We Need to Talk About Abigail Adams with Laura Kamoie and Stephanie Dray

What if the story we’ve been told about the American Revolution is only half the picture?

In this episode, we sit down with bestselling authors Laura Kamoie and Stephanie Dray—the powerhouse duo behind America’s First Daughter, My Dear Hamilton, and their newest release, A Founding Mother. Known for bringing history’s most overlooked women to life, they’ve built a career on telling the stories behind the story—the ones that didn’t make it into the textbooks.

We talk about their collaborative writing process (and how they make it work without killing each other), the research behind their novels, and why the women of the Revolution—especially Abigail Adams—still feel strikingly relevant today. This conversation is part craft, part history, and part reminder that the people holding everything together were often never the ones in the spotlight.

In this episode:

• How Laura Kamoie and Stephanie Dray built a collaborative writing process that actually works 
• Why historical fiction is uniquely positioned to “read between the lines” of history 
• The real lives of women during the American Revolution—and what’s been left out 
• How Abigail Adams’ voice stands out among the founding generation 
• The role of research, letters, and archives in shaping authentic storytelling 
• Why every generation thinks it’s living through the “end”—and what history tells us instead 
• The unexpected, chaotic reality of researching historical sites (yes, including almost getting in trouble)

About our guests:

Laura Kamoie and Stephanie Dray are bestselling authors of historical fiction known for their deeply researched, emotionally rich novels centered on women’s lives during pivotal moments in history. Together, they’ve written America’s First Daughter, My Dear Hamilton, and A Founding Mother, bringing new perspective to the American Revolution through the voices of the women who lived it.

Books mentioned:

• A Founding Mother by Laura Kamoie & Stephanie Dray 
• America’s First Daughter
• My Dear Hamilton

Announcements:

Laura and Stephanie are currently on tour for A Founding Mother. For upcoming events and appearances, visit:
👉 https://draykamoie.com/events

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

What would Abigail Adams be drinking if she was here right now?

SPEAKER_02 0:02

A tall glass of Sam Adams?

SPEAKER_01 0:06

That's a good answer. I was going through like every cocktail in my head that I would be like, mm-hmm she's a martini girl. But if I was having a drink with Abigail Adams, I'd want to be drinking a beer with Abigail Adams. Well, 100%. And it wouldn't be dainty.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

It would be just bold. And I can see her like grabbing an IPA and being like, this one's for the fallen boys.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

I cannot tell you, dear listeners, how thrilled we are about this episode. We have Stephanie Dre and Laura Kamoy on Mark's manuscripts today. They have written three of my absolute favorite historical fiction books. You've seen the covers, you've definitely read the books. They wrote My Dear Hamilton, Hello. They wrote America's First Daughter. That was their first one, and that was my first read, and that's when I fell in love with them. Today, May 5th, when this episode airs, is their release date for A Founding Mother, which is about Abigail freaking Adams, everyone. Like I can't say enough wonderful things about these two women and their writing. They make history digestible. They relate it to everything that you're experiencing today, being a woman, um, and and finding kinship with women that came hundreds of years before you. I'm just so excited to talk to them. And so welcome Stephanie Dre and Laura Kamoy. Thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_02 1:33

And uh take a drink every time Kate gets misty-eyed.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Take a drink every time I cry, take a drink every time I talk about being from Boston.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

I am a little disappointed you didn't like slip into your like, you know, your your uh native tongue.

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Yeah, when when uh all the Revolutionary War reenactments were happening in this, and and this was gonna be my first question was like, which are the founding fathers of the sexiest? Because we have opinions here in Boston. And when we were watching the reenactments, we were like, I was like, oh my god, it's like Paul Revere was like a celebrity. We're like, do you guys see Paul Revere? Holy shit. Do you see him? Do you see him? Oh my god, he's fucking hot. I knew it. I knew he was gonna be hot. I knew he was gonna be hot. He they got a good one. They that's a good fucking Paul Revere right there. Okay, so Paul Revere is yours. It's my founding father, Smash Repass. Yeah, Smash Paul Revere. This book opened my eyes to some new ones, though. I really never considered Joseph Warren to be kind of hot, but Abigail says he's pretty attractive. So I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to agree with her. And the Revolutionary War is something that I think is like can be extremely romanticized. And the women are very much forgotten. I mean, like, if you know, if you're listening and you're like, oh, I watched the John Adams series, John Adams goes to France for like five friggin' years. Years he is in France and she is at home raising kids. Yes, and they're like, screw it. He got his story, like, let's tell Abigail's story, and I am so here for it. I love this book so much, I cannot recommend it enough. And any of their other books, like, um, I'm honestly sure that you've read some of them because they're they're just so lovely. Um, they highlight the ladies, you gotta love it.

