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

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i'm really excited to be here today with marissa bardick ramel who's the co-author of the goodbye diaries, a mother-daughter memoir, which she wrote alongside her mother, Sally Bardock, who has since passed away.

A graduate of Syracuse University, Marissa worked as a magazine editor and contributed to many publications, including 17, HuffPost, Glamour, Modern Loss, and Others. She currently lives

with her husband and two children in Brooklyn. So welcome to Marissa. Thank you so much, Zibi.

I'm so happy to be here with you. It's so great to have you here. So tell me how you got the idea

to write this book. It's an alternating memoir between passages from your point of view and also

from your mothers in her

voices if she's writing a diary. Were you guys actually keeping diaries? Tell me the whole thing.

Okay, so basically this whole book was my mom's idea. She called me when I was a student in

college at Syracuse University and she said, you know, she called me Missy, and she was like, Missy,

everyone keeps telling me to write a book, but I don't think I can do it on my own.

But what if we wrote a book together?

And I was studying journalism at Syracuse University and obviously immediately loved this idea.

And the next time I was home on break, we sat together in my bedroom and she took out her

diary. She was always keeping journals and diaries and we wrote down what we wanted the chapters to

be. We wanted a chapter about her diagnosis. We wanted a chapter about how our friendships had

changed. We wanted a chapter about this big fight we had had after she was diagnosed and how our

...