Sara Faith Alterman, LET'S NEVER TALK ABOUT THIS AGAIN

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Sara. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Sara Faith Alterman: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: I do know the name of my podcast, I think. [laughs]

Sara: We're all scrambling day to day. I wouldn't worry about it. I'm going to say some crazy stuff. It's fine.

Zibby: Can you please tell listeners what your book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Sara: My book is called Let's Never Talk About This Again. It is about my relationship with my father who was a very strict, vanilla person who did not want us to see anything that was beyond G rated, and then, as it turns out, had a secret career writing sex books, and not like clinical textbooks, but very bawdy, 1970s borderline-porno books. I found those books when I was a little girl. They taught me about sex and all kinds of other stuff. It is about my relationship with my dad and trying to reconcile these two dads that I knew about from a young age. Then when he was in his mid-sixties, he developed Alzheimer's disease. We had never acknowledged these books at all. Suddenly, we were talking about them all the time. It is about that journey. [laughs]

Zibby: You do such a good job, by the way, of taking us with you. First, you introduce us to your family so well that I feel like I totally get your dad and you and the whole relationship with the puns and all the rest. Then you see you going and getting your Sesame Street cookbook. By the way, I would really like to see what a Snuffleupagus meatball is, or whatever it was that you were making. It sounds horrific, but I'll just leave that alone.

Sara: [Indiscernible/laughter] does not look good.

Zibby: You're finally tall enough to reach the secret stash of books. You talk about it in the book. Then at the end of the chapter, you're like, and then I never talked about it for twenty-five years. What? How is that possible? Tell me about that.

Sara: My parents had what we called the duck room because my mother had tricked it out with all kinds of duck paraphernalia for no reason. It wasn't cartoonish. It was tasteful ducks. We had wallpaper that had a mallard pattern on it. We had chairs that were upholstered in very New England-y, dainty duck patterns. Then we had a little phone shaped like a duck. There was no reason. We called it the duck room. We had these built-in bookshelves at the back of the room. They had waist-high, for an adult anyway, cabinets with a counter. Then you could climb up on top of them and look through the books. My brother and I would do that all the time because we kept some of our books there like my Sesame Street cookbook, as you mentioned, and some of my parents' stuff like their yearbooks from high school and my mom's novels, my dad's [distorted audio], just all friendly stuff. I couldn't reach the top shelf until I was probably eight or nine. One day when I realized I could reach the top shelf, I just was like, everything else is for me, let's see what's up here for me.

I found crammed into the corner, this stack of large-format paperbacks. I pulled them out thinking, clearly, this is fine. The first one had a cartoon cat on it that looked a lot like Garfield. I thought, oh, this is comic strips. I opened it up. It was called Games You Can Play with Your Pussy. Being a little girl, yeah, cat book, obviously. I opened it up. It was very clear very quickly that it wasn't really about cats, but I couldn't understand what I was missing. Then I kept looking through the stack. I found all these different sex manuals that were, again, not clinical. They were sort of joke-y. They had cartoons, so these big-breasted women sitting in men's laps and all kinds of panting, sweating people mashed up together. I did not understand what was going on. Then I found some that were more and more risqué. Once I started to see naked real people, I thought, this is something I'm not supposed to be looking at, definitely. They made me uncomfortable but also a little turned on, which is weird. Then I saw my dad's name as the author on these books. It was this moment where, again, I didn't quite know what I was looking at, but I knew it was weird. I put the books away.

Then I just was so uncomfortable bringing it up to my father that I never brought it up ever until he was in his sixties. That was partly because -- actually, it was entirely because my dad was so G rated. We were not allowed to even watch kissing scenes on TV. If he saw people kissing out in public, he would make a huge scene to push us out of the way or create some sort of distraction by dropping something. It was very cartoonish. I knew, oh, my god, if I tell my dad, one, that I was looking around in stuff that I wasn't supposed to look at, and two, that had to do with sex or even kissing in any way, I was going to get either in trouble or he was just going to freak out. I just put it aside and never mentioned it. We had that kind of relationship through my whole life. When I told my parents that I was pregnant with my son, I was very uncomfortable telling them because it was acknowledging that I was having sex. Even though I was thirty-four and married, I still was like, oh, god, I have to acknowledge that my husband and I have been putting our parts together in a way that made a baby. That sort of defines our relationship. I could talk about this forever.

Zibby: This is great. [laughter]

Sara: Ironically, I can talk about this forever.

Zibby: Great. It makes my role here very easy. I just get to hang out and watch.

Sara: You relax. Have coffee.

Zibby: I have a coffee right here. Thank you. I'm just going to settle in.

Sara: Cheers.

Zibby: Cheers. I was surprised at the time that you didn't tell your brother because it seemed like you guys were pretty close. You kept that aside. Did you debate telling him?

Sara: He was a couple years younger. He is a couple years younger than I am. When I found the books, I was very young. I just didn't think it was something that he could wrap his head around either. It wasn't just that I was uncomfortable talking about sex with my parents or kissing with my parents. It was just talking about it in general. Even when I was a teenager and got involved with the guy that I ultimately lost my virginity to and did all the firsts with, I couldn't articulate to him anything at all besides -- this is weird. I learned a lot of my sexy talk from my dad's book, which is really messed up not only because that's gross and terrible, but also, these books were written largely in the seventies. I was a teenager in the nineties. A sixteen-year-old girl talking like a porn-y woman in the seventies, it's a very bizarre, wrong way to talk in general. I just couldn't talk about sex without feeling uncomfortable in any way, and I think in part because I conflated it with my dad and with his books. I didn't bring it up to my brother probably for the same reasons I didn't bring it up to anyone. I just couldn't say sexy or sexual words without getting super uncomfortable. I still feel that way a little bit, which is funny because I'm in my forties.

Zibby: And you're talking about a book that has this all over the place. You wrote a whole book about it. It's coming out now. [laughs]

Sara: Warts and all. Warts is a weird thing to say when you're talking about sex. Not warts. All the things. I really struggled and still sort of struggle with talking about sex in a matter-of-fact way. I think that I always kind of joked about it because I was uncomfortable. Actually, that's a note I got again and again from my editor on this book. She’d be like, "There's too many puns. I can tell you're uncomfortable. You're writing like a fifty-year-old Jewish man. You got to pull back on the Borscht Belt-y stuff about sex a little bit." I would make innuendo or jokey jokes about penises or whatever. She was like, "We're all adults. You got to move past it."

Zibby: Editor as therapist, if you will.

Sara: I feel like they always are. Especially when you're writing memoir, you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable even when it's really uncomfortable. I would get on the phone with her. Of course, this is about the illness and death of my father. Obviously, for most people it is a really difficult topic. I would get in a zone where I would be writing about some of the harder scenes like when he was ill or when he was dying, which is not a spoiler because I think the second sentence of the whole book says that my father died. Hopefully, no one feels spoiled. I would call her and we would have to talk through the scenes. I would have to really be honest with her and vulnerable in a way that I hadn’t really been with anyone else, even my husband. She would listen. She would, to her credit, be very sympathetic but also give me wonderful advice on how to write about something painful, which I imagine is a really hard position to be in because you're trying to comfort someone but also critique them and emotionally cradle them through a difficult time but still focus them in a productive direction. I give her a ton of credit. This would’ve been a totally different book without her.

Zibby: What made you start writing memoir and personal essay, all that? When did you start doing all of that?

Sara: I have a background in sketch comedy and also in producing and storytelling shows. One of my jobs is I produce, or one of the producers, on a show called Mortified. It is a live stage show where adults read from their teenage journals to the great embarrassment of themselves and the delight of an audience. I have spent many years performing myself in the show but also working with people to go through their diaries to pull out the funniest and yet also most vulnerable parts to make a story. A lot of people who've heard of Mortified think that it's like an open mic, you just show up and read your diary, but it's actually really curated. We don't make anything up, but we want to make sure that what's coming out of the mouth of a performer is relatable to and funny for an audience. I've been doing that show for about twelve years as a producer. I've spent over a decade working with people to tell their own stories.

Zibby: You have read all those people's diaries, essentially?

Sara: Yeah, hundreds of diaries. It's amazing that people turn their diaries over to me. Again in that sort of same relationship that I have with my editor, Suzanne, it's a real relationship built on trust and compassion and belief that I'm not going to exploit them in some way. Being on the editorial side of that but also the performer side of that, it just felt natural to start telling my own story because I help other people tell their own stories. Actually, this book came from -- obviously, it came from my life, but the idea for the book originally was from my performing at a storytelling show in San Francisco that's called Bawdy Storytelling, B-A-W-D-Y. That is a sex storytelling show. I, being really uncomfortable talking about sex, especially in public, did not want to do this show, but I know the creator who's an amazing woman. Her name's Dixie De La Tour. She was trying to get me on the show for years. After my dad died, I just felt compelled to talk about him and talk his books to try and keep him alive a little bit. I did a show where I told an abridged version of this story. The audience really liked it, not to... They really liked it.

I ended up, from there, crafting a book proposal. I've written two other books in my early twenties. I have the same literary agent as I've had -- she's been my agent for almost twenty years at this point. I had talked to her about, "Hey, I'm thinking about this germ of a book idea. Here's the audio of a storytelling show that I did. What do you think?" She was like, "This is the one." It began as me trying to vomit out my feelings on stage, and then from there over the course of a couple years, I ended up shaping into a book. I feel like I am a talker when it comes to writing. I get asked about my writing process a lot. I don't know why I'm doing quotes. I get asked about my writing process a lot. [laughs] For me, it's really talking out loud. I will monologue alone in a room to get out what is in my head. I work a story out, out loud. Then sometimes I'll record it, but sometimes not. Only when it feels good coming out of my mouth, that's when I sit down and actually write it. Taking the story from the stage to the page made a lot of sense to me.

Zibby: Wow. I feel like I'm the exact opposite of you. I can't even get a coherent sentence out until I write it down first. The idea of, I'm just going to try to randomly talk and maybe that will lead to something I write, I have so much respect for you for being able to do it that way.

Sara: Thank you. As you can probably tell, I am a talker. I can just go and go and go. There's something about talking out loud that, for me, helps me find the cadence of a sentence. That's just how it worked out. I don't know. Anytime I've tried to really sit down and focus and write by sitting at the computer, it's just not successful for me. I have to either talk out loud or handwrite. When I was writing this book, I would take a notebook and go to a coffee shop. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is tech central. I'd go to a coffee shop. There would be everyone on their computers. Some tables would be dudes -- it’s always dudes -- talking about their startup and how they're going to get funding. I was just surrounded by technology. I would be writing on my notebook. I got a lot of strange looks because I probably looked like I was writing in a diary or something. That's how I have to do it. I don't know. It's what happened. I'm not sure why.

Zibby: That's great. Whatever works. It's art. This is an art form, so you do it however you do it. There's no right way or wrong way. I read your New York Times article about when you were pregnant with the ice cream and the Mr. Misty or whatever it was. Then you were pregnant as your father was descending rapidly into Alzheimer's and your belly was expanding out. It was such a powerful visual as both of you expand and contract at the same time. Tell me about that experience and what it was like having to cope with something so traumatic while going through something physically very traumatic in a way too.

Sara: It was traumatic, both things. I talk about this pretty candidly in the book, but I did not want to have children. It's not as though I had my son against my will. It was just more, it took a lot of convincing. I had my reasons for not wanting kids. My husband had his reasons for wanting kids. It was a big decision that we made. It happened really quickly. I had gone to my OB. I was thirty-four. She had said, "It's going to take a while. Usually, women in their mid to late thirties, it's a process. In a year or two when you're not pregnant, come back to me." I was like, yeah, I have a year or two. This is great. I got pregnant very quickly. It was upsetting. Some people would probably think that's a horrible thing to say, but it was upsetting. I wasn't ready. I was already coping with the emotional trauma of coming to terms with the fact that I was going to be a mom before I was ready and the physical trauma -- you have four children, you understand -- of your body just taking over and there's nothing that you can do and this little creature inside of you, this little vampire creature just sucking everything out of you. That was hard.

My father was diagnosed right around the time that I found out that I was pregnant. I was dealing with the trauma of accepting that I was going to be a mom, the trauma of accepting that my father was dying. It was a lot. I was growing this baby as my father was becoming more of a baby, which was profound in a way that I have a hard time articulating. That process was just trying to focus on the good and the beauty of both experiences. I tried really hard to focus on the beauty of growing a child and the beauty of having an expiration date on my relationship with my father and saying all the things that we never said and really treasuring our time together in a way that I don't think I would have. I always treasure my time with my parents, but it just felt like every moment, every conversation, I really need to be the best that I can because I don't know how much longer I'm going to have these conversations with my dad.

Zibby: How did your mom and your brother -- how did other people in your life respond to this book and even just this piece of your dad coming out?

Sara: My whole family has been on board since the beginning. There are memoirs in the world that are salacious and kind of tell all. I didn't want to write a salacious book. I also am really uncomfortable writing about someone without having their permission, especially my mom and my brother and my husband. They all gave me their permission ahead of time to even write the book. Then they were really instrumental in helping me recreate -- not recreate, but help me remember things that had happened. They all signed off on the book before I submitted it, especially my husband because so much of the book is about our developing relationship. We spent a lot of time talking about, remember when we went on this camping trip together? Remember the lead-up to our wedding? We would work together to make sure that I was remembering things correctly and also representing him in a way that he felt was accurate. I did that with my mom and brother as well. There were a couple things that people were uncomfortable with, and so I just took them out or I changed the way that I talk about them because I wanted everyone to be on board with this book. I don't think that I could be comfortable with myself if I had written something despite other people's opinions, despite my family's opinions. They were happy. My brother is a very -- what's the world I want to find? He is someone who is very stoic and does not really talk about feelings. He was in the military, so I'm sure that's part of it. I sent him the book. He texted me a thumbs up emoji, and that was it. [laughs] I guess I have his sign-off. My husband really loved it. My mom was really proud. She feels like it is an homage to my dad. That's it. What more could I want, honestly?

Zibby: It was one of the Time books of the year. That was awesome.

Sara: Thank you. I was totally floored and grateful, especially because this year so many incredible books came out. You've interviewed so many of the authors of the incredible books that came out this year. Plus, what a year. What a garbage year for so many reasons. I felt really grateful for having that exposure or having validation from a publication that I really respect.

Zibby: I wonder sometimes -- we all collectively spend so much time bashing 2020, myself included. Can't wait for 2021. We'll all remember it. I just wonder, in a decade -- obviously, you take some parts of memory with you. Others, you forget, like having a kid, that whole thing. [laughs] Of course, on a national scale, it’s been horrific. There have been horrific personal things. I just wonder looking back, will people say, wow, that's actually the year I ended up repairing these relationships with these people and reprioritizing my life? I don't know. I just wonder. Food for thought.

Sara: I completely agree with you. I sometimes feel a little guilty talking about silver linings that I have found because the year has been so difficult and painful for everybody, but to some people especially to a horrifying degree. I feel so bad for my older son because I'm constantly trying to find silver linings amid his existence, as I mentioned before. I've had so much time with him this year that I would not have had. Sometimes it's awful and stressful and difficult. Sometimes when I'm really getting down about this year, my husband will say, "Listen, Collin --" my oldest -- "is going to look back on this and remember he just gets to be with Mom and Dad all the time. He's going to be happy. I've really hung onto that and hung onto getting to know him and my youngest who's almost two, being around for him in a way that I was not around for my older one when he was the same age. I've been trying to hold onto that. Collin, my oldest, is also really asthmatic. Whenever he gets what would to other kids be a little cold, it's always emergency level. He's never had a little cold. It's always a horrible respiratory infection that lands us in the hospital. He has not been sick since February. It's the longest he has not been sick in his entire life. For me, COVID is extra scary because I have a little kid that is high risk. He hasn’t had anything. It’s been incredible. For me, those are the silver linings that I try to really hang onto. Being a mom, even though I was so reluctant to become one, has become a huge part of my identity. The thing that I am the proudest of is my relationship with my kids and that they seem to be turning out to not be sociopaths. [laughter] I hope to look back on 2020 and remember the good that came out of it for my family.

Zibby: Might as well. You referenced earlier when we were chatting that you have one writing project that you're working on. Otherwise, your stuff is sort of on hold. Can you talk at all about that writing project, or not really?

Sara: A little bit. I have been working on adapting my book for television for a couple years. I sold the option for the book at the same time as selling the book itself. I actually wrote a TV pilot and a book at the same time and was also pregnant with my youngest son. It was a very intense time. I can't talk too much about it. The book is in development for television. That's been a ride. It's been wild. I've been focusing all of my energy lately on that.

Zibby: That's really exciting. That's great.

Sara: Thank you. I'm excited. I also have started very tentatively to put together an outline for another book which I think is also going to be memoir about a time in my life that was bonkers. Right after undergrad, I moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which is a spring break destination. [laughs]

Zibby: I was there for my graduation [indiscernible/crosstalk] my whole college class. Anyway, go ahead.

Sara: So you'll understand why to me it's funny anyway that I moved to Myrtle Beach in an effort to really find myself and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Other people were going there to just get wasted and party. The book right now, the germ of an idea is a memoir about the search for finding yourself or the effort to find yourself in a place where people go to lose themselves. I have wild stories. It'll be personal and vulnerable, maybe not to the same degree that this book is. It was just a wild time in my life, but a different wildness than Myrtle Beach is for other people.

Zibby: It's like going on a yoga retreat to Daytona Beach or something. It's something that's so not what you imagine when you think of a place. That's great. I love it. That's awesome.

Sara: It was crazy. That's what I'm doing, and just mom-ing.

Zibby: I really love the way you write. Obviously, I can tell now you write the way you speak, which is even better, which I guess means I like the way you think in general, which sounds weird to say to somebody else. I feel like you could write a book about anything. You're just describing your point of view of experiences. I'm sure you'll have lots more books coming out of you over the years. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Sara: Yes. Two pieces of advices. The first piece is don't be afraid to be vulnerable, which I know I've talked about a lot already in this conversation. For me, it was a huge revelation to just lean into pieces of my life or pieces of my story that I didn't want to write about. I ultimately realized those are the pieces that are the most interesting or at least the most compelling. Don't back off of an idea or of a sentence or a story just because it makes you feel uncomfortable. Often, I think that's where the best stuff comes from. Also, don't be afraid to suck. I have gotten in my own way so many times just ripping a page out or deleting a bunch of stuff because I thought, oh, this is garbage. Then I get up and walk away. Because I would reread something that I wrote first draft and think, this is a piece of -- I'm not going to swear. This is a garbage sentence. I'm done. If I had just continued to erase things rather than put them out in the world, I don't think the book would be where it is. What am I saying? Don't be afraid to suck because your first draft, two drafts, five drafts are going to suck, but they are part of the process of getting to the draft that is good. I wrote this book -- I keep looking at it. That's why I'm looking down.

Zibby: Hold it up. Let me see it again. It's great.

Sara: Oh, my god, there's squirrels on my roof. Maybe you can hear them. [laughter] I probably wrote three full drafts of this book. The first draft was a totally different book. It felt different. There were different stories, the same characters, but a few extras. It was very dark and morose in a way that didn't feel good, but just felt like, this is what's coming out right now. It was awful. My editor was incredible at being shiny about her critique that it was terrible. I put this in the acknowledgements, but I made a lot of jokes about murder and death and trying to be funny, ha ha. She was like, "This is not good." Then the next draft wasn't great either, but they were steppingstones to getting to what the book is now. If I hadn’t accepted my sucky-ness, I don't think that I would've been able to polish stuff into the final version. Don't be afraid to be vulnerable. Don't be afraid to suck. Both of things will lead to greatness.

