Welcome to Our Head House.

This is Jasmine Singer.

And thank you for joining us this week.

Marianne's guest is Laura Jean McKay.

And this is a fascinating interview.

Laura is Australian, is the author of the recent novel, The Animals in

that country, which was the winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction and

the Victorian Prize for Literature 2021. That's very impressive.

This book is mind-blowing. It really is. And it doesn't, you know, if I describe it, which I don't really need to because we're going to get to the interview in a minute. But it would sound like it's not going to work. I don't know how she pulled it off, but she really did. It's a little bit science fiction. It's got some really deep characters going through some angsty stuff.

And miraculously, even though she started to write it a while ago, it's about a pandemic.

It's a mind-blowing book because she really, how can I say this without people thinking it's not going to work?

She just, she gets kind of into the minds of the animals.

But in a way that doesn't

overdo it. The book is about, you know, what animals are thinking or something, but it does go there

and blah, blah, blah, I'm just rattling along. We'll just have to wait for the interview because

it's so good. And I love this book. And she's also your guest on the flock bonus segment, so people can get even more from your conversation with Laura. Yeah, and as always, if you're a flock member, you'll get the link to that bonus content in your email on the Tuesday after this episode goes up. You can always find it on the flock Facebook group. And if you're not a member of the flock and you can afford it, you can join for $10 a month at our henhouse.org slash donate. And if you're a flock member, please join us for flock Friday Zoom calls at 4 p.m. Eastern, 9 p.m. Greenwich Meantime, where we focus on how to be better activists and how to take care of ourselves. So if you are a member of the

flock, check out that flock Facebook group for updates or write to us at info at our henhouse.org.

So I have been enjoying hanging out in your apartment, partly because it is like a different,

you know, a totally different environment from mine, you know, and that's always

better. Like I could grab something from your refrigerator and it's like, what kind of

seltzer does Marianne have today? Is it different than mine? Our needs have become so simple.

You know, you used to have to go to Paris to get a chain of scenery. Now you go to somebody else's

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