SPEAKER_02 3:10

And if you are feeling a little blue come the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, please get to the end of the episode and you will feel like there's light at the end of the tunnel. It's a little bit of hope, and our guests do the best job telling us it's okay to be mad about the current state, but also still be excited about where the country has come from and where it can go. Because there were people like Abigail Adams in the seat on the bus helping drive this sucker. So, because who doesn't love a female in charge?

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Thank you so much for both of you being here together and chatting with us. I'm like, this makes me and Jenna feel so happy because Laura Stephanie was just telling us that she met you at a writer's kind of in a writer's group, which is how Jana and I met informed this partnership. Oh, that's it. I'm like, for me and Jenna, this is really special because I feel like we're seeing two ladies that like really connected um through this shared passion. And tell me more about that. I want to start there. You probably start from the beginning. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Laura and I were both members of the Maryland Romance Writers Organization, um, which at the time was a bit of a broader organization. It it was primarily romance, but you could sort of be writing historical fiction and also be part of it. Um and at the time, Laura was a professor of American history at the U.S. Naval Academy. And I was writing about Cleopatra's daughter at the time. And I the thing that I remember, I don't actually remember like the moment I met Laura, but I remember that I liked her very much. And then she pitched to me a story that she would like me to read for a blurb quote. And then as she was describing it, I thought, oh, this sounds terrible. And I should not read this because I really like her. And then we're not gonna be friends anymore, but I can't say no. So I I opened it with such trepidation, and then it was brilliant, and I was like, Oh, we're gonna be besties. She didn't tell me that story until much, much later.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

We're like, I was terrified, you were an awful writer.

unknown 5:33

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

In fairness, the whole story is set in an elevator in the dark. So I, you know, I didn't have high hopes, but she's brilliant, so she pulled it off.

SPEAKER_02 5:44

And you're like, if you can pull that off, you can pull off anything. That's right.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

That's right. Oh my gosh. I love the tea. I love getting the tea on here. Um how do you how do you split this up as writers? How like do this together and and make it work?

SPEAKER_02 6:01

To me, group projects, though I come from a design like like I come from a design background, so you like have to play nice with everyone, but it's not everyone's like first choice.

SPEAKER_03 6:12

We made it up as we went along, basically, because neither of us had ever written with someone else like this. And so when we came up with the idea for America's first daughter at a writing conference, and we we went from having a dinner table conversation to uh to coming up with an idea based on the thought that we couldn't really think of much that had been written about Thomas Jefferson's daughters, to racing back to the hotel room and researching it for hours, and then in the middle of the night that night, deciding, oh, we're gonna write this book and we're gonna write it together. Um, so with a lot of excitement and a little bit of hubris, we sort of dove into this, and our process has evolved with each book. With the first one, we outlined and brainstormed together, and literally we were so sort of together in the process that we would get on a Google video chat and I would be working on one chapter, and Steph would be working on the next chapter, and we would be researching live and swapping source material that we thought would be useful for the other person. And then we would immediately trade the chapters and revise freely. And 95% of the time we just, or more even, we just accepted all of the other person's changes. And that changed over time based on, you know, what else might have been going on in our solo writing careers or based on what was going on with the book. But basically, we took a lot of the ego out of the process and and tried to remember that it wasn't Steph's words or Lara's words. It was the character that we needed to have one unified voice. And so we really found ourselves, you know, handling pretty much every page of the manuscript in order to get it there.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

So it was just a lot of that mutual trust and respect and saying, Yes, I believe that you are on the same page as me. And then you just kind of took off. And how many are you at now together that you've written?

