811: The One Place I Can’t Go

Bim Adewunmi

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Bim Adewunmi, in for Ira Glass. My younger cousin, Kamyl, is not really a dog person, but there is one dog she adored. Her name was Foxy, because she looked exactly like a fox, except she was black. She was the neighbor's dog, but she and Kamyl seemed to have a real kinship, maybe because they both weren't very far from the ground.

Kamyl was around four or five years old back then, and she had a little lisp, so "Foxy" came out as "Fozhy." I thought it was one of the cutest things I'd ever heard. The way Kamyl remembers Foxy, it's almost like a movie. Her memories feel like endless summer, hazy and perfect, like a scene shot on crackly film.

Bim Adewunmi

There's a story about Kamyl and Foxy that I think about fairly often. I've talked about it with my sister for years, but never with Kamyl. And it's this. Once when they were playing, Foxy nipped at Kamyl, nothing serious, just an excited kid playing with an excited dog. One minute they were playing, half under the coffee table in the middle of the room. And the next, they weren't.

There was no need to go to the hospital or anything, but it was enough to startle Kamyl and to make her cry. But it's what happened after that I think about the most. The day after Foxy nipped her, Kamyl went right back to playing with the dog, but she would not go back to the place where the nip happened.

If her feet unthinkingly moved her towards the coffee table, she'd redirect. She'd swerve her little body around it. Instead of avoiding the dog, she steered clear of the place. When I brought this up to Kamyl, she had no memory of doing it.

And even more curious, Kamyl still seems to have a hard time fathoming this, that Foxy, her beloved friend, could even unwittingly hurt her. 20-ish years later, she still won't let herself go there.

Avoidance is a surprisingly common reaction to information that might knock us off kilter, shying away from the things we cannot wrap our minds around. It's self-preservation. The world is so full of dangerous things, things that might hurt us if we look too closely at them. So we avoid. We circumvent. We choose not to go there.

That's our show today in three acts, people finding there's one place in their lives they simply can't access for reasons that, sometimes, even they don't fully understand. There's just a mental "keep out" sign on the door, do not look. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Stay with us.

Bim Adewunmi

I Coulda Grown Big in Japan.

Atsuko Okatsuka is a comedian, and she's incredibly close with her grandma, Ying-Hsi. They talk several times a day. They're together every weekend. And Atsuko makes these incredible videos of herself dancing, while her grandmother plays incidental hype woman.

Her grandma raised her, but for a while now, Atsuko has joked on stage that her grandmother stole her from her dad when she was little and brought her and her mother from Japan to live in the US.

Atsuko Okatsuka

From the outside, she looks like this sweet, unassuming old Asian woman, but she's a liar.

[LAUGHTER]

She a liar. When I was eight, she told me we were coming to the States for a two-month vacation, so I packed lightly. And then we never left. Yeah, true story, yeah, yeah. And till this day, we're still dealing with the kidnapping in our own ways.

Bim Adewunmi

But the truth is, Atsuko only has the sketchiest idea of what really happened. She doesn't really know how she ended up in America. Her family doesn't discuss it. Talking about it has been a no-go zone for her and her family. But recently, Atsuko decided to find out.

Atsuko Okatsuka

Because my family doesn't talk about this, as a kid, all I knew was I was living in Japan, and suddenly I wasn't. I was separated from my dad and my friends. I was forced to go to school in America and learn English and start a new life. I went by "Stacey" for two months. It was jarring and confusing, and I blamed my dad for giving up on us and leaving us in America.

Then, as an adult, that shifted. I decided my grandma was the bad guy. She stole me away from my dad, and he was the victim. But I never asked anybody the hard questions to find out the actual truth. It was way easier to just talk about it on stage, where nobody could fight you on whether it's real or not. That's why I love standup. Nobody talks back to you. It's good for people who don't want to process feelings.

