Alex met Sam at nursery. They were first loves. They built forts together, shared sandwiches in high school and were each other's first kiss.

They were the dream couple until Sam got into EDM music.

While Alex enjoyed folk, first loves are kind of like your current account. If they aren't working for you anymore,

maybe it's time to switch with the current account switch service.

I'm so so excited to meet you again and have you on the podcast and congratulations on your amazing book.

I have it all highlighted here. It's so so phenomenal.

Thank you.

I can't wait to have this conversation with you because I really do want to talk about your writing process and your research and how this came to be.

I'll start with a really easy question but something I feel most listeners will want to hear.

Why did you decide to write this book now and what were you hoping your audience and readers would take away from it?

I had been working on the book for a while. The ideas for the book and the things that were brought out in the pandemic, the inequalities and inequities and vulnerabilities, including that more people were vulnerable to violence because they were in their homes.

All of those things kind of came together. What I wanted people to take away was this sense of urgency for addressing the problem.

That it wasn't a problem that just was going to go away on its own. It wasn't going to go away because a new generation would come along and resolve it.

The problem was much more complex and deserve complex solutions in order to respond to it.

The third thing that I wanted people to understand is that it is a larger problem than one just behavior or a few bad apples out there that we read about in papers.

It's really an everyday problem as well as an astonishing set of series of egregious problems.

I wanted people to understand that it was real in part of their lives or part of the lives of people who they know and they care about.

As I was reading it, it hit me that every chapter it feels like a lifetime of material.

But you definitely feel your generosity on the page. That is one thing that really shines through.

It made me also think of your first book, you know, Speaking Truth to Power.

What was the process from that book in 1997 to this? Was there a big difference in your writing process or did you feel like you had to address new things with believing that you left out and your first memoir?

Yeah, well, you know, I call it a 30 year journey because there are things that I have come to understand in the past 30 years that I wanted to add to this book.

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