I'm going to go and One of the most personal and meaningful projects I've ever made was my podcast series called

The Secret Tapes. There are a series of interviews that I did with the people I write about in my book, Share Your

Staff, I'll go first. And I did these interviews last winter in the months

before my book came out, but after it was already written and turned in, so there

were no takebacks on these stories that I told.

But I still wanted to get the perspective of the people I wrote about. I wanted to know if they saw things the same way as I told them.

And honestly, as a long time memoir and non-fiction reader,

I'm always left wondering what the friends and the families

and the lovers of the author are thinking about when a book comes out that they're in, that they didn't have any say in.

And so I had these recorded conversations,

recorded conversations are really a better way to describe them than interviews.

I had them with old friends, some I hadn't talked to in years. I also recorded conversations with my parents, with my

siblings, with my oldest friend in the world drew, who I write about as coming out to me as gay when we were in our 20s and how

pivotal that was for me as a human. I talked with two of the members of my original book club that I write about in the belonging chapter of Share Your Staff, and I hosted a reunion of friends who were in Sri Lanka with me back when I was a blogger and we were on a

humanitarian trip to raise money and that conversation that episode of the secret

tapes much like that trip, was deeply meaningful, just

really profound in some ways as we talked through what an impact that Sri Lanka trip had on our lives.

I wrote about it some in the chapter of the book,

the chapters called,

When did it change?

Because in some ways, Sri Lanka changed everything and I'm not the only one

who feels that way. Also one of my favorite conversations is the first episode of the secret tapes titled A Game Called Go, and it's the origin story of my deep desire to share my stuff all the time.

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