Talia Carner

Talia Carner is the rarest of women. She was the publisher of “Savvy” woman’s magazine, a university professor, marketing guru, the author of six renowned novels, a wife and mother. She’s a wonder and if you want to know what it takes to become a wonder, listen to Talia tell her story.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome back to How We Love. Joining us from Paris, our guest today is the writer Talia Karner. Talya has not only written six acclaimed novels, but also 50 award-winning short stories, articles, and essays. Though recently widowed, she had a deeply loving marriage with a blessed family, and as youthful and beautiful as she is, she has grandchildren to boot. To say that Talia Carney is a woman I admire is an understatement. Hi, Talia. I'm so glad that you were able to join us.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Thank you so much for having me on your show.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

So, Talia, let's start. I mean, you're so accomplished, you've done so many things, and we're gonna have two episodes. You're gonna come back and speak with us again about your marriage. So let's start with your early years. Your your your family of origin, where you grew up.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

I was I grew up in Tel Aviv. First early years, uh, just outside it, but then I moved to the center of Tel Aviv. Those who noted those who know Tel Aviv, it's uh Rothschild Boulevard, the corner of Mazir. It's the hottest spot today, and I still have a lot of friends from my old neighborhood. Yes, and uh that's where I grew up. Uh I was a tomboy, I like to climb trees, and I still like to climb climb trees these days. I think my grandchildren have to climb trees.

SPEAKER_01 1:59

You climb trees with your grandchildren? Yes. So what kind of a family did you grow up in?

SPEAKER_00 2:09

My parents got divorced when I was young, and my mother remarried to a man that I thought he married her only because he wanted to be my dad.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

He married just because he wanted to be your father?

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Yes, because I mean that was my childhood idea of your fantasy because the moment I met him, we took to each other so much. He was a 40-year-old bachelor who married my mother, and yes, of course, he loved her and she was beautiful and all of that, but immediately he became my father, and he was a very, very loving father. And I have a an essay that I wrote about him how um he was an intellectual, and I was a kid who had a lot of questions to ask. So I drew the best out of him in terms of now. I understand as uh an adult how fascinated he was with this kid that fell dropped into his life. So, yes, he was a fabulous father to me. And what happened with your dad? I um didn't like him. He, you know, that was just a story he remarried, but I didn't like him. I'm now friends with um a couple of his children from that second marriage. They are my siblings by choice, because when you become an adult and you meet you meet them and they are fabulous, uh, you have a choice. So when I met my sister Mickey, I I had last seen her. She was nine, I met her again, she was 36, and um I decided, wow, I can have her as a sister, so we are close now.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Oh my goodness. So uh yes, let me let me ask you something. Was divorce common back then in Israel? No. Yeah, I would I would have thought it was rare. Did it did it make you feel different?

SPEAKER_00 4:25

You know, my mother told me that I should not be ashamed of it. So I was talking about it all the time, all the time, and only when I was about 12, 12 years old, and I was visiting a friend, and she always said about how her father worked in hypha and he never came, and I realized that her parents were divorced, but she never never admitted to it, and I realized that she was ashamed of it. I I never thought to be ashamed of it, so it didn't bother me.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

It did. And how big a family did you grow up in? How many children were in your family?

SPEAKER_00 5:09

So actually, we were two girls when my parents got divorced, and then my mother and stepfather had another child when I was already 14. So she remained, she was a kid, she was only four when I went to the army at 18. So I had little to do with her, really.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Let me ask you about the army because the let me tell you, I've interviewed and I know hundreds of thousands of people, but to be honest with you, I've never known one woman who is in the military. So, what's it like to be in the military?

SPEAKER_00 5:48

Um what's the name of that film uh about uh what's her name? A horn.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Um Goldie Horn. Sorry, I'm not sure what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Yes, yes. Uh the the actress uh Goldie Horn. Goldie Horn. And she's a a a private Benjamin, I I think.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

Oh, that movie. I never saw it.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Well, she hates what the uh she hates what she has to go through, basic training, and I uh hated it too.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

I just hated it. What is it? What what is basic training?

