But now it feels so much more important and poignant and fraught to be discussing. So, well before the world was put in a state of upheaval when it came to motherhood. We came up with this idea for the second book to do together back in 2018. And so for this book, we wanted it to be in motherhood, in the parenting space. As Christine said, we're really passionate about tackling race in intimate spaces.

JP: My gosh, I mean, in everything that we did. How did those aspects of your personal lives factor into the writing of this novel? Jo, you're about to have your third child Christine, you're child-free by choice. MC: In addition to race, motherhood is the main theme of this book. And then how they can view the world differently, through both our characters' eyes and really putting the reader in these characters' shoes. And, if anything, we wanted to double down in the wake of We Are Not Like Them on really pushing that, since people seem to really respond to this idea of, Why do I think a certain way about race? Why do I react to certain way when this character says something or this character does something? And pushing readers to think about.how they view the world. And that's what we're really trying to show in this story. But when you add race to the mix, it affects all of the tentacles, all the dynamics, all the relationships. You can write a story that feels universal about friendship or about motherhood. MC: And so taking that experience, how did you imbue learnings from that or move that conversation forward for this new book, in which race is a major theme but a secondary one?ĬP: I think it's it's the same idea that race really affects everything, right? And that's what our books really delve into and that's what we're very interested in as writers.

Jo piazza and christine pride