ICYMI: Publisher’s Weekly included Dad Brain in a round-up of books on family ties, and in good company, too (including Kevin Maguire). PW also gave Dad Brain this nice review, calling it “compassionate” “smart” and “uplifting.” As a former freelance PW freelancer, writing anonymous book reviews for $25/pop, getting mentioned in their pages was a thrill.
I’m going on (book) tour! These are the confirmed dates so far; more details to come. If you’re a subscriber and I’m coming to your town, or you want me to come to your town, let me know.
I’m trying something new here at Natal Gazing: an interview! The science journalist Elizabeth Preston is out with a brand new book today, titled A Creature’s Guide To Caring: How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care. Her book is a lovely tour through the wild and woolly animal kingdom of mothers and fathers…and I’m in it! She interviewed me for the second-to-last chapter of the book, aptly titled Dads in the Mist, in which she visits me in my lab and I am unable to find the keys to show her the MRI scanner. This was an embarrassingly on-brand anecdote for me, but I was cheered to learn from Elizabeth that it actually inspired the central metaphor of the chapter. I was eager to compare notes on book publishing with Elizabeth, learn more about her reporting journey for the book, and talk through the central takeaways of both of our books. This was a fun conversation. Here’s a lightly edited transcript, and the video is above.
Darby: The last time I spoke with you, you were interviewing me for your book. That was a couple of years ago. And now it is out today. And it’s really wonderful. And as you know, my book is also coming out soon (awkward and shameless attempt to wave both books around at once, Price is Right style). So these are two somewhat similar, somewhat different books. I thought it would be fun for the two of us to talk about writing science books about parenting, and cool stuff we learned, and what your experiences have been researching and writing this book. So, hi!
Elizabeth: Hi! Thanks so much for this idea, and I’m excited to chat. We talked a few years ago – I don’t even know how long it’s been since I was working on the book. It’s so fun to see your book out almost out as well. I just got to read it. When I realized we were writing similar books coming out at the same time, I was like, uh oh, even though they say that’s good; if people are interested in in a topic enough for one book, they might be interested enough for two books. I think they’re very complimentary. Because we really focus on different views of the same topic.
Darby: Yeah, I also was nervous opening up your book because you never want to feel like there’s too much overlap. And I also would be nervous if it was wildly different because then I’d be like, oh, I missed a huge thing. But your book was so fun to read, and I felt like you had a different spin, even though you talked to some of the same researchers and we even talked about some of the same studies, you had a totally different take on it and it’s structured and organized in a different way.
I’m curious to ask you -- I know you have a background as a science journalist, but what initially inspired this particular topic and how did you start to approach it as you were building out what research you would do for the book?
Elizabeth: I started with a very broad question: It’d be cool if there was a book about the evolution of parenting. As a parent, I had just one kid when I started thinking of this topic and then had my second at the beginning of starting to talk with my agent about it. And I felt like there’s a million parenting books out there, but they all really focus on humans in a bubble.
As a writer, I love to write about evolutionary biology and animal behavior. And I think it’s so informative to look at ourselves in the context of other animals and say, how did we get here? How did we get where they are? What’s the broader story that we fit into? And I felt like I wasn’t seeing books about parenting that took that approach, like, a human who is parenting is not an animal, it’s this separate thing. And I felt like, that’s not right, we are animals. And what can we learn from viewing ourselves as animals and asking about our history?
Darby: That’s one of the things I love about evolutionary biology, too, is just the reminder that we’re all fundamentally primates. We’re all animals. We think we’re sophisticated computers, but we actually have these drives and instincts. And one line I really liked in your book was, “What kinds of parents and people could we be if we left our assumptions behind?” And it feels like a lot of what you’re doing in the book is upending some of our assumptions about what it is to be a parent, and who is the most important parent. What are some of the things that most surprised you and some of the assumptions that you were most eager to challenge in writing this book?
Elizabeth: The biggest is just that, as humans, we have this bias to see parenthood as motherhood, right? Fathers are kind of secondary. And in mammals, it’s sort of true. Although fathers are involved to different degrees in different species. But across the animal kingdom broadly, that’s not a rule at all that mothers have to be the primary parent.
In fish, when there is a parent who’s involved, it’s much more likely to be the dad. If you look in amphibians, it’s a co-parenting situation. Birds, almost all birds, have co-parents. So it’s very much a human bias to see motherhood as this really, you know, primal thing. Like mothers didn’t even come first on the planet. Fathers were the most ancient caretakers. I thought that was a cool lens on the world, and this is your interest too.