And then my dad had a stroke. He survived it and is recovering, but it was kind of a wake-up call. Am I really going to never ask what happened with my move to the United States? I mean, it was the biggest event in my life. It completely changed everything. Time to get answers. Was I kidnapped? What really happened?

So I started with my grandma, the perpetrator, and confronted her face to face. She and my mom lived just 20 minutes away.

Atsuko Okatsuka

She's saying in Mandarin, "There's no such thing. I didn't kidnap you."

Atsuko Okatsuka

"When people kidnap a child, they demand money, ransom to return the child. But we didn't ask for that, so it doesn't count as kidnapping."

Atsuko Okatsuka

Oh, OK. She didn't ask for ransom. She's still a kidnapper, she's just bad at it. She took a kid to raise for free. Can you imagine trying to negotiate with a kidnapper, and you're like, please, how much money do you want? I just want my kid back. And they're like, oh, no. It's on me. Free. In fact, I'll take her to LA for you. I think she's going to be a star.

I'm glad my grandma and I can joke about these things today. We sat on a couch in her living room. I told her, I think our family has a habit of not speaking about difficult things.

As we talk, my mom interrupts us from the top of the stairs. My mom lives with her.

Atsuko Okatsuka

She's asking my grandmother to please not talk about these sad things. It'll affect how I see my life.

"It won't. I asked her," I yelled.

Atsuko Okatsuka

"Don't say it," she says. "Try not to talk about anything too sad."

My mom goes back to her room. So a big reason why we don't talk about things is because of my mom. She has paranoid schizophrenia, and talking about sad things can trigger bad memories and the voices in her head.

So any time we want to talk about the past, we have to tiptoe around her. We whisper or just avoid it completely. And that's how our family has always done things. We didn't even talk about how my mom has schizophrenia. As a kid, my grandma would just say, oh, your mom just has low blood sugar. She's hungry. When she was clearly wilding out, throwing plates at Grandma. It's like, uh, she needs professional help not bread.

I was eager to hear my dad's side of this. For starters, when they divorced, did he have custody of me? Because if he did, this seems way more like a real kidnapping. And did he even know that my grandma was taking me to the US? We talk, like, once a month. We reconnected when I was 15. So I flew to Japan to see him.

When my dad and I see each other, we try to do as much as we can. He's up for anything, like getting on a big pink dog seesaw with me at the playground to shoot a little video.

I have all these memories of what it was like to live with my dad. I'd stay up and welcome him home from work. He'd make instant Japanese curry out of a bag for me. Then he would lay on his side on the floor and watch the news before bedtime. I would lay beside him, copying his pose. I wanted to be like him

We walk across the street from my old elementary school to an old apartment building. There was a period I lived here, in Japan, with my mom and grandma, separated from my dad.

We head across the street.

After I came to the US, there were seven years where my dad and I didn't see each other. He wrote me letters, but after a while, I couldn't read them anymore, because my Japanese had gotten so bad. It made me too sad to know we couldn't really communicate anymore, so I stopped writing him back.

Then, when I was 15, I asked him to come visit, and we've been talking ever since. But it's never been the same as when I used to lay next to him on the floor. Now, I sat him down to do an interview in my hotel room in Tokyo.

I had an interpreter help us, so our conversation might sound more formal than usual. We are very Japanese, and a stranger will do that to us. But it also helped us not cry as much, which is really cool and also very Japanese.

Atsuko Okatsuka

Which means I was kidnapped. It's a kidnapping. I told you it was, but why did my grandma kidnap me? And why didn't he stop it? Before I get to his answer, I should probably explain a little about his relationship with my mom and how unusual it is.

This is the part of the story I knew before I flew to Japan. So my mom and dad met through the speed dating event in Japan that my grandma signed my mom up for. She worried my mom was getting older and decided she was going to have to step in if my mom was ever going to find someone.

She and my mom were in Taiwan, so they flew to Tokyo for the event. Yeah, both of them. My grandma has to tag along to everything. That way, she can make sure everything is perfect. That's where my parents met. After just a few dates, they got married, and it was great for a bit, or so my dad has told me.

