Hey there, I'm David Kern.

I'm Heidi White.

I'm Sean Johnson.

You were listening to Close Reads, a podcast for the Incurable Reader,

on which we are discussing Udora Welty's novel, The Optimist Daughter, in particular, or more specifically,

we are discussing the rest of the book, parts three and four. We're going to, now are going rest of the book. Parts three and four.

Now we're going to discuss the book as a whole.

It's a big picture, all those sorts of phrases.

Before we dig into that, I want to remind everybody that next week will be our Q&A episode.

So we will have a thread for that over on substackack at closewreaths.substack.com

where you can post your questions. That's always a good place to do that.

Lots of good conversation there. And you'll get a sense of what's coming on the next episode

if you like that sort of thing. If you like some spoilers. We also have, of course,

our parallelandra discussion over there for the, you know, people who are supporting the show,

which we are very appreciative of. And those conversations have been really, really good.

So got another one of those coming soon as well. Heidi, how was your birthday?

It was great. It was a really good birthday. Yep. On my actual birthday, we just did like

family dinner with steaks and that kind of thing. But I did

have a birthday party that was pretty great. Scott hired a chef and they came over to our house

and he did like a four-course South American extravaganza. That's fun. Cocktail pairings. It was awesome.

So we had a really fun time.

Nice.

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