Darby: I loved that you said in the book that we call it Mother Earth, but in some ways it makes just as much sense to call it Father Earth. It actually made me think of the ancient Greek myth of, I think it’s Cronos, who grows his children in his belly like stones. (Editor’s note: Whoa, I looked it up after the interview and got this myth completely wrong! He eats his children because he doesn’t want them to grow up and overtake him. Then he is forced to vomit them all up after being tricked into a swallowing a stone. Basically the opposite takeaway of what I was trying to say here. Dads, don’t eat your children!). You know, it’s like there are these mythologies, like I think we’re used to the Judeo-Christian tradition, but you know, mothers and fathers play different roles, even in different cultural traditions in humans.
Your book had so many fun animal stories. It seemed like you started with fish and there’s a lot of fish in the book, and then there’s insects, there’s frogs, you start to get into primates a little bit later in the book. Was that species-level structure part of how you planned to organize it? What were some of your goals in how you structured the chapters the way you did?
Elizabeth: Oh yeah, the structure was tough. I went through I think five different versions of the structure –luckily, all before I started writing, so I didn’t have to take it all apart and put it back together. My agent was really helpful in forcing me to think about what I was doing, and then after I sold the book I looked at it again having had a little time away, and I had some epiphanies about where I should land.
Originally the chapter that’s now the next-to-last chapter about dads was the final chapter, just because the way I thought about it was as these building blocks of concepts. Flexibility in sex roles is one of the concepts, and the relationship between food and eating and care is one of the concepts, so they were stacking on each other. When I got to the end of the book, I was thinking, what are the concepts that stack up to build a human? This unusual combination, completely unheard of in the other great apes, of pair bonding and cooperative care. None of the other apes look like that at all. And so that was why I ended with, there’s the cooperative care and then the pair bonding. But it felt anticlimactic to have the dads have the last word in the book. I decided to change it and end with the chapter about cooperative breeders and say, what are the species including humans where cooperative breeding lets them transcend the family and create broader societies. So, starting with the little building blocks and the older species, the fish and the insects, and then building, building, and then expanding outward into what are the biggest things that a species can do.
Darby: Our alloparental heritage, I mean, it’s not solely unique to humans, but I think it’s one of the coolest things about being human that we did evolve that way. So you started to talk about like some of the big themes in the book, like food, and relationships. If you were to try and summarize the big takeaways in a few sentences, what would you say?
Elizabeth: I have two or three big takeaways. One: We are not alone as parents. Looking outward to the animal world and saying, as much as it feels challenging and existential for us to raise kids, it’s also challenging for all these other species. Maybe they’re not calling their moms and crying about it, or writing their blog posts or whatever, but it’s also an existential struggle for them. It’s life and death and they’re trying to keep their kids alive and pass on their genes. A human parent is not an isolated figure; we come from this deep history of other animals addressing basically the same problems and coming up with their own solutions. So I hope that that’s comforting to be able to look around the world and say, all these other living things are doing what I’m doing.
Another one of the big takeaways is our history as an alloparental species, a cooperative species. The argument I tried to build in the book is that those tools that we have in our brains for alloparental care mean that anybody who is around an infant can start to care for them. There’s this “outside in” quality, and it makes sense for us to have that ability if we evolved to care for kids cooperatively. It means that anybody could be called on to help with a baby or a kid. We all have that ability, that unlocked equipment in our brain, to open the door to caretaking and start caring for a kid. You can argue that that is the basis for our whole society, that we have that ability, we have this urge, and we have these incredibly unusual, empathetic, cooperative brains that we’ve built. And all together, that allows us to do things that no other animal can do.
Darby: Yes --you have this amazing Ruth Feldman quote in the book that I think, I’m paraphrasing, but it’s like the parent didn’t create the human. Wait, the human didn’t create the parent.
Elizabeth: I think she said the parent prefigured the human.
Darby: Yes. Like we are human because we parent, as opposed to like, we parent from our humanness. It’s because we need to care for each other, we have these big social brains that are totally tuned to who we can trust and who we should affiliate with. What another person might be thinking or feeling -- that is all designed to help us keep our offspring alive because it’s the way that we parent. I love that.
Elizabeth: Sarah Hrdy made some really interesting points about that too, from the perspective of the baby. It’s not just about the parent, it’s about how from the moment we’re born, it benefits us to be able to make eye contact with another adult and charm them. It benefits us to be cute. It benefits us to understand which adults to trust and when to cry. So that this feeds into itself, this positive reinforcement of becoming more and more social in this cooperative caretaking context.