Zibby: Love it. Thank you. Thanks, Sara. This was such a fun conversation. Now I have to go back and watch your show and the stockpile from all your productions and everything. I'm really glad we connected.

Sara: Me too. Thanks so much for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Good luck with everything. Bye.

Ashley Audrain, THE PUSH

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Ashley. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Ashley Audrain: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you for having me. As I was telling you before we started recording, I am a huge fan of your podcast. I love it. I listen to it every day. I don't know how you do it, but the content you put out for us, for all of us listeners, we just appreciate it so much, especially during these COVID days when you just need something to get through the day. You're always there. Thank you.

Zibby: Aw, thank you so much for saying that. It really, really means a lot to hear, especially from an author whose book I so enjoyed. To know that you are out there listening to other interviews, it's awesome.

Ashley: I have to start by telling you a funny story. I listen to your podcast a lot in the car when we're driving to school and driving home from school. My son, who's now five, he humors me and listens along with me all the time to your podcast. He always, especially when he was bit younger, he would hear your opening and he would say, "Mom, why is this lady saying you don't have time to read books? She's saying you can't read books. You don't have time." It's just so funny, trying to explain to him what it means. [laughs] He's always very concerned about the title of your podcast and what that means for me. I've assured him I read, so it's okay.

Zibby: Maybe I should put a disclaimer that it's just a joke. I read lots of books. I love reading books. I have an almost-six-year-old, but he's still five. The other day, he was in the corner. He was holding up some little toy. He's like, "Hi, I'm Zibby Owens from Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." [laughs]

Ashley: They're always listening.

Zibby: Always listening. Five is the cutest age, by the way. I'm really sad that it's coming to an end having lived through it now four times. Anyway, can we talk about your amazing book, The Push? which is alternately chilling and life-affirming and worrisome. I just wanted to run out and find a therapist to throw in the pages. I was like, oh, my gosh, now she needs a therapist. Wait, now she needs a child psychiatrist. Wait, now. Oh, no! Then last night, literally in some scenes, I have to close my eyes. Tell listeners, please, what The Push is about and what inspired you to write it.

Ashley: The Push is about a woman named Blythe Connor. She comes from a history of women who have struggled deeply with motherhood in various ways. She's quite determined that her experience is going to be different and that she's going to be this warm, empathetic, present mother that she never had. She and her husband have their first child, a daughter. Her name is Violet. At first, Blythe goes through the various typical early days of motherhood that we can all relate to, tired and just overwhelmed. Then as Violet gets a bit older, she kind of starts to realize there's something wrong with Violet. There's something different about her. She's quite aloof and doesn't really express much emotion. She's not very attached to her mother. As she gets a bit older, she starts to witness some behavior that she feels is malicious towards other children. The problem, of course, is that her husband cannot see this. Nobody can see this. She's really the only one who believes this about her daughter. They try to move on in their marriage and have another baby, Sam, who's born shortly after. In Sam, she finds that connection that she had hoped to have as a mother with her child until something very tragic happens in the family and they're all forced to face what has happened and who their daughter and who Blythe herself is. The rest of the novel looks at that unraveling of the family from there. That's sort of what happens without giving too much.

Zibby: I have to say, the whole time I was reading the book, I kept flashing back to your opening scene of the book which makes you wonder, how did they arrive there? I don't think I'm giving anything away because it's the opening scene. You have the mother in the car looking in through the window. You're wondering why. What is going on? How did she end up there? As you go, you still don't know. What is it? How is this happening? It's almost suspense, but it's not a thriller. How would you even describe? I don't view this as a thriller. It's more like a psychological drama of sorts. Yet there's this element, this big question mark hanging over it.

Ashley: It's interesting you say that because a lot of people have described it as a thriller. I didn't really set out to write a thriller. It wasn't what I had intended. I love, like a lot of us, just a page-turning book, something that you want to find out not so much what happened, but why. Why did that happen? Why have we got there? It's funny. One of my editors described it as emotional suspense, which I thought was maybe a better description for it than thriller. I think people who enjoy thrillers will hopefully enjoy this book because of the pace of it, but it's really more emotional suspense than anything. It's really more of a family drama, I think, than a straight thriller where you're trying to figure out what happened.

Zibby: You can definitely tell in the writing just how close to early childhood you are. You can tell in some books, maybe this author has young children. Maybe she doesn't. With a galley, you never really know how old anybody is. I'm not looking at the author photo. I don't have any context. I just always am diving in. In this book, I was like, this author definitely has had children recently. You remember all of it. I started finding myself wondering what your view on motherhood was because there seems to be so much ambivalence on the part of the characters. Did you feel that way? Then I was thinking, if you didn't have any of these ambivalent feelings, how would you have put these characters together, and even just the inherited trauma of generation after generation of mothers who are disappointing their children? Tell me about where this is coming from for you.

Ashley: It's interesting. I started writing this book when my first child, my son, was six months old. When he was born, he had some health challenges that we didn't know about. We didn't expect them. It puts you in this situation where you're planning for a baby and you enjoy your pregnancy and you have this healthy pregnancy, and you think everything will be fine. Then when he was two weeks old, we discovered it was not. We were going to be spending a lot of time basically living in a children's hospital and trying to get him better and figure out how to manage the problems that he was having. We know how hard those early days of motherhood already were. At two weeks old, two weeks in, to have everything completely change and flipped upside down was very challenging. I loved him. I loved being his mother, but I just didn't know -- I guess I was learning how to mother within the walls of a hospital and with nurses helping you instead of your family members. It was very challenging, obviously. It just really made me think a lot in those days about those expectations of motherhood. Society sort of teaches us to think that it's going to be a certain way and that we're going to feel a certain way and it's going to look a certain way. Then when it isn’t, it's very isolating. It's a very isolating experience. You really don't feel like you can really relate to anybody. I remember all my friends having babies at the same time, which at first, seemed like such a wonderful thing. Then when my experience ended up being just so different and so far from the experience they were having, it was hard.

Those are the things that I was mulling over in those days. Then having the mind that I do, taking it a bit further and wondering, oh, my gosh, this was not experience with my son, but what would happen if it was even worse, if you didn't like your child or you couldn't feel like you loved your child or your child did something that you couldn't forgive or you really regretted having that child? What would that feel like? Those were the things I started writing about. The stuff I was writing about was so much darker than what I was going through. I was going through a hard time, but the stuff I was writing about was darker. Maybe that was a way of working through or coping with I was going through at the time. It's just exploring that.

Those were the seeds of thinking that grew into the character of Blythe and her daughter, Violet, and the story that became The Push. Then once I started exploring Blythe and figuring out who she was, especially through revisions, I started to understand that I couldn't really understand Blythe without understanding the women that she came from. That was when the backstory started to develop, which is basically the story of Blythe's mother and Blythe's grandmother and the challenges that they went through. I was very much interested in that idea of inherited trauma and what we carry from the women before us and how much of that is this maternal anxiety and how much of it is true, literally in our DNA, in our genes. That really interested me. Although, I feel like I must disclaim this on every interview I do that my mother is nothing like the mother in the book, nor is my grandmother. I feel like I owe her the service. [laughs]

Zibby: I had a feeling this was coming. I could tell you were going to that place. I do not blame your mom. She is off the hook. You seem pretty normal from our little limited interaction. [laughs]

Ashley: It's really funny because I didn't talk to my mom, my parents, or really anybody much when I was writing this book about what it was. It was internal and living within me. Then when I realized that this was going to happen and the book was going to be published, I had to tell my mom what the book was about. She was like, "Oh, wow, interesting." It was a lot for her to take in.

Zibby: It's interesting, too, how at one point you have Blythe go to the support group for mothers whose kids have done sort of unpardonable offenses. I always think about that when I hear about the mother of this shooter or the mother of this. How does that mother feel? Of course, the mothers of the victims. You do your best with your kids. As parents, I know I've had moments where I'm like, oh, my god, I cannot believe my child did that. Then it reflects on me or reflects on my parenting. What does it say? Then you wonder, like you did, let's extrapolate and make this the biggest mess ever. Then what?

Ashley: It's so funny. I always think that too. When you hear something in the news or see something that's happened, I always think of the parents, if the biological parents were the people who raised them and were involved in their lives. My mind always goes there to think also, what did the parents know about their child? Did they ever suspect? Did they ever think that something like that could happen? Did they believe the humans they were raising capable of that? If they did, did they say anything to anybody? Would you say anything to anybody? It kind of comes back to that question that I tried to explore in the book. Ultimately, what do we owe our children? What do you owe them? We, in many cases, birth them and raise them. What's our obligation in helping them to live in this world? It's really interesting. A lot of it comes back to just the nature versus nurture argument, of course. It almost goes further than that, asking yourself, what are the lengths that you would go to? It's really more of an ethical debate. It's funny that you say that because my mind always goes there too.

Zibby: There was just in the paper this week -- this episode will come out not this week. Now we're in -- I don't even know what we are. November, pre-Thanksgiving. There was just, on the New York Post, some man pushed a woman onto the subway. He had done so also in January. The mother had said, "Don't let my child back out on the streets." They did. He did it again. She was like, "I told you." It's her face in the paper. He was adopted, not that that matters. It's so on the theme we're talking about, not necessarily all the themes. Wait, so let's go back to the fact that you had a six-month-old son and decided to try to write a book at that point and that the book ended up becoming this, which is a good book, not the tired musing of a completely stressed-out new mother. Tell me about that undertaking and how you did it.

Ashley: I think it did start as the tired musings of an overtired mother. It's gone through a lot since then. It's gone through a lot of revisions since then. It's interesting. I had always wanted to write. I was writing. I was taking writing courses at night and writing on weekends. I had another full-time job and career. I couldn't afford to do an MFA when I was in school. I honestly felt like I couldn't really afford to pursue writing for a lot of my life because I needed to go to university and work part time to pay for that and then get a job that could pay the bills when I left. Writing just never felt attainable to me, writing as a career, and so I didn't pursue it that way.

Zibby: What kind of jobs did you have?

Ashley: I worked in public relations agencies. Then after working in agencies for a while, I did move over to publishing and worked at Penguin Canada as a publicity director. I was just really focused on that and writing when I could even though I would've loved to be a writer full time or to consider myself that or be published. When I had Oscar, when I had my son, I realized I wasn't going to go back to work after that because, I mentioned, he had these health challenges. Life felt different. I just couldn't really see myself being able to balance both of those things. It was around that six-month mark where we weren’t spending as much time in the hospital. I was home a bit more. We were lucky to have a bit of babysitting help through the week. I used those hours to write. It's funny. You had an author on your show, Rumaan Alam. Yours was such a good interview. I thought he put it just perfectly. He talked about when you have children, sometimes it can really clarify for you what you really want out your life and who you want to be and who you want to show up as in the world. Who do you want to be for those children? Who do you want to be for yourself? Your time becomes so limited when you have kids.

I really started thinking about that limited time very differently. I just thought, I need to do it now. This is when I need to pursue this because this is the time. Yes, I was tired and exhausted. It's very hard to write during those months. It is a privilege to have help with childcare. That is for sure. If I didn't have help with childcare those few times a week, I wouldn't have been able to do that, I don't think, because that's really how it started. Our babysitter would walk through the door, and I would run past her with my laptop under my arm running to the coffee shop on the corner trying to get in as much as I could while she was here. It wasn't easy. I think without help, it is very, very difficult. There was just so much on my mind then too. It's funny. A lot of writing advice you get is, write the story that's just burning inside you or you feel like only you can tell. I did have a bit of that. I had this creative energy around that time that I just felt compelled to do it. Looking back now, of course, I'm like, I don't know how I did that. I don't know if everything were to happen all over again, if I could do it again. It just felt like what I needed to do at that time, if that makes sense.

Zibby: Can I even ask, how is your son? This might be personal. Is he okay?

Ashley: He is. Thank you for asking. That's so kind. Yes. He has a chronic illness, a chronic condition. He will have that forever, but it is very manageable now. He is thriving and is just the most incredible five-year-old, almost-six-year-old like yours. Now those days feel so far behind us when things felt so much worse because he's doing so well. We've learned how to manage it. It does get better.

Zibby: I know you said earlier, I can't remember if we were recording yet or not, that he was upset that I was always talking in your car radio about how moms don't have time to read books. Tell me about your reading life. Are you reading a lot around the house? Do you have books everywhere? What's your relationship to reading like these days, or do you just not have the time?

Ashley: We read a lot in our house. We do. We do read a lot. My kids love books, which is great. I'm definitely a nighttime reader. I have a hard time reading during the day, but I read every night. It's amazing how fast that can add up if you just commit to doing it at night. I love to read new releases. I love to read debuts. I love to read whatever the newest book -- which is probably why I love your podcast because you have many authors whose books are just coming out. It's such a nice pairing with reading what's publishing at the moment. We do read a lot. I always make sure my kids know how much I'm reading. Even though I'm reading at night when they're asleep, the books are piled on the bedside. We go to the library a lot and buy books a lot. I hope that my kids grow up with that. We'll see.

Zibby: It's so funny because I didn't set out to do books that were coming out now. In fact, I remember at the very beginning when I was trying to get an author on my podcast, the response was, "So-and-so doesn't have a book coming out." I was like, so? It never occurred to me that authors would only be interested in doing publicity around new books. It's become this because that's what the authors need the most, but I never would've thought. I was like, I'm going to work my way around my bookshelves. Luckily, most of those authors end up coming out with new books. Then I'm like, let's talk about your new book, but really, I want to talk about the old one from ten years ago. [laughs]

Ashley: It's funny, isn't it? I would've thought that too. Now that I'm writing, I sort of get it a little more because it's hard to talk about one book and be writing another book. You have these two totally different worlds in your head. I think a lot of it is people needing to kind of shut out the world and dig into the next project. You can't even let your mind go back to the other book. Maybe that's part of it. It is funny. There's something fun about always wanting to dig into whatever’s new and whatever's out. I'm definitely a news junkie. I love reading the book that's everyone's talking about. The reviews are happening. I just find that adds to the whole experience of reading for me.

Zibby: There's some books, though, I know they're going to be big books, but I know I wouldn't have bought it. This is my big thing. I'm always like, I was pitched that, but I didn't do it. My husband's always like, "Maybe you're passing on way too many books." I'm like, "I just have to stay true to the books I would want to read. Maybe it's going to win a huge prize, but I'm not sure I would want to read it." I don't know. I have to want to read it.

Ashley: I'd still have to want to read it. It still has to speak to you in some way.

Zibby: Not that I haven’t read tons that don't go beyond my comfort zone. I am so grateful for them. If it's just a little too -- I don't know. I don't even know why I'm talking about this.

Ashley: I know what you mean. Books still have to speak to you. I don't know about you, if I'm not enjoying a book, I will put it down. I will never force myself to finish a book because that's just not what reading is to me. Reading's just about being swept away and enjoying it, enjoying every page and enjoying every minute that you're devoting to that book. If I'm not in love, I usually don't finish it. I get it. I totally get it.

Zibby: As a big book lover, tell me about the thrill of the publication journey for you then from when you were starting to write and then editing. Then what happened? Tell me about what happened.

Ashley: It was really crazy. It was a wild ride, for sure. I worked on the book for about three years from that time I was talking about when I first started to get it to where I felt like it was maybe ready to go out there in the world. Because I'd worked in publishing for a couple years, although I was on the editorial side, I was on the publicity side, I think I had an idea of how things worked and going to agents. Even though you have that knowledge, you still don't know what you have. I hadn’t shared it with that many people. As I shared with a few, had got a few more readers, I started getting more comfortable with going out there with it. Again, because I worked in publishing, I kept friendly with -- it was Penguin Canada at the time; this was just before the Penguin Random House merger -- with the head of Penguin Canada, Nicole Winstanley. She and I would meet a couple times a year for tea or whatever just to keep in touch. I met with her. This is when I was just working on my query letters getting ready to send it out to agents. I met with her for tea. I was so anxious to meet with her because she didn't know that I was writing. When I worked there, I never talked about wanting to write a book or publish a book. I didn't tell anybody that I used to work with that I was doing this because it just seemed like such a pipe dream and was so interior, living within me only.

I thought, I want to just get her advice on agents. I had this list of agents I wanted to go to and would love her opinion on it. I sat down with her for tea. I said, "I have something to tell you. I'm nervous to tell you this." She interrupted me and said, "Let me guess. You've wrote a book." [laughter] "Was I that transparent? I thought you would never guess that I would do this." It was kind of funny. She gave me some good advice. Then it was out to agents. From there, it was really a whirlwind. It was life-changing. I will always remember and I always save that email back from my agent, Madeleine Milburn, she's now my agent, just her reaction to it. It's really incredible to see this dream, to see something that you've worked on for so long that you just don't know if it will ever be anything. Then to have these people take a bet on you and have this kind of reaction to your work, it's a very magical thing. I will never forget it. I don't take it for granted. I feel very lucky to have had that experience. Then from there, it very quickly went out to publishers and went out into the world, and we're here. Magical is kind of a funny word, but that's just how it felt. It felt kind of magical, kind of incredible.

Zibby: That's amazing. Are you working on anything else now?

Ashley: I am. I'm revising the second novel now, which has been a really fun process. The process of writing it has been very different than writing the first one just because life looks a little different now. I have two kids. They're a little bit older. We're in a pandemic, obviously. That's another challenge. I've been working through that now. I'm so new at this still. I still am just trying to figure out how to write a book. This is the second one, so just working my way through it.

Zibby: Can you give a glimmer of a plot, or not really? Is it too early? If it's too early, don't worry. I don't want to jinx it or anything.

Ashley: I feel like it's for the same readers of The Push. I feel like it's for those same kind of readers. It's family drama. It's emotional suspense. It's motherhood and female friendships and marriage. I'm really excited about it. I'm enjoying writing it.

Zibby: That is a combination that I would be like, yes, sign me up. Pre-sale, pre-order, okay, you sold me on that. That's good enough. I will definitely be reading that book. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Ashley: After I just said I have no idea what I'm doing? [laughs]

Zibby: I don't believe that at all. Scratch that and be honest.

Ashley: I have advice for new mothers who are writing because I think that's my experience. That's the place where I can offer advice. It's two-part advice. The first part is that it's okay to ask for help to write your book specifically. It's so hard to ask for help, period, as a mother, we know this, or as a parent, especially when your kids are super young because you just have so much anxiety about other people caring for your kids and all of that. Something that I had to learn with the first book when my son was so little was that it was okay to ask my mom or have a babysitter or obviously my husband, whoever, to say, I need help for two hours and it's because I'm going to go write this book, and making that really a priority, showing people that writing a book is a priority for you and that writing is as important as the things that my husband got to go out to do like go to work, where I was home. Making it a priority, committing that time, and letting other people know about it. Giving yourself permission to make that as important as doing the errands and going to the grocery store and everything else. That was my number one.

The part two to that advice is that everybody says, so many writers, accomplished writers, say you have to write every day. I really believe that when you have little kids, you cannot write every day, and it's okay. I did not write every day. It took me longer to get this book done, but I could not write every day because I was exhausted. I was overwhelmed. Babies get sick. Things pop up. Some days, I just did not have it in me even if there was a blank slate for the rest of the day. Some days, I just could not rally to write. I think if you're a new mom, throw that advice out the window. Just do your best. Write when you can. When you can get those windows of help, write during those windows of help. Something I could do every day, which I do recommend doing every day, is think about the book. You can think about the book even when you're not sitting down at your computer to write it. I would think about the book at the park or think about the book when I was walking or think about the book when I was bouncing the baby or whatever at night.

