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Music Hello and welcome back to Big Mood, Little Mood. I am your host, Danny Lavery, and if I sound a little different this week, it's because I'm wearing glasses. With me in the studio is Rakesh Sattyal, the author of the novel's 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 erudite.

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.

I almost took a gamble and tried to say, air you dieter. And then as I was formulating that idea in 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 what I did. It's perfectly fine by me. I will take Eruditer and run with it. Do you remember how you realize? 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 that I bought my very first cassette tape,

and it was Kylie Minogue's debut album.

...