this is Margaret Fuller's sun warmed boulder where she sat and edited the dial. And this is where we're going to go. Her, her guest room, which caused a lot of tension in the Emerson household because it was literally right next door to Waldo's office and Mrs. Emerson's bedroom was tucked away on the other side of the house.

Her guest room is now the gift shop. So there's her bed, and then there's the gift shop, which to me was like the perfect exemplar of, you know, Just the ways her legacy has sort of been pushed under the rug compared to the others. 

Zibby: Wow. When you see her in your mind, I know you described the long flowing hair and like the bluest eyes and all of that is in the book.

Who do you see? Like, is there anybody to conjure up who lives today or just, you know what I mean? 

Allison: I really see Natalie Portman because the first time I met Natalie Portman was at the Star Wars premiere. She was a young woman student at Harvard. Margaret Fuller was the first woman to study at Harvard. So in my mind, I just see them, it has to be a woman who is dynamic and strong and charismatic, but also incredibly, like, in so many ways feminine.

And Margaret Fuller was just this captivating leading lady. And I think Natalie Portman has that charisma and that gravitas and that, that like intellectual and like emotional heft to her when she brings a performance. 

Zibby: So, you talk, to set up Margaret and why she is the way she is, it's all about her relationship with her dad and how he, she was the oldest of eight, he wanted to make sure she knew everything and it wasn't about formal schooling and she, I guess, went to Groton for part of the time, but more about what he taught her with Greek and Latin and, and all of that and just that it was okay, that he thought it was okay for women to be treated this way even though she calls it, quote, unnatural.

So. Unnatural. Yeah, tell me about that and what does that say for, you know, today's dads and moms and what we can do with our kids. 

Allison: Yes, she was the eldest child, and he recognized this incredibly precocious, brilliant mind, and so he said he was going to educate her like a boy. And he was, in her words, exacting and severe, and he just drilled her, like a drill sergeant.

And by the age of five, she was fluent in Latin and Greek, and he got mad at her because she snuck through the door. this rag into her bedroom to read this tawdry reading material that was so beneath her, and it was the complete works of William Shakespeare. And he was like, Why are you slacking off by reading Shakespeare?

My five year old is not reading Shakespeare and if she was, I would be quite OK with that. But, he really, he drilled her from sun up to sun down was how she described her childhood. And In some ways there were very, there was a very real human toll on her that led to, that was when the nightmares began and the anxiety and the insomnia.

But it also did create in her this singular mind. She was known by her 20s as the most well read person in America. Edgar Allen Poe, her frenemy, said, their humanity can be divided into men, women, and Margaret Fuller. She really existed on a plane of her own. And so then what became so compelling to me was what she did with that brilliance.

She, she wanted to spread it to other women. She wanted other women to feel empowered and educated, inspired as well. She was, You know, leaving boarding school after a year because she was already more educated than all the teachers. It was like a waste of her time and money. So she really was largely self educated.

And then when she plugs in to this genius cluster at the invitation of Emerson, when he's like collecting this circle of great thinkers, that's the first time she's in her mid twenties. That's the first time where she's finally meeting people who are on her level and where she can be. And, and that's when really transcendentalism takes off for all of them.

They are, she describes it with Waldo in particular, this intense connection they had much to the chagrin of Mrs. Emerson. She describes this union of the souls. It was this like, It was this like surreal experience for both of them to connect in this way and Emerson apotheosized her. That's what Hawthorne said.

He made her into this goddess in his mind and he told Hawthorne, Waldo Emerson told Hawthorne, that Margaret Fuller was the one, woman in the world worth considering of ancient or modern times. So this was like lofty stuff. And as you can imagine, that has, that has interpersonal consequences with their, with their personal relationships.

But yeah, they saw Margaret as this muse, this goddess, this rock star. They really, admired and loved her intellect. And that was sort of the first time that, that men in her life, other than her father, seen that as a good thing because she had sort of eschewed the role, which could have been hers, of debutante and society bride and wife and hostess and mother.

So she, she's this very kind of controversial, Dangerous figure, like people see her as disrupting the domestic order because she's this woman out there living unwed, without children, living on her own, working on her own, writing these big ideas. So she was, she was a rock star. 

Zibby: Wow. Margaret is so inspiring.

Like, I feel inspired, and you're obviously so passionate about her, and by the way, like, your intellect, I'm sure, rivals hers. You are so, no, I love just even listening to you talk, Allie. It's like, the way you come, you're, you speak in full paragraphs, and it's, you know, you're just so, you're so bright. It's amazing.

No, it's fabulous. 

Allison: Nobody could make, nobody, like, that could not mean more coming from anyone, but you, because look at you. 