It's funny. I won't say which writer it is because I don't want to freak her out, but I live across the street from an accomplished Canadian writer, which is kind of funny. She has no idea who I am, so as I said, I won't mention who she is. I remember -- this is with my second. I was going through revisions on The Push. My second baby, she was such a bad sleeper. She was up. It took me so long to get her to bed. I remember standing in my house rocking her and bouncing her from the witching hour until the wee hours of the morning and looking out across the street and seeing this other writer's office light on and just thinking, oh, my god, she's in there writing. She's in there writing her next book. She's able to write for hours on end. I would just sit there and bounce my daughter and think, I wish I had that. I wish I could do that. It made me so anxious thinking that this woman across the street had all this time and I did not because I had this crying baby. I couldn't write every day, but I could think about the book every day. I could make notes. I could come up with ideas. I could feel committed to the project every day in other ways. That is my best advice. Don't worry if you can't do it every day.

Zibby: By the way, some people find having too much time to be a paralysis of sorts as well. If you just have blank pages in front of you and endless amounts of time, I find it harder to get anything done than when I have like two seconds and so writing is an Instagram post. I'm like, well, that's all I got. I can't even remember the last time I opened up Pages or Word on my computer. Anything I "write" now is in the body of an email or it's a post or it's something. I'm like, you know what, it might not be this way forever, but this is what we got right now. [laughs]

Ashley: That's what you have at that time.

Zibby: You got to go with it.

Ashley: Being a mom is hard. You got to do whatever you can get done. You can't live up to other people's expectations of what it looks like to write a book.

Zibby: Whatever you're doing, you look amazing. [laughs] I say that because I'm particularly disheveled. You look so put together like you're Kristen Bell on her way to the Oscars or something, and I'm just like, oh, my god, with this great book. For all the drama, from the outside, it looks like you have it made.

Ashley: That's very, very sweet. Thank you.

Zibby: I'm really excited for you. I can't wait for this to come out in January. I'm just so thrilled. I'm so thrilled for you. Thanks for our little intro pre-recording and the conversation and the hours I got to spend with your novel, which were great.

Ashley: Zibby, thank you. That means so much coming from you, truly. Thank you so much.

Zibby: Thank you. Let's stay in touch. Buh-bye.

Ashley: Bye.

John Allman, BOYS DANCE!

Zibby Owens: Welcome, John. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

John Robert Allman: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: Thank you for these amazing children's books which are really impressive. You have three. I have three, I should say, in front of me, which are amazing. I particularly love Boys Dance. All of them are through the American Ballet Theatre. I'm sure you can tell me more about that. Then there's B is for Ballet and A is for Audra: Broadway's Leading Ladies from A to Z. Tell me how you became a children's book author.

John: It's actually a little bit of a fun story because it was completely by accident. I was working one job ago at an advertising agency that focused on live entertainment. Most of our clients were Broadway shows. I'm a huge theater fan. Grew up doing theater. Love living in the city to be able to see theater, which has been one of the horrible things about this time, is that none of us can go do that. I thought it was funny that some of my coworkers didn't really know their Broadways divas even though they worked in theater. It kind of was a gag gift. The idea just popped into my head. I ended up writing it out over the course of a couple days to give it to a coworker of mine as a gag, basically. Then that somehow coincided with another one of our colleague's baby showers. I just put two and two together and couldn't let go of the idea. I ended up just chewing on it for a while, telling a bunch of friends about it. Eventually, enough of them had said, "You never know what can happen in publishing. This is so funny. I would love to be able to give this to my friends' kids too. You should go for it."

I didn't really know much about the process or the industry at that point. I did a little bit of research and realized that all you really had to do was pitch it around and cross your fingers. I really went into it totally blind. I cold emailed a bunch of agents. One of them, my amazing agent Kevin, got it immediately and offered to rep it. Then after going back and forth on a proposal over the course of the summer, one of the first two editors that he pitched it to turned out to be a huge theater fan herself and bought it instantly. He was like, "Settle in. It'll probably be a year before this lands anywhere." It was a week into pitching it, it was sold to Random House Children's Books, which was crazy. I still don't feel like that alone is real. I would've written it for free and been so happy for anyone to put it out there just to educate people about these dames that I love so much.

The fact that someone else saw that and then convinced somebody else to see that who had to convince a whole team of people to see that and then put up with having a very surreal, wonderful meeting at one point where we just sat there and went through every diva in the book and decided what show we'd draw her in and what costume she’d be wearing -- it was this business meeting to do that. It was just truly amazing. Then from there, I lucked out. Knowing that I have a background in dance and theater and performing arts, my editor and her team did a deal with ABT to do a handful of books, not all children's books, over a bunch of years and had a couple of ideas that they felt like because of A is for Audra, I might be right to take a stab at. They offered me to noodle on two of them. I couldn't really decide between which one to do because I had just done an alphabet book. Following up A is for Audra with B is for Ballet felt fun. I also grew up doing dance and was very often the only guy in dance classes in Houston, Texas. There was a personal connection to Boys Dance that I felt like would just be too perfect to pass up, so they let me do both. These both just dropped this past September. They're the first two books in Random House's series of books with ABT.

Zibby: Wow. That is such a cool story. I love that. Good things happen to good people. It's really nice to hear.

John: I think it's a very good lesson in just following the North Star of your passion too. I never wanted to be a children's book author, but I love theater. I love musical theater divas so much. The little kernel of wanting to be able to package that up and share it with friends' kids, which I think tapped into something that so many musical theater fans feel which is that it's something that they're passionate enough about that they love to share it, there's never really been something like this that you could give to someone to open their eyes to the breadth of all of these amazing performers in such a concise, kid-friendly way as opposed to the classic taking them to shows, which isn't accessible for everyone and you have to be a certain age for, or listening to cast recordings, which is a little bit of a different experience too. It's cool to have been able to just stitch it all together and package it up like this and be able to introduce people to these ladies that I love. Just sticking to your guns when an idea takes you, running with it, and seeing how far you can take it is definitely something I have learned the easy way.

Zibby: I'm curious, you reference in all the books -- you have more bio information. You mention them, but then you go into more detail a lot at the end, like in Boys Dance for instance. I'm flipping through now just to find you the page. You have all these pictures and bio information on people like Calvin Royal III and Eric Tamm and James Whiteside and Arron Scott, then obviously in A is for Audra and even B is for Ballet. These are hilarious. I love this.

John: Our Sardi's wall.

Zibby: Yes. I'm holding up the wall of the head shots at the back of A is for Audra, which is hilarious. You make it look like one of those signatures outside of a show or in the playbill or something. Did you send these books to those people?

John: We did. Part of the fun of when A is for Audra came out was just crossing my fingers and hoping that everyone in it was flattered and would share it and be an advocate for us. So many of them were. As a theater fan and a huge dork, to have Kristin Chenoweth blurb the book and then Instagram about it and say that it was so cool was just crazy, and two years in the making too. As I'm sure you know, picture books take forever to get done. Not only from the process of writing and then finding an agent and going through the sales process, but once it sold, it was over two years from that week in September that Random House bought it to it actually coming out. That entire time I was crossing my fingers that it would actually even happen and just holding my breath. Then for it to drop in such a big way with all of these women being so supportive was really crazy.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I feel like that would be such a dream. Maybe I should do a children's book with authors. I feel like those are my heroes the way that Broadway performers are for you. That would be kind of fun.

John: Totally. The cool thing about the back matter for Boys Dance is that -- for A is for Audra and for B is for Ballet, I wrote the bios in the back just to give people a little bit more information, a tiny bit more information about each person. For Boys Dance, my editor and I actually went down to ABT after one of their core rehearsals. A bunch of their dancers stayed around after, their male dancers, and were gracious enough to just talk to us for a couple of hours over pizza and beer about their own histories growing up as boys in dance, how they found ballet, the obstacles they overcame to getting to the point where they are as professional ballet dancers now, and who their heroes were, what their dream roles were. As a dancer casually but not a professional-level ballet dancer, I would never know what turns they were most excited to finally nail or those littlest things like that. We were able to bake a lot of that into the book. Then ABT actually tapped a bunch of them to write their own mini memoirs which are what are in the back of that book. I didn't even write those. They're kind of personal essays on these dancers' backgrounds and their encouraging love letters to young guys who might want to get into dance and haven't had role models before. It's really special. It was just so amazing that they not only gave us their time, but wrote these amazing blurbs for the back.

Zibby: That's so great. In the back of Boys Dance under your bio, it says, "John Robert Allman, he was born and raised in Texas where he was often the only boy in dance class." I was like, that's a book right there. I would like to hear that story, please.

John: [laughs] No story, really.

Zibby: What was it like growing up in Texas and being a dancer? What was your background like? What was it like for you?

John: I was lucky in that I had an incredibly supportive family. I had an incredibly supportive school environment. I mostly did all of my performing arts stuff, for the most part, at school, whether it was school plays or school dance classes or dance concerts or choir or any of that. I was lucky to be in an environment where there was tons of options. It was all amazing. I had these incredible teachers who didn't bat an eyelash at any of my very young theatricality or interest in dance or any of that. I actually dedicated Boys Dance to my two dance teachers from Houston. They put me in class and saw things in me that I kind of knew I could do. I actually met one of them when he was new to our school and choreographed a musical. They gave me a little tap solo even though I didn't really know how to tap. He just worked with me alone and really encouraged me to come out of my shell and master that in a way that I don't think I could have if he hadn’t done that and was just so amazing.

Then from there, it snowballed. He drew me into actually taking class even though I was the only guy in those classes. Ended up doing concerts at the end of the year where, again, I was always the only guy in front of the entire school. Then eventually, we did a student choreography showcase. I think because I just really wanted to be him in a way, I choreographed a piece. I set it on three of my girlfriends who were also dancers for this student choreography showcase and then ended up -- for some reason, one of them couldn't do it in this big end-of-the-year performing arts celebration. I ended up dancing it with them again in front of the entire school and just loving it so much. Then went to college, and I didn't major in theater, but I choreographed four shows at school. Now in the city, take dance class every now and again just to take up space and feel big and use my body in that way and see dance all the time. It's really turned into a real lifelong passion of mine. It's all because of Aaron, my dance teacher from freshman year.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice. I feel like teachers need to know, especially now. I feel like teachers are just at their wits ends having left my remote school in the other room with the littlest guy to come in here and do this podcast. It is tough what they're doing with all of this remote, and to know that no matter what they're reaching these kids and making a huge difference for the contributions in the world. You and I wouldn't be talking. I wouldn't be holding these books. All these things would've been different. I wonder how many of the books around me wouldn't have been written if people hadn’t had encouragement, or the books that are lingering inside people who haven't yet had someone give them the boost that they needed.

John: Totally. I was insanely lucky.

Zibby: That's so nice. It's amazing. What other projects do you have in store now? I can't imagine you're going to stop, right?

John: It's funny because I really never set out to be a children's book author at all, but something about the seed of being able to share my passion and introduce young people to different areas of the arts I think has struck a little bit of a chord in me and also in people who want to be able to do that as well by giving books like these to young people. We are working on a few more in that vein. I don't know that I can say what they are specifically yet because we're still gestating on some of them and haven't announced anything officially. We are doing a couple more, knock on wood, that'll continue to flesh out just a little bit of arts intros for young people that I'm very excited about and feel very fortunate to be able to do.

Zibby: Did you feel like when you moved from Texas to New York that the world opened up in a whole new way for you with the live access to all the performances?

John: Yeah, kind of. Being a patron of the arts was always something that I was able to do even in Houston, which is where I grew up, mostly. It's a huge city, so there are amazing arts organizations. I grew up seeing pretty much every show at the Alley Theatre, which is Houston's Tony Award-winning regional theater that does incredible, first-class productions of plays and sometimes musicals. The Houston Ballet is obviously a world-class ballet company, where I saw my first ballet. I was fortunate to be immersed in it and have access to it then. It's definitely clicked into a new gear when my family moved to New York City. The year that I went to college, actually, my parents moved to New York just by coincidence. I was going back and forth for breaks and at Thanksgiving and all of that. I was coming back from Chicago to New York and able to see like ten shows in five days. That was all I would do. It would be like, bye guys, and meet up with my friends in midtown or wherever and see as many shows as we could cram in before going back to school. That has stayed a huge part of my life. I was just reminiscing about how crazy it is to not have been in a theater in so long now when I probably hadn’t gone longer than a week before in eight years. It's just crazy. I feel very lucky to have been able to see as much as I saw when they first moved and been able to make that such a big part of my life.

Zibby: Have you been watching any virtual things like the Hamilton thing on -- the virtual productions versions?

John: Yes. There have been some amazing moments, especially early on, where I feel like all of us were so shellshocked that being able to kind of commune together and watch some of these virtual events was such a needed faux substitute for the feeling of being in an audience. You'd be online tweeting with people about what was happening in real time. It just felt similar to a big lightning rod moment like when a show opens and everyone's chattering about it. There was a Sondheim Birthday Concert early on where they had all of these incredible Broadway actors and actresses performing from home in a series of Zoom performances. Then obviously since then, there have been so many amazing workarounds for being able to share live theater and arts during this time, including Hamilton on Disney+, which I loved. Actually, just last night I watched -- City Center's gala this year is a brand-new concert that they filmed in the theater with Audra McDonald. It was so crazy and kind of jarring. As a substitute in between these events that have been produced for this moment, I've been binging older canned performances from people every now and again just to feel something and feel like I'm watching a live performance.

She programmed the night and chose her songs and wrote her banter for this moment. All of a sudden, after months of really not seeing anyone in concert like that, you have Audra McDonald opening her concert with a song called "Solitude" and speaking to the moment that we're all feeling of being so alone right now, and then shifting gears and doing some other rep, and then coming back to it and doing "Some Other Time" from On the Town, which is this gorgeous song about catching up down the line since we're out of time now, but I'll see you later, or "A Place For Us" from West Side Story, these amazing standards that take on such a crazy new meaning in this context. To see her perform them so beautifully and really cater the evening towards an audience that's all over the place, at home alone or with their families, was just really special. I highly recommend it to anyone. I think it's available for another week on New York City Center's website.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, I'm going to have to go do that with my daughter.

John: Hopefully, they do something else with it. It's stunning. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Zibby: Wow. Have you thought about teaching kids dance or teaching kids about this whole world in any other way?

John: You know, I haven't. I work in TV by day. I'm in marketing. I've been thinking a little bit just with how much is blowing up in the content space across all of these different streaming platforms about what it could be like to look at some of this through a lens of kids' TV sort of like CBS Sunday Morning for kids that teaches them about all of these different arts areas and people. I don't know. We'll see. It's fun that it's such a ripe area to have tapped into and be able to explore in different mediums. I haven't thought too much about anything concrete beyond the books.

Zibby: I know a school where you could get involved in [indiscernible/laughter] including a couple of mine. Maybe you could start by rolling it out on Zoom.

John: Totally. I did choreograph a few musicals for local elementary and middle schools growing up. I would love, if I ever had the time and could be there during the day, which is tough on a nine-to-five work schedule to do something like that again, just to move around and be able to share a love of performing with young people in the same way that it was shared with me.

Zibby: My two little guys are doing an after-school Frozen II Zoom class, which has been very tricky to get them to focus on the computer and having them say their lines. They're six and seven. It's really cute. They have their whole dress rehearsal and then performance next week.

John: That's amazing. They're putting together the whole show on Zoom?

Zibby: Oh, yeah.

John: Wow.

Zibby: It's been a semester-long project.

John: That's incredible. The creativity of the way that folks have been able to use that to string together really, really phenomenal programming has been blowing my mind. That's amazing.

Zibby: I'll send you the link.

John: Please do. I would love to see.

Zibby: John, this is amazing. I'm so impressed with you. I feel like you should be running a theater and you should not be in marketing for TV. I want to guide you to the calling that you probably [indiscernible/laughter]. I'll stay out of your business. You should certainly be on the board of a theater or something.

John: I don't know about that, but thank you.

Zibby: All right. Well, I'm going to follow up with you about this. I feel like there's such a, not waning interest, but so much of the theater-going population pre-COVID was becoming a much older audience. I was actually on the board of Lincoln Center Theater for the young people when I was young, trying to counteract the aging thing and inject some life and excitement into younger people to go into the theater. Not that you need that. You're obviously totally on board. To spread that contagious joy and excitement, it would be awesome.

John: It's definitely an energy like none other for me. I feel like if anything, if these books encourage anyone to go take a dance class or to listen to a cast recording for the first time or to see a show, I feel like even one, then my work here is done.

Zibby: I'm about to stand up and dance right now. Watch out. [laughter]

John: Not to get overly sappy about it, but I think now more than ever, really, we're a society so in need of empathy. I think live performance and theater especially are so uniquely positioned to foster that if you're open to it. Just getting more people into seats to experience things live and communally and to let them chip away at them a little bit, it's just so important. I'm very hopeful that we can start getting back to that as soon as we can.

Zibby: Yes, sounds great. Do you have a favorite play or anything, favorite musical, just to leave us with? Can you pick one?

John: I hesitate to because I feel like it just ebbs and flows with my mood. I love so many for so many different reasons. If I had to, Gypsy is probably my favorite show. I'm a sucker for a good diva turn. I'm also a sucker for theater about theater. I don't think either of those things get better than that show.

Zibby: Awesome. Fantastic. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on this podcast. Thanks for all the books. I'm just so excited to have connected.

John: Of course. Thank you so much for having me. Ditto. It's been a pleasure to chat.

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care.

John: See you. Bye.

Emmanuel Acho, UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS WITH A BLACK MAN

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Emmanuel. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Emmanuel Acho: Of course. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: I feel like I should rename it for the night. I should call it Very Comfortable Conversations with a Mom. How about that? [laughter]

Emmanuel: That's a little more welcoming, you could say, than Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man.

Zibby: My whole thing is making people feel like they can talk to me and whatever. Although, I have to say, that is your thing too. The uncomfortable is sort of a misnomer because you make people comfortable immediately.

Emmanuel: That's the trick. People are like, Emmanuel, where's the discomfort? I'm like, it's not always for you. Sometimes I'm the uncomfortable person. Sometimes the listener's the uncomfortable person. Sometimes my guest is. More than anything, I try to make people comfortable because that's when you really get the truth out of people.

Zibby: It's so true. I was thinking to myself ahead of time, I was like, ooh, what could I ask him to make him really uncomfortable? [laughs] I decided not to do that. We can just chat. It's fine. Take me back to May when you decided to start Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, the videos, and when your friend came and you were going to going to record together and then she bailed on you that morning and the whole thing of how you started it as the video series and then how it transitioned to a book.

Emmanuel: After the murder of George Floyd, Zibby, I was like, what do I do? I have to do something. I'm a sports analyst, but I'm a black man before I'm a sports analyst. Before the world acknowledged me as a black man, I'm a human being. It's my responsibility to positively contribute to society in some way, shape, or form, leave the earth better than it was when I found it, when it found me. I said, okay, what am I skilled at? I'm a, to a degree, gifted orator. I can speak. I'm going to do something called Questions White People Have. I grew up with so many white people. I know they have questions. I grew up in an affluent neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, went to this affluent, white, private school, wore a uniform, all boys' school called St. Mark's School of Texas. I said, I know my white brothers and sisters have questions and they don't have answers because they’ve never actually asked the questions. I've just heard the murmurs and the whispers. Great. I'll get three white people together, three black people together. We'll sit around the roundtable, clear fishbowl in the middle of it. My white brothers and sisters will pull out a question. They’ll ask it to the black people at the table. We'll have a conversation.