Unfortunately for me, my parents both say their connection had a lot to do with lust, which is cool. I think everyone should experience that in their lives. And honestly, talking about sex is the only time I've ever seen my mom really light up. It's kind of sweet, actually.

She told me they'd go to porn theaters together and would make love listening to Elvis. And when they'd get into fights, my mom would accuse my dad of only wanting her for her body. Gross, I know. And then they'd do it even more. Ugh. I'm surprised I don't have siblings. I mean, I do, but they're from my dad's previous marriage.

And that's who my mom moved in with. She became a stepmom to a boy and a girl. And it got pretty bad. I mean, my mom didn't know anybody in Japan. She had no friends. She didn't speak the language. She never even dated anyone before my dad. So then to have to suddenly move in with a family and try to fit in, it was too much.

My mom would get jealous whenever my dad paid attention to my half siblings over her. My dad told me she would throw things at them and get wildly abusive. One time, on my sister's birthday, when she had her friends over, my mom came home and lost it at the site of the party. She threw my sister's cake across the room, kicked all her friends out, and then started pulling my sister's hair until my dad stopped her.

So they divorced right after they had me. I don't even remember my parents together. After they split up, my mom and grandma went back to Taiwan, and I was living with my dad and his two kids in Chiba, an hour outside of Tokyo. But now my dad tells me things I'd never heard. He says my half siblings didn't really like me because of the way my mom had treated them, and that worried my dad.

Atsuko Okatsuka

Sometimes, he'd dropped me off to live with his parents because of my siblings, and because he was a single dad, already barely holding everything together with a full-time job as an engineer at a big company. And then sometimes, my mom and grandma would take the three-hour flight from Taiwan, and my dad would let them take me back to live with them for short periods.

I was like a hot potato, except in this game, everyone wanted me. So I was more like mashed potato? Anyway, I asked my grandma about this, but there's a lot of words I don't know in Mandarin, so I had an interpreter help me. Grandma told me how hard it was for her every time she'd see me, and then had to drop me off again at my dad's.

Atsuko Okatsuka

They heard how mean my half sister was to me, and they saw that my dad had to put me in daycare during the day.

Atsuko Okatsuka

My dad explained what happened next. So one day, when I was in the first grade and living with him, we went out and ran into my mom and grandma, right in Chiba, where he lives. My dad was really surprised.

Atsuko Okatsuka

I like that they just accidentally ran into him, like an ex who's not over the relationship. Like, oh, my god. You shop here, too? What are you doing here? And it's like, yeah. I live here. What are you doing here? You live in Taiwan!

Anyway, he agreed to meet with them.

Atsuko Okatsuka

That's right. They flew into Chiba from Taiwan, rented an apartment close to him, and took me away after running into my dad at a store. I got to give it to them, that's commitment. I had no idea that's how much they wanted to be with me. Anyway, that was kidnapping number one, almost like a rehearsal for the big heist that would come later.

So I started living with my mom and grandma, just a 15-minute walk away from my dad in that apartment across from my elementary school. I think they stayed in Japan because they didn't want to disrupt my life too much, and they hoped my dad and mom might still get back together.

But during first and second grade, they wouldn't let him see me. I missed him, knowing he was just close by, but I was too scared to ask what was really going on. I didn't want to upset my mom.

Atsuko Okatsuka

He told me he used to watch me through the side gate because he wanted to avoid running into my mom and grandma at the main entrance. I had no idea that went on, that he would watch me alone, afraid to call out to me. I wish he did. I missed him so much.

I told my grandma my dad's version of the story and how sad he was when they took me away from him.

Atsuko Okatsuka

It went on like this for a year or two, and my grandma was realizing how hard it was to hold everything together. And my mom was getting a lot worse. Grandma says the divorce really changed something in her.

