Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein

In this episode of Historical Happy Hour, bestselling author Jane Healey sits down with novelist Alison Epstein to discuss her bold reimagining of Oliver Twist in her new book Fagan and the Thief. Epstein offers a compelling retelling from the perspective of Jacob Fagan, Dickens’ infamous pickpocket, giving him a first name, a backstory, and—most importantly—humanity. They explore the novel’s reclamation of a deeply antisemitic character, delve into Epstein’s research process for recreating Victorian London, and unpack themes of identity, mentorship, toxic relationships, and moral ambiguity. The conversation is an insightful look at how historical fiction can be both entertaining and powerfully subversive.

Transcript

Jane: 0:02

Welcome to Historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction. I'm your host, Jane Healey, and in today's episode, we welcome author Alison Epstein to discuss her latest novel FA in The Thief, which the Wall Street Journal hailed as an impressive achievement and the Washington Post described as a sorrowful reflective pockmarked. Uh, a so sorrowful reflective novel pockmarked with episodes of real insight and beauty. Welcome. Thank you so much for doing this, Alison.

Allison: 0:33

Thanks so much for having me, really looking forward to this.

Jane: 0:36

Yeah. So I'm gonna do a quick bio and then we will jump right in. I was saying I have probably too many questions, but, but that's always good and if everyone wants to like chime in about where they're zooming in from and what you're currently reading that would be awesome. Alison Epstein earned her MFA in fiction from Northwestern University and a BA in creative writing. From the University of Michigan, a Michigan native. She now lives in Chicago. We not writing. She enjoys good theater, bad puns, and fancy jackets. Nice. She is the author of the historical novels, A Tip for the Hangman, and Let the Dead Bury the Dead again. Welcome. So this is your third novel. Such a fascinating pre premise. It's described as a thrilling re-imagination of Charles Dickens Oliver Twist from the perspective of Fagan. Jacob Fagan, you gave him a first name, um, the infamous pickpocket and ringleader. Um, how did you, like, how did you come up with this premise?

Allison: 1:30

Yeah, I've, I've been quietly in the back of my mind threatening to write this book probably for 10 years. I've been thinking about it for a really long time. I first encountered like the original story of Oliver Twist when I was very, very young. It was the, the Broadway musical version. That's my entry into it. And it's funny talking about this book, I hear a lot of people who were in all over. Exclamation mark the musical as kids. Oh, that's fun. But I saw that when I was probably seven or eight years old and just fell in love with the character of Fagan. From that show, he is, he's hands down the best person in that show. He has all the best songs. He's the most charismatic, he's the most interesting. And so when I got old enough to read. Actual Dickens, I thought, you know, I really enjoyed that show as a kid. Maybe I should read the original Oliver Twist and see what, what that's like. And it's a, it's a very different reading experience than the stage show. Dickens' portrayal of, of Fagan is really two dimensional, really focused on how evil and horrible and vile and disgusting and Jewish he is. And he really, really connects those two things He. For Mines the reader That Fagan is a Jew, I think 350 times in the novel, just in case you ever forgot. And so I remem, I was. Frustrated by that and annoyed by that, and also still found something in that character of Fagan that I still loved, despite the fact that Dickens clearly didn't want me to. And so I just kept thinking, there's more of a story to this person than what Dickens gave. And there's something darker and more interesting than what the stage show gave. And I wanted to be able to, what I wanted was someone else to write the book so I could read it and enjoy it. But I waited long enough and no one did. So I then I decided, okay.

Jane: 3:15

Sometimes stories need to marinate a little bit right before you're like, ready to dive in. I think. Um, I, so to that point, I, I loved this. I was reading some of like your views online and I thought this one really captured what you tried to do with the character of Fagan. It says, I. Epstein's brilliant reclamation rescues Pagan from the antisemitic caricature. Dickens created a character referred to as the Jew over 250 times. You said 350 in Oliver Twist more than any other descriptor. Um, where where Dickens painted with the broad prejudice strokes of his time, Epstein restores humanity, complexity and dignity to Jacob Fagan without whitewashing his morally ambiguous choices. So how did you approach. Like making him, giving him more dimension and depth. Like how did you approach this incredibly well known character in a classic novel by Dickens? Like, how'd you dive in? How'd you do it?