Problem, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Nobody can travel. Now what do I do? I'll call one of my white friends who can come down from Dallas to Austin, Texas; three-hour drive, straight shot, Interstate 35. She said, "Emmanuel, if I'm going to be there for you, I have to show up." I said, "Thank you. I greatly appreciate it." She shows up on Saturday. We're going to record on Sunday. She spends a night in my guestroom. We rehearse in front of her mom, in front of her sister, in front of my best friend. We're good to go. An hour and six minutes before call time on Sunday for the first episode of Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, I come downstairs. She's in my kitchen with tears in her eyes. "I can't do it. It's not right. You should it by yourself. They don't want to see me. They want to see you." Long story short, she had a change of heart. Now I'm like, what do I do? I got to do it myself. I still didn't want to do it myself. Transparency moment, I don't think I've said this. If I have, I haven't said it often. I called another white friend last minute. I said, "Hey, can you just stand in and ask me these questions? I'll answer them." Remember, Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man, not Uncomfortable Monologue with a Black Man.

Zibby: [laughs] I was going to say that. I was just thinking monologue.

Emmanuel: The first episode was not supposed to be me talking for nine minutes, twenty-seven seconds. The first episode was also very likely only going to be one episode. If you listen closely, episode one, "Welcome to the first of hopefully many episodes." I didn't know what the heck I was going to do. That is how this all came to be, the ups, the downs, the highs, the lows. It was kind of ordained, a moment meant for me. I wasn't searching for it or seeking it out. The man met the moment.

Zibby: Wow. That's impressive. So you started doing all the videos. By the way, the quality of the videos, this isn't like you were just propping up an iPhone. They're highly produced. When Oprah shows up on episode three or four, whenever she came, I was like, of course she's going to show up because it already looks like an Apple TV set that you're doing this on.

Emmanuel: Let me interrupt you. First episode, the producer was my best friend who's an Olympic gold medalist in Rio Olympics 2016, a sprinter, anchored the 4x100 meter relay. The videographer was a wedding videographer, not some Emmy-award winning videographer. It was just my friend who's a wedding videographer and his wife. The first episode was shot in an area that I shot my 2018 birthday video. I wanted a white psych wall. I said, wait a second, if we're going to do this, we got to do it well. It looks very highly produced, but the reason it looks like that is because it was so simple because I paid for it. I paid for the first three episodes out of pocket all myself. I said this, people's eyes need to be satiated, if that's the right word. They need to be stimulated. Content is digested better if it's higher quality. I said, let me take the $1,500, let me do this with friends. These aren't pros. It's a track Olympic gold medalist and a wedding videographer and myself. We were the four people in the room for episode one. That was it. Episode two, I got my friend who's an interior designer. She was our stage manager. It was not a family affair, but it was a friendly affair of just me gathering a group of people who wanted to see the world be better and wanted to see the world change. We all garnered those first forty million views just kind of doing it.

Zibby: Unbelievable. There's something almost metaphoric in the fact that it was you against the white background. The black man, the white background, you've probably thought of this before. Thought that was genius of me. Let's go to the content of what you talk about and what you put in the book and all the rest, which by the way, was so much more than just a continuation of the videos. This is a history book. I was reading it before bed. I was just like, oh, I'm learning. I feel like I'm in school again. Also, memoir, highly engaging, but just so many facts. You must have had to go research. Do you just know all this off the top of your head? Tell me about what went into making the book.

Emmanuel: The book, I didn't want it to just be regurgitation of the episodes because that, to me, is, to a degree, lazy. It's also not enough. It's accurate, but it's incomplete. I wanted the book to be both accurate and fully complete. I wanted to give people a ton of information. Let me submit this to you because this is something I've had a challenge with. We learn our history too young in America. We learn our history too young. Why do I say this? I was taught about the Civil War before I cared about the Civil War. Don't teach me about the Civil War when I'm eleven years old and I can't even spell. Don't teach me about that stuff then. Don't teach me about the judicial system. Don't teach me about the three-fifths compromise. Don't teach me about things that have to do with my identity before I know my identity. I've never said that before, but I'm really having that moment of, we learn so much stuff so young that we didn't digest it.

Now when I was writing this book and researching more information, I was having those moments of -- I forgot the grandfather's clause. Prime example. Everybody knows the term the grandfather's clause, but we don't really know what it means. We don't remember what it means. For those listening, when black people were disenfranchised, they would put those Jim Crow laws together that would try to limit black people from voting. They would make you take literacy tests in order to vote after slaves became free. You had a literacy test. The problem is, black people couldn't read because they were slaves and you weren’t allowed to read. The problem was you were disenfranchising white people because some lower-class white people couldn't read. Rather than adjusting and removing literacy tests because that might have helped black people, we said, let's create the grandfather's clause. If your parents could vote, if your grandparents could vote, you can vote. Black people's grandparents couldn't vote because of slavery. I don't care about that in fifth grade. I care about that as a twenty-nine-year-old. That's when I care.

When I was rereading all the information as I was writing this book, I was like, we have this notion in our head that history is boring, outside of the few history majors that are walking the earth that we all are like, oh, those super nerds. We have this notion that history is boring when all you got to do is go watch the Hamilton musical and you'll be like, yo, history's kind of interesting. We just learn it too early. I kind of [indiscernible] and went all over the place. I do think those listening will really feel that. When I was writing this, so much of the stuff, it's so interesting. The fact that black and white people couldn't be married sixty years ago, that's so interesting. I think it's Loving v. Virginia. So much stuff is so interesting. I'll end like this, you have to know your past to know your future. You have to know where you came from to know where you're going. I think we have to do a better job of knowing where we came from.

Zibby: You're absolutely right. By the way, I was just helping my thirteen-year-old daughter study for an American history test. I had to go through all the things that happened around the 1760s, 1750s. I was like, huh, is that really what happened? When you get to be this age -- I'm forty-four, so this is even more embarrassing. I learned it in school, but it hasn’t really come up that much more since, and so all the details get a little foggy. Yes, I think knowing your history and also positioning -- history needs a rebrand. I think we should call history class amazing stories or something. I totally agree with you. You need the context. I'm also curious about -- I know so many people are watching you and listening to you. You're engaging people, everyone from police to just so many people about things that they're unwilling, perhaps, to look at or haven't thought about before. I'm wondering what you, deep down, believe is the potential for change. Do you think that the right people are listening? Do you think people can change? You asked that amazing question with the police when you said, "Do you think we'll ever get to a place where a young black child could look to a policeman as someone who's a safe haven?" The answer was sort of up in the air. What do you think?

Emmanuel: We have to make incremental leaps, steps, and then eventually bounds. Here's what we have to understand. The people that are on extreme sides -- my black brothers and sisters on extreme sides that are just, I hate white people because of what they’ve done and the history and I just will never forgive white people, we got to move off that fence. The white people on the extreme side of, racism doesn't exist, systemic racism doesn't exist, black people just need to get over it, things have been equal for fifty years now, there's not a problem, got to move off that fence. We all got to get away from our sides and get towards the middle because the truth of anything lies in the middle. The truth of most arguments, it lies in the middle. It doesn't hover on extremes. How can we move forward as a country, as a world, as a nation? We have to have real dialogue. The biggest thing for me, Zibby, and it's the simplest, conversations. I was talking to the group of police officers -- my latest episode, for those that are listening but haven't yet watched it, it's a group of twenty-five Petaluma police officers in Northern California, and predominately white. This a population of sixty thousand but that's less than one percent black. My first question I asked the officers was, "When's the last time you had a dinner, a conversation, with a group of black people?" Two officers that I asked said, "Honestly, Emmanuel, we never have."

Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing right with that either. Inherently, there's nothing wrong with that. I don't think it's malicious. You have to understand, if you're not going to expose yourself to a group of people that don't look like you, don't sound like you, aren't cultured like you are, then how do you expect to interact with them? However you think you're interacting with them, how can you think you're interacting with them properly if you don't even know the them that you're interacting with? I went to an all-boys' preparatory school. I told you this, high school. I didn't have girls in my school from fifth grade to twelfth grade. Didn't go to school with girls. Some perks to that. You don't have to worry about wearing cologne and looking good and all that other stuff, but there's some negatives. When I got to college, I was like, there are girls here. There's some women here. What do I do? I had to learn and relearn how to navigate, how to act, how to be. Don't be so aggressive. Don't be so hostile. Don't be so curt. I had to learn some things because I hadn’t been exposed on a daily basis to a large people group. It's the same thing. I don't even remember the question you asked anymore.

Zibby: That's okay. Whatever. It doesn't matter.

Emmanuel: Nonetheless, I think that's what we have to do to become better as a nation. We have to just have real conversations.

Zibby: So we'll get rid of all-boys' schools. That's the answer.

Emmanuel: [laughs] Basically.

Zibby: I worry. My son is at an all-boys' school right now. I'm like, what is he going to do when he gets face to face with women? Do you feel like you were behind the other guys when you got to college, or what?

Emmanuel: Yeah, but it's a quick learning curve. It also depends on -- I was still going to church on Wednesdays and Sundays. Then I have two older sisters. It's not like it was a completely foreign species, like, oh, my god, brain malfunctioning. I see someone with longer hair. I don't know what to do. That didn't happen. It was just different being in class. Now you got to figure out how to navigate differently. It's just different. I submit that it truly is the same thing with black and white people. Just because we're all people, no; Emmanuel Acho navigates differently around white people than he does around black people. He just does. We just have to understand that and move and navigate life accordingly.

Zibby: Wow. You must have written this book really quickly. How did you fit this in? You already have a busy schedule. You're hosting a show. You're all over the place. When did you do this?

Emmanuel: Well, I don't have a ton of fun right now. I have a ton of work. I did it from the last two weeks of June to first two weeks of August. That was like, hey, let's knock this out in six, seven weeks. That was before I was doing a lot of talking and public speaking. In my free time, I would just start notating the stories, notating the concepts. Where do I want to go? Here's the thing, though. I realize the end of something before I ever start it. What do I mean? 2015, I'm playing for the Philadelphia Eagles. I get a direct message on Instagram from a fan, Zibby. "Hey Emmanuel, if I get two thousand retweets, will you go to prom with me?"

Zibby: I saw that.

Emmanuel: I say, "If you get ten thousand, you got yourself a deal." I never thought it would happen. Here's what I also said. I said, "May the odds ever be in your favor," a quote from the famous movie Hunger Games. That's how it was ended. I said, in the event that she gets these ten thousand retweets, I want there to be a cool story, a cool response, so I ended with that. Long story short, Elizabeth Banks, the lead star of Hunger Games, ends up retweeting the story. I had gone to the end before I ever got to the beginning. When I was getting thousands of emails after my episodes, I was favoriting the ones that were really good questions. I said, in the event this ever becomes a book, I want to use these questions in the book because I want to be able to talk to real people and answer real questions. It was easier to write because as I was always thinking about it, I always thought, I don't want this to just be a moment of sizzle. I want it to be a moment of substance. Books are more substance. Spoken word is sizzle. I was always preparing for the potential.

Zibby: Interesting. Were there any questions you considered putting in the book or making an episode of your show and you felt like they were just too uncomfortable or you just didn't want to go there?

Emmanuel: The biggest place I don't want to go is politically. Some people are like, hey Emmanuel, why don't you bring on somebody on the hard-extreme end who doesn't even think racism exists? Then I submit this, Zibby. I say, I want to have an uncomfortable conversation, not an uncomfortable argument. If your mind was already closed, what am I going to do? I'm not here to bang on a door that's deadbolt locked. I'm there to knock on a door that's cracked open. If you're already closed-minded, it's not going to do me any good. I'm not sitting here trying to get into a yelling match. Racism is real! Zibby, if you were like, hey Emmanuel, the Earth is flat, I'd be like, okay, you're wrong, but you're entitled to your wrong opinion. People that are like, systemic racism doesn't exist, okay, you're wrong, but you're entitled to your own wrong opinion. We're not debating opinions. We're talking about facts. I'm not going to get into an opinion-based debate over factual matters. That's, to answer the question, what I've been asked most to do that I just don't bother with.

Zibby: Where is this whole thing going? I know it started, you didn't plan it. You just responded emotionally. Then you put this enormously brilliant whole thing together. It's already been expanding. Oprah's been on your show and put you on her list. The book's going to just blow up. This is probably releasing right after the book. I'm sure by then it will have already blown up. Where do you see this going? Do you have a vision? Are you going to be the president one day? How big? What do you see? What's your secret hopes and dreams?

Emmanuel: Great question. I think any answer would be too small. If you would've asked me on May 30th or May 31st, I never would've told you that I would've got a call from Matthew McConaughey, Oprah Winfrey, and Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, all within a month and a half. My mind can't fathom the reach in which this could have, nor do I want to. I've said this before. When I was a kid, you would lay a hundred dominoes, the black and white dominoes, and you'd push the first one in hopes that you would see a train of a hundred dominoes fall. It was just the coolest thing ever. The first domino, Zibby, didn't care about the hundredth. It just cared about knocking over the second one. I'm not worried about the two hundredth or hundredth domino. I'm just worried about the next episode. I'm worried about the episode with the police officers. Then I'm worried about the next one. Then I'm worried about the next one because I just want to keep making pockets of change, keep making pocket of change. Then I'll look up and be like, oh, this is pretty cool. So many people have been like, Emmanuel, have you not stopped to celebrate? Are you not super excited? I'm like, I don't have time. I got work to do. I'm going to stop and look back one day and reflect. I've had one waterworks, tear-jerking, god, thank you so much moment, but I don't have time. I don't have time to celebrate. I'll look back at the end, and I'll be grateful that I was used as a vessel in the moment. I don't have visions of where I want it to go. I just want to keep staying focused and true to the moment because I think our society will benefit.

Zibby: Did you feel like you had room for a calling before this happened? I was looking at your before-Instagram. I'm like, what was he up to before? It's not like you were doing nothing. You already had a whole -- singing and this and that. This came in and clearly has just ignited every sense of you. You're in it, you said earlier. Did you know there was room? Can it just happen? Did you long for something?

Emmanuel: Can it just happen for other people?

Zibby: I guess. Did you know that there was something that you wanted to do to make meaning and then this fell in your lap? Were you waiting for something? in other words.

Emmanuel: I wasn't waiting for this. I was trying to create content around love shows and create a crazy type of entertaining content. It was never this. Let me answer your question. There's a difference between your career and your calling. I think your career is what you're paid for. Your calling is what you're made for. Many people have heard that being said before. Your career is what you're paid for. Your calling is what you're made for. My career is sports. I was focused on my career, but I was still attentive to my calling. I got three calls from no-caller ID numbers during the course of these Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. The first one, Oscar award-winner Matthew McConaughey. He calls me. "Acho, McConaughey here. I want to be a part of your second episode." Matthew McConaughey. The second call, Oprah Winfrey. "Emmanuel, I love what you're doing. Would love to have a conversation," etc. The third one, commissioner of the NFL, Roger Goodell. "Hey Emmanuel, I just saw one of your episodes. I want to be a part of this conversation." I say that to say this. Your calling will call you. Pick it up. Your calling will call you. Make sure you pick up. My calling called me. I didn't dial any numbers. My calling just said, okay, Emmanuel, now is the time. Remember, I wasn't trying to do this alone. That's what people don't understand. I was trying to do this with anybody else, but I couldn't. I just still knew I had to do it.

Zibby: Last quick question, do you have any advice to aspiring authors?

Emmanuel: Man, that's a really, really, really good question. I have tons of advice. To aspiring authors, I would say stay true to yourself. Stay true to your intention. When I first talked to Oprah, the very first question she asked me -- she made is sound way more elegant than I will. She said, "Emmanuel, what is your intention? Your intention will drive you." I said, "Oprah, number one, I want to change the world, and I actually believe I can. Number two, I want to be a catalyst for racial reconciliation through dialogue and conversations." My intention's not to get a lot of Instagram followers. My intention's not to get a lot of clicks. My intention's not to get a lot of fame. My intention is to change the heart of at least one person or at least change and open their aperture of understanding. To my potential authors, stay true to your intention. Don't be focused on selling the most books, selling the best book. Sell the book that is truest to you. That is the best book. Whatever it is that your intention said, this is what I want to do, that is what you do. Everything else will come. Lastly, there's a different between success and significance. Pursue significance, and success will come. Pursue success, and you may miss both. If you pursue significance, success will follow.

Zibby: Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. This has been such a treat. I can't wait to watch your star continue to rise. I'm so glad we got to spend some time together.

Emmanuel: The pleasure was mine, my friend. Thank you.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Emmanuel: Bye.

Dr. Evan Antin, WORLD WILD VET

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Evan. Thank you so much for take two of "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" minus the technical difficulties this time, I hope. Thanks for coming back.

Dr. Evan Antin: Thanks for having us. I got Henry here too.

Zibby: I have Nya here on the floor.

Evan: Right on.

Zibby: I can pick it up. She likes to lay right there.

Evan: Hi, there.

Zibby: Good. It's a four-person podcast. [laughs]

Evan: There we go.

Zibby: Your book, World Wild Vet, which, PS, is hard to say, World Wild Vet, there we go, Encounters in the Animal Kingdom. Tell me a little more about this book. I know that you wrote it over fifteen years. Obviously, I've read it. Tell listeners what inspired you to do a travelogue of all the places you've been to and all the experiences you've had with animals. Why now in your career did you decide to write a book?

Evan: I'm so fortunate that I've been to so many places and I've worked with so many different species in different habitats and seen what it is to work with wildlife, appreciate them in their natural environment, be involved in their conservation efforts, and veterinary medicine for individual animals. I feel I've got a lot of different messages to share from around the world. It can vary quite significantly whether you're in Australia or Africa or Central America. I did think about writing a book for years, but I didn't think it'd be until later in my career. I decided to do it now because I think I have enough experiences to share. I've got a lot of messages to share as well. I felt like now actually is a good time to start writing and sharing those experiences and messages and lessons. My whole goal is to get people excited about animals, teach them a little bit about vet medicine and what that's about. Then of course, a big part of that is making an effort towards wildlife conservation awareness and sharing that whole world. I've gotten to see that in so many different places.

Zibby: Amazing. You've had some really unbelievable experiences. Actually, the part that stuck with me the most was after you went on this whole big adventure and collected this amazing footage and everything, was it your car that was broken into? You lost everything. You even lost thirty-four pounds. Tell me that story again.

Evan: Oh, man. I don't often rent cars when I travel. So many places I go, you just don't need to. It made sense for the things I wanted to do in Costa Rica. I had just gotten to this hotel. I think I was arranging the room, just getting settled in there, and away from the car for not very long. It was dusk. By the time I came back to the car, it was night. I opened the door, and everything's gone. Everything. I had a day pack with me that had my passport, which was huge. It had a memory card that had a few pictures. Ninety-nine percent of it was gone, all my travel stuff obviously. I bring my snake hook and my croc snare. My clothes and everything was in that bag. That was all gone. Oh, man, I was so pissed. I was not fun to be around for a few days. It was crazy. I'm not an angry person, but oh, my gosh, I wanted somebody to disrespect me in some way so I could take out the anger on them or something. It was a horrible mental state to be in. Things worked out. I still have those memories. Nobody can take those away from me, but I sure wish I had the footage and the pictures to back it up.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. That was all of your Galapagos experiences too, right?