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Well, you know, they wake you up at two o'clock in the morning. We were a barrack of 50 girls. That's a basic training. A barrack of 50 girls, and they tell us that within five minutes all the beds have to be made and completely and aligned, and every blanket and has to be aligned and completely done, and we have to be dressed and outside in with our shining shoes. So that was one type of nonsense. It sounds awful. The other nonsense was yes, we learned to use the weapons and take it off uh the Uzi and undo it and put it together, knowing that we were going to be secretaries and we never ever would have would have to use it.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I want to ask, hold on, I want to ask you a question. I didn't know that. I thought that when you were trained in the military and the IDF, you actually fought along with soldiers. So you're saying that the the way the women were treated were different from the way the men were?

SPEAKER_00 7:40

That's absolutely a myth. Today, now, which is decades later, there are women who are tank commanders who are flight um who are airplane pilots in in the air force. At my time, not a single one. It was just the belief that it will do something to your um uterus if you do this or that. Something, it's like all kinds of myths were running around, but anyway, we were going to be in in support positions no matter what. Uh we were, yes. So no, absolutely no fighting at that time. It's a myth.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

And but do you have any interaction with the male soldiers?

SPEAKER_00 8:33

Oh, yes. Um once I finished my one month of basic training, I was sent to uh some admin some camp where I worked in the office. We were about six people, probably, or seven, and probably three three women, four men. Yes, we worked with them for the rest of my military service.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

How long were you in the military? Two years. Two years. Was there a war on at that time?

SPEAKER_00 9:07

Yes, there was, and we worked very, very hard. Uh it will date me if I tell you which one it was.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

But I can only because nobody's gonna know, but which war was it? I I cannot, it's will date me. Oh okay. Just tell me what country is always at war. What country?

SPEAKER_00 9:27

What do you mean what country? All of the Arab countries. Every war was it with every one of the Arab countries. No country ever stayed, Arab countries stayed aside when there was a war against Israel.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Let me ask you, what is it like to live in Israel when there is a war going on?

SPEAKER_00 9:46

That is very scary. That is very, very scary. And what's happening now? Now there's an active war going on because while they were talking about maybe peace talks with Iran, the Hezbollah, which is armed by Iran, is still continuing in the north. So there's a war, active war going there. Uh, in Gaza, there is still stuff going on because Hamas is still in power and they are suppressing and killing their own people, which they have been doing for decades.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

I understand that, Charlie, but I'm I'm asking you on a personal level, what was it like for you to be in a country that was at it was very scary, but while I was in the military service, uh I don't remember being scared during the war.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

