And I was wondering if you could read from page 155, ending that chapter,

Yes, I'd love to.

And this is from toward the end of the book.

And I'll just set the scene a little bit by saying that, you know, the book has gone through a lot of challenges with both my daughters.

They were teenagers.

So this kind of is a little coming together at the end.

And I'd love to read it.

What would your advice be? What should they do?

Why this memoir, Kate?

Well, so this memoir was really born out of kind of a whim that I had before turning 50.

I'm now 53.

But when I was staring down my 50th birthday, we were just post-pandemic.

My first book had just come out, and I was still quite unhappily married and feeling really stagnant in my life when I was about 48, and knew my milestone birthday was coming in a year and a half, and I was like, "Ugh, I do not wanna turn 50 and be living like this, but what can I do to kind of mark this milestone?" And I've always loved water and nature and swimming in natural places, and I was like, "I'm gonna go out and swim in 50 different bodies of water," and it was gonna be just for me and just for fun, and I didn't really think of it as, like, a big meaningful journey, more of just, like, a personal quest to bring some fun and enjoyment back into my life.

And along the way of doing what I called the 50 Dunks project, I really started realizing that if I was living for myself in that way, I could live for myself in a lot of other ways.

And I separated from my hus- ex-husband in the middle of that in, um, early 2022.

What was the most memorable dunk that you took?

For those who didn't hear our earlier conversation, what happened?

Sure.

Well, my husband at the time was diagnosed with a very aggressive, very rare form of lymphoma in 2015 and progressed through an extremely difficult stem cell transplant.

He almost died, was in the hospital for four and a half months, came home blind.

immune compromise.

It was really a miracle that he survived.

And we had two young children at the time.

What was that like?

You know, getting back to what you said, like, was there room for any of your own needs, including emotional intimacy or desire, like, once everything became about caregiving for your partner and his survival?

I mean, not a lot, or I didn't feel like there was a lot, and, you know, there was a long period where he was essentially not, you know, even with, with the best will in the world, he wouldn't have been able to offer reciprocal care because he didn't have capacity for anything but being sick because he was so incredibly sick.

I will say that, um, during a lot of this period, my, my in-laws, um, came there, uh, came to California from Canada.

They stayed for months on end and were incredibly helpful.

They did a lot with our daughters.

They became very close with our daughters, which was actually, like, one of the small silver linings.

Um, you know, it was the kind of closeness that I think long-distance grandparents often don't get to have with, with grandchildren.

Mm-hmm