Darby: Yes, it’s like we’re built to elicit care and to bond to other people. You know, you wonder as a parent why your little kid is following you around and won’t let you go to the bathroom alone, but that’s also how they survive in a different ecological context; if you’re away from your child and a predator comes, they’re out of luck. We are designed to attach to the people around us. I love that way of thinking about it and and I think that’s also a theme in my book too. I say this about fathers: Great fathers are made, not born. We often think of care as a trait, like something that we just know how to do, but it’s also like, this alloparental idea that these are skills that can come online when circumstances demand, and we’re all born with the capacity to build these skills. Whether or not we cultivate the skills is up to us and our motivations and local demands. But there’s no law that says that only moms are capable of forming that kind of bond.
Through looking at creatures in your case or through looking at human dads in my case, it seems like we both have a shared project, which is expanding our understanding of parenthood, and thinking past some of our own cultural frames and biases. I was also super jealous that you got to go to Sarah Hrdy’s walnut farm. What was that like?
Elizabeth: Oh my gosh, it was really fun and that was one of the first trips that I took for the book. I think that was the same trip where I saw you. I did a big California trip and I saw Lauren O’Connell at Stanford and I saw her frogs, and I saw you, and I went and I saw Sarah Hrdy and it was so fun. She’s just a lovely, warm, enthusiastic person lives in this idyllic spot and has all these things that she grows. What I took away from that and used in the book was the idea of her as a caretaker everywhere in her life. She’s a grandparent now, but also what she’s focused on is the land. She cares for her land. She puts so much love and energy and investment into this farm. They’ve planted these tens of thousands of trees and all these different things and they have animals. There’s this deep care for the land. And I thought, how does that connect? You know, we humans have so much capacity for care. Sometimes we handle it in ways that aren’t even about children or other people. We have pets, we have gardens. We can’t help ourselves from caring for what’s around us.
Darby: That must have been quite a trip, because I loved also reading about the poison frog experiments, which are just so bonkers and wild. I’ve written about them for my Substack also, the super fascinating work that Lauren O’Connell is doing. And then I also laughed when I got to the section where you talked to me because of course I lost my keys! Is there anything more on brand for me? I’m taking you around the lab and I can’t find my keys. Also, I’m sorry we didn’t have lunch in the lab meeting. (In the book, Preston writes that her stomach was growling and she was hoping that we were going to serve food in our lab meetings…but the plastic baggies she saw us using were actually for collecting hair samples).
Elizabeth: Oh, yeah. It was just a very...It was just a silly day. I got there much too early and it was all off schedule because that’s what happens. But it was funny because, I think anytime you go on a reporting trip, you end up with something valuable and it is often not what you thought it was going to be.
So, you know, I went to see you and I thought we’re going to go see some equipment or I thought, initially, maybe I can see some of this research happening. And that was a non-starter. So I was like, at least show me the cool machines you use. And then we couldn’t get in the door! We were literally locked out and we were just kind of peering in the window. And I think you said “This is a really underwhelming tour.” And then in that same chapter where I wrote about dads I also had visited Karen Bales at UC Davis, and she also had this ridiculous situation with her keys. She’s got all these different rooms all around campus because she’s so many different animals that she works with. All day, the whole time I was with her, we were just trying to get into locked doors. So I realized it was this theme of the chapter. Then that moment with you not getting into the door, that became the first piece of the whole book that I wrote. On the plane home from California, I’d seen all these things that I was synthesizing in my brain. I thought, oh, this is a metaphor that I can use in the book. You know, we’re trying and trying and doing all this research but there are fundamentally unknowable things and we can’t see exactly how this evolutionary story unfolded. I use that as the turn from the penultimate chapter to the final chapter in the book and I was really pleased with how that came out. But it was the first thing that I wrote and it came out of us getting stuck outside your building, so it all worked out.
Darby: I’m so honored that my extreme flakiness of packing my bag and bringing the wrong keys, which I do all the time by the way, led to this beautiful metaphor. I loved how you connected the keys throughout that chapter, and it does turn into this idea that we’re always making these probabilistic guesses, but we never actually know what’s happening. And so there is this unknowableness about the work that we do. So I thought you used it well, and I also liked how I said, “well, if you’ve ever seen an MRI scanner it looks just like one.”
Elizabeth: It wasn’t just you, though, it wasn’t just the keys. There was also a building under construction, like we walked through a door and it was just a pile of rubble for some reason.
