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Hello and welcome back to BigMood, LittleMood. I am your host, Daniel Levery, and if I sound a

little different this week, it's because I'm wearing glasses. With me in the studio is Rakesh

Satyal, the author of the novels Blue Boy and no one can pronounce my name. He is currently an

executive editor at the Harper One group slash Harper Collins. Rakesh, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

I'm so happy to be here answering questions in glasses for the very first time. So

my advice will be 20% more air-u-date. I mean, welcome to the club. I've worn them since I was

nine years old and I'm still waiting to get smarter, but maybe we'll arrive there at the same time.

So I almost took a gamble and tried to say air-u-diter and then as I was formulating that idea

on my head, I was like, I don't care if it's a real word or not, I'm just not sure that I would have

been able to pull off like the third syllable. So I'm glad I did, but I did. It's perfectly fine

by me. I will take air-u-diter and run with it. Do you remember how you realized? I mean, I guess when

you're young, they give you eye exams sometimes at school, but like, do you remember realizing at some

point? I think I need glasses because it feels like a challenging level of both self-awareness and

an awareness of norms and standards for a nine-year-old to have. Well, I will tell you it's a very

specific memory because oddly enough, I was in Australia at the time. I was visiting my uncle,

my dad's brother lives in Australia and we were visiting there for a summer and I complained to

my mother that I was having blurry vision. Now, in retrospect, I understand that this was a very

opportune time emotionally to be having these feelings because it was also the very week

...