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Uh, I think we say it's three and a half because we've written um two two founding mothers uh books, Erica's first daughter and my dear Hamilton. But we also collaborated on a little-known book called Ribbons of Scarlet about the women of the French Revolution. And there were other authors involved in that, so that's why I count it as half. Um, but I think we could count it as all, you know, whole books. Uh so we'll call it three. So this will be our fourth. So are you working on any others too? We are, but we can't tell you what it is yet because the publisher doesn't know yet.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

So if if we told you first Well you're coming back on here so we can get the scoop on that one. That's yeah. Okay. We like we we want the scoop. But how do you my question too is when you are deciding on these topics together and who you're gonna cover, is there is there a thought about working with, you know, your traditionally published authors? Is there kind of like what's gonna work best in the market, or what are we the most interested in? Or like, do you have ideas that you would have wanted to pursue, but maybe they weren't the best at the time for the market or whatever it is now that you are connected to.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Yeah, I mean, and I know Laura will agree with me. We were actually quite reluctant to take on even Abigail for a long time. We've been asked over and over again to do Abigail Adams. Everyone wanted a book on Abigail Adams, and Laura and I are both fans of the HBO special, John Adams. And so we yes, it's totally obsession-worthy. And Laura and I, you know, we would talk all the time about the fact like, how are we gonna outdo Laura Linney? Like, there's no way. She's an American treasure, we cannot compete. And then eventually we found a way in that was unique because the special doesn't really cover Abigail's life and her motivations and her contributions that way because it's really about John. But once we, you know, wrapped our heads around what we were gonna write about, what we were gonna focus on, then we thought, okay, this is commercial enough and it's something that we're excited about. Laura, did you have anything else that you wanted to add to that?

SPEAKER_03 10:32

Yeah, I would just say that the other consideration that has gone into each of these selections is that we're writing women who live in the same time period, sometimes in the same places, who are in the same social and political circles, um, and all of whose lives overlap. In fact, I think they all or almost all play cameos in each other's books. So the other consideration was who can we pick that gives us a substantially new story to tell about the revolutionary era? So we don't want people who all had very similar experiences because then we don't have something new to say. We don't have a new story to tell. So, you know, we went from Patsy, whose life is dedicated to her father, who spends her formative years in Paris, but then marries young and spends the rest of her life on a plantation, mostly her father's. And she played very little role in his public political career compared to the others, especially. And then we have Eliza, who's not only from the northern frontier, but comes from a place that is quite culturally diverse. Even the Dutch background is more liberal than the English colonial background. She's the daughter of a general, so when the war breaks out, his cause is her cause. That's how she's been brought up. And she very soon after falls in love with a soldier, and the military life then becomes her life. And then when he goes on to politics, his political life becomes her life, and they are very much partners, and politics is happening in their parlor every night. And so it's very hard to separate Eliza's personal life from his political life. And then, of course, he dies and she famously lives another 50 years, and so that's you know, an experience that's that's very different. In fact, she's the one of, if not the longest living member of the founding generation, because she does not die until 1854. And um, and she lives to meet and know Abraham Lincoln. I mean, it's crazy. She knows most of the first 16 presidents. Um, and then with Abigail, now we have the oldest of them. So she's an adult when the Revolutionary War breaks out. They live in Massachusetts and Boston, which is the center really of the resistance to all of Great Britain's unpopular policies, and therefore becomes the target of Britain's repressive punishments for that resistance. Because of her husband's nation-building activities, she ends up being basically a single mother in the middle of a war for really a cumulative total of about a dozen years. And so each of those stories allows us to look at the revolution from a different perspective in a different geography, where different battles and issues are playing out. And so that's always been a consideration for us, too, is you know, we want to have a unique story to tell each time.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Something I love about all of your books, um, I especially love it in the Abigail Adams, but because she is a person that we know so well and we truly like adore, you do such a good job at like reading between the lines of history. And that's like the best way I can say it is like taking these thousands of letters and being like, I will, you guys, she had like how many children? And going into like even intimacy of like the lives of Abigail and John. And I'm just like, yes, we're talking even in. I was dying when she was talking about even just like how attractive like George Washington was, or how like Jo Joseph Warren was. I mean, because George Washington's not on my top five like hottest founding fathers. Paul Revere. Oh my god, no.

SPEAKER_03 14:40

Have you seen the like AI pictures of the founding fathers with like their shirtless and stuff? Oh god. Oh my god. No, no. George is a looker, I'm telling you.

