Max Friedman discusses his journey in writing his book, Painful Joy, which follows the story of his parents, Holocaust survivors. The book restores their humanity and tells a different kind of love story through their journey. Max shares his experience as a child of Holocaust survivors, discussing the trauma his parents faced and how it affected their lives and his own. Ultimately, the book becomes a message of hope for survivors and their loved ones.

Key Points
• Painful Joy took Max five years to research and write.
• Max's parents were survivors of the Holocaust camps, and he sought to unearth and understand their real life stories.
• The book explores a different kind of love that can survive even in extreme circumstances. • Sometimes we have to go through hard things to find the lesson.
• Even in traumatic situations, you can learn skills of persistence and tenacity.
• Survivors of traumatic events can gain knowledge by examining how others survived.

Best Quotes
02:42 - 03:00 "Doing the book, painful Joy, as you said, took five years, but it actually took a lifetime because it took me till I was almost 70 or a few years before to even begin to try to tackle it."

04:06 - 04:20 "We knew that what we saw in school with our friends and people we knew, it was just very different. And so we had different ways of coping with all that."

16:55 - 17:03 "You as you know, in writing, getting that first those first words down is, is what really counts."

23:21 - 23:31 "It explains in ways that I couldn't have imagined how they actually survived and how they coped with their survival."

30:09 - 30:23 "Throughout it all, you know, there, there is, you get to understand, so how did they get through this? How did these two individuals actually make it through when everybody else didn't?"

33:35 - 33:49 "It was sort of a breakthrough in the sense that I convinced myself that this had really happened. That, that this was real, that this was not one of my mother's fantastic stories." #realttalk #community #stortyime #dreamers