Atsuko Okatsuka

I mean, my mother would never hurt me. She says that I'm all she has, but that scared my grandma. It put her on high alert. But she couldn't ask my dad for help, because she knew that would upset my mom. So she took charge, like always, and made a big decision.

Atsuko Okatsuka

I feel so much for my grandma in this moment. I didn't know she moved us to America because she was scared for me, that she was feeling so alone and overwhelmed. But I also feel for my dad. Did he know we were moving? And if he did, why didn't he do anything about it? This is one of the things I most wanted to ask my dad about.

Atsuko Okatsuka

Grandma confirmed this. She didn't tell him, not before we left. He realized it later.

Then my dad told me something that completely shattered everything I thought I knew going into this. He said that back then, he thought maybe it was better for me to be with my mom and grandma. He was working all the time, and my siblings were mean to me.

He felt he couldn't provide the best environment for me. And here were my mom and grandma, so excited to have me. Maybe I should be with them, he thought. That's why he didn't fight to keep me. This was all news to me.

Atsuko Okatsuka

It's interesting that my dad thought he was looking out for my best interests by letting me go. It broke his heart and mine, too. But he did it for me. He could have confronted my grandma, just like my grandma could have told him the truth about taking me to America.

But this is one way they're similar. They avoid these conversations, because when you converse, there's conflict. And my family, we don't like that. They could have done it, though, and they could have talked to me. I would have asked to go back to Japan. I would have asked to see both my parents equally. They could figure out the details from there, summers in America, school year in Japan, maybe. Who knows? They're the adults. I was eight years old.

Before we left for America, my friends from second grade in Japan threw a farewell party for me. But I thought it was just them being dramatic, because I was coming back. I liked the attention, though. We were at a McDonald's, and everyone brought me gifts. They also wrote me tons of letters, too, that I discovered years later in a box. They all said they were going to miss me. So pretty much all of Chiba knew I was leaving for good, except for me and my dad. It's like The Truman Show directed by my grandma.

I told her, "When you brought me here without telling me or my dad, you knew we'd find out one day, right? Did you think about that?"

Atsuko Okatsuka

I love that when it comes to intense things, my grandma's got a surfer attitude about it. She's all, ride the wave, bruh. It's just America. But this is how she generally deals with stuff in life. She raised three kids on her own after her husband died, and she just pushes ahead and figures something will work out. It has to.

For years, she supported her kids by teaching English in Taiwan, without really speaking English. It was just another one of the scams she pulled. With a smile on her face and a few lies, she always figured it out. That's what she did with me.

When summer ended and she enrolled me in school in Los Angeles, that's when I realized we weren't going home. I started dreaming of being back in Japan, being with my friends, being with my dad. I had that dream every night.

I asked, "Did I cry or ask why we're still here? Did I tell you I wanted to see my dad?

I told her, "No need to keep apologizing. No need to be sad." Before I started these interviews, I thought either my grandma was the villain for stealing me from my dad or that my dad was for deserting me once we got to the States. And it turns out, the truth is, my grandma did take me away. And my dad could have done something to stop it, but he decided I'd be better off without him, which is so much sadder and somehow feels worse. I just feel so bad for all of them.

Atsuko Okatsuka

Grandma tells the translator, "Oh, thank her, too. I am also very grateful for her."

Bim Adewunmi

Atsuko Okatsuka is a comedian. You can watch her HBO special. It's called The Intruder. She's also currently on tour with her new show. Tickets at AtsukoComedy.com. This story was produced by Ira Glass, with Miki Meek and Diane Wu.

Coming up, a faraway planet and the alien whose spaceship just can't land there. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Bim Adewunmi, sitting in for Ira Glass. Today's program, The One Place I Can't Go, all about the mental roadblocks that people set up to keep them from engaging with thorny issues. We've arrived at Act 2 of our show.

Bim Adewunmi

Act Two, Killing Me Softly.

