commute with to get to and from work, and I never felt like I saw women, like people that I knew and and actually, and not just that. And sometimes, you know, notice about when I graduated, which is in the late 90s, it was a little blip, like in the 90s, and like, into the early, very beginning of the 2000s is a little blip of Latina fiction, and a lot of it was kind of historical written by women that were older than me. And so, like, you know, you had so far from God, which is an amazing book that really bucks a lot of trends. It's very ahead of its time kind of book. But, like, there wasn't a ton, you know, you had in the tip of the beautiful book with historical fiction like you didn't really have women living like in contemporary times. And then there was this book that is a giant thing with all of our People Magazine, when people actually read People Magazine, like, you know, and it was for the jury girl Social Club. And then, in fact, like a giant advance it was gonna change everything. And then they were gonna make it into a movie. And then, like, nothing happens, and the victim, whoa, but not amazing. And then, like, you know, 4% like, what, like, driven into, like, you know, like mad by this situation, and then, and then they were like, Oh, this stuff doesn't sell. Like, and so then there's just nothing. It wasn't like I was reading a trend of Latin fiction and then, like, I'm not seeing myself. There wasn't a ton of it coming out and but what I was definitely seeing was that, what I never saw was I was still seeing a lot of sort of stereotypes, and I was like, That person exists, and also, I'd say, a lot of immigrant narrative, which has an important place in American literature, but just wasn't the experience that I was having. And so I didn't really feel like I needed to prove anything, or just like I just, I really felt like I know that there's women that know this experience, and they were Latino women, they were second generation immigrant women. They were Caribbean women in general. And where you're balancing this demand, particularly with my first book with Olga, where it's like, how do you stay true to what you were raised as being happy in the when that, when those things are in direct like, competition with the demands of capitalism and American success and so, like, how do you balance that and and so I didn't really feel we decided to do something post 40. Like, I started this book when I was 41 years old. I didn't really care. I remember, like, leaving, I gave up a rent stabilized apartment in Brooklyn, and I came down here before I was gonna do my MFA at Iowa, and I had to move to Iowa to give up this apartment. And I came down to New Orleans, and I was like, Well, this is much cheaper than New York. I can always come here. This is a cool place. So like, I think I just sort of felt like I didn't really have anything to lose. And like, if 100 people read it, I'd feel really happy. And then it turns out that, like, I was right, and there was like, and it's spoken to so many different kinds of people. It speaks to my audience, but so I just say like, I don't think so that I would have been I think I would have felt like I wanted to make people happy. And by people, I mean, I think editors and agents and things like that, who didn't really know what I was doing. And because I was older, I was really confident. And I remember my editor being like, I know this world exists. Like, literally, what I was doing, she read the first 100 pages of the first draft of Olga, and she was like, I know this family exists. I don't know them well, but I know they exist. Keep going, and let's just do it, and I'm gonna sell this book to you and like, and I think though that it was because I was kind of like, I'm just writing it unapologetically, and so I don't think, though, that everything can't come with every age. And I don't think that without having lived all those experiences and also seen to the point about the piece that you read, I had like, I remember being at like an alumni thing at Brown and somebody with a straight face named me. I can't wait they start putting white people on the cover of the alumni magazine. Again, look what they really thought. And for years, just living this life of microaggressions. And so when I started working on old people, like, what's it that it's a big book of microaggressions, four years of microaggressions. Like, I think that the contradiction and partly why it is, like, challenging, sorry, I think that it gives us long answers. I've had women Latino women that are a little older than me or my age that, like, have worked and excelled and thrived in corporate America, and they're like, you say these things, like, I like, I wept because I didn't know this is what was happening to me. Because I think sometimes we don't have the space to have language for it, but it's like, like, the truth of the matter is that you were cognizant that you were holding up an entire department while at the same time being sabotaged by your boss, like and like, and yet you don't. There's no space for that cognitive dissonance. And I think what I do is give voice to the cognitive dissonance, and then that's what sort of speaks to a lot of my readers. Yeah,