Zibby: No, no, no, no, no. You're, this is a whole different. This is a Holderen followaxe. So when you get really excited about something, like what do you do first? And what do you, like, I feel like that you don't want it to end with this book.

I feel like this book is like a launching off point for you. Maybe I'm wrong. 

Allison: Thank you. I hope you're right. Yes. I hope readers will let me talk about Margaret for many, many decades to come. Because that's really what's happening when I, when I like pick this, oh, a woman and I know I've met my next subject or my next.

Heroin of the book. I tell Dave, my husband, I'm like, I've been bitten. I just know. I know the story gets its teeth in me and I'm obsessed and it's a compulsion. It's like there's not going to be any turning it off in my head. So then it becomes this process of researching, front loading the research up front.

So with Margaret, it was going to Concord and I was just on this high visiting Walden pond and visiting the Emerson house and the orchard house and walking Margaret's footsteps sitting on her boulder where she tantalized Nathaniel Hawthorne beside the banks of the river. And so going there first, whoever, if it's Marjorie, if it's Cece, if it's Desiree, if it's Margaret, going there and walking her footsteps and soaking up as much of the richness of her world and the context and the details as I can.

And then really it's just reading a really hearty diet of non fiction facts and biographies. And then it all, it all kind of brews in there and marinates, and I get to a point where I've ingested as much of the raw material as I can. Let's say I have the bones. I know my beginning, my middle, my end. I know my dates.

I know my characters. In this case, it's the Titans of American Letters. I know You know, the scenes I'm going to hit, the moments. And then it's, and then at that point, I know I'm ready to begin writing. Then I'm ready to go and put the fictional flesh on top. And that's where Margaret as a historical figure in my head morphs into this like living, breathing character who begins to sort of lead me into her story.

And then, you know, I know the scenes I want to hit, but then that's when they really come to life for me. And we get to enter as the reader, hopefully, and the writer. Into those moments into those scenes, and there's this great quote, which I'll just paraphrase it here. The biographer tells you what happened.

The novelist tells you how it felt. And that's what I'm going for with historical fiction. It's E. L. Doctorow. But just putting us in those moments, imagining the heart truth, imagining how it might have felt to inhabit those moments with, you know, through the eyes of our, in this case, our dynamic leading lady, Margaret Fuller.

Wow. Do you have your next, have you been bitten by the next one you have? I do. I do. It's another woman in America. It's coming to the 20th century this time. So a little, a few decades closer to us. And it's, it's juicy. It's dramatic. It's sexy. I'm, I'm, I've got a little more book travel coming up for Margaret and then I'm going to.

get back to my desk and I'm going to send it off to my editor and then I'm going to share who it is. But it's another American woman who I just was gobsmacked to see. I didn't know her name. But as always, we know enough of the touchstones to the story. We know the context. We know the men. We know the time period.

We And that's, that's always the way in is like, Oh, but then there was this woman hiding in plain sight in the midst of it all. So it's another woman like that. 

Zibby: How are you just cranking these out?

Allison: I mean, well, I mean, look who's talking. 

Zibby: No, I mean, I mean, there's, this is so much research and I mean, the amount of material even just to reconstruct it and to get to that, I'm ready to write point, I mean, just doing all that research and then writing it.

And then. I mean, Marjorie Merriweather post book, that was like, that couldn't have been more than two years ago? A year ago? When did that come out? 

Allison: Yes, two years. That was two years. Okay. It took me six years to write. So I'm, I'm always on this, this schedule, you know, where we're wearing many hats as writers.

As you know, we're researching one, we're writing or editing one, and then we're talking about one, or hopefully more than one people will have us. And so. I've got like, I'm always kind of thinking about something or researching something and then one day that's happening and then the next day if I'm getting the manuscript back from my editor, I'm editing or I'm writing.

And I've settled into a nice rhythm because I've done 10 books in 10 years and it's a lot. You know, as we know, we've got a lot of things going on as women, as mothers, as you know, we're running. Transcribed Our own businesses. So I've, I'm, I'm going to settle into a nice rhythm of a new book every two years.

That's, that's what I'm going for. So, you know, I'll have downtime where the book is in production, you know, it takes nine months to make the actual physical book. So then I'm working on my next one. And you know, it's Zibby, it's, we send our kids to school in the morning, we drink all the coffee, we sit down, we write, we crank up our playlist and then we drink some more coffee and then.

We, we take our time, you know, we, we seize our moments when we can, and it's what any working mom has to do. You know, we've got to lean on playdates and sports and, you know, husbands shuttling kids here and there and amazing babysitter that I have who makes my entire life possible. So, you know, it's a season of life that we're in with the little kids and also feeling the love.

very strongly that this piece of ourselves, this, this creative writing author piece is also important. And so, as you know, we make time, right? We, we make the time, we steal the time. So I sit down and I write whenever I can. 