SPEAKER_02 14:54

He was like a six-foot ginger with messed up white teeth and lead poison. Dennis got it.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

You know what? He had like they all said he had like a soldierly build.

SPEAKER_03 15:05

So what does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Um it means he was tall and muscly and looks great on a horse, dance, don't open your mouth. Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

He didn't need to be on that uniform.

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

You have a favorite founding father. I can tell when you're writing, you're like, definitely like I'm picturing Sam Adams like the hot one here. There has to be.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

I I actually think this is kind of funny, but our favorite, I think, changes every book because we've now written, so we write the Jefferson book, in which Alexander Hamilton is, you know, the devil incarnate. Then we write the Hamilton book, in which Thomas Jefferson is terrible, like he is the arch villain. And then we get to John Adams' book, and he hates them both. And and so we see them from all these different angles. And you know, there's a reason, if any of you have seen the Hamilton musical, they really gloss over the Adams administration. There's a reason for that because this is not Alexander Hamilton's finest hour at all. When you start delving into it, you're like, oh no, I can see why the Adamses think he is the literal devil. And Abigail even said that she saw the devil in his eyes. So I d I don't know that I have a favorite because it every time like right now, I'm I'm thinking I'm very charmed by John.

SPEAKER_03 16:29

Well, and I think we've talked many times about the fact that we wrote these books in the right order. Because if we had left Jefferson after Hamilton and Adams, I don't know that we could have really like sank into Patsy's idolization of her father in the same way after you know seeing him through the Adams's and the Hamilton's eyes. And so it's funny because sometimes in reviews people be like, they just hate Thomas Jefferson. And we chuckle because we're like, first of all, no, it's not us. It's not us. We wrote a whole book where his daughter does nothing but protect and defend and and mob him. It's the it's the Hamiltons, it's not us.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Yeah, it's it's well, I think that's a testament to being able to evoke your character's feelings and not putting your own, like asserting your own thoughts on to them. Because if they got done with that book and they're like, wow, they hate Jefferson, but like why? Like, right. You're like, we did our job. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_03 17:40

See, it's it's turning out to be something of like a soap opera where you really have to read all of them to get the real insight because you know they're all lying about each other and they're all scheming behind each other's backs and having affairs and telling lies and getting involved in it's like days of our revolutionary lives. Founding lives. I know it. You and you might be able to do it. Days of our revolutionary lives. Love it. Love it.

SPEAKER_02 18:11

I will watch HBO. This is your comment.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

I you don't gloss over the fact that John Adams does have a problem with vanity, and you know, and he was a man of his time. And I love that you you really dig into that and her reaction to that. It's in and yeah, I the Laura Linney stuff, I don't know. I I thought I John Adams is a comfort watch to me. It's Gilmore Girls, John Adams all day. And I pictured both I maybe I just pictured Laura Linney as Abigail Adams in her own movie, and it was it was so enjoyable. I just I loved this book so much. My other question too is like how I mean I would be totally convinced if you said that one person does the research and one person does the writing because the writing is so seamless. It's just it feels like one voice across all the pages. So my question is, how do you take those letters and all of that research and translate it into finding their voice as writers and keeping it consistent?

SPEAKER_00 19:07

Well, it's really a mission of ours that we try to let the characters speak in their own voices as much as possible. And it worked out especially well with Abigail because she left so many more letters than the other heroines that we've written about before. She's a very distinctive voice, she's tart and she's funny. Um and occasionally like super gossipy, and you know, she's a real flesh and blood human being with her own flaws, but I just adore her, so I'm willing to overlook. But whenever we would find a place where we could actually put something that she said in her letters into her dialogue, then we would do that, or even into her internal monologue. Now, the problem with doing this directly is that the writing of the 18th century can be a bit stilted and they they really don't pay any attention to punctuation or spellings. You know, it's pretty random. So we have to sort of edit this and use uh what Laura and I affectionately call old-timey language. We want to preserve that it's not modern, but also modernize it enough that the modern reader can understand what they're saying and make sure to normalize all the punctuation and the spelling. But I do remember the first time we had to edit something that Thomas Jefferson wrote, we were having fits because we were like, what hubris is this? We're gonna we're gonna edit the words of Thomas Jefferson. Like, who are we? Now we're, you know, we're comfortable doing this because it's really our job to help make these figures more accessible to readers.

