Hi! First of all, I recorded a voiceover of this So Into That! Click the play button above if you’d like to listen. I really, really tried not to cry, but it was just a crying kind of day apparently. I’ve had a wild few weeks of travel — both for pleasure to Mexico with the kids, and then, eight hours after landing from Mexico, I left for a 10-day work trip that included announcing my new book on Good Morning America, delivering a keynote at my alma mater (go Heels), taping an upcoming appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, bringing my 5-year-old along for the second half of the trip, and having a bazillion meetings and coffees in between. That 10-day trip marked the end of breastfeeding my fourth baby. I breastfed my first baby for 14 months, my second baby for 12 months, my third baby for six months, and my fourth baby for seven months. That’s three years and three months of breastfeeding. Before I go on, I want to say that I am not writing this to glorify breastfeeding. Any way you feed your baby is absolutely perfect. Formula rules. Giving a baby a pumped milk or formula bottle is just as cozy and wonderful (and also difficult at times) as breastfeeding, and provides many or all of the same moments I share below. But I did breastfeed (in combination with formula for my last two babies), so, now that that chapter of my life is behind me, I wrote a toast to it, to say goodbye. Breastfeeding: You made my boobs resemble empty wind socks, you made me question every single food or drink I had consumed in a 48-hour period whenever my baby wiggled slightly too much in his sleep, you made me smell so, so bad, you made my nipples bleed, you made my boobs leak in so many public places, and, according to my math, you consumed roughly 2,400 hours, aka 99 entire days, of my life over the past seven years. You also allowed me to spend precious hours alone with my tiny, perfect babies, to escape countless boring conversations, to get out of so many tedious obligations, and to hide in dark rooms at parties. You created quiet pockets of time in the middle of loud, busy life. You gave me thousands of small moments with my babies that I’ll never quite be able to explain to anyone who wasn’t there with us. I have loved you, I have hated you, and I have felt pretty whatever about you, sometimes all in the same minute. And it’s time for us to say goodbye forever. But before we do, here’s a toast to you. To the 1 a.m. feeds, the 3 a.m. feeds, the 3:45 a.m. feeds, the 5 a.m. feeds, and the 5:32 a.m. feeds, when the whole house was silent except for the rhythmic, baby-piglet snorts and gulps. To that first successful latch. To that first public breastfeeding session when you’re still trying to maintain a shred of modesty. To that last public breastfeeding session when you’ve thrown modesty to the wind. To the newly postpartum oxytocin blasts that felt like drugs. To never ever sitting in the rocking chair that my mother-in-law so lovingly bought me, instead preferring to breastfeed in bed, surrounded by pillows, in what my sons aptly named “mama’s nest.” To the frantic “I NEED WATER! SERIOUSLY, I’M DYING, PLEASE HELP ME RIGHT NOW!” shouts to my husband. To the times he handed it to me before I even asked and it felt like the truest form of love. To my sons asking “does he need to drink yer boob!?” every time the baby cried. To all the food dropped on my babies’ heads. To going from breastfeeding being a quiet, peaceful time to learning how to breastfeed while kissing toddler boo boos, or feeding myself lunch, or building MagnaTile castles, or making snacks. To living life to a soundtrack of white noise. To crying while listening to Michelle Obama’s memoir in my first baby’s first nursery. To flipping the pages of so many books with my chin because I didn’t have any free hands. To my body literally having a super power: the ability to instantly calm a baby. To powering through the extreme discomfort of breastfeeding on the bleachers at a baseball game or on a 90-degree day at a water park or on one of those tiny chairs at a pre-K teacher conference. To the hours spent pinned under a sleeping child, oscillating between feeling trapped and feeling like I was exactly where I was meant to be. To the way a soft diaper-clad newborn felt curled against my soft, squishy postpartum body. To the milk drunk faces. To the milk that dribbled out of the side of their mouth when they couldn’t even stay awake long enough to finish that mouthful. To kissing their little face and tasting the sugariness of my own milk and being kind of grossed out but not really. To helping me get to know my babies. To helping me understand every single noise they made except for the really weird ones that made me and my husband or whatever big kid was in the room laugh and laugh at the absurdity of such a tiny, adorable baby making such a wild noise. To my body waking up when the baby’s breathing changed