Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens.

And I'm Jan Black.

One of the things most of us come to terms within life is that there's so little that we can control.

As a result, we may worry or hold our breath

and wonder when the next crisis may occur. Our guest on this episode, author Mary Laura Philpott,

has spent a lot of time pondering life and death and everything in between. Now, you may know Mary

Laura from her bestselling book, I miss you when I blink, or from her writing in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and other respected outlets.

Her latest book is called Bomb Shelter, Love, Time, and Other Explosives.

Mary Laura, thank you so much for joining us.

Of course. Thank you for having me.

What's behind the title of the book? And why did

you decide to write it? Thank you. I sort of love the title. This was not the original title of

the book. That's why I say I love it because it came to me a little later in the process.

I was writing, well, let me back up. Let me tell you a little bit about what the book is about

so that this will make sense in context. So bomb shelter is a memoir, a slice of life memoir about a

two-year period in my life where a lot of the things that had been stable in my life were

beginning to destabilize. My parents were getting older. My children had turned into

teenagers and would soon be leaving the nest. And that felt like a huge change for me to get used

to. I had become this middle-aged person with all of these various middle-aged maladies.

So I was kind of writing through this time of change in life.

And then something happened that kind of kicked it all into a different gear,

...