SPEAKER_02 20:47

When you were nailing down her voice, is that out of all of the ones that you've done, you said she had the most letters. How did you get access to all those letters? Are they public like what's the T on yeah?

SPEAKER_03 21:02

Yeah, that archives the easiest part, actually. The National Archives has digitized and transcribed, probably at this point, hundreds of thousands of letters of the founding fathers and mothers, the founding generation. They're not all there, but many are, and they're adding new ones all the time. And the wonderful thing about them being transcribed is that makes them searchable. So you can literally search Abigail Adams babies, and it'll come up with all the letters, either to, from, or about Abigail Adams that mention babies. So if you're working on a certain kind of thing, you can search that way. You can also just read them in chronological order, and it's an amazing and free resource that is available for everyone, and we've made significant use of it in all of our books.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

Have you ever seen them in person? Is that a thing you can? Even do.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

You can. We have seen some letters in person. I don't think we did not have to do serious archival research this time for Abigail because her letters are so famous and they've been translated for a very long time. But when we were working on the Eliza Hamilton book, many of Eliza's letters were had not been digitized yet. And so we went to the New York Historical Society. I want to say we went to a library, Laura, where it might have been closed for renovations or something.

SPEAKER_03 22:30

But we went to the public library and they had taken the Schuyler family letters off site to photograph them for digitization. And we were crushed. I mean, happy that that was happening, but crushed because it meant we couldn't see them. So then we went to the Schuyler House in Albany, which is a historic house museum, where they had some of the letters there as well. So we also looked into their collections. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

So sometimes we do get to touch them and see them. And generally I freak out, and Laura's the only one with the presence of mind to take a photo of the letters and the signatures, but it's always an experience.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

What's like the coolest in all of the books that you've written? Probably what's the coolest bit of research you've been able to do or thing that you've been able to see?

SPEAKER_00 23:19

Well, usually these are madcap adventures on our part. I can think of two. One of them was when we went to Monticello for America's first daughter. I'll let you tell the other the other time that we almost got arrested. This time, uh, we were at Monticello and we had not told anyone who we were or what we were doing. And so we get there and we are just, you know, gobsmacked by everything. We're so enthusiastic. And we're in, I think, the Madison room, and the docent says something like, Oh, and this shaving kit belonged to William Short. Of course, no one else knows who William Short is, but he's a major character that we're writing about. And so Laura and I both like shriek, William Short! Oh my god! And we, you know, we're like, we're shoving people out of the way. We want to touch this stuff, and they are now concerned. And so they have like a security guard trailing us through the house to make sure that we don't touch anything. But we also got to go upstairs into Patsy Jefferson's bedroom when it had just started to be open to the public. And for us, that was a really meaningful experience because we got to understand in a way that we could never have understood if we weren't in the space, that Patsy's bedroom is directly over Thomas Jefferson's. Now, if you see his room, and there's a million beautiful pictures of it online, it overlooks a flower garden. It's all beautiful. It's his idealized world of Monticello. Patsy is above him, and her room overlooks Mulberry Row, which is where the enslaved people live on the plantation. And we think it's why she always had a much more realistic idea of what was happening, both in the country and especially on the plantation, and what their prosperity was built on. And so we tried to really work that in uh to the manuscript. And Laura, you can tell them about your misadventure with the window at Tuckahoe. Did you break and enter?

SPEAKER_03 25:22

But yes, so we went to Tuckahoe Plantation, which is outside of Richmond, Virginia, which is the ancestral home of the Randolph family, which Patsy married into Thomas Mann Randolph. And there is a tradition in the family. There's a date that's carved into a window in a parlor. And the tradition that they um that they tell at the house when you go for a tour, which is what we were doing, um, is that the daughters, in order to test if their engagement rings were actually diamond, would write into the glass. And first of all, this doesn't make sense on a lot of levels, but it especially doesn't make sense when you realize that the date is March 6th.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

I don't know what date it was, but you're pulling that out of your butt. And I say that there's only one date carved on the window. I could be wrong. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 26:24

