Many great writers seem to have two spirits —
the author and the person, the visionary and the awkward real human being. I think of Kafka, Hemingway, London, Dickinson — all great writers and yet people with personal lives filled with the stuff that makes up reality not
fairy tales. Libbie has revealed herself as a real person in this podcast and how brave she is. She may be Olivia Hawker in nom de plume — a gifted writer of historical fiction — but Libbie the person is who we meet and what fun it is. I discovered her books almost by accident since I noticed she grew up in Idaho. She wrotes rich, provocative stories about the West, which is a rare find. I happened upon the podcast after reading about it on her author bio. Wow. It fills in a lot of blanks on numerous fronts. It’s very irreverent, brutally honest, totally funny, truly groundbreaking to use too many superlatives. But I am not exaggerating! Thank goodness we live in a time when a women can speak her truth, a nonconformist can tell her story. I hope our increasingly uptight society can protect those rights and come to see that only the the whole tale of human experience unfiltered by doctrines and rewrites will save us from our follies. I’m looking forward to more from Ms. Hawker — including the soon to come familial work about the earliest followers of LDS to whom she is related. Good luck and thanks for this amazingly thought-provoking podcast.