My colleague, Emmanuel Dzotsi, he has a tale about something he avoids at all costs. Even though it seems to follow him everywhere he goes. It's been like this for years. Here's Emmanuel.

Emmanuel Dzotsi

What I'm about to tell you is not some funny story I tell at parties. In fact, I don't really talk about it at all. The thing I don't talk about is a song.

I don't talk about it because for over 10 years, anytime I listen to, sing, hum, or even think about it, it gets stuck in my head. And when that happens, bad things happen to me, often immediately. I've lost keys, wallets, my Social Security card after listening to this song. I lost a relationship once, got dumped after it played in a coffee shop I was in.

I'm not a superstitious person, but I truly believe it is the ultimate bad luck for me. Right before I sat down to write this, no joke, I made sure to renew my renter's insurance, just in case. That's how seriously I take this song.

The first time I heard it, I was a freshman in college. YouTube suggested it to me during a morning study session for a midterm I had later that day. I remember listening to it and feeling so happy. I was having a great day, and the song was my soundtrack. I remember that feeling staying with me for hours, hearing the song in my head as I took the midterm. It was still playing in my head a few days later, when I got the results back and saw that I'd failed.

At the time, I didn't blame the song. I was just like, well, that's what I get for taking a class about black holes. I moved on. In fact, I added the song to a long playlist I had.

A few weeks later, when I was listening to music in the middle of the day after some classes, the song played, and I fell asleep while listening, slept through a work shift I had, and got fired for the first and only time in my life. I just need more sleep, I told myself. It's a coincidence.

But then, months later, the next time this song came on, I found myself feeling weirdly on edge. I thought about skipping it. But just as quickly, I also thought, that's ridiculous. So I kept the song playing. Later that day, after a concert band rehearsal, I put my backpack down to help a friend move some chairs, and somebody stole it, presumably for the laptop inside. I went in the rest of the semester without a personal computer. I was freaked out.

You know how in horror movies, there's always that moment where the happy couple finally realize they might not have booked a great weekend getaway at a cabin after all and that the vibes are most definitely off? That's what it felt like.

After that, even though I knew it wasn't rational, I tried to avoid the song. But it didn't work. The only bike accident I've ever been in happened after I heard it being played by a passing car. One time, it came on during a long road trip. And the next time I stopped, I noticed a nail in one of my tires.

When I was preparing to run my first marathon, I was putting together a playlist, and my phone played a bit of a song before I could turn it off. A few hours later, my sister called me and told me, Emmanuel, our parents are getting divorced.

The next morning, I forgot to bring my headphones to the race, and, for the nearly five hours it took me to run the marathon, all I could think about were my parents, their marriage, and that song, which happens to be a sappy love song, endlessly looping in my head.

I know all of this sounds delusional. A couple of years ago, I tried to convince myself, once and for all, that the song was just a song, but it backfired spectacularly. I decided to play it every day for a month. I'd wake up, play the song, and then walk around the rest of the day telling myself not to worry.

When nothing bad happened for three days, I felt relieved. And then, on the fourth day, I suffered a freak wrist injury, which plagued me for nine months. To make matters worse, because I'd played it so much, Spotify kept pushing me the song for months after the accident, because it thought I wanted to hear it.

That year was, by far, the worst year of my 20s. My hair, which, until that point, was decently robust, started falling out aggressively. My long-time family cat died. I went through a massive breakup. My professional life was a mess. And I got COVID right before Christmas, so I spent my first-ever Christmas completely alone.

And it pushed me to do something I should have done years earlier. I added the group that sings the song to my do-not-play list on Spotify, which is a shame, because I really like the song. It is good with a capital G.

It is one of those R&B disco ballads from the '70s that is so ridiculously happy, so positive, it makes you wonder if the '70s were the most optimistic Americans have ever been or if things were actually so bleak artists had to make songs like this one. But yeah, no, I will not be playing this song or naming it. It's poison to me.

