Romy Ash

And I think in a lot of these little towns, people can be really conflicted in their relationships with people who might fall on different sides of this discussion, you know.

And

Often when I've found speaking to people who might work at the salmon farms, for example, or like they're people who know the ocean as well, you know, or people who end up in forestry because they love trees, you know, I wanted to kind of capture that.

that complexity and things can become really binary in these sorts of conversations when, you know, people are complicated and grey.

You know, we're all sort of in this muddy area.

I love how confident she is and how much joy and pleasure she takes from her own body.

And I think it's pretty rare for, you know, a 50-year-old woman to be depicted in that way.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I guess Miranda Delisle's All Fours was an incredibly excellent example of that.

And I was like, yes, it's in the zeitgeist.

Well, writing this book, I was kind of thinking a lot about sort of ecosystems, you know, like the under the sea ecosystems, the forest as like this incredibly complex ecosystem.

And then I was kind of thinking about our bodies as ecosystems too, like the brain and the gut, also our skin, how things, we have these sort of community of

you know, microscopic tiny little creatures, I like to call them the millions of weirdos that we're sort of living communally with.

Yeah, so I guess I was just drawing in all of those ideas to this book that's really intimate and sexy and incredibly weird.

I don't know.

It sort of seemed natural to write it in this way, but maybe that makes me seem very strange.