On today's episode we get to chat with Hadley Leggett, award-winning author of the debut novel, All They Ask Is Everything. A love letter to the messiness of motherhood, the book tells the story of three very different women who each want custody of the same two little girls — and discover they have more in common than the children they’re fighting for.

Hadley fell in love with storytelling as a child, but as a people-pleaser born into a family of scientists, it never occurred to her she could become a novelist. Instead she went to medical school, became a science journalist, and then spent nearly a decade as a stay-at-home mom of three. During those years, she was too busy trying not to drown in breast milk and toddler tantrums and postpartum anxiety to write, but when her youngest daughter finally started preschool, she returned to her childhood dream of becoming an author.

For her first book, Hadley wanted to explore modern society’s brutal expectations for mothers—how moms are expected to give everything to their children, all the time, without any real assistance in terms of childcare, paid time off, or mental health support. She drew on her experiences both in medical school and as a mother, and also did extensive research on the foster care system in her home state of Washington.

Bestselling author Ann Garvin describes the book as “a relevant and absorbing exploration into parenting, foster care, and love,” and NYT-bestselling author Tara Conklin says, “This book spoke to me on so many levels. I didn't want it to end.”

You can learn more about Hadley at www.hadley.ink.

Follow her on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook as @hadleyleggett.

Support your local bookstore & this podcast by getting your copy of All They Ask Is Everything at Bookshop.org. 

A little about today's host-

Author and musical composer Kathleen Basi is mother to three boys and one chromosomally-gifted daughter. Her debut novel, A SONG FOR THE ROAD, follows a musician on an unconventional road trip. Bestselling author Kerry Anne King writes, “In a novel filled with music, heartbreak, and surprising laughter, Basi takes us on a journey that encompasses both unimaginable loss and the powerful resilience of the human heart.”

Meaty, earnest, occasionally humorous, and ultimately uplifting, Kathleen’s fiction highlights the best within ourselves and each other. She writes monthly reflections on life, writing and beauty on her newsletter. Subscribe at https://kathleenbasi.substack.com/. 

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Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us 15 minutes of your time and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know some of your favorite writers in a new light. I'm one of your hosts, Kathleen Bassi. I'm an award winning musical composer, a feature writer, essayist, and, of course, storyteller. Let me tell you a little bit about today's guest.

Hadley Leggett writes layered book club fiction exploring truth in shades of gray. Before becoming a novelist, her winding career path included degrees in medicine, biochemistry, Spanish, and science journalism, as well as a 10 year stint as a stay at home mom. She began writing fiction, her secret lifelong dream, when her youngest child started preschool and she finally got a moment to herself. Hadley's first novel, All They Ask is Everything, is her love letter to the messiness of motherhood. It tells the story of 3 very different women who each think they're the ideal mom for the same two little girls. Bestselling author Camille Pagan calls the book hopeful, wise, and ultimately uplifting and says it surprised her in the best possible way. Welcome to Author Express, Hadley.

Thank you so much. I am really excited to be here today.

We're gonna start by talking a little bit about you as a person, and then we'll talk about your book. So what is the most interesting thing about where you're from? Whether that's where you live now or where you grew up, you get to choose.

Well, where I'm from is always a tough question for me because I moved around a lot as a child. And I have actually lived in Seattle now for 12 years, which is longer than I have lived anywhere else in my life. So I say that I'm from Seattle now. And one really cool thing about Seattle that I didn't know when I moved here was that it is a UNESCO city of literature. So Seattle has an incredibly vibrant literary community, which I did not realize. There are only 3 cities of literature in the United States. There's only 53 worldwide, and Seattle was picked because of its incredibly vibrant literary community. We have a lot of writers that are from here.

We have 28 independent bookstores in the Seattle area. Wow. We've got a library system that is very, very vibrant, and we actually pioneered the one book, one city program in our library, which is where the library picks one book and buys a whole bunch of copies of it so everybody in the city theoretically could all be reading it at the same time and discussing it. And that came from Seattle. So I was just lucky to happen to move here and plop into this great literary community.

That's really cool. So let's ask a little bit more about you as a person. You said you moved around a lot. You have siblings. How would one of your siblings describe you as a child?