Evan: Exactly.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. Then of course, you go to Costa Rica -- I think it was when you were in Costa Rica when you sort of kidnapped a crocodile and left your girlfriend sleeping in Costa Rica in some hotel. She thought god knows what happened to you. You came back with the crocodile, which I can't say has ever happened to me in any of my travels with anyone.

Evan: I've never heard of anybody doing such a thing. I wouldn't do it again today. Legally, I don't know what that would entail. It's probably not allowed. It was my first crocodile that I'd ever caught in the wild. I worked with alligators and some other crocodile species in captivity. To see one in the wild, it was so easy. I just was dying to make an educational video about it and get some pictures with it and everything. At the time, I was just making educational videos for YouTube. I have one picture from that experience that I'd emailed to somebody. I at least have that from that experience. It was so funny. I guess I didn't realize how long I was gone because she was freaked out when I came back. She really was about to call the embassy. She thought I was kidnapped. She can worry sometimes. That can escalate rather quickly. She went from being freaked out to being willing to help me film this guy within a matter of minutes. She got in the car and we went over to exactly where I caught him, got some amazing footage for a few minutes, and let him go. That was that.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Then you were bitten by a snake. Your mom had to get involved. It was a whole thing.

Evan: I've been bitten by hundreds of snakes, maybe thousands by this day, but that was a venomous snake. Again, it was the kind of thing where you learn lessons along the way. I've definitely done many things that I wouldn't do today. That was one. That was probably the biggest one. That was also a blessing in disguise because it did obviously give me an opportunity to gain an even bigger respect for dangerous animals. I'm lucky I got bit by not the most venomous snake. It was a copperhead, which is bad news. That can be pretty destructive and pretty scary. I didn't have any permanent damage that I know of. Everything worked out. If I'm working with an animal where I think the danger risk is too high, then I just say, I got to pass on this one or we have to do this a different way, or I have to sedate it. We have to just approach it a little bit differently. I still work with a lot of venomous snakes and still love it.

Zibby: How did you go from doing educational videos on YouTube to having a million followers and a TV show on the Animal Planet? How did that happen?

Evan: That was all part of the vision. That all started in that first chapter when I'm road tripping Australia and I had my mom send out my camera and my tripod. I wanted to start making that kind of content having no idea where it would go. I did a couple TV guest appearances shortly after graduating vet school. I think they found me on YouTube or something. I'm not totally sure. The Kris Jenner Show was my first show. It was a total blast. Then I did another couple shows. Then towards the end of 2014 about a year and a half after I graduated vet school, People magazine, I don't know how they found me, but they offered to include me in the Sexiest Man Alive issue they put out at the end of the year every year. That year I was the sexiest beast charmer. The other years they did it I was the sexiest veterinarian, at least. The first time, it was a men-at-work section. It was different professionals. They're the sexiest chef or teacher or whatever. Then in early 2016, and I think it was unrelated to the People thing, I had some big publications put out articles about me. One called Bored Panda did. Then when they did, Huffington Post and -- what's that other big one? Buzzfeed and a few other big ones reached out for an interview. Then they did a story on me, basically. In those days, it was easier and more possible to just go viral. I went from hitting 10,000 followers the night before that I was so excited about, and then two weeks later I was at 220,000, and then grew from there.

Zibby: Wow. Has that affected your personal life and your relationships? Do you feel like you have people glomming onto you who you don't trust now? Do you stick to your core people from growing up? How do you handle that?

Evan: Personal-wise, nothing's changed. My friends, they think it's funny when I'm the sexiest vet or whatever. They know that's not what I was striving for, necessarily, even though it's been a blessing. I'm not complaining about it. Same with going viral. There's been way more positive things than negative things. For me, I'm a pretty down-to-earth kind of guy. It's not changed a whole lot in my personal life. I've always been close to my family. I've always been close to my friends. That's all totally the same. They're super supportive. It's opened a lot of doors and created a lot of opportunity in a very good way for me. Really, those things have been absolute blessings.

Zibby: You said this whole vet empire world you're building was part of the vision. What is the next phase of your vision? What's your secret hopes and dreams? What's next? What do you want?

Evan: Honestly, I want to keep doing what I'm doing and just get on a bigger and bigger scale. I want to do even more than I can in the media space and that platform and just creating awareness for wildlife and its conservation and promoting quality veterinary medicine and even talking about how we can best care for our pets too and getting people excited and educating them about animals and just growing that and making it bigger and bigger and becoming well-known in that space, but in a very positive and constructive way for our pets and wildlife.

Zibby: How have you dealt with the pandemic, not being able -- I saw on your Instagram you were recently in -- where were you? Tanzania?

Evan: Tanzania, yeah.

Zibby: Amazing. I didn't even go to downtown. How did it affect you to not be able to do your thing and travel everywhere? Was that really hard?

Evan: This is the first year in several years I've traveled not nearly as much. The last few years, I think I've been gone probably, cumulatively, three to four months out of the entire year, probably closer to four months, and in a dozen different countries over the course of a year. Listen, I'm not complaining. I'm super lucky. I've already been to Australia and Tanzania. That's more than most people can say they get to do in a year. From my perspective and what it usually is, yeah, it's significantly less. Our hospital's been open the whole time. I work at Conejo Valley Vet Hospital in Thousand Oaks nearby. I'm still seeing patients when I can. I'm still working on other projects. We're talking about the book. The book, it's taken a lot of my time this year. I've had other projects. I did another Facebook show. Tanzania was actually, technically, a work-related thing even though I was getting to have fun and get in the bush and host this really fun series. It's definitely slowed some things down. I've absolutely managed to stay busy. I picked up a new hobby this year that I've just absolutely loved and dove into headfirst. It's woodworking. I've gotten some new power tools and having just a ton of fun doing that and building furniture and stuff.

Zibby: What's your latest creation?

Evan: I'm working on some midcentury chairs right now. It's called a Z chair. The Z chair is the standard common name for it. It's proven to be a bit of a challenge. This is a very new hobby. It was maybe a little bit ambitious for me, but so far, so good. We're moving along. I think they're going to turn out okay.

Zibby: If you're selling them, my name does start with a Z. If you run out of options, I'll invest in some Z chairs.

Evan: Z chair Zibby. I love it. [laughs]

Zibby: Tell me about writing this book. How did that process work for you? Did you sit down and write it every day? Did you dictate it? Did you work with somebody else on it?

Evan: Writing and reading were never my strong suits through my education. I'm much more of a math, science, right brain or left brain, whatever that would be. Because I'm not a professional author by any means, I did hire a ghostwriter, which I think is common unless you are a professional writer. I ended up getting a phenomenal writer. Her name's Jana. She really found my voice. We talked a lot. We had really long interviews. I had a very good idea of how I wanted the book laid out, the stories I wanted to tell. Then she would interview me. She would ask a lot of questions. I would tell a lot of stories. We had a really good back-and-forth. A lot of the work was just that, and then of course revising and editing what she would bring to me. She is so phenomenal at finding someone's voice and sharing their verbal stories and putting it on paper in a way that would come -- when you read it, that really is how I talk and how I share. She did a phenomenal job. That was a big part of it. Of course, working with the publisher. I've been very happy with Henry Holt Publications. They're a boutique company under Macmillan. They do awesome work. They’ve had some really cool books. It's been a dream to work with them too. They’ve been really helpful along the way. Of course, I have a team that's very helpful. I've got a manager and an agent that I trust. Everything's just been this perfect collaboration, cooperation with everybody. It's been great.

Zibby: What do you think the most effective part of your book marketing has been in terms of what you did or some event that was different or just anything in this whole, I'm out and about trying to tell people more about my book? What stands out to you out of all the stuff? Aside from our amazing interview right now.

Evan: Other than this amazing interview -- to half-answer a previous question about the pandemic, this changed everything. I was going to be going on a national media book tour. I was going to be going to several big cities doing in-person signings and readings. Obviously, that's not so much the case. My team, the publishers and my agents, everybody says social media is the most important, most valuable tool. Having a decent following is very helpful for that. It seems to be that way. I'm getting a ton of positive feedback from my followers. I've been sharing a lot of things from the book, whether it's animal facts or just sharing what the book's about and how the project's been going and that kind of thing. I think that's helpful. To answer that question, I think it's a combination of things. Social media's huge. Doing podcasts like this one I think is really, truly valuable too in just getting it out there. I don't know if there's one thing.

Zibby: Do you have any advice to either aspiring authors or people who want to do something to really make a difference in the animal kingdom, in the animal world, and conservation and all of that?

Evan: For someone that really wants to pursue that in a very big way, you have to be passionate about it. You have to show that passion. I think that's what's worked so well for me. I'm not working or trying to show my passion. My passion is very vibrant in me. I'm lucky that I can portray that on a media platform and on social media. I think that's a big part of it. I'm so lucky too. I get in the trenches. I get in the field. I get to work with these vets on the ground and these conservationists and get to wildlife rescues and get my hands on these animals and show what that's all about. That's a huge part of it too, the hands-on stuff. I can sit at home or in my yard and talk about conservation, and people will listen. If I'm actually out in the field, I'm in the Philippines or I'm in South Africa and I've got a binturong or a rhino or an anaconda or whatever, I think that goes a long way.

Zibby: My last question, my kids are in the stage where they want every animal under the sun. My little guy had a tantrum that we couldn't go buy a blue jay today after school.

Evan: Oh, come on, Mom. We got to get him a blue jay.

Zibby: So not fair. I want a bird. I want a bird. One day, it's a hamster and the fish. We're in that mode. We already have dogs.

Evan: How old is he?

Zibby: We're overrun. We have dead fish floating that I haven't even dealt with. We're like a menagerie. My little guy is almost six. Then I have a seven-year-old and two thirteen-year-olds. They're kind of over the --

Evan: -- Wow. That's a whole other challenge that I can't relate to, but I do a hundred percent sympathize. Most of my friends have children. It can be tough at times.

Zibby: In terms of the animal/pet management piece of life for many parents, you are the ultimate animal whisperer. What do you say to that? Should us parents get browbeaten into getting all sorts of different animals to give kids more exposure or just stay with the traditional black lab who I have over my shoulder? What do you think about bringing them into your home? Today, we were trying to explain that, no, blue jays are out in the wild. They don't want to live in a cage. How do you tow that line of wanting to give your kids a love of animals but not have your home be taken over?

Evan: Number one, there's a lot of ways to cultivate that without necessarily acquiring new lives that you have to then be responsible for. Most big cities and areas, moderate-sized cities, they have really high-quality zoos. Zoos are accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums and/or American Humane. They're good places where they're doing right by the animals. They are, in a very major way, contributing to wildlife conservation in their respective parts of the world where they have some of the animals as ambassadors of these areas. That goes a long way. Even going to petting zoos and things like that, just getting them exposed and getting those interactions is really valuable and really important. Nature's such a big thing too. I grew up in Kansas. We had a creek in my backyard. My parents, they both like animals. They're not completely insane like me, but they totally cultivated it. If I brought a turtle home for a couple days, it was okay. I'd get out in the creek and appreciate the nature. I'd go catch crawdads and look for insects and look for turtles and snakes and the wildlife. Anywhere you live, there's going to be something in your backyard no matter where you live in the world. That's always an option too.

Then when it comes to the pets, there's no one answer. It really depends on the individual, the parent, the family, the children, everything. You have to ask yourself -- I say this for any new pet, whether it's an exotic pet or a dog or a cat. I have three main general tips. Number one, do your research. Know what you're getting into. What does that pet need? Diet, space, time, ambient humidity, temperature, all of these things. You need to be aware of what you're getting into. You don't provide these things, you're not giving this pet the fair life that it deserves. It's going to be disservice to you and the pet. It's going to be expensive and sad and just not what you want to do. Second question you ask yourself is, can I provide these things? Do I have the space? Do I have the budget? Do I have the time? Do I have the ability to provide all of these things? Am I going to do the upkeep? All that stuff. Then number three, find a veterinarian in your area that's comfortable working with those animals, whether it's a small animal practice that's very comfortable seeing dogs and cats. If you're looking to get, say, a cockatiel, which is a great pet bird -- they do very well in captivity and can be phenomenal pets. Find yourself an exotic animal veterinarian that's comfortable. They're going to be a big tool and resource for regular check-ups and preventative medicine like vaccines and that kind of thing. That depends on the species, obviously. That's really important too.

If you can ask yourself those questions and say, yes, we do have time for -- say we want to get pet rats. Rats make phenomenal pets. They get super strong emotional bonds. It's really like having a dog or a cat in rodent form, super intelligent, great animals. They need to be social. We need two rats. We need decent space for them. We need good enrichment. They're super smart, so we need to constantly do mazes and toys and engage and that kind of thing with them. Can we get the right diet? Can we get with a vet? It really depends on the person. For some parents that have the children, especially a six-year-old boy that wants everything as I did, you just have to pick and choose. Do what makes the most sense for you. It sounds like you guys have a lot of pets. It sounds like you guys are doing pretty good. Just putting the energy into the pets that you have is also really important. There's ways you can re-excite them about their pets. You do a little bit of research and -- what do you have again, for example?

Zibby: My mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law had a dog named Nya, this black lab. They both just passed away from COVID.

Evan: Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry to hear that.

Zibby: Thank you. They had two dogs. We took Nya. Then my husband's sister took Luna, the other dogs who's a mix of three different breeds. Nya's a black lab. Then I had a Pomeranian who is now basically my babysitter's dog. She brings the Pomeranian in every day. Anyway, I could go on and on about this, but this is not about your book. Then we had these two fish. Now my daughter wants a bunny. My son wants a bird. We had two fish that we got over the summer that lived quite a while, but not anymore.

Evan: It's the kind of thing you want to educate yourself in. Fish and some of those other pets, they can be lower maintenance in some ways. At the same time, you need to be very familiar with what a biological filter is and know how to properly care for these fish. It takes some experience. If you're considering any of these exotic kind of animals, do your research. When it comes to bunnies or rats or --

Zibby: -- We're not getting a rat. I'm drawing the line on even discussing buying a rat. Full stop on that.

Evan: Let's say bunny just hypothetically. You do want to know what you're getting into. They do need space. You do need to have at least two. They're super social animals. Don't just get one bunny. Don't just get one guinea pig. Know what you're getting into when it comes to that space. If you have time that you can do some research if you're kiddo's really excited about one species, you ask yourself -- don't tell him yet because if he knows you're thinking about it, it's over, probably.

Zibby: I know. At first, I was like, I'm going to play him this podcast. Now I'm like, I am not playing him this podcast.

Evan: No, no, no. This you do until after the fact. You get the bunny. Then you can say, if you do that. If you don't get a bunny, he can't hear this one. [laughs] You just ask yourself those things. At the same time, you have four children. You have a dog. You are a busy working woman as well. Don't do something that's unfair to the pet. There's things you can do with your dog. You can do fun training and things to get him excited about that. There's other opportunity to cultivate it. Then of course, there's great programming available. I'm sure he's into Kratts brothers and Coyote: Brave Wilderness.

Zibby: Wild Kratts? Isn't that what it's called? The Wild Kratts?

Evan: Wild Kratts, yeah, the brothers. Then there's Coyote Peterson. He's got great kid content, super educational, good guy. I met him on a show we did together, actually, about a year and a half or two ago. Super good dude, a good space. He promotes wildlife in a really good way too. There's lots of ways you can cultivate it without necessarily having to get the pets.

Zibby: See, after this conversation, maybe now my almost six-year-old will turn into you. Who knows?

Evan: Cultivating it's so important. I'm lucky that my parents would let me have pet reptiles and let me do these things. My mom is a landscape designer. She wasn't doing it professionally, but she was crazy about her landscapes. She had all these little rock gardens and different things and other plant gardens too and everything. I was flipping rocks every single day looking for roly-polies and millipedes and grubs and cicadas in the right time of year. I just loved all of that.

Zibby: It all comes down to having your parents foster the love of whatever.

Evan: I'm glad you're saying that message because I cannot stress that enough. There's so many people, they buckle down, their kid's getting a pet. They don't do the research. It's their kid's pet. It's like, listen, it comes to you guys. Then they come to see me at the veterinary hospital when I'm seeing patients, and they really don't know what they're doing. Our veterinary appointment is not just a wellness thing because their hamster has a legitimate health issue that's out of their hands. It's because they didn't know what they were doing, because they weren’t providing the proper ambient humidity or UV light or they're feeding an all-seed diet to their parrot. There's so many things that people just don't know and assume. They're wives' tales or whatever. It's just common knowledge that's totally not right for these pets. They find themselves seeing me because they just didn't do their research. That's the number-one thing. Please do your homework. Whether it's for your kids or for you, please do your homework before you get a pet and take on a life. Make sure you're doing it right.

Zibby: Excellent advice. Thank you, Evan. Thanks for doing this round two with me and sharing all these great tips. To be determined what pets I end up with next. [laughs] I'll keep you posted.

Evan: Hit me up anytime. I'm happy to answer questions and make recommendations. There's plenty of other pets besides rats that make great pets. With a bird, a cockatiel. Look into that. If you're considering a bird, look into that.

Zibby: Okay. Cockatiel, I'm on it.

Evan: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: Thanks so much. Take care.

Evan: Take care.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Evan: Bye.

Rumaan Alam, LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Rumaan. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about Leave the World Behind. I'm delighted to finally be talking to you.

Rumaan Alam: It's my great pleasure. I only wish that we were doing this in person because I can see into your home library, and it's absolutely beautiful. I would love to get in there and poke around on those shelves personally.

Zibby: You have an open invitation as soon as people are allowed to socialize again. I don't know when that will be. I miss having people here. I miss it. I loved having authors streaming in and out. You're welcome anytime.

Rumaan: Someday I'm going to take you up on that.

Zibby: Please do. As I mentioned, we were supposed to do this interview a while ago, but now you've had all sorts of great news that has come since the launch of the book, including today. It won't be when this airs, but today you found out you're now shortlisted for the National Book Award, which is really exciting. Congratulations.

Rumaan: Thank you.

Zibby: And also a Barnes & Noble pick and a Read with Jenna pick. What next for this book? [laughs]

Rumaan: The thing about writing a book, and I'm sure you've heard this from your guests in the past, is that it's just this very sustained leap of faith. You have absolutely no idea what will happen when the book exists. I'm also aware of the fact, as you know very well, there are so many great books every year that never really connect with the right readership. Sometimes it takes time for a book to find its way into the hands of the right readers. When that happens quickly, you know what a blessing it is. I know every step of the way, what a particularly thrill it is because the book isn't alive in any meaningful way until someone reads it. It just isn't. Those awards are wonderful. Being part of a television book club is wonderful, but the reason it's wonderful is in service of getting the book into the hands of the people who will bring it to life. That's what's exciting about it. The idea that more readers will come to it is a thrill, really a thrill.

Zibby: If you were to win an award and no one found out about it, let's say there's this secret Pulitzer Prize but you can't announce it, you wouldn't be excited?

Rumaan: I'd be excited because, of course, it's a statement about how those judges felt about the book. That's really just a statement about how those particular readers felt about the work.

Zibby: I'm just playing with you. It's fine.