Darby: Right, in my defense, we would have gotten into the scanner if the campus hadn’t under construction, but also, I’ve worked at USC for 15 years and there’s never not a building under construction, so I probably should have predicted that. So yeah, that made me laugh but one thing about the book that is unique and that must have taken a lot of time and energy is how much you go to talk to the researchers and visit their lab spaces, so it really has this sense of you bringing the reader into the laboratory. And you’re also bringing in your own parenting journey throughout that. I think you said in the chapter where you’re on your way to visit me, you’d been woken up by your daughter at four in the morning, so you were exhausted. So I was curious, first of all, how as a mom and a journalist, did you manage that wear and tear on your own life? And second, how did your own parenting experience inform how you were seeing the research that you were learning about?
Elizabeth: I really tried to put at least one in-person reporting element into each chapter as I was planning the book, just because I really think it helps with longer writing. It helps so much to have something that you can describe in person, just as far as getting color on the page, something interesting that the reader can latch onto. So that was my goal. There was only one chapter where I failed to get an in-person element. I’m not even going to say which it is because we’ll just pretend. It’s probably not obvious because I tried to describe other things.
Darby: The book is very vivid even when you’re not in the room with the researcher.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I tried to describe things where I could, but it always helps just to get there. Even if it’s not what you hoped to see, you usually find some material that you can use in some ways. But like you said, I do have two kids and it is very disruptive for me to go and travel somewhere, so I tried to be strategic. In that California trip, I hit three different chapters in one five-day trip. I got a scene for chapter one, a scene for chapter 10, and half of chapter three.
Darby: You went to northern California, Davis, southern California. So lots of different parts of the state.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I just made it all a big loop to get back home. And also the other thing was at that point, it was 2023, and I had had my second kid in spring 2020, which we talked about when I was in your lab. You were studying parents who had COVID babies.
Darby: Yes. I forgot that the day you came, we were packing baggies to send. We were sending hair kits out to parents of 2020 spring babies to try to look at hair cortisol a couple years later.
Elizabeth: So I had a lot of debt of trips that I felt I owed people, like visits to see family. I used the reporting trips to get me to see people I wanted to see. Like the California trip, I was visiting my sister who lives in Berkeley. I went to Denver and I visited my other sister who was living there at the time. And I saw Pilyong Kim, who also studies dad brains. And I saw hyenas at the Denver Zoo. I did a trip to Connecticut and visited my grandmother in assisted living and saw Stephen Trumbo with his burying beetles. There was only one trip in the book that I did not combine with a visit to family, which was going to Canada to see the jays, which was amazing. But I definitely thinking about had guilt about traveling and I was trying to be really efficient with those trips and really maximize and get a lot of reporting out of them and also social and family time.
Darby: How many separate trips did you take then? So California, Colorado, Connecticut, Canada.
Elizabeth: I feel like there was something else. Oh, I went to Pittsburgh and I met the nun who does the beekeeping and also saw the naked mole rat lab. So that just worked out they were in the same place for the same chapter. There was also a chapter where I just visited Catherine Dulac at Harvard. So those were the main ones.
Darby: It sounds like it was a really busy reporting and writing process. But I also noticed that you bring your daughter along, like she’s almost a character in the book. In some chapters, like when you go to the trip in the woods with stay-at-home dads and she’s along for the ride with you, so I thought that was cool too, that she’s part of the reporting.
Elizabeth: Yeah, I mean, I stopped trying to fight having my kids in the book, because so many of the scientists I talk to have their own kids and it’s part of their stories as well, right? How they are fitting in their work and their own family life and thinking about parenting even as they’re doing parenting.
Darby: I think a lot of us got interested in doing this work either because of our own family experiences in our own childhoods, or because of experiences that we had of becoming parents and just seeing the gaps in the research literature.
Elizabeth: I’m curious, can I ask you a question? I was just thinking about how we both have been thinking a lot about parenting and writing these books about humans as alloparents. One thing that has occurred to me lately is that sometimes there’s discourse about, say, “babies shouldn’t be on airplanes,” “kids shouldn’t be at breweries,” or whatever. I feel like a lot of people now have been able to live a lot of their lives without being exposed to kids and they feel like they deserve to be able to be in spaces without children. It’s because we are living these isolated lives where only the parents take care of the kids, we’re not like letting ourselves do this alloparenting; people are like, “Why are there’s kids where I can see them? They should just be with their parents,” you know. It self-perpetuates this cycle of “I shouldn’t have to be around kids, Why are they my problem?” I wondered if that’s something that you think about as well. Like you were saying, dads are made not born. It doesn’t have to be intrinsic to be around kids and learn to care. So I wonder if that’s something that like frustrates you that you notice as well. Like people having this attitude, I don’t need to deal with kids.