But there was another war when I was not in the military and I was very scared. All the time. Fear is is not an emotion that's easy to describe. I know that as a as a novelist, when I try to describe fear for uh any of the characters, what you need to do is show sweaty hands, shaking back or arms or or something, or pounding in the head. It's it's in in writing, I have to describe it as physical manifestations. I don't recall it as being physical as it is in the heart, and it's there, it's it's just a heavy stone that's filling the heart, the whole chest. That's how I can describe that the emotion. And when did you leave Israel? I left in uh nine in uh 1974. That's uh 50 years ago. Um I was young and I thought um oh, it's I was going to come to America for a while. It was fun, it was wonderful. And I let me give you a background. Uh my two of my mother's sisters, her oldest and the youngest of six children, had moved to the United States. My oldest aunt lived in Beverly Hills, literally in Hollywood, and she had this one of those amazing houses. She would come and tell me. And I remember when I was 11, she told me that her children, who were one and two years older than me, had an ice cream machine in the basement. And all I wanted to do is come to America and have my an ice cream machine. That was 11. So that was one end, and I would get the dresses from her daughters that would ship, send to me, and I loved, loved, loved my dresses. I realized now that my love of clothes started then, and I would actually um I actually knew how to change because my cousins were even as skinny as I was, they were skinny and very tall. I I knew how to ham. I would starch the dresses, and I would actually wear crinolines under the dressers going to school. I have schoolmates who still remember me in dresses with crinolines. So you must have been the only girl dressed that way, correct? Of course, of course, I was the only one, but I love those dresses and I had a lot, and I knew how to handle them, how to make how to take care of them. So my other aunt lived in Park Avenue, in one of those apartments where the elevator stops, right in your own apartment and opens. You had two wealthy ones. Yes. And later on, when I was still young, I had a friend, the Duchess Christina Paolucci. And she was a uh I'm sorry, explain that again. She was a Duchess, Christina Paolucci, I think her name was, if I pronounce it right. And she was a an Italian nobility who lived in New York. And she also had an apartment on Park Avenue, and uh she was quite older and she died young. She died in her 40s. Uh, but my view of America was between Hollywood and Park Avenue living. And this ice cream machine, I outgrew the desire for an ice cream machine, but not for a lot of other things that I could get. But my aunt in New York actually arranged for me for a scholarship in uh Columbia University, and as I was becoming out of the army, I would be going to New York, except that I had a boyfriend, and he said he wasn't going to wait for me for four years. So I still have my aunt gave me the letter in which I tell her that I can't leave the boyfriend. So that's when I ended up going to the university in Jerusalem for my undergraduate. So you didn't leave, you you didn't leave for the ice cream, you stayed for the boyfriend. Well, I ice cream machine started at 11. The boyfriend. What happened with that boyfriend? Did you you didn't marry him, did you? No, no, no. No, I did not. But at that time, a lot of my friends married young. A lot. A lot of people. You must have been in love or deeply infatuated to have stayed. I don't know. He was my boyfriend for five years, so uh it was uh in Israel, the whole idea of boyfriends at the time, and maybe I cannot speak about today, there was very serious relationships. We were very serious. If I had to go to the doctor, my boyfriend came with me. If it was it was just a very responsible relationship, not between kids. How did it end? Uh he didn't want to marry me. He uh decided that we were 21, I think. And he said he was too young when all of our friends got married at 20 that year, uh the year before, the year after. And he said he was going, and so the our parents, both sets of parents, told him that if he was not going to marry me after five years of dating, he should let me go. So actually, he went shopping with me for new clothes because I was going to go into the dating world. You're kidding me. Yeah, I mean I tell you, it was like having a parent. Let me answer me. He got married at 40. Eventually he got married at 40 minutes. Let me answer something. Were you heartbroken? From the idea, but we actually were bickering a lot, a lot, a lot. So he was doing what a lot? We were bickering. You were fighting, fighting a lot, a lot, and I now know it's had to do with questions of control, and I was too independent. I didn't understand it at the time because of male, female positions in society. I did not understand that I was rebelling against certain things. So if I was better than him in some areas, he was domineering. I'm sorry, he was domineering. Yes, he was domineering, but I took it as it's okay because a boyfriend, a man is more important. Uh, but at the same time, I was better than him in some areas, for example, writing, and he could not accept it. So there were all kinds of areas that we I can't even remember what. Okay, so I can remember. I just can know that in hindsight, it was just very, very good that we did not get married. And I'm many, and by the way, you still I see him sometimes because those years he became best friends with two of my cousins. So eventually, after even after he got married, uh sometimes when I visit Israel, I see him.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Uh so um, you know, it's uh knowing what you know about love, because you had a truly loving marriage, would you say that you were actually in love with this guy, or you were you just dependent on him and attached?

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Uh probably both. I think I loved him. So you had you not I was not you had a chemistry with him. Oh, definitely, definitely. He had a very strong kind of chemistry, he was very good looking, he had a magnificent voice, which I learned eventually that I always loved fabulous voice, but that men have great voices. He was tall and blue-eyed and very handsome, yeah. And he was uh had a very strong dumb um charismatic personality at the younger. So then it was not such an easy breakup, but then he lost as charisma as he in later years. So he broke up, he still not not then, but as I'm saying, because I had the chance to see him, because he remained friends with my cousins over the years, like decades later, I was less and less impressed with him and happier that I didn't end up with him.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

So when that broke up, is that when you came to the United States? Yes, more or less. Yeah. What do you mean, more or less?