Whatever the date is, it is the date that Thomas Mann Randolph, his mother, died. And very quickly thereafter, the father married this um 18-year-old twit who very quickly set about redecorating to get rid of everything that the mother had the other woman had done. So that's not random. Somebody specifically carved the mother's death date into the glass, this permanent reminder that she could never be gotten rid of. So you couldn't get super close to it. We go outside and we're basically like, we want to take a picture of this date. So we're basically like sort of scaling the size, the side of the building to get our camera close enough to take a meaningful picture. And we sort of did. I have the pictures that we took from that day. You can see that.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

And I distracted the guard. So it was a it was a successful caper where we got the picture and we can prove. I mean, there's no way that a girl who's getting engaged randomly carves her mother's death date into the window. So that was a that was that was a fun mistake.

SPEAKER_03 27:38

So somebody was making it known to this 18-year-old girl that you may be the new mistress, but you're not the mistress of Tucko. The other funny story that came from that same trip, and we had so many actually, is that when we were at Monticello, we went down to the family cemetery, which is back behind the mansion. And we're we're standing at the gate. Thomas Jefferson's obelisk is sort of right in front of you behind the fence, and there's a bronze plaque that draws all the burials to tell you who is buried where. And I'm looking at this, and all of a sudden I see something, and I cannot talk. And I'm grabbing Stephanie and I'm like pulling her and I'm freaking out. And of course, there's other people around who are trying to enjoy the cemetery as well. I'm starting to make a just a little bit of a scene because what I saw. Right. It's fine. Is that if Thomas Jefferson's obelisk was here, Patsy was buried here and her husband was buried on the other side of Jefferson. So literally, Jefferson was buried in between them. And since the husband died first and Patsy died second, that means that she probably had some say in that. And after we had just drafted a book about how Thomas Jefferson was always in the middle of their marriage, to see it literally in the ground was like even just talking about it right now, I'm getting chills on my arms because there are these moments when you write historical fiction sometimes where later you fall over the proof that what you theorized and interpreted was actually true. And it was probably the most fantastic example of that from any of the books. I don't know. That just made me so emotional.

SPEAKER_02 29:43

I know. I'm like, Kate, are you crying? Are you crying, Kate? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

I just let's just call it.

SPEAKER_02 29:51

Call a spade a spade, you got messy-eyed. It's fine. I know. I love it.

SPEAKER_03 29:57

So sometimes we can be kind of menaces when we go places and we find stuff that's important to the books, and we just can't hold back our excitement.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

But Laura, this is how we know that Kate and Jenna are our people because she got reclamped about a historical thing, and that's us. We are lunatics. You know, you we walk into the Library of Congress and cry, you know. This is who we are, and so you're our people.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Yep. I did. I didn't post recently for it. I don't know why, but I had never been to Orchard House before. I grew up pure. I my dad on Bunker Hill Day, we would go and sit where General Joseph Warren was shot and have lunch, like on the thing. But I had never been to Orchard House, and I walked into Orchard House and like walked into her room and lost, just started calling like by myself on this tour. So like I totally get it. And I think being from Massachusetts, it's so ingrained in us. Like that history is is just a literally a part of growing up. It's in our blood, it is, it is very present everywhere you go. So when you guys come to Boston, we'll we'll do your thing at Old North Church, and then we'll go grab a drink at Green Dragon and we'll hang out. At the Green Dragon? Yes, of course. Kate worked there. I mean, have you been into the Green Dragon? No. We're so excited. Oh my god, great! We might cry. It's right down the screen. Okay. From Old North Drake. We will raise a glass to Abigail. Absolutely. It is, I mean, unchanged. You will love it. You will absolutely love it. That's so awesome. Yeah. And here like it's like literally a five-minute walk.

SPEAKER_02 31:53

And so I'm going out to Boston for Kate's book launch at the end of May. And my husband's coming with, and he's huge, huge history buff. He's like, what museums can we go to? I want to go see, I want to go see old shit. I'm like, oh my God. Like, like, we're going for Kate's book launch, priority number one. And he's like, I want to go see old thanks. I just wanted to give us the opportunity to um Can we just do this all day? Like I know, I because it needs to be.