So that is such a interesting question. I had a nickname when I was little, and my nickname was bug. And that was because I bugged my 2 older brothers. And so I think that when we were young, they would have described me as the best that was following them everywhere and wanting to keep up with them all the time. I also had the distinction of being the most talkative in our family. We're there was actually a when we lived in Tucson, Arizona, that was one of the places I lived, there was a mountain that had, like, this big valley, and my brothers nicknamed it Hadley's mouth because they were like, there's the big valley. It's Hadley's mouth.

And so my gosh.

I was Oh, brothers. Me.

At least we know brothers are the same the world around, I guess. Oh my goodness.

Yes. I think they are.

Okay. So outside of your family, if you moved around a lot, who was your best friend growing up?

That would depend on where I was living, but the best friend that pops into my mind was a friend that I had in Tucson, Arizona, and she and I both loved hamsters. And we had hamsters that we would get together and have sleepovers with our hamsters and bring our hamsters together. And, yeah, we also both loved cats. We were just absolute animal lovers, the 2 of us.

Well and you have cats now. I was gonna ask about that later. You foster kittens. Right? I do. Yes. As well as having your own.

Yeah. We have 3 cats, and then I am constantly fostering kittens. We don't have a batch right now, but we just adopted out a set of 5.

Oh, that must be so hard. I grew up with cats on the farm, outdoor cats, and we loved there being kittens every year. Okay. We'll come back to that. But let's start by saying talking a little bit about your book, which is All They Ask is Everything. And for the benefit of the readers, I got to review this book long before it was agented or in the process, it was part of the rising star contest for the Women's Fiction Writers Association, which ultimately had won that contest. Right?

Mhmm. In 2021.

Yeah. And I made contact with you after I was one of the first round judges because I just thought, oh my gosh. This is gonna be one of those books that's just fantastic. So I was so struck by it even in that very early stage of reading it. So tell us about this book in one sentence.

Yeah. So All They Ask Is Everything explores the question of what makes a, quote, quote, good mother through the perspectives of 3 very different women, biological mom, foster mom, and estranged grandmother, who all want custody of the same 2 little girls.

Yeah. This book just takes that thing that every mother fears at some point, which is having their kids taken away from you by some do gooder on the street who doesn't know a thing about you. And you just take that fear and you just you don't shy away from it. You just dive right into it. Is there one of those 3 characters? You've got the kid's mom. You've got their grandmother. You've got the foster mom, is there one of those 3 who you find yourself identifying with most closely?

So that's a tough question, and it actually changed as I wrote the book. So when I started, I suffered from a lot of postpartum anxiety after my 3rd child was born, and my biggest anxiety was exactly, as you say, being declared an unfit mother, making some kind of mistake. And so that was just a fear of mine. So I think I came at the book most closely identifying with Hannah, who's the biological mom who loses her kids. But interestingly, as I wrote, each chapter I was writing, I felt like I started to identify with that character. So when I was writing the Julie chapters, that's the foster mom, I felt like I was able to get into her perspective and really feel like, oh my gosh. Why is Hannah such a terrible mom and, like, Julie's doing the right thing? And then I would switch over to Elaine, who's the grandmother, and I would feel like I was more attached to Elaine. So it really, like I felt like my allegiance has changed as I wrote.

And sometimes it was hard to switch chapters, actually, because I had to, like, take myself out of one mindset.

And Yeah. Well, I think that's why the book works so well too. I mean, when you can really dig into all of those different people, then they are all very real. Is that the hardest thing about the book to write was trying to switch from one head to the other?

That certainly was, I think, a really big part that was hard. I think the multiple perspectives with the time line also became really tricky, and this was something so this is the first novel that I ever tried to write, and I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. And so I didn't realize that doing 3 perspectives was gonna be so difficult that I'll have to have 3 separate arcs and that they would all have to be interwoven. And so what happened was when I went back and edited, I would change something that happened in one arc, and then it would mess up the timeline for everything else. And so it was like the I feel like the hardest thing for me ended up being trying to reconcile the timeline changes that I was making as I was editing.

Yeah. And that's the kind of thing that's invisible to the reader because they just read right through it and don't even they have no idea of how much agony went into making it read as smoothly as it did.

I hope so. I hope it reads smoothly, and nobody can tell all of the work that I put into trying to eliminate those timeline gaps.

Yeah. That's also a testament to the reality that publishing is a a group effort because you have copy editors, and there's, like, one particular round of editing that is just for finding plot holes and timeline problems and things like that.

Absolutely. And I was so impressed with my copy editors and my proofreaders. Like, I just love I love editors and the things that they found and the I mean, it's nitpicky, but it's nitpicky in, like, this wonderful way that, like, as the author, you're just so grateful for. Like, thank you for finding that. It's like I'm so glad that you found it and not readers later on.

