Vanessa, today is such an incredibly exciting day because your book is out in the world.

I know a lot about your book because I've read it, but I'm guessing that most of our

listeners don't know it as well as I do and certainly don't know it as well as you do.

So I'm wondering if we can just talk for a few minutes about the book and about what excites

you in the book and why you want to share it with people.

What is it?

What's it called and what's the premise of it?

So the book is called Praying with Jane Eyre reflections on reading as a sacred practice.

And I will say my biggest hope for the book is that non-Jane Eyre readers read it.

You don't need to know Jane Eyre in order to enjoy the book, just like you don't need

to have like read the whole Bible in order to listen to a sermon, right?

That's the goal.

But the idea is that I would say that the religion and sort of nationality and everything that

I was raised in was the Holocaust, more than Judaism.

And I really wanted to reckon with that and reckon with my grandparents' stories and wonder

at what meaning I could make of my grandparents' stories, but trying to make meaning of their

stories always felt like sort of a gross privilege of someone whose two generations removed.

And so I tried for a long time with the Torah and I feel like a lot of people who have been

traumatized by religion for any number of ways, traditional religion feels like triggering

for lack of a better word way to try to make meaning because you're like, well, this text

has betrayed me in some ways.

And so I wanted sort of something to refract the stories of my grandparents in order to make

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