Zibby: Wow. And it's not just your kids. You wrote, as you know, I'm obsessed with your book, Beauty and the Broken Places.

That what happens when you have a husband who has something going on and you're also a caregiver, even though I know Dave is in such a good place right now, but maybe just share a line in case people don't know. 

Allison: Yeah. Life, like all the stuff that happens in life. And in this case, my husband, Dave, at the age of 30 had a, had a massive near fatal stroke and we didn't know if he would survive or not.

And it was just. As the doctor said, the world's worst lottery ticket. It was the most random stroke for a healthy 30 year old. Doctor, athlete, nonsmoker, just there was no reason why it should have happened. And he had this massive stroke and he, he did survive miraculously, but he woke up less functional than a newborn.

Cause you know, newborns can swallow and drink milk. They can cry. He couldn't breathe on his own. He couldn't swallow on his own. So he's got like a complete state of life support. And then when he did wake up and got off the machines, he was still totally amnestic. He couldn't remember anything for. Well, over a month.

So we nursed him. We fought his way back to a place of functioning and, and like reengaging as a, as a human being in society. So that, that was in 2015. That was almost 10 years ago. That was how we first met. That was the first book we spoke about together. But yeah, so when you're a human being and you're in relationship with other people and you love other people, whether it's your spouse or your children or your parents or your friends, whatever, yeah, stuff is always coming up, right?

So that's, that's what we're all, we're all carrying that. Even on a good day where I'm like, okay, I'm going to sit down. I'm going to have three hours of uninterrupted writing time. Get the skull from school. Uh, your daughter is, you know, just threw up and needs to be picked up. So it's like, you never, or there's going to be a total solar eclipse today.

So you're going to have to pick, you know, you just, you never, you never know what's going to happen. So it's like, you know, it's whack a mole every day to make the time to work and do what you love and be with the people you love. 

Zibby: What is, I don't have a playlist. What's on your playlist? 

Allison: So it depends on what I am working on.

So I like to write from home because I want to control like the coffee and the water and the, the music. And then I've got my dog here, the temperature. So I'm not like a coffee shop or a library writer for that reason, but I have the Amazon Alexa. She's probably going to hear me and start talking. And so I will just sort of channel whatever I'm vibing for the book I'm writing.

So when it was CC, it was a lot of like Johann Strauss and Wagner unleashed because I wanted the, uh, the Habsburg, Playlist. And then when it was Marjorie Post, it would be a lot of like Gershwin and like Jazz Age. They were like Great Gatsby. And then this was a lot of classical. So well, Margaret Fuller was like always taking walks in the woods with Waldo or Hawthorne or Louisa May Alcott.

And it was kind of like even the cover, it's like the green and the nature. I'm like channeling this out. So just a lot of like gentle instrumental music. Like I'll, I'll just say like, I would just be like, Alexa play songs like Gustav Mahler and then, and then Alexa makes me my playlist. So I don't, I don't necessarily have a playlist now.

Um, it's more just like what I'm vibing with. So. It's Taylor Swift all the time once my kids get home. It's the classical before they get home. Mostly, probably no lyrics so that I can keep that, you know, headspace clear. 

Zibby: We're in a, we're in a big Olivia Rodrigo kid phase at the moment. 

Allison: Oh, okay. We're, we're not, we're not there yet.

Okay. 

Zibby: They're a little older. So, um, Right. Should we, yeah, should I try and, well, no, I don't, don't, it's fine. No, it's a little advanced. We'll get there. We'll get there. Even for my kids. So I know you can't see. say who your next person is of interest, but can you say who the playlist is inspired by? Like, what's, what do you say to Alexa?

Allison: Oh, for the next, for the one I'm currently writing, it's coming back to jazz. It's like, it's coming back to the early 20th century, New York in this moment of Like this brand new stuff called electricity and this like ambitious new thing called the subway and the telephone and intercontinental travel and like all these breaking news developments that were happening with Thomas Edison and the light bulb.

So like that era of just like the gritty flashy kind of sparkly New York City early 20th century. 

Zibby: Amazing. 

Allison: I'll tell you. And if people want to know first, they can find out by connecting with me online and social media. Did I tee that one up? 

Zibby: You did. Where should, Allie, where should they follow you on social media?

Allison: So it's just my name, Allison Pataki. So I'm on Instagram, X. Facebook and my website is just alisonpataki.com and so I will share the news on my next lady there first. 

Zibby: We will all be there. We will be waiting with spaded breaths. So impressive per usual. I'm just such a fan of yours. Congratulations. 

Allison: Thank you, Zibby.

Likewise. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for having me. 

Zibby: Thank you.