Darby: Totally. I think about this all the time and it worries me about where I see our society going. There’s all this hand-wringing about the birth rate dropping. I wonder how much of that is just that we’ve created a society that is hostile to kids in a lot of ways. The journalist Stephanie H. Murray, who I follow on Substack and like a lot, has written about this intolerance of babies on planes and breweries and public spaces. It’s like, if we really want to build a world that excludes kids, in some ways we’re excluding our humanity and our hope for the next generation. It also has the effect of making parents, especially moms, just isolated from society. Another writer on here, Elena Bridgers, wrote a great piece about how, in a hunter-gatherer context, when a woman becomes a mother, it doesn’t constrict her socializing in any way. She’s as connected, if not more connected, to the people in her community. Whereas, in contemporary societies, a new mom is frequently expected to stay home or spend time only in the company of other parents. All of a sudden people are giving you the side eye if you take a rowdy baby or toddler to a restaurant or a coffee shop, or out and about. Some of it is cloaked in safety concerns and some of it is just convenience, like people just don’t want to be bugged.
I wrote a Substack called Vitamin Baby that’s just about how we’re designed to find baby faces appealing and and that it can be calming to interact with babies. Like, babies remind us of our humanness. They’re not devices. They’re not optimized to capture our attention. They are attentionally captivating but not capturing, if that makes sense, like they don’t lock us in like a phone with all the little rewards and pings, but they’re also like totally designed for us to bond and find them appealing. I think it’s not great for our social fabric that we spend so much time in adult-only spaces and then kid-only spaces, these very age-segregated spaces. It’s almost like there’s an inefficiency in the economy where there are a lot of lonely people that might benefit from spending more time with kids and in intergenerational spaces. And then there are a lot of parents who are overwhelmed and isolated who would love a break from their kids. And it’s like, how do we, it’s like, can we build like a dating app? I mean, that sounds horrible and creepy. But just a way to better connect people across generations. It seems like in a lot of the animal models that you looked at, the whole society is designed to live that way. I’m curious what your reflections are on that also.
Elizabeth: Like you said, babies are calming, and there’s literal research on that in the prairie voles. They’re very alloparental. It’s funny, because even if they have grown up in a lab setting and haven’t seen a baby before, these young adult prairie voles, especially the males, see an infant and they’re like, I gotta cuddle it! They run over and they cuddle it, like they can’t help themselves. It’s cute. Will Kenkel, who I talked to, he’s done this research. He found that they find it very calming. He had this study that involved some surgery that had to be done on the prairie voles. He found that after the surgery, they were seeking out babies to cuddle with, and he realized it was because it felt good to them. Like, they needed to go find a baby to cuddle with. It’s not only a human thing that we find pleasure and enjoyment from being around kids of different ages. And it’s not natural to segregate kids into different age groups. I talked to Karen Cramer in one of the chapters about kids in more traditional small-scale societies and how they’re off running around to these mixed-age groups, and that’s like their school. That’s how they learn, watching older kids. And in a lot of the cooperatively breeding species, the caregivers are older kids.
Darby: Right. Like older siblings. Or mixed-age playgroups. Whereas now we’re like, we have kids even subdivided by grade level. So like my son’s in eighth grade and I asked him if he knew one of the seventh graders at his school, who’s a family friend. And he’s like, why would I know a seventh grader? He’s horrified, like, why would he lower himself? You know, we’re so canalized within our narrow age bands.
I’m also curious to ask you, you said you wrote this book to broaden our understanding of parenting beyond just the emphasis on solely the mom. There’s this cultural resurgence of traditional gender norms and the neo-traditional family. I wonder if you think about how you want your book to be received, or how it can contribute to that discourse and maybe challenge some of what is powering it.
Elizabeth: I was going to ask you the same thing! In my book I mention the tradwives, this misguided idea that the traditional human family is this female homemaker, male breadwinner, pile of kids. And then in your book, you delved into the male side of it, which I thought was really interesting. Also, you probably deserve hazard pay for going into whatever podcasts you listen to. But I thought it was interesting you wrote about how there’s these two cultures. One of which is the like incel manosphere, “I’m not interested in partnerships or kids.” And then the people like the Elon Musks who are like, I need to have as many babies as possible, but not because of relationships, but because of propagating my superior genes or something. So you wrote that these are really the same thing, that it’s this divorce of fatherhood from relationships. I thought it was interesting that we both were looking at these weird “traditional” ideas about what’s traditional and what’s right for men and women.