SPEAKER_00 20:32

Uh there was some uh I started working in advertising, and um I became actually a very successful accounting executive in uh the mayor one of the major advertising agencies, again at an extremely young age. But what happened was that when I started, I started as an assistant to the vice president who was running some accounts, a major account, Carmel Wine, it's the largest uh wine and liquor company in the country. And then he was called into the army for reserve for two months. So those two months, I continued to work on the accounts, and I got the client to approve all of the upcoming campaign for the new season, the new year, all the artwork, all the schedule, everything. So when my boss came back and he saw that this account was managed so incredibly well, and is really it was done, uh he gave it to me. So then I got other important accounts because I was doing so well.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

And when you came to the United States, right, did you get involved in marketing then?

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Not immediately. I first had a very hard time with HR people understanding and believing like my other account was Faberger. I introduced Fabergé to the Middle East. It's hard to believe, but Iran was a friendly nation. Cyprus, Turkey. So I was introducing Fabergé to Middle East. And when I came to the United States and told human resource directors who were interviewing me for a job, that that's what I did, I'd done, they either didn't believe it or they did not were not able to see how one experience meant that I was very capable of doing something else. And I never thought of it. One question that an HR director, a woman asked me. It was uh because for Faberg was a side company that had a lot of toiletries. And uh so she asked me, I said uh about a client I was interviewed for a particular account in the toiletry business, and uh she asked me, I said, yes, I did all of this toiletries. She said, Yes, but did you do soap? Bar soap, did you do a bar soap? And I looked at her like a she was an idiot. I mean, but for her to ask me that stupid question, that I did not have a bar soap in the toiletry business that I was running. So, yes, they uh so I had a tough time. Eventually I did get No, it sounds like they didn't know what to do with you. Right. Eventually I did get a job with a promotion agency. I did, I needed to have a local US based experience on my resume. And uh at that time I access it was also much stronger than it is now. Uh so that uh would kind of also had a tough time with that.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

But you did go on to work for some pretty prestigious magazines like Red Book and Savvy Women.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

That's uh soon after. So I moved, so as I'm saying, I needed to have a New York US-based experience, so I joined a small promotion company, but it did uh for Colgate Palmolive and those companies, and I got that underway, and uh from that I moved to some my advertising sales, advertising sales of space sales, and I loved it. I absolutely loved selling advertising space in magazines. Why was that? I just enjoyed it, and I learned again that I had the brain for marketing in a way that it was unusual in different ways. First of all, I was able to understand every industry of every client that I was soliciting an advertising page, I was able to talk to them about their industry. And so advertising directors, marketing directors, they were all impressed with me, and I was and they bought from me. The other thing is that when I studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I studied psychology and sociology. But actually, what I studied a lot within those two departments was statistics. And I was very good at statistics. So now I'm in New York, and every time I look at a marketing, I ask for the research departments to provide me with the data was there. It's a matter of asking the computer to spill out the information in a way that's creative. So I would do that and was able to find marketing trends where they non-existed, and now understanding on insight. A very good example is a Red Book magazine. Our our reader, so that's when I moved. The reason I moved to Red Book magazine is my clients put me there. They were the ones who were giving me their references.

SPEAKER_01 26:36

You were telling me about how, in some way, you began the concept of the baby boomers. Could you go into that, please?