SPEAKER_01 32:21

And this is why I have to stop at 45 because we just got so excited to talk to people. We could go all day. But please like plug the book. Anything that you want that's like officially plugging the book that we can add in, or anything that you wanted to touch on about the book that you didn't get to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 32:39

Um anything like that. Yeah. All right. I would say here it is: a founding mother, a book for everyone who knows how important it is to remember the ladies.

SPEAKER_03 32:54

It is. I'll say a couple of things about founding mother that I would love for readers to know. One, that we are going on an absolutely fantastic book tour starting on May 2nd. Most of the stops we are gonna be together. A few of them we are going to divide and conquer all over the East Coast, but into the Midwest and even out to California as well. And you can get more information about that at drakemoi.com forward slash events.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

This is so exciting. I'm and ugly. I can be talking about when you guys said remember the mothers in that chapter, in that opening chapter, and you said, What about the mothers? Died. I died, I died. What an opening. Oh I love it.

SPEAKER_02 33:39

So I will just like my little like moment of reading that was when her first her daughter died in like one of those opening chapters. And I was just like, I had never experienced I have never experienced anything like that. But so many people have, like in our like who is alive today, and just thinking of how that is a transcending experience that women have faced for centuries, thousands of years of like going through that with your child, and that never I granted, wanted to kind of slap John when he told her like you gotta like buck up. But also, like she was always like this pillar for everyone around her, and it was so beautifully written that scene where it wasn't it wasn't full of unnecessary prose. It wasn't full of descriptors that needed to convey her grief. It was just a if you were a woman reading this, this is what happened. You know exactly what all of these feelings are, and it was absolutely gorgeous, and I'm pretty sure I cried. It was it was gorgeous. I haven't finished it yet, and I'm like dying to because jobs, kids, podcast things. Um, but if you get your hands on this, if you're gonna pause on it, just you're not gonna be able to put it down. Like it's it just it's like trickling in the back of my head. It's like, go read it. Go read it right now.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

No, you won't be able to put it down, and it is such a great reminder that um and you start off with uh it starts off in 1814, which was so brilliant because you it's just also a reminder that at some point every generation had the feeling that this country was gonna end. Yes. I mean, the oh you know, the the White House is on fire. Imagine if that happened. I mean, and we talk about I I think our generations specifically, like we talk in these kind of like this is it, like it's over, like we're looking all the things we've been through as millennials, like 9-11 and stuff, and then you open that chapter and you're like, oh yeah, we are not like this is times have been pretty bad. Yeah, this is not unique. This is not unique. So thank you for that organization.

SPEAKER_03 35:52

And even a step beyond that, too, is that like they didn't have the choice to give up or wash their hands of it or say it's somebody else's problem, right? They they knew that the union surviving took active participation, and that remains true. You know, they were regular people, they had to sacrifice a lot to keep it together, and that's a lesson that remains relevant.

SPEAKER_00 36:24

Yeah. And I I guess I want to add that when we were writing this, we were aware that it was going to come out in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And we were also keenly aware that this was a time, a particular anniversary, where Americans are going to be arguing a lot about the legacy of the country and where we're going now and what the mission of the nation remains, because we are the only nation on earth that began with a mission. And so we thought and we believe this strongly that Abigail's voice is the most modern and resonant to speak to this moment that we're facing. And so I know that people are gonna have complicated feelings about the anniversary, but this is the book that you read to help you sort those feelings out.

SPEAKER_02 37:12

I like God chills just for a second. I thought it was all around. Yes. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

Love it.

SPEAKER_02 37:19

Can I just can I just like live in Boston for the month of May and follow you around? And I can work remote, and we're just gonna, I'll just be your fangirl. I'll be like cheering in the background and everything.

SPEAKER_01 37:32

Thank you so much, Stephanie and Laura. This was as fun as I knew it was gonna be talking to the two of you. Your besties of the pod now. Please in the future let us know any way we can post, support, be there for you in any possible way that we can promote whatever it is that you're doing, not just this project, but any project.

SPEAKER_00 37:52

Well, thank you very much. And I'd like to extend a similar offer to you. Since you have a book forthcoming, please do send me information. I have a newsletter, and I think my readers might be interested. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

Absolutely. Yeah, I am serious about the green dragon. Let's I'll I'll send you a lot of things. Go have a stand up on this in the green dragon, yes for sure.