Hi, I'm Zivie Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast.

Moms don't have time to read books. Thanks so much for listening to my podcast. If you like what you hear,

please follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and also at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy it.

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I had such a nice time talking to Tommy Butler, although I feel like when I was asking him questions, I kept making mistakes.

So excuse me, because I think I was mildly sleep deprived that day. Anyway, Tommy

Butler was raised in Stanford, Connecticut, and has since called many places home, including

New Hampshire, San Diego, Boston, New York City, and San Francisco. A graduate of Dartmouth

College in Harvard Law School, he was a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and is an alumnus of the Screenwriters Colony. His first screenplay Etopia was the winner of Showtime's Tony Cox Screenplay Competition at the Nantuckett Film Festival. His debut novel is Before You Go. Welcome, Tommy. Thanks so much for coming on Mom's Stone. Have Time to Read Books. Hi. Well, thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here. Awesome. As we were just chatting, I feel like this has been in the calendar for so long. So I'm just so excited to finally talk to you. I know. I mean, it does feel like time is just crawling by. Yeah. How has it been having a book come out now? I mean, it's coming out in August, but I feel like this whole pandemic, I don't know. How has it been for you? Well, you know, it's a debut. So I haven't been through this process before. And to go through it during COVID and the lockdowns, I can't even, I don't know what the norm normal would have been like anyway. And I can't imagine this is it, though. It's a strange time and it's a sad time. And it's just, it's very strange for me to have something so important to be and so thrilling happening in the middle of something so terrible. I mean, just so terrible to the world. I don't know. The emotions are kind of all over the place, really. That sounds about right for basically everybody I know. I'm waiting to talk to somebody who's like, I feel like my emotions are totally in check and things are great. So anyway. Good for them. No, I'm kidding. I will not find that person. Oh, oh, oh. I thought you. I'm waiting. I'm holding my breath, in other words. Never mind.

Can you please tell listeners what before you go is about and also what inspired you to write it?

Yeah. So before you go, I think, well, actually I can answer both starting with one place.

So I think what inspired me to write it and I think what it's kind of ultimately about, at least thematically, are three questions that I found myself asking myself as a human and also as a writer. The first was, why does life

sometimes feel so hard even when it seems like it shouldn't? And the second was, is there anything

we can do about it? And the third was, if not, then what? And I found myself honestly kind of just

...