SPEAKER_00 26:46

When I studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, psychology and sociology, I also during through that, I had to study statistics a lot. And that sounds like the most boring subject in the world, but it's extremely important for marketing. I found, and especially once I came to the United States, it was it served me very well when I looked into marketing trends and industries, overviews. One of the things that, as an example, I worked for Red Book Magazine, where I was selling advertising space, which I love to do, and I requested from the research department to pull out data. We had data that was being studied every year, uh, all of mostly US population as a as a sample with a lot, a lot of specific questions. So I asked them to find out for me how women 18 to 24 today, this is back in the 19, early in the early 1980s, how do they, how are different they are from women who are 25 to 34, 35 to 44, and so on. And I came up out of that what gener was generated was that the specific question that I asked were Have you written a letter to the editor this past year? Now I didn't ask the question. The company that did this national studies was was always asking those questions. Nobody was probably asking to draw those figures. So we'd take that. Did you write the letter to the editor? Do you participate in a PTA? Have you been to town hall meetings and so on? And we found, I found that these women were much more civic oriented and active in society than somewhat older women and even older so who whose focus was on the kitchen, bedroom, maybe living room, and maybe garden. Some of those magazines that were, I was with Red Book, those other six were targeted towards somewhat older women.

SPEAKER_01 29:39

So the targeting was more, well, let me just get this straight. So the targeting was more for women in the home.

SPEAKER_00 29:45

And so you began to understand those other magazines were targeting the women in the home. So the focus was the focus was on the home and parenting and so on. And I pulled out, we already knew that the baby, that the younger women to that time were marrying later by started by three-quarters of a year, that maybe a year, maybe postponed the birth of their first child by another year. And that's what was already known. What I found was those characteristics of the fame female baby boomers. Until then, just because they married a year later or had a baby a year later did not mean anything other than those statistics. But now we understood that this was a different generation. So the definition of the baby boom generation females was mine through the fact that I was at Red Book Magazine. Now I could go to IBM, and they had a selectric typewriter, and say to them, You are published you are advertising in Forbes and fortune to the CEO. But who is the one who's buying typewriters who tells the office? It's the one, it's the secretary, it's the office manager, it's the woman who's now has a part-time job, maybe at a law office. She's the one who tells her boss what kind of a typewriter to write. So she's now your market. I moved that market from one place to this place where women were now considered a market, not just for diapers and for some stuff for the kitchen, you know, uh no olive oil, but rather for products that define the baby boom generation. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

That that's oh my god, I never that's awesome. That is awesome. You get a medal for that.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 32:25

Oh my goodness. Well, let's move on because we should not we're gonna run out of time. So I want to ask you something about going forward. You started getting involved with Africa, African women. Could you talk about that? Because that's pretty awesome. Why you did it and the subject matter itself.

SPEAKER_00 32:47

It really came about this, uh, I must say, that was a very marginal part of my career. I after Red Book, I became a publisher of Savvy Woman Magazine, which was a magazine for executive women, exactly because the sense that I understood the women's market in New York better than most people. So that's why I ended up jumping very, very fast into uh into the magazine publishing as a publisher, and that's a business job, not editorial job. At the time, there were only four females uh running the top two among the top 200 magazines in the country. So for me, with the And you were one of them, and you were one of them. Now I became one of them. But again, because of my understanding of the women's market, it started with that, and there were other things along the way, but this is all a matter of we're talking five years, uh, all of this. So I now left I had an idea of how to reach the top of the pyramid of the women's market. That's meaning the women who lawyers, accountants, engineers, bankers, women who were professionals and were earning their own money, and I had an idea how to do it, and no one else was able had those ideas. So I opened my own marketing firm called Business Women Marketing Corporation, which I ran for nine years. Every single consumer product marketing uh consumer product company at any point, one point or another bought into my programs because no one was able to reach the top of the pyramid at all, and I delivered it. So by doing that, running my own company, and oh, I did mention that I went to uh I went to Stanybrook and got my master's uh and concentration in economics. So my education was really in economics and the statistics I mentioned to you. So now I was running my own business and I understood entrepreneurship. So I became a volunteer for the small business administration women's programs in New York. And that is, as I'm saying, as a volunteer running sometimes workshops, sometimes one-on-one counseling. And I wasn't the only volunteer, there were a dozen of us maybe. Uh, but um uh at that time there were no books about entrepreneurship. So I had to write my own material, and um among the sometimes we got groups to come to study with us. So that's when I had a Japanese come, I think, and then and I think oh, sorry. So then in 1995 was the International Women's Conference in Beijing, and I went there in China to China, to Beijing in China, and I went there and I was invited to sit on economic panels and to teach entrepreneurship to women in some workshops, and while I was there in the first day, I was shown a video of clitorectomy. What is a clitoromy? Can you explain what that is? I think cutting the clitoris in Africa cutting off the clitoris. Cutting of the clitoris, yes, in African countries and some Middle East, the idea is that women should not have uh clitor clitor clitoris, and they would make them unmarriageable if they did have it.

