Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive

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Angela Baker is the author of When We Grow Up, a novel. She is also the author of Our Little

Rackett. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times,

Fogue, Los Angeles

Review of Books and Literary Hub. She lives in Eugene, Oregon with her husband and two cents.

Welcome, Angelica. Thank you so much for coming on to discuss when we grow up a novel. Congrats.

Thank you. Okay. Your book opens. There are a bunch of friends sitting in Hawaii who get a notice that an inbound missile is on the way and they might die. And oh my gosh, what do you even do with that? Tell listeners about the book where this idea came from, the whole thing.

So this people might know if they're listening. This happened in January

2018. This is not a made-up circumstance. And when it happened, I was on a vacation with people I had

known since I was 12 years old. And they are sort of my wider group of friends from high school.

Many of them have stayed really, really close. And they travel together every year in January. And I had actually not gone on the January trip at that point in like 10 years. And it was right after I had my first book had come out and my husband and I were engaged. He was in Japan doing research for the year. So I'd been on my own in New York for a couple months. I was going to Japan. And I was just kind of like, you know, why not? I'll go on the strip with my high school friends. I hadn't seen some of them in like five years. And that happened the first morning. And so it's really weird feeling of both that it was your mind kind of like rejected whatever sort of bigger things you think you would do in a near, it was a near death situation, but you weren't reacting that way because it was kind of like, well, what? It was just like, well, we're waiting to see. And also your mind wanted to think it wasn't real because as it turned out, it wasn't. So that was the likeliest outcome. But it was just so, such a massive thing to try to wrap your mind around. And then I also had this feeling of like, well, I mean, these are the people who have known me longer than almost anyone else in my life, but also like I hadn't seen some of them in five years. I was like, maybe it's appropriate that we're all going to die together, but it also feels really weird. So it only lasted for 45 minutes. And even before the official 45 minute mark when we got the follow-up message that it had been a mistake, we were all on Twitter. There were reporters on Twitter who had called Central Command in Hawaii or something. So we had figured out it wasn't real, but it was this kind of thing where we all just kind of sat there frozen. We were like, well, I don't know. What are we going to do with this? And so that was the original kind of

spark. Oh my gosh. You wrote in the beginning. But when she looks up at everyone else, they're in

motion, flitting back and forth between the house and the deck. No one else is sitting still or even

sitting down. She tries to refuse the terror any space to rampage, holding herself still the way

you might hold a glass of water high in the air

during an earthquake's initial lurch. Because all the possibilities are laughable, right? The image of

what, of dying? The image doesn't exist in her brain. It's an unwelcome specter scorched from the

...