Rumaan: Of course, it's gratifying to the ego. Every artist is possessed of an ego. Writing is just an act of ego, really. Of course, it's thrilling, but you have to think about what really is important in those moments. What thrills me, honestly, the most is when I see on Twitter or on Instagram -- I've seen this a bunch, and it's so lovely -- when readers get the book from the library, when the hold is released and they get the digital edition from the library. That's really thrilling to me. Look, the name of this podcast is moms don't have to time read. We live in a culture that doesn't make a lot of space for an experience of art. When people pay for your work, not in terms of their money but in terms of their attention, that's sacred, almost. It's really moving to me that people would spend the limited time that we all have, the hour before bedtime, with my work. It's really meaningful. I really love that.

Zibby: That's such a nice way to look at it. That's great. I love that. Will you please tell listeners who might not know what this is about a little about the plot and how you came up with the idea for it?

Rumaan: Leave the World Behind is a novel about a middle-class white family who live in Brooklyn. They're a professional couple. Amanda works in advertising. Her husband, Clay, works as a professor. They have two teenagers, Archie and Rose. The family, when we meet them, is heading out to Long Island for a holiday. They're not going to a super chic part of Long Island where you can go buy an expensive painting or have a thousand-dollar bottle of wine. They're going to a more quiet, understated part of Long Island. These parts do exist because, in fact, this is based very much on a place that my family and I went on vacation, beautiful, bucolic, rural farmland not far from the ocean, not far from the millionaires in East Hampton, but its own little quiet part of Long Island.

Zibby: Where is it? Can you say where it is?

Rumaan: Oh, it's my secret to keep. I will tell you later. The family goes on vacation. They have the experience that you want on vacation. They go and buy a bunch of fancy groceries. They make hamburgers. They lounge by the pool. They go to the beach. They stop at Starbucks on the way home from the beach. That's my dream vacation stuff. That's what I love to do. The second night they're in the house, there is a knock at the door. It’s late at night. They're in the middle of nowhere. No knows that they're there. It's not their primary residence. There's no reason someone should be knocking on the door. It's an older black couple named George and Ruth who tell Amanda and Clay that this is their house. They're the owners. They rented to them on Airbnb. They’ve come there because there's an emergency happening in New York City. From then, the book shifts from being a book about holiday and family to being a book about what you do in a moment of crisis. I feel like that's a good way of talking about what the book is without -- I don't really care about spoilers, but I'm mindful that some readers want to experience the shifts in this book for the first time themselves.

Zibby: We'll just leave it at that. Was the book inspired by your vacation?

Rumaan: Very much so. In 2017, we had had this beautiful vacation. At the end of that year, it was December and I was staying as a guest of the wonderful writer Laura Lipman at her home in New York City. It's on the Upper West Side. It was December. It was very cold. It was not far from the Hudson. When I left the apartment to run out and get a cup of coffee or something, it was just freezing cold, freezing cold. You know how in New York, you can have those patches of ice on the sidewalk? It never rained and it never snowed, so you don't actually know where this ice came from, but it's that kind of weather.

Zibby: I think they call it black ice.

Rumaan: It's just looming ice. You're like, what I want most right now is that feeling of summer vacation. I was remembering my own vacation. That particular moment, that stay, had really lodged in my head. I want to write a novel about vacation, but I wanted to push through it, push through the particulars of a family in a vacation home, which is a convention of books. There are many great books. I love that convention, but I wanted to find in that material, something with bigger implications, something that told us about not just family life, but cultural life, civic life, political life, the moment that we're all in right now. That was the attempt of the book.

Zibby: Looks like you hit the nail on the head.

Rumaan: I'll let readers decide, but thank you.

Zibby: Popular culture is saying you got it. Nice job. When you get an idea for a book, what comes next? Do you outline? Do you just sit and write it? Do you do any research? What's your process like?

Rumaan: That's a good question. Usually, what I do is I write into it for fifty pages, seventy pages or so. Then I make an outline. In those first fifty to seventy pages, what I'm looking for, really, is the sound of the book. To me, the sound of the book establishes everything, how I'm going to write about the people, what the people are going to be like. Somehow, the name of the person really defines how I write about them. It's just about nailing whatever the voice is. Once I've nailed the voice, I can sit down and say, what am I doing here? What is this story going to look like? I outline. Usually, what I try to do is confine an outline to a single piece of paper because it feels very doable. I can tape that piece of paper up onto the wall of my office. I can copy that piece of paper down in my notebook. I can carry it around with me. I can have this one little cheat sheet that says to me, this is what you're doing. This is the book. It is in twelve sections or four sections or whatever the structure is. When I say outline, I don't even mean the kind of outline that we made when we were in third grade and we were learning how to write a paper about the Declaration of Independence where it's the main idea and all this stuff.

Zibby: There are no Roman numerals?

Rumaan: No, no Roman numerals. Usually, what I do is I just put one, two, three, four, five. Here's the main idea of this section. Here are maybe how the characters will work. The outline is revised in tandem with the book. It's not a roadmap for a vacation destination. The math is changing as you're in progress. I adjust the outline. I change things around. I feel my way forward with some guide, but also a little bit by instinct.

Zibby: Interesting. Then once you do the writing, how long did it take for you to write this book?

Rumaan: I wrote this book very quickly. I wrote a draft of this book in about three weeks.

Zibby: Three weeks?

Rumaan: It fell out of me. Yes, I wrote a draft of the book very quickly, in about three weeks' time, but that doesn't reflect the amount of labor I had put in prior thinking about the book. I keep a notebook with me. I write sentences down. I write scenarios down. I write character names down. I write down ideas for scenes. I had a secret Twitter account where I was tweeting lines from the book. I tweet a lot, and I realized at some point that it's just a form of writing. I'm wasting that energy. I could channel that more productively if I tricked myself almost the way that you might trick yourself by getting off the subway two stops early, and then you're getting in your steps for the day. It almost feels like that, taking Twitter, a technology I use all the time, and forcing myself to engage in my fiction that way.

Zibby: What would you tweet?

Rumaan: What became the first chapter of this book was originally drafted as tweets.

Zibby: One line at a time?

Rumaan: Yeah, one sentence at a time, one thought at a time. I think that really helped me stay inside of the world of this book until I sat down and wrote it. I sat down and wrote it. The draft came out very quickly. It's very important for everyone to understand that that draft is very bad, very, very bad. It's the same relationship between a bowl of pancake batter and a finished pancake. The application of heat makes a pancake, and the application of time makes the book. It's revision, revision, revision, breaking it apart, breaking it into sections, looking at each section, seeing how each fits together, rewriting. Over time, you lost your sense of what material from that first draft exits in the final draft. It's really hard to say. For me, the work doesn't begin until I have those first three hundred pages. There's nothing to do. You're just talking theoretically. If you force yourself, as I usually do, to sit down and write, write, write almost like a marathon, don't look back. Don't correct. In a first draft -- the character's name is Amanda -- I could break that and call her Amy on some pages. It doesn't matter. I don't stop myself. I know I'm making mistakes. Revision is for addressing those mistakes. That period takes a very long time. It took a year, but that's what it's for. Good work takes time.

Zibby: Wow. I like that process. The secret Twitter account, did you ever unveil that it was you?

Rumaan: No, no, no, it's locked. No one can follow it. I'm the only one. I don't think my own account follows that account. It's totally locked. It's just an interface that I could switch my -- when you're inside Twitter, you can switch your identity to that other account, and then you can see all these sentences. It was just a fun way of staying engaged in exactly the same way that -- I'm sure you've seen this on the subway. You'll see somebody, an artist, sketching. If you don't have any artistic ability, that looks like an amazing thing to you. I think that what they're doing is just warming their hand. They're just indulging their eye. They're just sitting there. They have the time. They're commuting uptown or whatever. They’ll say, I'll just capitalize on this forty minutes that I have of sitting-down time to move my hand and use my eye. I think that that is so much of what being an artist is, is about keeping that muscle toned.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about your background and growing up and how you ended up here, how we got here, essentially. Where did you grow up? When did you fall in love with writing? Assuming you did.

Rumaan: That's an easy question to answer because I knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a writer, probably five. I was writing at that age. I think a lot of kids are inclined toward artistic expression, drawing. Kids can get really passionate about drawing. Both my boys have gone through periods where they're really passionate about making graphic novels. They're just reflecting what they take in as art. It's also because there's an impulse inside of you to communicate that way. Some people never grow out of that. I think I never grew of that. That was something I wanted to do deeply, and I knew that for a long time. I studied writing when I was an undergraduate. I studied at Oberlin College. I worked with a writer named Dan Chaon who's an extraordinary writer who blurbed this book, which is such a great honor for me. Then I moved to New York to work in magazines. As happens to so many people who have a particular feeling about art, reality intrudes. You've got to pay your rent. You have to join the labor force. You have to find a way forward. That can be difficult to do and also stay connected to the work that you care about. I tried to do it. I did do it. I worked in magazines. I had a lovely career in publishing. I also still wrote. I still exercised that muscle. In 2009, we had our first son. In 2012, we had our second son.

At some point in that period when my boys were little, little, little, I had a playdate with the writer Emma Straub who's also a novelist. She was my neighbor at the time. Emma and I went to college together. She said something that is so simple but so clarifying. Knowing my aspirations to write, knowing that I had been a writer all along in private, she said to me, "No one is ever going to ask you to write a book." That’s absolutely true. No one is. No one is ever going to ask you, unless you're Michelle Obama. Michelle Obama will be asked, but no one would ever ask me. The lesson being if there's something you want to do, you need to do it. I really do credit my children with this because having children, as I think it does for many people, clarified my own priorities. A lot of stuff falls away when you have kids because you just can't do it all. You realize that you care about your family life. You may realize you care more about your career than you had thought, and you want to commit yourself to that. You may realize that you care less about your career than you thought, and you want to be at home with your family while your children are young. This is what children can provide for so many people, mostly for women, to be honest, because this is not always the way that fathers have to reckon with this big question of, what is it you most want? In my household, there are two fathers, so it's a different dynamic.

What I learned in that moment when Emma said that to me was that I really wanted to try this. I didn't want to be fifty-one and not have given it a shot, not that fifty-one is so old. It's perfect valid to rebegin your career or your artistic life at that point, but I knew I wanted to do it. It was burning within me. My younger son came home in 2012. By 2014, I was working at New York magazine. I had an amazing job where I was editing the design issues, which was such great fun. Built into that job was a hiatus of, I think it was twelve weeks. It might have been fourteen. I had these fourteen weeks where I wasn't going to be working in an office. I wasn't going to be making any money, but I was going to be kind of free. My younger son was a baby. My older son was in school. He was in his Montessori school, his little preschool. Everything was kind of settled. I said to my husband, "I'm going to try something. I'm going to take these fourteen weeks, and I'm going to try something. You can't ask me any questions about it. You can't talk to me about what I'm doing. Every night at seven o'clock, if you're home --" He travels a lot for work -- "if you're home, you'll put the kids to bed. I'm going to sit down in the living room," which is where my desk was at the time, "and I'm going to work. In the morning, you're going to get up with the kids and let me sleep a little bit. I'm going to be focused on this."

Zibby: [laughs] Oh, my gosh, your saint of a husband.

Rumaan: I know. I know.

Zibby: I would be like, I don't like this plan at all. Absolutely not.

Rumaan: This is another big lesson from my career. For many people it is a spouse who provides this particular kind of stability, but it doesn't have to be. A lot of artists require an anchor in reality, somebody who cares as much about their work as they do. My husband provides that for me. He said, to his great credit, "Yes. You do what it is you need to try to do." For those fourteen weeks, Zibby, the boys went to bed at seven. I sat down at the desk from seven until one or two in the morning. I slept from two until six when everyone wakes up, of course. I would have breakfast with the kids. I would pack their lunch. I would take the little one to the daycare. I would come home. It would be eight thirty. I would have slept four hours. I would go back to bed. I would sleep until noon or eleven. I would get up. I would do the laundry, do the dishes, make sure dinner was ready, make sure everything was ready for seven PM so that when the kids went to bed I was back at my desk. The latest I think I ever stayed up was, I stayed up until four one morning, so I slept for two hours. I was younger then.

Also, I think you can kind of survive anything when you have a baby because the baby has so broken your relationship to time that it almost doesn't matter. When you have a small baby, you can be like, it's 1:50 and I have to be out of the house at two thirty, three. I'm going to sleep for eleven minutes. I'll feel better. I'll be fine. You do it because you don't have much of a choice. They showed me that I could do more than maybe I thought. In that period, I didn't do anything. I didn't watch any television. I barely had dinner with my husband. I barely spoke to him. I was really committed to that work. That's the period in which I wrote the first draft of my first novel. Work demands sacrifice. It demands sacrifice. What I had to sacrifice was that sleep, but it changed my career. It changed everything about my life because I sold that book. I found an agent based on that book at the end of that year in December. The book sold the following spring. It appeared the following summer. Completely changed my life.

Zibby: I hope your husband got a dedication in that book. He didn't, did he? You didn't even do it.

Rumaan: I think I dedicated it to the kids. [laughs]

Zibby: Oh, man, this poor guy. You need to go give him a hug after this conversation.

Rumaan: I can't stress how important it's been to my work. His faith in my commitment to it has been hugely important. This is demanding work. It's self-centered work. His acceptance of that and his belief in that and his confidence in my ability to do that have everything to do whatever success I've had. Very few artists, I think, feel confident at all times. You need to know that there's someone saying, no, no, no, you ought to be engaged in this. You're on the right path and it will pay off. I don't mean in terms of money. I just mean in terms of, you'll be happy. You'll have done the thing you want to do. When I said before about Emma challenging me or pointing out that no one would invite me to write a book, what I was thinking about was not, I want to have money or I want to have a career. It was that, I want to have done this. I cared about this. It was the thing I cared about since I was five.

I want to have been honest with myself and worked for that, and so I did. I'm really glad that I did. It makes it so much easier for me to be comfortable with the challenges of a life in which you're not always -- no matter what you do for a living, you care about it deeply, whatever, but there are other things to be done. Other reality intrudes. Family life intrudes. My responsibility as a parent is so much easier for me to bear because I know that I'm satisfied professionally and personally and artistically. I've catered to the monster inside of me. I've indulged myself, and so I can do the acts of parenting which have, as you know, nothing to do with the self, nothing. You're just a conduit. You're just a hand putting food into a mouth. That's what you are. That's the relationship. That's what you've committed to. That can be very difficult for people. That's a difficult relationship. It's also sacred and very meaningful. It's what I care about most.

Zibby: I feel like you just summarized what it means to be a mother, essentially, honestly, or a father. That's what the whole thing is. I would say a tiny percentage of, let me just say primary caregivers get that kind of filling of their bucket, so to speak, that enables them to then go back and do it. I've noticed the same way. I used to only work a little bit. Now I do this. I'm doing all these other things. Then I go out my door and I'm like, all right, pillow fight! [laughs]

Rumaan: I think it's true. It allows you to still be a person. It's a personal choice also. There are parents for whom that role is so fulfilling and it's all that they need. They can be really inside of that. It's not that I don't find it -- I find it deeply fulfilling. Words can't even really hold it, how fulfilling I find it. I think part of the reason I'm able to find fulfillment and joy in it is that I have this other thing. It's become important to me as a part of the practice of parenthood, because children are ego monsters, that they see firsthand the ways in which people have other things that they care about and that they can hold in their head the contradiction that you are the person who takes care of me and is always there for me, but sometimes you will not be there for me. Your not being there for me because you are a doctor working late, because you're a bus driver on your route, whatever it is, you are also doing as an act of care for me because you earn money and you take care of me. They can understand that over time. I think that's really a useful way to understand your place in the world. That's what I tell myself anyway. Who knows? No parent knows what they're doing, really.

Zibby: No, nobody knows what they're doing. I certainly didn't mean to say that I am not fulfilled by my children either.

Rumaan: Right. I know you are.

Zibby: I love being with my children. It is my greatest pride and joy. So are you working on anything new now? What are you up to?

Rumaan: When I described being at Laura Lippman's apartment in Manhattan, I was actually writing a different book. I've been trying to go back to that book. Leave the World Behind emerged and took over my life and my imagination. It was something that felt really urgent that I wanted to write. I'm glad that I did. I want to go back to this other book. At the moment, I'm teaching, actually. I'm teaching at Columbia and at Pace. I am, as so many parents are, kind of orchestrating my children's education as well in this particular period. I write as a freelance writer and critic. I'm encaged in a lot of stuff. To be honest, I don't feel wholly committed to the work of the fiction right now. In some ways, I think that that's natural. When I'm charged with talking about my third book, it's going to be difficult for me to be engaged in thinking about my fourth book in the same way that very few people are eager to run out and get pregnant again when they have a four-month-old at home because you're in that moment. You need a little time and a little space. I don't know, but I do intend to write another book. I hope that I get that clarity soon. I think when the semester ends and it's winter, and hopefully we'll have a new government in this country, I might feel a little less quotidian stress and be able to relax into a fiction again. That's my hope.

Zibby: Then in the meantime, this is going to be a movie or a limited series? What's the latest?

Rumaan: Yes, it's going to be a feature film that the writer and director Sam Esmail is writing. He's adapting the novel. He'll direct the film for Netflix. Sam is such a brilliant filmmaker, if you don't know his work. He made a show called Homecoming, I think it was for Amazon, with Julia Roberts. He made a show called Mr. Robot. Sam has a very particular sensibility that really, really suits this material. He understands how to find unease in what looks like elegant calm. Homecoming is such an extraordinary show. Julia Roberts, who is the star of Homecoming, will star in this adaptation of Leave the World Behind, which is insane. Every time I say it, saying it does not make it sound real. Denzel Washington will also star in the film. It's in such good hands. It's part of a larger charmed run I've had with this particular book to find collaborators like that who you can put the material into their hands. What a win.

Zibby: That's amazing. I'm so excited to see it. That's going to be great. What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Rumaan: I think that you have to actually do the labor. It's so hard to. One of the things that I always stress when I'm teaching is that there's more time than you might think there is.

Zibby: Especially if you stay up until four in the morning.

Rumaan: Look, not everyone is wired to do something that deranged. I totally understand that. The significant factor in that is not just my husband's help, but that was huge. It's that I wasn't working for that period of time. I could never have done that and had to go to a day job. Most people have to. That's a real luxury. When I say that there's always time, what I usually mean is that there are ways of tricking yourself, much as I tricked myself using Twitter. That's a great example. When I teach, I always say when I'm feeling really stuck and really desperate, I set myself a very arbitrary and accomplishable goal, usually with some sense of play, like, you have to write 333 words. You can't write more than that, but you cannot write less than that. It has to land at 333. You don't have to write the thing that you are thinking about writing. You can write anything, but it has to last that long. Or turn on an episode of Friends, turn off the sound, and sit there and write until that episode is over. The truth is that even on a really busy day, you would probably allow yourself the particular indulgence of sitting still and watching a sitcom for twenty-two minutes and saying, I'll do the laundry the second this is over. Let that TV run with a notebook on your lap or with the laptop on your lap, and write that whole time. Then when the show's over, turn it off. Go deal with the laundry. Get the dog walked. Take out the checkbook and deal with your bills, whatever it is that your life involves.