SPEAKER_01 36:50

So in other words, hold on, because the clitoris was a source of pleasure?

SPEAKER_00 36:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 36:56

Sexual pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:00

So um there are 80 million women right now in the world who had been cut. And uh it couldn't be. Clitoris cut, clitoridectomy, that's what it's called. Oh my goodness. So that custom is there and exists and continues to this day. And I must tell you, there's some immigration that comes to the United States from Somalia and some other countries, they continue um to do what they call it a nick. They don't completely cut, but in order to, it's like a custom to just nick the clitoris of babies. So anyway, the the whole point.

SPEAKER_01 37:48

Hold on a second. The whole point is that women should not have sexual pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 37:54

Yes, because then she's not she she yeah, that's the idea. Women should not have the pleasure, and actually, yes, um the at that time that this is the campaign that I helped develop. At that time in Egypt, Egypt was considered the more advanced country within Africa, and the other African countries and governments looked up to Egypt. So Egypt's Minister of Health was a gynecologist, and he declared that made clitoridectomy legal and performed in the hospital instead of in the field where women were cut and sewn together with thorns and packed with ashes until they hopefully one day healed if they didn't die from infection. So he said, and he said, teenage girls should not wear synthetic underwear because it will make them crazy. So now we have Egypt that the other countries are looking up to, legalizing clitoridectomy instead of stopping it.

SPEAKER_01 39:16

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 39:17

Women from Africa, I was I met these women who were activists who were trying to stop this horrific custom. And as I'm saying, it was done mostly in a field with rusty, rusted um uh shaving uh material stuff, you know, uh lousy equipment. And uh and there was a lot of women who died, and you heard about the problems, for example, with fistula. It sometimes is because it they pack it, they sew it so tight that the woman in childbirth, other parts of her are torn. So the damage, the internal damage for women is is incredible and the pain for life and and other things. So there were activists, African activists who were trying to stop it. So I helped them develop a campaign. They did not want Western countries involved because the idea that if we the Western countries come with their own customs and try to impose their Western ideas, then they're gonna be rejected. But if the women, the African women activists would do that from internally, from the different countries, each working with her own government, then they it's more likely to bring change. And I must say that it hasn't yet, and uh the phenomena continues. But that was my part of my activity. And then I mentioned entrepreneurship. We got sometimes we get in New York, we would get groups that would come and we give them workshops, but also in Beijing, I did uh that for I don't know, the 10 days, 15 days of the conference.

unknown 41:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 41:17

But you were also involved in China with something with their sex trafficking, sorry. Repeat the question. Were you not involved in China with in something that they call the dying rooms? That was their sex trafficking in in Chinese orphanages?

SPEAKER_00 41:39

It's there are two separate subjects. Sex trafficking are dealt with in South America. In China, there was the infanticide of baby girls. In 2000, it actually just before the 1995 International Women's Conference in Beijing, the BBC released a video, a film, a documentary called The Dying Room, in which they showed babies actually being killed, dying, in those Chinese orphanages that were really meant to kill them.

SPEAKER_01 42:21

Because and then are you telling me are you telling me that they were murdering babies?