ever so slightly because they’d just woken up. To the cheeks and thighs and knuckle dimples and wrist rolls my body created. To all the times I’ve nibbled on those cheeks and thighs and wrist rolls because I had no other option, I had to. To the thousands of hours of anxiety, joy, pain, and overwhelming contentment. To the end of an era. No more nursing bras. No more leaky boobs. No more pumping! No more calculating feed times before leaving the house. Thank you for allowing me to feed another human with my body, how cool. Thank you for the quiet moments, the escape hatch, and the excuse to re-watch every single season of Gray’s Anatomy. And now, respectfully, lovingly, goodbye. Unless you’re brand new here, you know that I’m a huge audiobook fan. Audiobooks accompany me on walks, make doing the dishes and folding clothes infinitely more fun, and played in my ear so, so often while I fed/rocked/walked/shushed my babies over the last seven years. I am excited to be partnering with Macmillan Audio today to introduce you to my new-favorite listen that I can’t bring myself to press pause on: This Story Might Save Your Life (TSMSYL) by Tiffany Crum, which released yesterday! I’ve been venturing outside of my usual romance reading over the last few months and am loving this story — it’s part romance, part suspense, with a touch of humor. And the audiobook specifically is a work of art. To celebrate the release of TSMSYL, we chatted with Tiffany! CARO: Before we get into This Story Might Save Your Life, we want to learn about you! I know (but also can’t believe because it’s so well done) that this is your debut novel — give us a quick rundown on your path to becoming a novelist. TIFFANY: First of all, thank you so much for inviting me into your community! My path to getting published was a long one. I’ve always loved writing, but I never allowed myself to pursue it as a career until my oldest son was born. That was when I realized: if I wanted my children to grow up believing they could follow their dreams, I needed to teach by example and follow mine first. I’d love to end the story there and say that was all it took — boom, immediate book deal! — but in reality it was a winding 18-year journey of writing manuscripts that will (very happily) never see the light of day. In the end, This Story Might Save Your Life is the one where all that practice and determination finally came together. CARO: I can relate to so much of that! How long have you wanted to be an author, and what did you do professionally before writing this book? TIFFANY: I’m not kidding when I say I didn’t even let myself think about writing novels until my first son was born. Before I became a parent, I worked full time as an executive assistant in the film industry. After he was born, I reprioritized. I chose to work part time so I could carve out space to pursue my dream while raising our son, and later our sons. We struggled for many of those years, but my husband was completely on board. He likes to say he never had any choice in the matter because I’m miserable when I don’t have time to write, but that really downplays how supportive he’s always been. CARO: Where do you live and where are you from? TIFFANY: I grew up on a dairy farm just down the road from a maximum-security prison, which is a pretty good origin story for someone who ended up writing suspense. After many years living in California, I now live outside Atlanta with my husband, our two sons, and our two dogs. CARO: What was your inspiration for This Story Might Save Your Life? How and when did the idea come to you? How long did it take you to complete this novel? TIFFANY: I’ve always been fascinated by the strange intimacy of podcasts. When you listen to someone’s voice for hundreds of hours, you start to feel like you know them — even though you’ve never actually met them. This made me wonder: what if something terrible happened to one half of a beloved podcast duo? How would the audience react? And what if the story behind the microphone turned out to be very different from what listeners believed? The first draft came together quickly because I was head over heels in love with these characters, but, like most novels, it went through several rounds of revision before it became the version readers have now. CARO: OK now give us the scoop on This Story Might Save Your Life! Will you sum up the plot? TIFFANY: This Story Might Save Your Life is both a thriller and a love story about two best friends, Benny and Joy, who host a wildly popular comedy survival podcast, and what happens when one goes missing and the survival story becomes their own. CARO: Is there a podcast that inspired Benny and Joy’s — their dynamic together, if not the content itself? TIFFANY: I’m a longtime podcast listener, and I’ve always loved shows hosted by close friends, particularly My Favorite Murder. Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark were a real