Darby: Exactly, and so much of this is in flux. I think there’s a lot of tension in our society right now because we have these different models that are conflicting and people aren’t sure what’s right or what’s natural. So I think you writing about animals or me writing about dads, hopefully just gives us a different vantage point on what our assumptions are. Both you and I talked to Lee Gettler, who’s done such cool work on testosterone and dads. He told me about this idea - You have the high T model of fatherhood, where in some of the societies he looked at, resource gathering is risky and hazardous, and men are out slashing and burning in the forest and aren’t really involved at all in caretaking of kids. They’re providing economic resources to the family, but they’re not providing active care. Then there’s what he calls the lower T model of fatherhood, which he saw in other societies like the Aka and the BaYaka, where there’s more egalitarian arrangements for resource gathering and less strict gender hierarchies and men are really involved in hands-on care. Both of these models can be successful and both of them can help kids survive. Lee said something I thought was so interesting, which is that contemporary societies are in flux between the high T and the low T models of fatherhood. I was thinking of that with Elon Musk, who’s got like 14 kids, but seems estranged from at least one of them, is fighting with the moms of at least two of them, and is not necessarily winning father of the year through hands-on care. There’s this manosphere idea of “get as many women pregnant as you can but don’t stick around,” versus the model that I think a lot of millennial men and Gen Z men are embracing, which is like, “I want to know my kids, I want to spend time with them, and nurture them.” Lee Geller said that he thinks that model is ultimately a really healthy one; it’s really good for kids. But it’s like, as a culture, we can’t decide which one we like better. I think young men are like attracted to one model but maybe feel also pushed by other forces into the other. It’s just this weird tension. I don’t know if you if that resonates with you.
Elizabeth: Yes, I wrote down what you wrote in the book, “fatherhood is in flux.” Maybe we’re at an inflection point in what fatherhood looks like, at least in western societies. It also makes me think of one of the big things I kept coming back to in the book, which is that one of our defining traits in humans is our flexibility. You wrote about all these interesting conversations with different dads who you had these deep conversations with, about their evolution through parenthood, and some of them weren’t there at their baby’s birth, or weren’t able to take care of their children at every point in their lives. But there are all these different routes we can take into a connected relationship, different routes to raising a kid, different family structures. And because we evolved with this alloparental model, it doesn’t have to be a mother and a father. The point is just that any group of people who love and nurture and pay attention to a child can successfully raise it.
Darby: I love that. Just look at the fruit bat, look at the octopus, look at the seahorse. We both talk about seahorses in our books! There are so many colorful examples of parents who don’t fit the standard definition. So how are you feeling now that the book is coming into the world?
Elizabeth: I’m really excited for people to read it. Everyone I have chatted with about the book along the way has said, “Oh, that sounds interesting. I want to read that.” So hopefully they’ll follow through and read the book. I remember talking to one neighbor a year ago about my book, and he said “What have you learned?” The first thing I thought of was burying beetles and how they regurgitate food for their young, and he was shocked. You know, I have been so deep in this material that I think I’ve forgotten how much of it is really surprising and counterintuitive to people. So I’m excited to see what people think.
Darby: I was reading my daughter the passage about the octopus going from purple to white as it was being drained of nutrients and then incubating its eggs for four and a half years. Like, that is a long pregnancy. What did you say in the book? “I thought I needed a cocktail.”
Elizabeth: Exactly.
Darby: What’s the creature that has the oldest, what is it, the oldest penis among land animals?
Elizabeth: Oh, it was a harvestman. Similar to a spider, but not a spider.
Darby: I wrote that down because I was like, who knows when I’ll need to use that information.
Elizabeth: Yeah, it may come up in bar trivia. You never know.
Darby: I mean, that would be some esoteric bar trivia, but yes. Well, it was super fun to talk to you. I’ve got the book and people should totally read it and then people should read this (once again awkwardly waving both books around). I think they make a good set of companion pieces. I’m so excited to have readers discover them. And I was really honored. You talked to so many interesting people. So I was really honored that I got to be included.
Elizabeth: Thanks so much. It was really great talking with you for the book. I’m really glad I was able to feature your work. I’m excited to see your book coming out too. And I think people will enjoy both together. One for Mother’s Day, one for Father’s Day.
Darby: Yes! Two good companion pieces. I hope we get to connect again soon.