SPEAKER_00 42:28

Of course, of course. They were murdering baby girls in different ways, either at home uh by okay. And Pearl Buck, the author, who in 1930 published a book called The Good Earth. She tells how during Great Famine in China, when a baby was born, they uh smothered her with a pillow to kill her. We don't see infanticide like that in Africa when there is a great hunger. Okay? So murdering baby girls in China was as old as China. But we are now we're in the 20th century, and we were had different sensibilities. So after this film, the Chinese government said to the world, what do you want, world? You told us to control population, our population growth. So that's what we're doing. Infanticide in China was as old as China. And with the numbers gathered from the Chinese government, we the world realized in 1995 and moving forward that there is a huge discrepancy between the number of female babies born and Male babies born. Many were done through uh official abortions, many were done through infanticide. And uh once the world starts screaming about it, the Chinese government changed uh it at least its uh transparency about it. I ended up actually presenting my findings later on again, statistics, in um at the UN in 2007 at the uh in what is it, the uh status, the commission on the status of women. It was the first time in the history of the UN that infanticide in China was presented. And that presentation, by the way, is on my uh website. And the way I got to that is yes, it started at the in at the International Women's Conference in Beijing in 1995, where I began to learn about it. But then I did my research and ended up writing a novel because by that time I had already started to write fiction, but the world didn't know that. The world knew me for my uh entrepreneurial skills and economics, knowledge, and so on. So I uh started to write fiction. I changed uh careers and closed my business in that year, and now devoted myself to just uh writing fiction.

SPEAKER_01 45:32

And what was your first novel?

SPEAKER_00 45:34

What was your first novel? My first published novel was a published novel. There's there were others, there was one that didn't get published, but I used the material later. The first was a puppet child, which is about a mother fighting the legal system to save her daughter from the, so to speak, justice when uh the child was being abused, and the legal system was not sexually abused by the father, and the legal system was not helping her. So it's not about as much child molestation as it is about how our legal system fails children and mothers who come seeking help. Then came, again, by order of publishing rather than by writing, came China doll, which was about infanticide in China. But it's really the fictional stories about an American pop singer on a concert tour in China when a baby is thrust into her arms and she decides to keep the baby. She learns about what happens to the babies in orphanages. But the both the Chinese and American governments are in cahoot in taking to take the baby away from her because of the huge bad publicity for China. And that's so that's the part of the story, and that's how we got to decide.

SPEAKER_01 47:05

Hold on, hold on, because we're running out of time, we're going to have to stop. What I'm just astounded at is where in the world have you had the time? By the way, I just want our audience to know that you were also married and raising children. Where in the world did you have the time to do all of this?

SPEAKER_00 47:32

I don't know, I just did. And I must say, I had extremely, I must say, I had an extremely supportive husband. Extremely, he was he was more than carrying his weight. I would say probably more than I did in some areas.

SPEAKER_01 47:49

For example, how many hours a day when you started writing novels? How many hours a day?

SPEAKER_00 47:54

Yeah, uh I used to write 16 hours a day. But also when I worked in my marketing novels. Did you just say 16 hours? Yes, 16 hours a day. I could write for 16 hours a day. But also when I was running my marketing company, I was working 80 to 100 hours a week. So I also was traveling. I was traveling to see clients, and I had a lot of Detroit, the car companies were my clients. I would travel to Chicago. I I traveled every week in addition. So even if it wasn't active working, I was not home. So yes, I just did it because I was young and energetic, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 48:40

And I had to not not everybody, I was young and I was energetic, but I can't imagine writing 16 hours a day and having a family. It's almost incomprehensible. But we're going to have to stop now, and we're going to continue with our interview once again to get into your marriage and your romantic life with this fabulous husband that you had and your children. So let's stop for now, and we will continue in our next interview. I just want to tell you something. I said it at the beginning. I am awed by you, and I'm a woman that's been around the world many times. You are one of a kind. Thank you. No, don't thank you. I want you to say to me, I'm right. You know it. So thank you, Talia Karner, and we will be speaking again.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

Thank you very much for having me on your program. Bye. Bye.