A skeptical friend of mine pointed out that yes, bad things happen when I hear this song, but don't bad things happen to all of us all the time? Maybe I just noticed them when the song plays. He suggested I try to keep track of every unfortunate event I encounter without the song so I could see, once and for all, there was nothing to this.

And so I did it. I listed every tiny thing over the course of a couple of weeks, and I was surprised by how many there were, even if they were small. I cut myself on a metal can, accidentally got bleach on one of my favorite T-shirts, got into a never-ending back and forth with my health insurance over almost 20 claims they didn't want to pay. I spent half of a family wedding in the ER because a guest passed out at the reception.

I know I'm supposed to look at that list and feel freed, feel finally able to listen to that song whenever I want, but-- don't judge me-- all it did was convince me that lousy stuff happens to me a lot. So why would I risk playing this song and making it worse?

I have nothing else like this in my life. I don't believe in astrology. I don't believe in luck. I don't believe that misfortune is God punishing you for your bad deeds. I know it's entirely possible that when I hear that tune I freak out in a way that causes unpleasant things to happen to me. But this I believe. I have to stay away from this song.

Bim Adewunmi

Emmanuel Dzotsi is a producer on our show. Right after working on the final draft of this piece, he went for a run in the woods, got chased by a loose dog, and fell, bruising his ribs and busting his ankle. As of this taping, he's also home sick with strep throat.

Bim Adewunmi

Act Three, Lost in Space.

This last story is about someone who spent her childhood craving a world that she could not find on Earth, so, as an adult, she just created one. And it was perfect until she became the one person who couldn't go there. Lilly Sullivan has the story.

Lilly Sullivan

First let me tell you about the world she created. It's called The Locked Tomb. It starts on an isolated planet.

Lilly Sullivan

This is Tamsyn Muir. She's the author of this series of science fantasy books, which begin on that sad planet. But they are also some of the most breezily gay books I've ever read. The blurb on the cover of the first book basically just says, "Lesbian necromancers in space." So I was in.

Reading the first one was unlike anything I've ever read. Here's first line. "In the myriadic year of our Lord, the 10,000th year of the king undying, the kindly prince of death, Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines. And she escaped from the house of the night." Gideon is a Cavalier, which is kind of like a knight, but she's not like a classic knight. She refers to people as douchebags, and she's constantly saying things like, "That's what she said."

Unlike most queer books, there's barely any sex or romance or making out. The words "gay," "lesbian," "queer" never even show up. People are queer, but it's more like their personalities, their humor. It's just understood. And I'll just say, I'm sure these books aren't for everyone, but I love them.

I read the first book one summer a few years ago. I was on vacation with a few friends, and we all got pulled into it at the same time. And it was like we all just fell into this kind of imaginary space that Tamsyn had created, kind of youthful and very gay, in a fun rather than oppressive way, which, Tamsyn says, is exactly what she'd hoped for. Tamsyn says she wrote this book for her 17-year-old self, who really could have used books and worlds like this back then.

Lilly Sullivan

Tamsyn ended up dropping out of high school. She says she wasn't a good student. She'd been put in the class for the, quote, "stupid kids." She said she spent most of high school dyeing her hair, shaving it ways nobody liked, sitting in the back of the class, her eyes glazed over, daydreaming about big martial arts fights. She came out in high school, in a small conservative New Zealand suburb, a different era.

Lilly Sullivan

She was bullied, beaten up. And to escape, she wrote stories, which is not such a surprise given where she was hanging out online. It's a place she stumbled on when she was about 11.

Lilly Sullivan

Fanfiction, a whole world of people equally obsessed with stories and sci-fi, to the point they were going online to write their own versions of the stories they loved, X-Files, Lord of the Rings. They fix the things they feel the author got wrong. There's tons of shipping, that is, people deciding which characters should have ended up together and rewriting it so that they do.

None of this is for money, for the most part. It's just for fun. Tamsyn was just a kid, but she starts publishing stories there, stuff she never would have taken to school. It's the first place she ever published anything, the first place she ever really showed anyone her work.