Allison: 4:13

Yeah, I mean, it started with. Reading as much dickens as I could. I must have reread Oliver Twist five or six times before I started actually writing this. Just to immerse myself in what Dickens provided. And the more I dove into that, the more it became clear to me that I didn't want this to be an apology for Fagan. This wasn't going to be a story where Fagan was taken from. Villain two hero, and suddenly everything he's doing is understandable and noble, and he's a role model for people to look up to. That was not the project that I was after. I wanted to see sort of a middle way between the pure villain and what an actual person experiencing this. Situation would feel like. And so it was a careful balance sort of as I was going through it, to make sure that the characters in this book, Fagan, and then also the secondary characters were real enough that they would feel human, but also not good or whitewashed, that they wouldn't feel honest to the way that Dickens had presented them. So I, I wanted that. I was, I think about it as the darkness and the mess of those characters. And I wanted to keep that, that was really important to me, but how could we shine a little bit of a light on the darkness and the mess and see where it was going.

Jane: 5:30

Oh, interesting. What was important to preserve from the original novel? Your retail and in addition, in addition to this was one of the questions, you had some excellent questions that you, you sent into, in addition to the way Fagan was stereotyped, what did you wanna change or rethink about the overall narrative?

Allison: 5:49

Yeah, I wanted to think about Fagan. How he might appear when he's told by a narrator that doesn't hate him, because that really seemed to be what's holding him back in. In the original. It's very clear that Dickens is not interested in looking for the good or the. The reasoning why behind why Fagan might be making particular decisions. And so the, the idea that I had was how much of the story can I tell not changing the decisions that Fagan makes in the original novel, not changing his actions, not changing the way necessarily that the plot unfolds. But changing how it's framed and how it's explained and how it's thought about. So for the most part, the plot of Fag and the Thief and the plot of Oliver Twist kind of line up. There are some instances where I, I did make a couple of changes a little bit here and there, but overall the goal was to say, let's take exactly the raw materials that Dickens was working with. And let's, let's reflect this in a different way. So there's still a feel like I didn't wanna erase the antisemitism that was in Oliver Twist necessarily. I wanted to think about it from how the character would experience it, rather than how the narrator might continue to perpetrate it.

Jane: 7:08

Definitely. And you know, one thing in this book, instead of unlike Oliver Twist the relationship that's kind of central to the story is, is Fagan and Bill Sykes and their kind of origin story. So how did you, like, why did you decide to center a, a. You know about Jacob and Bill Sys, and how did you develop the dynamic between them and come and Bill's whole backstory. Talk a little bit about that.

Allison: 7:37

Yeah. Oh, I, I went back and forth on Bill because I, I came into this book knowing I want to spend time thinking about Fagan. He is, that's my guy. That's the reason I came to write this book. And then I encountered the problem of you also have to write a book that has Bill Sykes in it. And for those who are familiar with the original novel, there's nothing redeeming about Dickens' Bill Sykes. There's nothing interesting. There's nothing. It's just toxic masculinity. In a trench coat, wandering around. That's all we, yeah.

Jane: 8:08

Yes.

Allison: 8:08

I was really resentful that, oh, I have to figure this guy out and I don't want to, this is not a character I'm interested in, in reclaiming, but if the goal of this book was, I have to look past the stereotype I'm given and see. The humanity inside of these characters. I, I owe it to Bill to do that. And so the longer I sat with him, I had to figure out what is ancy in Bill? Why are they still. Quote unquote together after all this time, they've been working together for, for decades in the original. And their relationship is obviously very tense, but there's had to be something there that was keeping them together, it would've been much easier for them to no longer partner and just go their own separate ways. And so that was sort of the central question that I ended up wrestling with, and that ended up really being the emotional heart of the novel, was this relationship between these two people who are. Both deeply problematic in their own ways, and they make each other so much worse, but they just need each other in ways they're not really able or willing to admit.

Jane: 9:16

They're both broken and they're trying to find something in each other that they didn't have as children. I mean, they're, terrible childhoods. And, and so to that point, like, I think one thing that you show you, you really illuminated in this book is that. Fagan, it was not just all out for himself. He had a level of humanity. And he, rather than exploiting these, these children that he took in, he, he provides them with stability. He's kind of a mentor and a surrogate. They're. They're committing crimes of course, too. So, you know, how, how, talk about that, that aspect of the, of the story, because I thought that was so, it was like he collects this, these misfit toy kids, you know, and like these, you know, with these terrible, terrible backstories. So talk a little bit about that.

