Jowita Bydlowska speaks about her accidental expertise in shame

Because this new book, Unshaming, kind of stands on the shoulders of your first book, Drunk Mom.

I want to kind of start maybe biographically, maybe like bibliographically.

I want to start by asking how your life changed for you after publishing that first book.

That's a great question.

I just had this image of this book standing on the shoulders of drunk mom.

I think I'm having actually a lot of reflections on that recently because having been publishing books for almost 15 years now.

I realized what an extraordinary and unique thing it was to publish Drunk Mom and get the sort of publicity that I got and it being a bestseller and I'm not patting myself on the back I just thought that this is what happens when you publish books.

So I thought yes of course you go on TV and you do radio interviews and you're flown all over the country And that is not what happens, as I have learned after that, when I started publishing novels.

And not because I started publishing novels.

I think it was just a very unique experience.

And even for Canada, I think it's possibly more American, I guess, to be celebrated to that extent.

And so, yeah, so my life changed in a way that I felt like I was misled about life.

book publicity, but then I had a really good reality check.

And then I sort of found myself somewhere in there as a writer.

And, you know, especially recently, I got to ask my questions like, why am I really doing this? Is it Do I want to be on TV or do I want to be doing interviews? And I ended up with, I actually really genuinely like writing.

I don't like what happens after the book is published so much.

But yeah, and that's, I think that's really good because I never, I don't have these ideas.

I know a lot of people who publish for the first time, they think of their covers and what's going to be author photo, etc., And I never think of that.

So I'm like, I'm glad that I found this sort of safe and balanced place in writing itself.

What I was wondering about was how, how, you know, not just your life as a writer, but, you know, personally, because it was, it was such a revealing memoir and, and this is a revealing book as well.

And I, I wonder, you know, having had the experience of, of laying out in the world a great book, a beautifully written book, but it was also a book that was an exposing book.

And I imagine it changed kind of,

it kind of

changed how you would meet people, how people would meet you.

Yeah, I mean, I was prepared for some of the reactions, and I'm talking about more negative reaction and sort of, you know, backlash of publishing a book about relapsing into alcohol and while raising a baby and all that stuff.