Twenty-two minutes is not a lot, but it's a step forward. It's just like going to gym. We've all had that experience when it's January and you're like, god damn, I've done nothing but eat since Thanksgiving. I've really got to go to the gym. You reactivate your gym membership. Then you're like, I can't go today because I have to take the kids to soccer. I can't go next week because, actually, they have this dentist appointment that I forgot about that I made eleven months ago. Why did I make it now? You find all these ways to tell yourself you can't do it. Then one day your resolve breaks. You're like, well, fuck, I guess I have to go to the gym. You go to the gym. You're like, I'll just go for thirty-eight minutes. I'll ease into it. You go, and what happens? You feel amazing. You're like, I went. I did it. I didn't go for an hour. I went for thirty-eight minutes, but you know what? I did it. Now I know I can do it. I'm going to do it next Tuesday too because I know the kids are in soccer. I can drop them and go and run for thirty-eight minutes and come back and pick them up. Everything is fine. The world will continue on. Making space for writing in your life, if that is something you prioritize, can function the same way. If you go to the gym for thirty-eight minutes a week, it might take you six months to feel like, yeah, I feel strong, I feel better, I feel good, but you will get there. If you write for twenty-two minutes a week and you're producing three hundred words, yeah, it's only three hundred words, but six months later -- I can't do math. I just realized I backed myself into a corner.

Zibby: I get the point. [laughs]

Rumaan: You're at like seven thousand words. That's not that much, but six months later, you're at fourteen thousand words. Then you're like, wow, I have one fifth of a book here. I did it. I put one foot in front of the other and did it. That's exactly the same way that everyone who does this does it. Every writer you admire who you think, oh, my god, I could never do what Jane Smiley does, I could never do what Louise Erdrich does, I could never do what Margaret Atwood does, yeah, they're all geniuses, there's no question, but Jane Smiley has to sit down, take out her pencil, and be like, all right, it's time. I got to show up and do it. Anyone can do that. As Emma said to me all those years ago, very few people will invite you to do that. If that's what you want to do, you have to find a way to do it.

Zibby: Wow. That was a pretty tempting pseudo-invitation. I feel like that was very inspiring.

Rumaan: Get to work. What can you do? It's just work. It is just work. If there's one thing we understand in this country, because we have such a warped relationship with work, it's that we can do more. You can squeeze time out. To be honest, I don't have much of a life beyond this, to be perfectly clear. At this moment, no one's doing any of these things, but I very rarely go to the movies. I very rarely go out to dinner. I very rarely have a night where I'm just out with friends doing nothing. I spend a lot of time here at this very desk where I'm talking to you, but it's a choice that I've made. I've published three books in the span of six years. There's a direct relationship between my productivity and the other choices I've made. There's a lot of privilege in play there. There's a lot of luck in play there. Fundamentally, it is accomplishable. If you want to write, if you care about it as I do, I think you'll find a way. You just have to allow yourself to find a way.

Zibby: Awesome. I will be sitting here mostly at this desk. You will be over there. I'll think about you on the invisible Zoom once you're off and imagine you writing and not having any fun. No, I'm kidding. It was lovely to meet you.

Rumaan: Likewise.

Zibby: One day, you'll come here. We won't have to be apart from a screen. This book was amazing. I'm honored to have talked to you. Best of luck with all the great successes that you deserve. Go get a bottle of wine for your husband.

Rumaan: [laughs] Thank you so much, Zibby. It was really lovely. Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Elizabeth Ames, THE OTHER'S GOLD

Zibby Owens: Elizabeth Ames is the author of debut novel The Other's Gold. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Elizabeth has lived in Seattle, France, and Rwanda since leaving the Midwest. She currently lives in a Harvard dormitory with her husband, two children, and a few hundred undergraduates. At least, it was that way until this year when everything is going virtual.

Welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Elizabeth Ames: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: I'm particularly excited because I feel like we've been trying to plan this for like five years or something ridiculous. This is one of my longest to-do podcasts that I've had on the list.

Elizabeth: I know. My book has been out for almost a year, but I really appreciate your flexibility. I'm happy to be on anytime.

Zibby: I'm sure it was my fault. I'm not trying to say it's not.

Elizabeth: We were back and forth. Obviously, we all had quarantine time. There was sort of, maybe that's only going to last a few weeks. Maybe it's going to last indefinitely. We don't know. I'm just glad we found a time.

Zibby: Me too. I know we're doing video and audio. For the podcast listeners only, you are in this gorgeous library at one of the houses at Harvard. Just tell a little bit about it and about writing The Other's Gold in that library. It must have been amazing.

Elizabeth: People who aren't familiar, Harvard has I think twelve, I don't want to get it wrong, but I think it's twelve undergraduate houses outside of the freshman houses. This is all funny to talk about, or not funny, but strange to talk about now thinking about, how will it be this coming fall? Last year and the year before when I wrote this book, I moved into this house, Quincy House, with my husband and our then six-month-old. I guess I'm taking it too far back.

Zibby: No, go back.

Elizabeth: Okay. I'm in this beautiful library. Every house has its own library. This is the Quincy House cube that I just ducked in for this short time to chat with you.

Zibby: It's beautiful. Wait, keep going back. I like that. So your husband's a professor. You ended up at Harvard.

Elizabeth: He's a professor.

Zibby: What does he teach?

Elizabeth: He's in the department of folklore and mythology. His PhD is in African and African American studies and anthropology. His class this fall is going to be The Art of Emergency: Storytelling in the Time of -- I'm going to get the title wrong, but it sounds like a very timely class. Storytelling in the Time of Trauma? I've got to look at the [indiscernible]. The department of folklore and mythology, I think it's a cool department.

Zibby: Gosh, I want to go back to school. I miss taking classes. Should I learn about this? Should I learn about that? Education is so wasted on the young. At the time, I was like, if I drop French, I can go out Thursday nights. [laughs]

Elizabeth: What time to get up, I know. When we moved here, I had this vantage from this library where the students work. I could look out over the courtyard, which is so idyllic. It's so manicured and green. Students would be walking to class. I always say I love campus novels. I always hoped I'd write one. Then when we moved into a dorm, I thought, this is the time. If I'm ever going to write a campus novel, I have to do it now when I have this really useful perspective for a writer. I'm an outsider in that I'm not a student at Harvard. I don't really have much of a formal affiliation with the university, but I live in one of the buildings and work with all these students and have literally a privilege and a joy to live amongst them while they were going through this really intense time of being away from home. I was going through this really intense time of becoming a parent, living here with a six-month-old. That was what got me thinking about the book. This is so weird to be a new mom amongst all these sophomores. I lived mostly among sophomores. Seeing them be dropped off at school by their parents, and their parents just looking at me with my baby so longingly, giving me the, it goes so fast. I believed that from day one. Also, obviously seeing parents drop their kids off at college is really a -- while you're wearing your baby, if you weren’t already weeping, you will be any minute.

Zibby: [laughs] Oh, my gosh. Tell listeners what The Other's Gold is about.

Elizabeth: The Other's Gold, it follows four friends, Alice, Lainey, Ji Sun, and Margaret, from when they meet their freshman year at a fictional college, Quincy-Hawthorn College. I just mentioned Quincy House. The college is named in part after Quincy House, but it is an invented college in New Hampshire. They meet their freshman year. It follows them from that time to when they start having children or not. It's a thirteen-year time period. It's structured around the worst mistake made by each of the four friends during that really intense and transformative twelve years.

Zibby: I was particularly drawn to Alice and her situation with her brother and the accident and how she talked about it and processed it and wanted to tell her friends but didn't want to tell her friends. How you go through life with secrets, I feel like that's one of the most powerful things in books. What do people do with their secrets? What causes people to do things? Does it matter if you're young or old? What makes something forgivable and not and all the rest? I was just wondering about developing her character in particular, if you could talk a little more about how you decided on her narrative trajectory, if you will.

Elizabeth: I always feel like when you talk about characters you start to sound so nutty. You're like, she came to me. I do think she came to me maybe third or even fourth. How does a character come to you? That's the part that actually feels like magic to me. I think there's a lot of things that you can try to invite characters in your mind, but they just kind of come knocking. Then you start thinking about them. I feel like when you get really into it, then suddenly everything's grist for the mill. You'll hear people talking. I remember at some point actually, speaking of Alice because she becomes a doctor, I was sitting by these two doctors at a coffee shop listening to them talk. They were talking about children and one who hadn’t had children and she had wanted to. They were just having this pretty intimate conversation about their careers and their lives. I was just thinking, Alice, Alice. She's a doctor. She struggles with her fertility. Those were just strangers in a coffee shop. Once the characters arrive at your doorstep, then you start to see them everywhere. They're really present.

Zibby: Did you have a college experience anything like this? Did you have three girlfriends that you roomed with? Did you base the window seat off of a dorm room there? How real to life, if at all, is the book or parts of the book?

Elizabeth: I always say I feel like I could count the actual things that came from my life on one hand. I went to a large state school, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is a great school. Part of my fascination with small liberal arts schools is probably fueled by the fact that I didn't go to one. The idea of the en suite dorm room and the smaller sometimes claustrophobic environment, I think my curiosity about that partly fueled the book. I've been very lucky with the long-term friendships I've had. I've never been part of a quad like that, of a foursome. I think that partly inspired the book too, was just the curiosity I have about those kinds of friendships where you're living together, taking classes together, eating together, dating, breaking up, sometimes going on to marry each other or not. It's just such an intense time. Your bond is forged so intensely. Then I would see these groups of students just completely inextricable. I was curious about how that friendship forms and then how it's weathered and tested once you're not in the environment that totally supports it.

Zibby: My sophomore year I lived in a room very similar to that. We had a common room. We had two little rooms with two of us each with bunk beds. It was so tight. You couldn't even open the dresser drawer without sitting on the bunk bed. The four of us, we did everything together. I remember my dad got married. I was like, I have to invite everybody I'm rooming with. That's non-negotiable. It is so interesting to see, even if you took this little group of us, what's happened over time. You could take any cluster, really. I think that's what's so great about books like this. My group of friends, it's just a little microcosm. It could happen to anybody because life is so random. Any characters you pick, all these horrible things and great things are going to happen. It's just a mishmash, like a commentary on life. That was a ramble.

Elizabeth: Are you still friends with the three people who were your roommates?

Zibby: I roomed with one girl. Then there were the other two. The two in the other little room went to St. Paul's together, so they had been friends before. I'm still close to them. We go on girls' trips once every other year at this point. Now I don't know when we'll see each other again. One of them lives in Denver. One of them lives in Hong Kong. Then my roommate died on September 11th.

Elizabeth: I'm so sorry. I think I've actually read your essay about that. I'm so sorry.

Zibby: That's okay. It's okay. We were friends after school. We lived together after school. She was twenty-five when it happened. I have so many of those memories and all of us on campus together just totally embedded the way you're saying. If there was a social or whatever, it was us with the guys. It was just that time. To lose someone in the group is also, when you go back, it changes the way you look at everything that had happened. Even when we go to reunions, I'm looking around. It's just not the same. The book kind of took me back to that intensity because you don't get that with anyone, I feel like, at this age other than -- there is an intensity that comes with parenting in the trenches together that's similar because you're in it. You're stressed. You don't know what you're doing. There's too much to do in the same way that I felt like it was at school. I think you do get that with some new parents, especially first time around, but not in that many other junctures. Maybe if you're working in a really intense environment. I didn't really have this big corporate setting where you might bond with people in your class or something.

Elizabeth: I think you're right. I think that's what's interesting to me about that span of life. As adults, it is unusual to have that kind of same intensity of the circumstance. I felt like because I was becoming this new parent alongside these students who were kind of forging their own new families, it did highlight for me the similarities around your identity changing. When you come to college and you're figuring out who you are, so much of that I think is forged as a result of who you befriend, which can be totally random. You're sort of like, I want to be like this person. I want to not be like this person. Then that rachets up through college. The moments I tried to choose in the book around getting married or not, career choices, or other touchstones where you're thinking about your identity -- what does it mean if this person marries someone who I really loathe? What does it mean if my friend chooses not to have kids or another friend can't have kids? or all these times you define yourself against even your closest friends. Like you said, when you're new parents, your identity is -- that's a complete upheaval, the first time especially when you're just -- I feel like for most people I know, that change from not being a parent to being a parent is huge. I felt like those moments bookending leaving your family, starting a family, even though they felt so different, they have some things in common.

Zibby: Totally. I totally agree. Speaking of family, I'm sorry, you can probably hear my son screaming in the background.

Elizabeth: No, you can't apologize for that. That's a side effect of this Zoom life. People have to be aware that children exist in some working people's lives.

Zibby: So you've been up there. Have you been there the whole time at Harvard with your -- well, now he's not a baby anymore.

Elizabeth: I moved with my husband and first baby when she was six months old. Now she's four and a half.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh.

Elizabeth: I know. The students who started when we started, they already graduated. I guess this will be the start of our fifth year and a very strange year. I've since had a second child who's only ever lived in a Harvard house. It's a really amazing community. I always say I was kind of weary about moving into a dorm as an adult with a baby. [laughs] I lived in this apartment in a sleepy, really child-friend neighborhood of Cambridge known for being family friendly. I didn't have kids. Then I moved into Harvard Square. It's family friendly in its own way. It's also more like, you can go out and do stuff that isn't as easy to do when you have a new baby. There are other families. There are dogs. The students are amazing. Talking about it now, I just feel sad because we don't know what it's going to look like this year. Even if there are some students in this house, we won't be eating in the dining hall. We won't be having the kind of casual interactions with students that make it feel so warm and community-like, and with other tutors and other families and pets. So much around education is just a big question mark. I think this is a really special place to have kids. I felt so lucky for the people that my kids have met.

Zibby: I bet they have the best babysitters ever. You have access to the most brilliant, awesome babysitters. I feel like I should just come there to poach some sitters or something. [laughs]

Elizabeth: They're so busy, though. The ones we've had are so amazing. They have a lot going on in the schoolyear.

Zibby: I'm sure that’s true. So when did you write? How long did it take to write this book? Did you outline? I know you were talking about the organic nature in which the characters developed. Did you start with that timeline of the bookends that you just mentioned? Was that a "do not change" type of thing for the outset? How did you start it?

Elizabeth: Actually, it was, again, kind of college-like because it was four years start to finish. I was just thinking about this because I started taking notes, emailing myself, notes app kind of notes, when my first child was born. I just wanted to jot down some of the feelings. It wasn't even fictional yet. It was just like, I got to figure out how to write about some of this, really just intense feelings. I want to write it down now while it's so fresh. Then we moved here. I started really getting to work on it once we started having some childcare. When my first child was eight months old, we had a very part-time nanny share. I did some of the tentative first steps on this book. Then when she was a year and a half, I think she was nineteen months, she started at this little preschool daycare. Then I really got cooking. I had been working on the book but not in such a consistent way, in a very piecemeal way, but always walking around thinking about it but not just actually banging it out.

Then when she started at this daycare, I really figured out how to prioritize my time and be more efficient. I would drop her off and oftentimes go to this coffee shop that was really nearby that has no internet. I would just get to work. It was maybe a year of thinking, a year of writing, and then selling the book and then doing some revisions that year. Then it came out. It was kind of fast. I had written a book before this that isn't published that took a really long time. It was a lot more labored and protracted. This book came much more quickly. I felt a lot of joy, not necessarily with the content, but with the flow, when you really get into a project and you're just feeling the flow. I think that helped make it happen faster, and the fact that I was just so conscious of my time. I always say I closed my tabs sooner. I always have so many tabs open on my browser. Once I was working on this work and knew how precious my time was away from my young baby, I was just like, close these tabs. Open Word. Get to work.

Zibby: Love it. That's good.

Elizabeth: That's such a meandering answer. I'm sorry.

Zibby: No, that was great. I loved that. It's true. I feel like sometimes the less time I have, the more I get done in that time because I have to maximize every second of an hour. If I have four hours, then I might, well, I must have tons of time, I'll go read the paper.

Elizabeth: I heard an interview with Helen Phillips at the Boston Book Festival. She talked about that same thing, how she's had decreasing time with each book, but she feels like she's become a better writer and makes better use of this time. Her writing's become more concentrated and powerful. I'm probably misquoting her. I feel so encouraged when I hear people talk about it in that way. I think, well, you wrote this book, The Need, when you had this little time. You were doing it in these chunks, and it's so incredible. I was sort of totally deluded. I felt like when I was in graduate school at twenty-four, I thought you have to publish a book before you have a baby or you never will. Obviously, there's evidence throughout time that that's not true. I just had this notion that if you didn't publish a book before you had a baby it was all over for you. It's so archaic. I don't know how I got this idea, but it really stuck with me. For me, it was the opposite. I got so much more productive. My career as a writer didn't really take off until after I had a baby. I think it's helpful for people to hear, especially "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," that it isn't always the derailment that you might fear. I can't speak to this during times of no childcare. Certainly when childcare is involved, people with small children can still do a lot.

Zibby: It's a whole new set of life experiences to draw on and include. The perspective of living through it versus just knowing about it informs the writing in such a richer way. If you can find the time when you're a mom, for sure it's not over. Are you working on anything now?

Elizabeth: Not much. I'm back to emailing myself. Even, it's degraded to texting myself at this point, so jotting notes and things. I need to get more organized. I'm texting, emailing. These notes are everywhere. I got to start pulling it all together. Not too much. I think if we have a little bit more childcare in the coming weeks or months or if I just get more -- people also get up really early and write or they write in the night. It's possible. Also, I've just been so distracted and all the things that we're all feeling during this time.

Zibby: It's okay. I didn't mean that you had to say that you were doing anything.

Elizabeth: I'm working on something, but very scattered. I like to call it the filling-up stage. You're filling up. Then you're going to put it out.

Zibby: It's true. It's so important. How can you make sense of stuff if you haven't processed it? It all is part of it, so don't feel bad. You're like the five hundredth person who's said the same thing, so don't worry about it.

Elizabeth: I know. I listen to the podcast. Of course like all of us, I'm distraught and stressed and all these things. It's a very intense time. It is encouraging. Even prior to this time I felt like hearing from people who talk about the rhythms of their work as being -- some people write every day and are super regimented, and some don't. There's just seasons in your life, as with all things, where you're super productive or you're more fallow. I think that a lot of writers think if they're in a fallow season, well, this is it. It's like new parenting. It's a similar mindset where whatever trouble you're having, especially those early days, your child is having all these sleep interruptions, you're like, this is my life now. I guess I never sleep. I don't sleep. Then a couple years later, or hopefully for some people a month later, you're like, I totally forgot about that time. I think it's similar with writing in the sense that people -- I'm comforted when I hear about people whose books I revere having forgotten how to write a book between books. Each one invents itself. Maybe the difference is just that they did. You know you can do it. You don't necessarily know how, but you know you can do it. Hopefully, you can do it again.

Zibby: I feel like you've already sprinkled in all this advice and inspiration. Do you have any parting advice to aspiring authors?

Elizabeth: One piece of advice would be to prioritize your work in the way that it is in your heart. If you can prioritize it that way in your day, that can be really meaningful. I feel like I always put writing below a lot of obligations for a long time, like my day job. Obviously, it's a huge privilege to be able to move writing up the list. If you can at any point -- for some people, that's grad school or a fellowship or just doing worse at your day job. Honestly, just doing a worse job at your day job and better with the thing that your passion is really for, I think that's something that was useful to me. For me, that meant starting the day working on my book instead of getting to it after other things. The other piece of advice that I was thinking -- it's hard to give advice not knowing what someone's doing. For me, having a baby, I would walk around with her so much to try to get her to take a nap. I wasn't listening to my headphones because I felt like she's brand new and I need to be very alert and not distracted. That was really useful for me. I listen to podcasts. I love podcasts. This is weird advice to give on a podcast. For me, finding some time that's generative. It can be walking or even in the shower or swimming, just some time when the voice in your head is the one for your book and not other voices or music or other things. I think that can be an actual practical tip to try. See what happens if you just only listen to your own thoughts for a walk if you're stuck.