Allison: 10:03

Yeah. Um, I, that was. Obviously a question you have to think about if you're gonna be writing a book about Fagan, who is famously known as sort of a collector of children, which is of course not great. So I really wanted to understand what might be behind that in a way that would feel human and real. And to me, as you were saying, it sort of became a, a projection of what Fagan sees in these children. There's a, a kind of a sequence in the beginning of the book where Fagan kind of encounters. Another adult pickpocket when he's very young, who's sort of teaching him the ropes and teaching him how to make his way in in life. And of course, that mentor for him is not, it's not a great relationship, but it doesn't really pan out for him in the end. And so there's a feeling that my character of Fagan is sort of wanting to be that mentor that he didn't have or that that parental figure that he didn't have. But it is still a very transactional relationship to him. He is still saying, you know, you come in, you steal, I'll teach you how to steal. We'll both make money. Is this good for everybody? There's a level of humanity there, but there's also a level of transactional, which was important to me to keep because I think that felt more honest than he's only doing this out of the goodness of his heart.

Jane: 11:23

Right. I'll give you breakfast if you like, if you Yeah. If you contribute. It was a very fair trade between the two. Yeah. So talk to me about the research beyond, reading everything you can about Dickens and Dickens novels you, because you really created a, a great, like the sense of se setting and atmosphere in place. So what kind of research did you do to capture Victorian London?

Allison: 11:48

The research is my favorite part, so I always have this long windup of research before I started to sit down and start writing a book. So for this, it was really just a pleasure to research Victorian London be compared to other places and times I've researched in the past that haven't been as well documented everybody. Can access documents about Victorian London. They're everywhere. And the Victorians loved to document things. So there were, there were 500 page books written by Victorian London sociologists talking about the nature of crime in London and exactly the year I needed. And that sort of, it was really a question of I have to stop researching at some point and actually write this book because you could research this time period forever. The other fun thing that I didn't expect but have really come to appreciate as I was researching this period, it, it's regency through early Victorian period and the historical romance community has done so much incredible research already and also shares all of their research with all of their bibliographies and their sources. I didn't expect going to Regency Romance sites to learn. For this particular novel, but I always have to shout out the historical romance authors for sharing with me the layout of a park that I needed to see at this time. It's really remarkable the level of detail they get into.

Jane: 13:09

They really do. Yeah. I mean, I know some of them and it's, it's really remarkable. Like Lauren Willig. Who write historical fiction, but she also has written, um, a at the Pink Carnation series and she's written a lot of Regency wr and those, those others are very serious about their research. You know, even though it's a romance, they're very serious about it. Was there anything in your research that surprised you?

Allison: 13:33

I think what surprised me is. I had to start thinking about historical antisemitism in a different way, which is sort of a bummer of a surprise. I know, like there are other, other fun details that I learned, but having to think about the way that I. Antisemitism manifested in England in this time was very different than what I had assumed and what I had read about in other history. Um, my, my second novel was set in 19th century Russia, and so I had done most of my research into historical antisemitism there, and that had been a really different sort of. Loud, big picture, like monarchical, kind of antisemitism. And what I was learning, the more I read about this period, is how much kind of the soft and the quiet and the underlying nature of that, of antisemitism in England at this time was really different, but really pervasive. The way that it would show up sort of quietly in. Laws or in ways that things were phrased in newspapers. It wasn't necessarily laws and acts that would expel an entire people from a country. It was more insidious and sort of more, more relatable to the modern day, I think, in that way.

Jane: 14:47

Interesting. Yeah. Um, so in your notes. Back to me. You said, I'm passionate about bringing historical fiction to new readers by writing stories about underrepresented characters in ways that feel entertaining and accessible. How do you, so how do you choose your subjects? Talk about this. I I love that. I, I love that statement. I love the idea of bringing more readers into the historical fiction genre.

