Sorry.

Which-- No, no, no.

I love, I mean, I love it.

I wrote a whole essay about it.

I could talk about this forever.

And, uh, it's, you know, it's my mom's favorite.

It's my editor's favorite.

I just got excited, but I've come up with that bit.

[laughs]

I have chills.

I'm almost, like, have tears in my eyes, and I have to...

And, I mean, the answer that is coming from my gut is yes, 100%, and the darkness that I'm thinking of is the lowest point, the lowest place in my life, in my imprisonment in trying to be good.

That might sound, like, kind of lightweight, [laughs] like, oh, trying to be good, like, trying to be polite or whatever.

But I'm talking about, like, staying in a marriage that was poisonous and toxic because good women don't ask too much of their men, and good women don't break the family for the sake of their children.

They don't do that.

Read the book.

It's so perfect in that it brings in so much compassion into this conversation 'cause I know so many individuals are trying to do what you have done as to, to divest away from diet culture, but then it's like, but then what? And so I'm curious when you realized, like what you said, maybe around 35, you realized like, "I don't wanna be in this culture anymore," what was your path or what was your journey to move away from that, and what was the language that you felt like you started to learn?

Well, the very first concept that I came across was intuitive eating.

But of course, I imagined that it would be a good diet.

[laughs] Like, initially it was like, "Oh, maybe that's the way.

If I can just somehow be intuitive, I will somehow find that my intuitive appetite leads me to be several sizes smaller," you know? [laughs] So even, even when I was starting to get glimmers of a new vocabulary, I was like translating them into the old language.

When I was 35, I had just had a baby, so my daughter was then, oh, about six months old.

And like so many new moms, I felt pressure around my body and what it looked like after having a baby.

And so I'm wondering if you can speak more to that and, like, what did body liberation actually look like for you in real time?

[laughs]

Ha ha ha.

Um, but putting aside the jokey self-promotion, yeah, the, uh, I'm not advocating any one life with this book.

I'm not advocating that people leave their marriages or, you know, do what I did or, um, put themselves in, in sort of harm's way, material harm's way, or any other kind of harm.

Um, I'm advocating really that we expand the question of what it means to be female, and that women have space to cultivate their own response in a way that is not in conformity with patriarchy.

But part of the challenge of that is absolutely, um, that we sometimes depend on the people who are embedded in these systems with us, the institutions that are embedded in these systems with us.

Um, it's not...

I loved your take on it, actually.