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Okay, so let's go to your lived experience in your family.

How did you... and it's sensitive to... I'm sure with the memoir, it's so hard.

How do you talk about your parents when they're still alive? How do you talk about your siblings when they're still alive?

I get the sense that your parents were kind of cool. At least that's the sense I get from what I've read so far.

Almost like your mom was like this yoga kind of hippie mom and your dad was this doctor by day but an expert chef by night.

Exactly.

So maybe it's easier to talk about your parents but talk about what your parents were like and how the religion sort of informed their parenting.

Sure, but my parents are part of the Modern Orthodox Jewish community in Memphis. I'm actually going there tomorrow morning.

It's the next stop of my book tour.

And my parents really, you know, they are fully part of this world. I think that they believe in it and this is the world they've shaped us in.

You know, it's interesting. I think my parents probably had the experience of what happens when a child is not like you.

I think they had that experience with my older brothers. Maybe they were practiced in it by the time they got to me.

So even though we were raised in this modern Orthodox world, my brother after college eventually gradually became part of a chastity Jewish community in an ultra-orthodox community in Israel.

And so, you know, from the Alzheimer's perspective, maybe that difference doesn't seem so vast but from within it, it felt very big.

It felt like he was changing from who our family was. And I think in that my parents had to reckon with what is what happens when a child doesn't choose who you are when they choose something different.

So that was sort of the first case of it. And then of course they have me now. And I think by the time I made this change when I was about to turn 40.

And so maybe we were ready to talk about it. And they were able to, you know, my parents, I think, were able to accept that there was sadness for them, I think, particularly for my mom, this idea that I wasn't the person maybe she wouldn't wanted me to be.

Or I wasn't going to have wasn't going to believe in the same things she believed in.

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