Allison: 15:10

Yeah. I have to choose a subject that I am. Ridiculously excited about and that I, that I can kind of see myself in and identify with in some way. And I see myself in every single character in Fagan, the Thief, as problematic as that is, they're all a mess, but they all come from my mess. I think there's been really exciting movement lately in the historical fiction space so that we're starting to. Not only tell, but promote and celebrate new kinds of stories. And so for me, being able to tell queer historical fiction, or Jewish historical fiction or historical fiction about people, maybe we haven't read these kind of stories before. I think that's really exciting. And I think it helps for some people who think, I don't like historical fiction because I don't like reading books about, you know. World War II or World War I, maybe that's not your entry into the genre, but if you're, maybe you're interested in something else that you didn't even know you were interested in, because there's a different way in it for you. So that's something that I have been excited about and I love talking to people who think they don't like historical fiction because it seems. Bonkers to me that someone would say, that's not a genre that I read. That's, there's so much that can be in historical fiction, it can encompass so much. If you don't like historical fiction, chances are you haven't found the entry point in it. That's right for you.

Jane: 16:37

Totally agree. And so when you decided you wanted to write novels, was historical fiction something you'd always wanted to write or was did you start off thinking, oh, I'll write mystery, thriller, some other genre?

Allison: 16:49

Yeah, I've been, I've been writing historical fiction since, forever, since the fifth grade. The first thing I ever wrote that I actually committed to was 50 pages of historical fiction. About the Marquita Lafayette and I turned that into class and my teacher was like, what on earth are you doing this with me? Like this? But sort of ever since then, it's just been, that's where I tend to find the stories, the ideas come to me out of the research for histor from, for historical fiction. And I love researching into the past and finding interesting little nuggets that I can't stop thinking about and that end up kind of spiraling out into their own stories.

Jane: 17:32

I feel like that about it too. It's like, I like having that jumping off point of, for, you know, some sort of research, some sort of random thing that's a jumping off point for a story. That's very cool though, about fifth grade. I was not writing it in fifth grade.

Allison (2): 17:46

Oh, it wasn't good. No one can ever read it, but I, I stand by the idea.

Jane: 17:51

50 is pretty good though, at that age. Yeah. Um, how do. Fact or fiction in your storytelling, and are there any strict rules you have, uh, you know, in terms of what creative license you'll take and what you won't? Yeah, they're not,

Allison: 18:08

I don't know if I have strict rules exactly. I feel like I have, I have guidelines generally, and my, my, I have kind of two rules of thumb that I go by, and one of them is a change that I am making from the historical record. Disrespectful to the people or the time does it misrepresent it in a way that's fundamental and gives people the wrong impression. This was really important to me in my first novel, which was biographical historical fiction about Christopher Marlow, and so I knew that was a figure that not a lot of people were familiar with, and so this might be their first. Entry point to this person. And I did make a number of adjustments from the historical record for the sake of narrative, but I didn't wanna make any changes that I felt would make people think he was a different kind of person other than the kind of person I understood, or that events happened in a way that were. Not accurate. The other kind of touchstone that I have is, is this going to help the story or am I just doing it because I can't figure a way out of a problem? Yeah,

Jane: 19:11

I understand that so well, yes,

Allison: 19:13

there are many times it is deeply inconvenient that history happened in a way that it did. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to write a scene in a building that burned down 10 years before I needed it to exist. And so for things like that, that's just. I like to set myself that as a challenge to work around that if it's sometimes real life doesn't unfold in a way that's narratively satisfying and for those situations, I think it's fine as long as you're being thoughtful and of course, making good use of your author's notes to make sure readers know. This maybe is not exactly what happened, but if it's in service of the story and not disrespecting or misrepresenting the historical fact, then I think it's, I'm okay with a little bit more leeway, fact versus fiction.

Jane: 20:00

Complete sense. So this is your third novel. What is your process, your writing process like? So I've got a few more questions re regarding like writing, and then if anyone has questions for Allison, put them in the comments or the q and a. Um, but you know, I always ask grad to come on, are you a plotter? Are you a pants? Do you write by the seat of your pants? Do you plot things out meticulously? Are you somewhere in between? Like, what's your process?

Allison: 20:27

Yeah, I'm somewhere in between. I think I have a, a wonky process that does not map neatly under any of those, but what I usually do is I, like I said, I have a long, a long windup, which is my research window, and once I feel like I'm grounded enough in the time and place to start writing, then I just start writing whatever I can think of for the characters and the plot. The setting that I'm thinking about, it's not in any particular order and I'm not going toward any particular place. It's just helping me get to know the characters in the setting. So I feel kind of at home in the story. Sometimes that stuff makes it into the book. Sometimes this is a big waste of time, but it, it always helps me feel like I'm kind of getting somewhere. And then once I'm more or less grounded, then I sort of half outline a book. I like to outline the first. 10 to 15 chapters and then start writing based on that outline, because I never adhere to that outline. When I'm writing. I always realize as I'm going that, oh, this character wouldn't do that, or That doesn't make sense. And so by the time I get to probably chapter 10 or 15, I need to stop, go back, look at where I am and reline the rest of it, and then. Hopefully by then I have a first draft that kind of hangs together is it's a lot of stop and start and look around and see where I'm at, but I've learned I can't do it without any outline at all. That is a disaster, so I need some kind of guide.