Lilly Sullivan

Punk for dorks, in other words, her people. A lot of people think of fanfic as lowbrow, embarrassing. A lot of big sci-fi fantasy writers slam it. George R. R. Martin, who wrote Game of Thrones, has said it's copyright infringement, a violation of intellectual property. Anne Rice, who wrote Interview With the Vampire, has famously objected to people writing fic about her stories, because who wouldn't want to ship Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise?

There are some writers who, like Tamsyn, write fic before going mainstream. But once they make it mainstream, they might delete their accounts, delete all the things they wrote pre-mainstream days. Not Tamsyn. Tamsyn still loves these worlds. When the first book in the series came out, Gideon the Ninth, it was a big deal, nominated for the biggest sci-fi awards.

A review in The New York Times called it "meticulous and moody, haunted by difficult and complex feelings in a wasted universe." And in all this excitement about the book, Tamsyn heard about some buzz from the place where she'd always felt so comfortable, one of the main fanfiction sites, AO3, or Archive of Our Own. One day, she saw something she'd never seen before. People had started writing fanfic about her work.

Lilly Sullivan

Tamsyn says that writers in general are told pretty firmly to not read fanfic about their work. There needs to be no question of where their ideas come from. Earlier this year, a fanfic writer sued the Tolkien Estate and Amazon Studios for $250 million, alleging they'd ripped off his storyline for The Lord of the Rings prequel. The Tolkien Trust countersued for copyright infringement.

If you look up Tamsyn's work on the big fic sites today, there are thousands of entries, people writing, interacting, playing around in the world of The Locked Tomb. Tamsyn can't participate in any of it. And it kills her because, again, these are her people. And now that it's about her own books even more so her people.

Not only do they like the same books, but they are devoted to her characters, her humor, the entire fantastical sci-fi universe that lives in her head. So the people who loved it were like a custom-made group of people who could not possibly have interests more tailored to Tamsyn's own brain, all milling around in one spot.

Lilly Sullivan

Talking to her, somehow I couldn't help but tell her what it was like being in that world among her fans. I told her about that summer vacation I spent listening to her book together with friends, how we bought a little boat and named it Ianthe. It was one of the characters in the books, a villain. People online call her a Draco in leather pants.

Lilly Sullivan

Fandom around her books, speaking from experience, it's really fun. This is what she's missing.

Lilly Sullivan

She's also come to accept, this is their party. If she arrives, it's like the teacher showing up and trying to hang with the students. Her very presence means that no one can act normal. And she understands that, but it's OK, she says. She gets to spend plenty of time in the universe of The Locked Tomb. She's still at work writing the end of the series for the rest of us to enjoy without her.

Bim Adewunmi

Lilly Sullivan is a producer on our show. The third book in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series, Nona the Ninth, just came out in paperback.

Today's program was produced by Diane Wu and edited by our senior editor David Kestenbaum. The people who put together our show today include Jane Ackermann, James Bennett II, Phia Bennin, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Aviva DeKornfeld, Cassie Howley, Valerie Kipnis, Seth Lind, Tobin Low, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alyssa Shipp, Alix Spiegel, Christopher Swetala, and Matt Tierney.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Noriko Meek, Caro Perny, Taylor Britton, and Mikafui Dzotsi.

Interpretation for act one by Siyi Chen and Yukiko Hata, with research help from Zeyi Yang, Hisae Kawamori, Kiku Matsuo, Karin Jeffery, and Japanese voice over by Toshiji Takeshima.

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Thanks, as always, to my boss Ira Glass. He's recently started coaching a team of amateur bobsledders. The vibe is supposed to be super relaxed. No one's keeping score. But he's also really competitive, wants his team members to get the fastest times. You can hear how conflicted he is each time he shoves them down the track.

Bim Adewunmi

I'm Bim Adewunmi, back next week with more stories of This American Life.