I have this story about how this woman came running up to me at the gas station by the grocery store and threatened to call the cops on me because I was she thought what I was letting my kids do was a problem while I was working with another one of my kids. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that this really does tap into something that all of us fear. And so what is it that you hope that people will take away from reading this book?

I think I hope that people just see what a complicated system the foster care system is and how complicated these questions are of what it means to be a good mother. I hope people come away with a little bit more perspective. So I came at it from when I was in medical school on my pediatrics rotation, I was actually a mandated reporter, which meant that I had to if we suspected any child abuse, I had to report that to CBS. There were a couple of cases where I actually had to do that, and it was very uncomfortable for me. And I just really saw how traumatic these situations could be for families when there is a CPS investigation. But at the same time, I have three couples in my family, my extended family, who have actually adopted children from the foster care system. So I've seen that from both sides, where there are really terrible cases where kids need to leave their biological family and just sort of that duality that it's complicated and it's nuanced. There's no one answer.

There's it's not that, like, every time CPS comes in, they're investigating something wrongly, and it's not a easy answer.

That's a really valuable perspective that not very many of us have. We all have fears that are perhaps overblown, and there are sometimes things that are on the TV and that you can or that, you know, urban legends about things that happen to people and just knowing that there are such complexities and nuances around these things. It's really you're really well placed to have shown a light on that. So that's cool. Thank you. So you went to medical school. You went through all your rotations, it sounds like. So what was it that brought you that that was a pretty intense list of academics that we saw there.

What what made you decide to chuck it all and devote yourself to motherhood and writing?

So I did. I graduated from medical school, but I struggled all the way through because I discovered on my rotations that I have a really strong vasovagal reaction to other people's pain. So in other words, I faint when other people are going through, like, severe pain. And so I fainted over and over and over again through medical school. And I thought I would get over it. Like, it's a cliche that the medical student faints because it happens a lot. Like, it's just a normal thing that you go through. But for me, it didn't get better.

It got worse, and it became this kind of anxiety spiral where I was constantly fainting. So that was a big part of my decision. It wasn't the whole decision, but that was a big part of my decision. And what I did when when I graduated from medical school, I went and did a program in science communication at UC Santa Cruz, and then I went into medical writing. So that was kind of like I'd always loved writing. That was always something I wanted to do, and it was a way that I could use my medical degree without actually seeing patients and fainting and ending up on the floor.

That's really good. I have a kid who has a vasovagal reaction to whenever he, like, stretches. And I just get I call it a low blood pressure, and I I know when it's coming on. And I'm like, sometimes I'm just like, I'm sitting down now. You know? And and people are always like, are you okay? Yes. I'm fine. Just give me a minute. You know?

Yeah. So you can imagine. It's not what you want in a doctor. No. You want your doctor vertical and upright and able to care for you.

Right. I totally sympathize. Okay. Well, let's ask where's the best place for people to find you if they want to find out about your book or about you?

So my website is really simple. It's just hadley.inc. So hadley.ink. And if you type that into any browser bar, you will find my website. And they're all my socials and everything are on there.

Very cool. Alright. Well, tell us in closing, what book or story is inspiring you the most these days?

I was very inspired by a book called No 2 Persons by Erica Bauermeister, which I read recently. And it comes from the quote, no 2 persons read the same book. And it's the idea that every reader comes to stories with their own background and their own expectations. And I have found this such a soothing concept as a debut author because this is my first book going out into the world, and I have so much anxiety about how people will feel about it and how it will be received. So this book is really cool. It's a series of 10 interconnected short stories. It starts with the author who writes the book and then the agent who finds the book, and then it goes to each of 8 different readers and eventually comes back to the agent. And it's just fascinating to see how one book could have such a different impact on all these different people.

And I think I recommend it for any author to read. It's such a inspiring book as an author.

So it's a fiction or it's a Mhmm. A set of interconnected stories. Oh, that sounds really interesting.

It's a novel. It's really a novel. Like, it hangs together like a novel, but it's following these different characters. And there's there's interconnections between those little Easter eggs, how they connect with each other. And so it's it's a really fun book. I highly recommend it.

Oh, that sounds very cool. Alright. Everyone take note, especially the authors who are listening. Thank you, Hadley, for coming on. Good luck with your debut.

Thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun.

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