Jane: 21:50

Same, yeah, definitely. It definitely evolves. The outline of alls along the way. Like you said, there's sometimes that I feel like, oh God, I'm gonna write myself into a corner with this next chapter. How do I back it out? But yeah, I couldn't, I can't imagine doing it without anything like with no net. No. I did my

Allison: 22:08

first book I did with no outline because I hadn't figured out my process yet, and I had 15 drafts of that book. So that's what happens if I don't have an outline.

Jane: 22:15

Yeah, same. Yep. I totally get. What advice, this is a two part question. What advice do you have for writers about writing, and what advice do you have for writers about getting published?

Allison: 22:29

That's a great question and I love that it's two questions because my advice for writers first is make sure that you have separated those things in your brain. That writing is a completely different. Situation from publishing. I, this is super important for me as I'm thinking about what I want to write because it's so tempting to look around at what's selling or what's in bookstores or what people are talking about and say, oh, I can write one of those. I can do that. And. Not only will my readers be able to tell if I'm writing a book that I'm not actually excited about, but by the time I finish writing a book, which takes, you know, any number of years, and it goes through editing and it goes through revisions, and then it goes through publishing by that time what was popular when I started writing it might not be popular anymore. So writing to trend is super difficult to do unless you are a much faster writer than I am. So I think my advice to writers is just make sure you love what you're doing. Uh, because you're gonna be the one who's spending the most amount of time with it, and there will be days I have them all the time when you look at your page and think, I'm the worst writer in the world and I don't know how to do anything. But if you can go back and think, I, this is still a story I'm excited about, this is still a book I wanna, I wanna read and I wanna finish. That's what's gotten me through those days when I feel like everything I've done is garbage.

Jane: 23:50

I, I, that, that's all, everything you said is such a common theme. Every writer at some point thinks that what they have on is garbage. And also if you don't, if you don't care about it, if you're not passionate about it, like readers are smart, I always say readers are really smart and they, they will see right through you. Like you're not, if you're not, like, you know, they'll be able to tell like that. It's just not on the page. You're not feeling it. So, yeah, I completely agree. What's the best writing advice that you've received from someone else?

Allison: 24:22

Oh, the best writing advice I got was from a, a professor I had in grad school named Juan Martinez, who's a genius. And what he told me was, write it bad the first time. And that has changed my life. Yep. I, I used to be so concerned about. Is this, does this make sense? Can I show this first draft to somebody? And they will think I'm a reasonable writer who knows how to do things, and now I write the ugliest first scenes you've ever seen. I'm just writing to get from point A to point B. I'm getting the events down, and then I can go back and think about how to make it nuanced and interesting and and honest to my characters. But if there's nothing on the page, it just, you can't edit something that you haven't written. So just. He, I feel like he gave me the freedom to write badly in a way

Allison (2): 25:09

that

Allison: 25:09

I needed and that I tried to encourage other people who suffer from my kind of perfectionism to do too. Just do a bad job and fix it in post.

Jane: 25:17

Yeah, I think that's excellent. Excellent advice. I think that it's paralyzing sometimes.'cause you're like, if you, if you dive into a draft and you're like, oh, every page has to be perfect from the jump and, and that's never, that's nobody I know is can do that. Yeah. So, yeah, that's such excellent advice.

Allison: 25:34

One of his, uh, really down and dirty tips was if you're writing, make sure you get the ugliest notebook you can find so you don't feel precious about it. So I buy all my notebooks from Walgreens and that has helped me

Jane: 25:44

a lot. Yeah. Yep. In the dollar bin, whatever. Absolutely. Are you ready to share what you're working on next? Are you working on something new yet, or are you just, this book, you know, just came out a couple months ago, so.

