Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the Webby-nominated podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

This episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books has been sponsored by Himalaya, the best app for discovering, listening, and organizing podcasts.

Himalaya was nice enough to reach out and make me an editor's choice. So now they're a sponsor.

Check them out at Himalaya.com or in the app store. I'm really excited to be here today with

Karen Duques, who's the author of Novel The Last Book Party. A former journalist, Karen,

was also a speechwriter

for the United Nations Development Program on gender equality.

Karen blogged for Huff Post about raising boys

and has contributed book reviews to USA Today.

The graduate of Brown University

and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism,

she currently lives in Pelham, New York, with her husband and two sons So welcome, Karen. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming on Momston, and have time to read books. I'm thrilled. I'm such a big fan for quite a while. Oh, thank you. So can you please tell listeners what The Last Book Party is about and what inspired you to write it? Okay. So the last book party is a coming of age of a writer.

It takes place over the summer of 1987 and it follows a 25-year-old young woman and she moves from

book publishing in New York to Truro on Cape Cod where she takes a job for a New Yorker writer

and works in his house with him and his wife, a poet. And it's about

what happens to her over the summer. It was such a vivid portrait. Like, I feel like I actually

just spent the weekend on Cape Cod, like reading this book with you. It was so, like, it was just

so everything, you painted such a vivid portrait of it. So anyway, sorry, go on. So I wasn't,

when I started out, I did not have an idea for this novel in my head. I actually started this, it all grew from a piece of

memoir writing, not that the book is autobiographical, which I can get into later. But I did start out,

I had this amazing, magical day in my 20s. I had gone to a party like the one that opens the book, this kind of literary crowd, and met a guy, an artist.

And soon after we had this amazing day at the beach, the ocean, it was deserted. And after a storm and a buoy from a lobster pot was quite close to shore and we danced around in waves.

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