Courtney: The mother daughter relationship is another really key motor to this story. Her mom is the exact opposite of Sloane. She gives of herself readily, generously. She self-effaces a little bit. Sloane has a sister. Her sister’s about to have her third child. Her mother’s joy is taking care of other people. She went into overdrive when her husband died.
Kwame: How do you remain sane when these lives of brown boys are being moved, or being shifted, or being blown away like sand in a windstorm? How do you remain sane in the midst of that when you have brown boys -- as you said, children -- or you teach brown boys or whatever, if you're just a human being who understands the value of life, how do you remain sane and just move on with your day? One of the ways you do that is you raise your voice, and you share your voice, and you make your voice heard about what's wrong.
Allison: I appreciated in the middle of the crisis when I was being flooded, people putting in their emails, “Don't respond to this right now, but I wanted you to know I'm thinking about you.” Here's their email. They send you their words of love and support, but they remove the burden of you needing to do anything in return. I appreciated that.
Aimee: A lot of people who like the book are saying that it’s not this page-turning thing. Women are feeling understood in what it means to give birth now and to be a woman. There's a lot of these subthemes in the book. Most of the women have had some sort of harassment or abuse at the hands of powerful men. They're dealing with discrimination in other ways. Hopefully that's the reason that it’s also resonating.
Dylan: I really love what I do. This is my hobby. I've always collected candy on my travels. I go into my stores. There's tons of stress that comes with it. That's with every job. My core passion is the designing and being in the stores. The managing of people is definitely hard. Working out for me is a great outlet, travelling, being in nature, which is something I think is really key. I'm starting to learn more about where I should be.
Caitlin: How do we connect as mothers? Often it’s through shared confusion, complaint, sharing our challenges, and admitting how hard it is. She’s somebody who it’s almost not in her code to do that because of the way she was raised. She was raised in a harsh environment. It is a bit judgy. She’s almost portraying this, “Cannot compute. I don't understand.” She's one of those quietly on it, effective, efficient mothers and people who get it done. I think of her in the book as a good mother.
When I started to write Slow Motion it was from a place of feeling like I wanted to dig in and understand my own relationship to the story, which was really the story of my life at that point, which was how does the worst moment in your life become the transformative moment and wanting to explore that. Those two stories, the story of the tragedy of my dad’s death and my parents, and the extricating of myself that resulted in that, that I don't know what would've happened if my parents hadn’t been in their car accident. I miss my father every day. I don't know what would've happened to me. Nothing was shocking me out of where I was. That did.
Charles: I have many, many bad habits. Sometimes people ask me, “How do I get rid of bad habits?” The truth of the matter is your brain does not distinguish between a good habit and a bad habit. It just creates habits. It’s up to us to decide which ones we like and which ones we don't like. By the way, having a glass of wine at night, if you enjoy that, that's totally fine.
Sarah: I always loved fairy tales. As a kid I used to fracture fairy tales also. I would tell the story of “The Princess and the Pea,” but it would be “The Princess and the M&M” because I was not a fan of vegetables. I liked chocolate. I always loved fairy tales. When I had a daughter of my own and I would tell her these stories, I wanted to teach her that she doesn't have to wait for a prince to come and save her. That's not how she's going to get her happy ending. She has to have agency. She has to be empowered.
Jill: My life didn’t change at all. Everyone always says, “It must be so different now.” It’s the exact same that it always was. More people will come up on the street. I'm, for me, the perfect level of exposed. I don't have people freaking out. I have normal, cool people come up, gay guys or moms being like, “I love the show.” They're nice. They're not lunatics. It’s always people I would probably be friends with if I had more time. It’s a nice group. The show attracted cerebral, funny people.
Lauren: My goal with this book was to help women anticipate the fact that they are probably going to be back at work before they're physically and emotionally ready to be there, which is what I did end up discovering when I did a lot of research beyond my own experience. I interviewed more than a hundred working moms who had all approaches to work and motherhood and surveyed almost eight hundred.
Sarika: I became a binge eater too. I’d be so obsessed with sugar. My body was craving so much sugar that I would go through half a box of cereal every night. I’d be doing my homework. I'd eat a bowl of cereal with my fingers, no milk, just dry cereal, super sweet stuff too. It was Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Golden Grahams. I would eat one bowl after another until it was almost all gone. It was a lot of unhealthy habits that grew upon one another and really impacted me mentally and physically.
Cristina: I always tell people that I feel like writing is cheaper than therapy. It’s equally cathartic. My life was very much defined by the fact that my father died on September 11th. I was a week into my senior year of college. At the time I thought I was going to go be an English professor. I studied Medieval literature at Harvard, which is totally useless in every possible way except for if you want to go get a PhD in Medieval literature. I was on this very particular track. My dad died in this very dramatic and tragic way.
Dan: To be able to take it and be inspired enough to put it into a song, and then to step out on the stage and play it every night, and meet awesome people every night that reach out and say how much it means to them -- we may not be the biggest band in the world, but I feel like we’re making a difference because of that. Every little bit no matter how big or small, it helps. Obviously, the world needs that right now. I need it.
Andre: I start the book with the end, which was my last match. The end started with me trying to get up off the floor. My eyes open. I hear the kids in the other room. My body, the pain, brings me to my knees. It takes me to the floor. It’s the love and also craving for caffeine that gets me to my feet. It’s hard. It was literally a five-minute process to get up so I don’t do anything too startling to my body with the day’s objective.
My father had died. My father had been in the military. I was reading, at that time, everything I could about the military. I was newly interested in a subject I had not had a lot of interest in before and reading everything I could, particularly on the subject of special operations because of what my father had done.