Allison: 25:57

Yeah, I like, I'm in the long, the long run up research phase. So my recent bookshop.org hall has all been in service of what I hope is the next project. And I don't, I don't have a, I don't know exactly what it's gonna be yet, but I have a lot of books about the 14th century papacy in Italy.

Jane: 26:15

And tell everyone about your Substack, which I just signed up for'cause it sounded super cool. And yeah, talk about that. Yeah,

Allison: 26:23

this is my, my silly little thing I do for myself. Um, I have a, a newsletter every two weeks. It's called Dirt Bags Through the Ages, and it is an essay about a terrible person from history whose life entertains or amuses me in some way. I, I have two rules for selecting a historical dirt bag, and it's, they have to make me laugh and they have to already be dead, so I can't get in trouble with anybody's legal estate.

Jane: 26:51

That's so good. I, I couldn't remember the name of it, but it's such a brilliant name for a subsector facts through the ages. That's

Allison (2): 26:58

so good. So I had a friend who offered me that. She said, do you wanna name something that's like, yes, Audrey will be taking that, and I'll be every time. Thank you very much. That's so

Jane: 27:08

funny. And so, and how, um, how can readers best, other than the substack, which is one way, but how, uh, how do, can readers best stay in touch with you?

Allison: 27:18

Yeah. Um. All of the events and things that I'll be doing upcoming are on my website, alison epstein.com, which also has links to wherever else you can find me online. I'm most active on social media on Instagram because that one seems the least likely to disappear in the next two weeks. True. Um, but yeah, I think, uh, alison epstein.com would be your best bet.

Jane: 27:42

Okay. Awesome. Okay. Any questions from the audience? We will see oh anonymous attendee. Yes. Talk about, talk more about the antisemitism in Victorian, England. England and how did people condemn it and did they condemn it? That's a good question. That is a good question.

Allison: 27:59

Yeah. Um. There's actually my, my favorite story of this was related to Oliver Twist, actually, because there's a tendency to think that, because a book like Oliver Twist was written in the past that we can't apply, you know, morals of today onto the writing of the past. And so maybe that was just accepted and that's why Dickens wrote. Fagan originally in that way, but even when Dickens first published Oliver Twist back in the 1830s, there was pushback from readers that called out his portrayal of Fagan as anti-Semitic. So it was a much more nuanced situation that he was writing into. It was acceptable enough that you could publish that in a mainstream newspaper and no editor would censor you for that. I think today, if you tried to write a book like that, any editor worth their salt would say, this is not great. Please don't do this. Mm-hmm. But even at the same time, there were readers who, who pushed back. There was one Jewish reader who wrote a letter to Dickens and said, I. As a Jewish reader I'm surprised that you would write a character like this because you are so careful to like, humanize the, the poor and the dispossessed, and then you write a Jewish character like this and he. Dickens took that feedback and kind of took that to heart. I think it took him a while and he didn't ever respond to it publicly, but he did then go on in a future novel to try and write another Jewish character, and you can really tell he's trying to make it the anti fagan. This is the nicest, the least objectionable character that anyone has ever written. So there was sort of a, a push pull at this time of it's sort of in the water that everyone's swimming in, but there was. At least some voices raising up to say, we should see what we could do to change this.

Jane: 29:44

Yeah. And I read that in your author's notes and he did ultimately revise the, because I didn't realize too, I get, or I, maybe I hadn't forgotten, but, so Oliver Twist was written in installments in, in a newspaper. Mm-hmm. And then obviously became the novel, but he did UL ultimately end up revising and taking out some of the antisemitic. References in the book in later editions. Is that correct?

Allison: 30:09

What he did was he took out the word Jew. He left all of the rest of the characterization exactly as it was, but he just called FGA a Jew. Less times.

Jane: 30:17

Yeah. Oh yeah. Which I guess is better than nothing. Better than nothing. Not, you know, not great, but you know, you're gonna consider the time period too. Alison, this was delightful. Thank you so much for coming on. Um, I loved the book. I know you just, were just saying you auditioned for the. Net Jewish Book Council Network author tour, and I am sure you're gonna get many invitations to that. Will, you know, more events around the country. And yeah, thank you everyone. I'm having two historical happy hours next week. Registration will be on the website, um, Camille de Mayo and Jack Ford and, um, and everyone have a good night. Again, thank you. I wish you so much luck with this book. It's such a fascinating premise and it's so beautifully written too. Um, so congratulations. Thank you so much. This was really great. Thank you. Take care everyone.