Zibby: Sometimes I don't want to hear my own thoughts. [laughs] That's why I like to listen.

Elizabeth: No kidding. I know. I want to these chats.

Zibby: Someone, I can't remember who it was, but somebody said that part of their writing process was that on their commute to work every day, no radio allowed. That was her time to think about what she would maybe want to write at lunchtime. Now I'm forgetting who that was. My brain is just falling apart. It's like what you were saying. She had that protected time. I mean, she was driving, but whatever part of your brain that that uses is only a tiny bit compared to imagination.

Elizabeth: Isn't it wild that that sounds -- I'm like, that sounds so boring. Don't you want to have the radio on? My impulse is, turn it on. I guess that being bored is so crucial for creative work. You have to be bored. We're not bored as much, or we haven't been, maybe, these days.

Zibby: Yeah, it's true. Planned boredom episodes, I think that's our new thing here.

Elizabeth: [laughs] Do you have the time for some boredom?

Zibby: Making time for boredom, there we go. Thanks, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and for sharing your experience and for letting me feel like I got to spend a half an hour in the library this morning, which is a huge perk.

Elizabeth: Thank you so much for chatting with me. It was a pleasure. Even though I just spoke out against -- total silence on your walk. I love listening to podcasts. It was a pleasure to be part of it.

Zibby: Thanks. You too. Have a great day.

Elizabeth: You too. Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Kendra Adachi, THE LAZY GENIUS WAY

Zibby Owens: Kendra Adachi is the author of The New York Times best seller The Lazy Genius Way: Embrace What Matters, Ditch What Doesn't, and Get Stuff Done. She's also the host of "The Lazy Genius Podcast" and has a blog. In fact, all of this together she calls The Lazy Genius Collective, which I think I might have to steal. That's so genius. Kendra lives with her husband and children somewhere.

Welcome, Kendra. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Kendra Adachi: Thanks for having me. I'm so excited about this.

Zibby: I am too, oh, my gosh. I feel like your book, it was like, here's how to live your life a little bit better than you're doing. Here are all my tips. I just took all those and I'm running with these now. Thank you very much. [laughs]

Kendra: I'm so glad. Who knew that we would also have a pandemic that we would need to manage? The timing is not great, but also really great. I'm so glad.

Zibby: I'm sure the timing for you is not great with the launch. As a reader, the timing is pretty great for the content. On balance, maybe it works out.

Kendra: Totally. I'll take that.

Zibby: The Lazy Genius Way: Embrace What Matters, Ditch What Doesn't, and Get Stuff Done, tell listeners, please, what your book is about. What inspired you to write this book?

Kendra: What inspired me to write the book was hearing myself and a lot of women that I was doing life with and writing on the internet for just so tired all the time. We're always just so tired. I was like, we were told to pair back our to-do lists and we need to say no more and simplify our lives. I saw a lot of people doing that, and they were still really tired. Just tried to pay attention to what was going on and realized that I think that what we are doing is trying hard at too many things and then often trying hard at the wrong things or things that don't really matter to us. Everybody gets to decide what that is. As I started to unpack that idea, I was like, oh, my gosh, I think we might have cracked a code here. I think we might have found something really great. The book, The Lazy Genius Way, it's not about doing more or less. It's about doing what matters to you. If you actually spend your energy on what matters and sort of let go of the things that don't and then also begin to accept and engage with people in your life who prioritize different things than you, that we have permission to care and to care about different things, what a world, man. The Lazy Genius Way is basically a self-help, personal-growth book for people who are just really tired of reading them and highlighting a few things and cobbling together a way to live a meaningful life. It's a guidebook of principles to help you live a meaningful life by your own definition.

Zibby: Love it. Let's backtrack. How did you become the lazy genius? Why you? How did you fall into this? How did you come up with this? When did the whole thing start? Did it start with the blog? Tell me the order of everything.

Kendra: I've been writing on the internet for over ten years. It's been very different stuff. I wrote about food. I was a cooking instructor for a while. Then I had a blog, sort of, that was celebrities and desserts paired together because those are two things that I really love. I made things like cumber cookies which were cookies inspired by Benedict Cumberbatch. It was very niche. [laughs] It was a very specific thing. It was so much fun. I've been writing on the internet for a long time. The through line of my life is perfectionism. I've always had the genius part down. I don't mean that in back-patty, I'm so good at things way. I just mean really, really focusing on trying so hard at being good or the best at everything and then just being worn down. That was my own personal journey. I had kids. You learn a lot about yourself when you have kids. By the time the third kid rolled around, I was like, wait a minute, I do not have energy for the things that I used to think I did. How do we do this? Living my own life, I sort of have a systems brain and then I'm a writer, and all of these things came together into this conflation of The Lazy Genius. Then my best friend who's a writer, Emily P. Freeman, she wrote a book called The Next Right Thing, she's really, really good at giving names to things. It's like a superpower of hers. It's really weird. She was like, "You're kind of like a lazy genius." I went, [gasp]. The floor opened up. It was beautiful.

Zibby: Her forward was so nice, by the way. I was like, if I ever write a book, I need to grab my best friend to write my forward as well. She was so nice about you coming to her aid and packing up her house and just jumping in and doing what needed to be done. It says a lot. Sometimes you can tell more from what a friend says about you than what you could possibly say in your own introduction. I thought that was pretty genius.

Kendra: I cried a lot when I read it, for sure. It was the nicest thing ever. It was really sweet. It's a pretty special thing. Like you said, what a special thing that my best friend got to write my forward and that she's a writer, and so that got to be a thing. It was really special, for sure.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice. Then when did you start your podcast?

Kendra: My podcast started in -- well, I started the blog in August of 2015 because my daughter was born in April of 2016. I always start a business when I have a kid. [laughs] Every blog is matched to one of my kids being born. It's kind of weird. Then the podcast was June or July after that. It's been -- what is that? What's math? Four years, I guess, the podcast has been. At first, it was not just me. It was me interviewing people. I realized that I was doing that, and this is not true of everyone, but I was doing that because I was afraid of being the only one, that no one would listen to me because who am I to have something to say? It was an interesting transition. I did ten episodes of interviews. Then I took a break and reevaluated. Then I was like, okay, I'm going to do this by myself because this matters. I feel like these are important things to talk about. That was about four years ago. We're on 170-some episodes. It's great. It's a lot of fun. I love the show.

Zibby: Wow. I learned from your show some things about you that you shared in your latest episode about how you had never had a Double Stuff Oreo. How is this possible? Where did you grow up? In America? Anybody growing up in America must have -- not to shame people who haven't had it. Good for them for not succumbing to the double-stuff. I was surprised.

Kendra: It was surprising to me too. I grew up really poor. Whenever we did get real name-brand treats, it wasn't very often and you don't splurge for the extras. I don't even think there were Double Stuff when I was growing up. You just get Oreos. I'm kind of a brand traditionalist. I don't really veer off, like Extra Toasty Cheez-Its. I'm just original. If the box says original, I'll go for that. Then I had this friend of mine who brought me a pack of Double Stuff literally within the last month. I was like, I've never had this. I guess it'll be fine. It was like, where have I been? I was so upset at all the people in my life who had let me live this long without eating Double Stuff. Now we're a Double Stuff family exclusively. I will never buy original Oreos again ever. I'm so sad. I'm thirty-eight and I've gone this long without having them. It's a problem.

Zibby: [laughs] Oh, my gosh, you're so funny. Let's talk about some of the advice in your book because you give such great advice. One of the themes that you come back to over and over again is starting small and how sometimes you just try to do one downward dog a day and that's okay. I feel like in every chapter, whatever it was related to, again, it was, start small. Start small with the laundry. Start small with everything, every project, every everything. Tell me about that overarching principle.

Kendra: We start so big all the time, just the longest lists, so many checklists, tracking every single thing. I think there is something, maybe for a lot of us, is it about control? Maybe if things feel out of control, we have to cloak the entire situation in some grand scheme to make us feel okay. Starting small just doesn't feel like it does anything. We're not moving. There's not momentum. It's not making a difference. If I do one down dog a day, does that even count? Even saying it out loud, it seems so stupid. But guess what? I have been doing at least one down dog a day. It's going on four years now. That's a practice. Some days, it still is that. Some days, it's ten minutes. Some days, it's thirty. It's usually closer to ten. Thirty is very rare, but I'm doing it. It's part of my day and a part of my rhythm. If I had not started small, that embarrassingly small choice, I would still be whining to myself and shaming myself for not being good at yoga or whatever it is, fill in the blank of whatever yoga is.

I think that small choices, as long as they're small enough that you're like, oh, no, I can do that, I can do whatever it is, I can put my shoes by the door, I can cook one meal at home a week instead of seven -- if you're like, I'm going to become a cook and I'm going to cook for my family, but you don't cook, if you're always doing takeout and you try seven days, are you kidding me? You will not make it a week. Start with one breakfast. Just start small because small choices, it's easier to keep making them. Then you keep making them. Then you have that momentum. Then you don't stop. Then they become habits. The seduction of the big machine will get us every time. It just gets us every time. That's why we're all so tired, because we're trying to maintain all these stupid big machines that we built rather than just doing one tiny thing. Just do the one tiny thing. Do one small step and see what happens. What is the worst that can happen? You won't move. Well, you're not moving now anyway and you're just feeling bad about it. So why not not feel bad about? See if you actually want to move in that direction in the first place. I just think starting small, it gets such a bad rap because, again, it's not very grand. It's not very sexy, but it really works.

Zibby: It's so true. What you said at the beginning too about whether or not it counts, I'm always thinking about that too. Does it even count that I'm taking a walk for ten minutes? Then I have to stop and be like, who is doing the counting if not me and my own body? Isn't it better to walk ten minutes than what I would be doing which is sitting at my desk for ten minutes? Why talk myself out of it? At least it's something. I feel like that's my down dog. Although, I have no habit of it, so you're one step ahead of me.

Kendra: Thinking about the walk, there's something really important about naming what matters about even that small choice. If you're thinking about, I'm going to walk around the block, because that's not a minute thing -- if you live in a place where there's blocks. Not everybody does. If you're going to walk around the block and ask yourself, why am I wanting to do this? I think sometimes if we are truly honest with ourselves, it comes down to something that doesn't actually matter. I know for me for the longest time -- this is not true of everyone. Nothing is true of everyone. For the longest time, my pushing myself to exercise was to make my body smaller. Now I'm like, I don't care. I'm actually like, I feel good. I feel good in my skin. I have the energy. It's fine. I'm actually doing myself more of a disservice by beating myself up for not being thinner than I am for being in a bigger body and being comfortable in it. Then I just walk or run or do my daily down dog or whatever it is when my body goes, hey, can we move? I would really like to move right now. Just paying attention. Naming that, naming what actually matters about the walk or the run or the whatever, and exercise is just one example, when we really name what matters about it, then we're able to actually have a deeper motivation to do it or a greater conviction to let it go.

Zibby: Love it. All right, I'm going to try to distill the essence of my walk whenever I get a chance.

Kendra: You can do it on a walk.

Zibby: I'll do it on a walk.

Kendra: You're like, I'm going to go on a walk and figure out why I'm here. [laughs]

Zibby: Yes. I go on walks to debate why I go on them. That's just enough for me. You also in your book talk a lot about your house rules, which I thought were so genius. I should really institute more than I have right now. One of the ones I found most interesting was that you vowed to start a new book within twenty-four hours of finishing an old one otherwise you lose momentum and don't start books. Let's talk about that.

Kendra: Oh, man. I always get this confused. Have you heard the whole supply and demand reader thing? Some people are supply-side readers and some people are demand-side readers. Have you ever heard this?

Zibby: I haven't. No, tell me.

Kendra: I wish I knew who came up with this. It's such a bummer. I get it mixed up. One kind of reader will read anything that's in front of them, cereal box, magazine, it doesn't matter. It's good to put good things in front of them to read because they're going to read anyway. Then there's another kind of reader that will easily choose other things if there is not something good to read, so you lose momentum a lot easier. I am that kind of reader. I love to read, but I also love to watch TV. I also love to play cards with my husband. There are different things that I can do in those pockets of time that are not reading. I have just found if I lose that momentum, it's really hard to get it back, and I genuinely love reading. That house rule has been something that's been really helpful for me. When I finish a book, I need to start another one within twenty-four hours or I probably won't really start. Then it's harder to get back on the horse. It's a really, really small thing.

That's what I love about the principle of house rules. It's just one small thing that sort of keeps -- like when you line up a bunch of dominoes and one tips over the rest, if the rest are sort of negative things, like, oh, no, everything's burning, everything's falling apart, even in something like your reading life, a house rule keeps that first domino from falling. That is it for me. Just read something within a day of finishing the last book. That means that if I know that I'm coming to the end of the book -- at this point, I have a ridiculous in-my-house library where I could always reach for something because I've been building up and paying attention to what kind of books I like and trying to buy those at book sales and all that. Before when I would get to the end of a book, I'm like, I'm almost to the end of this, I want to still enjoy the end, but I also want to think ahead. What am I going to read next so that I don't lose the momentum? It's very, very small. Again, it's a very small thing. But doggonit, it really helps me keep going.

Zibby: I'm not sure anyone's ever said doggonit on my podcast before.

Kendra: As it came out of my mouth, I was like, nope.

Zibby: I love that.

Kendra: I feel like this is a unique situation. [laughs]

Zibby: It called for a doggonit. You gave it the doggonit. I love it. It's amazing. Thank you for that. So what type of books do you like to read?

Kendra: I'm still in a place where I don't want to feel guilty for answering that question in the way that I'm going to answer it because I don't love to -- my default desire to read is not to learn something. I do read to learn things. I balance it out. Seriously, my sweet spot is space, magic, circuses, a poor teenage girl sticking it to the man. She hates the patriarchy, but she falls in love with somebody who's part of the patriarchy. I am such a sucker for that stuff. It just ropes me in even if the writing's not great. I will see a good, interesting story that's world-build-y, I will see it through even if the character's fine or the writing's okay. Seriously, if there's a circus, I'm done. I'm so happy. [laughs] Or creeped out fairy tales, like reinterpreted sort of dark fairytales, anything that's fantasy. I like science fiction. Again, the patriarchy part is always fun as well.

Zibby: Got a real niche there. I'll be on the lookout for you. I will. Any book pitch that comes in from now on, I am thinking, does this have the circus, patriarchy elements?

Kendra: I will take it.

Zibby: So watch out.

Kendra: I have mentioned it before. I have a few episodes about reading. I talk about it on my blog sometimes. The people who have been following me for a while, they know, this is the stuff Kendra likes. It is really fun when I have DMs and they're like, hey, I just read this book, and I see the word circus. [laughs] Everybody's looking for circuses. Send me all the circus books. I'll take every single one. Ironically, terrified of actually going to a circus. I don't know what that says, but here we are.

Zibby: Here we are. Sorry, I wish I had been following you before. I hadn’t heard of you before. Now I'm like, I'm one of the people in the world who somehow had not. I'm so glad I did now and that the people who I know now are going to know about you and all of that. Tell me a little more -- this is kind of a big pivot. In fourth grade, your parents got divorced. You went through this tough time in your life. You referenced your childhood a little bit. Just tell me a little more about what it was like for you growing up. Then what about it do you think made you find your way in the world and had it be similar to this?

Kendra: That's a good, layered question. My parents split up when I was -- they divorced for real in fourth grade. They had split up a couple times before then. My dad had just kind of left. He just left a couple times before. I have a little sister who is seven years younger than I am. For a lot of the childhood, I was an only child for those early years. Looking back, when you're a kid, you don't really know what you're looking at. You don't always know what you're experiencing, but you might feel it a little bit. The way that you process your life is more attuned to what's really happening. Looking back, part of me is like, how did I not know that my dad was abusive to my mom and to sister and to me, but all in very different ways? It was a really hard thing, obviously. That's a stupid thing to say. [laughs] It was a really hard thing. But it was.

I honestly think that one of the things that has been the most galvanizing for me, maybe, from that time is I carried the -- this is quite a pivot from the circus conversation. I sort of carried the weight and the responsibility of the abuse that the rest of my family was victim to as my responsibility. If I had seen it, I could've stopped it. It was my fault. I really think that that was a huge thing for the first two thirds of my life, really, in feeling like I had to be the best. I had to be so dependable. I had to be the greatest friend that anyone would ever want. I don't know that it was trying to make up for failing my family. I don't know that I would really put it into those words, but I do think that there's a connection there. There's always been a deep responsibility in me to make sure everything else is going okay at the expense of myself. That expense looks like I don't do things unless I can be the best at them. It was just a very thin way to live. It was just a very hollow -- there wasn't a lot of substance to it. I just feel like if anybody blew too hard at me, I would break. I was working really hard to look put together and feel together, but anything could've knocked everything off its very shaky foundation.

Therapy is a real big help. I'm a big advocate of therapy. When I started going to therapy and I'd realized that responsibility I was carrying, that I think the root of it was my sister and mom, but it also was like a tree, just lots of responsibility branches going in lots of different directions, when I realized that, it made so much sense about how I look at the world, which is to fix it. It was always to fix it. I got to make it better. Now that I've kind of removed that negative responsibility off the table, that poorly rooted responsibility that's not mine to hold, now that I've taken that off the table, it's left the essence of my desire to make things better, but for you, not for my own protection, not for my own survival. This feels strange to say. I do think I have a gift for helping people see differently, to help people see how their lives, by their definition and their standards, can be better, not like, copy my life, my life's great. That would be dumb. None of us need to live that way. That's so ridiculous. I think that once I worked through that responsibility that I carried, it just left that real essence of who I am. I really do want to make the world a better place. I joke that I am Pollyanna, but with a clipboard. I'm like, guys, sunshine, hold hands, let's do this. Then here's a list of how. [laughs] It's a very specific vibe.

I don't know that I would've ever been able to really access that without having processed where my desire to make things better came from. That's why I love therapy. It's also why I love suffering. What a fun thing to say. I love suffering. That's the lesson that we can learn from hard, difficult things. There's a principle in the book called live in your season. It's not that we are supposed to push through our season and ignore that things are hard. I know that things are really hard for you right now. I've been watching your Instagram. It's not that we're just like, ignore it. It's hard. Who cares? Power through. That's not helpful for anyone. Also, to sit there and just drown in the emotional weight of everything and not tell yourself the truth -- or have eyes of gratitude sometimes. I don't mean that in a placating way, like, the trees are beautiful, it's fine that my mother-in-law's sick. That's not what this is. It's being honest about how you're feeling and also giving yourself permission to feel what you need to feel but not let it be in charge and to tell yourself the truth. All that to say, I think that that is one of the gifts of difficult seasons. They always have something to teach us, always. My parent's divorce took a solid twenty years to teach me something that I could put words to, but it did. I'm so grateful.

Zibby: Wow, I'm really glad I asked you about that. Now in turn, you've given me some therapy for the day. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Wow, I'm going to have to just keep calling you every so often and get my daily dose, the transitive property from whatever your therapist taught you or something. Thank you. Kendra, you are doing so many things. You're a mom. You're doing your podcast, your blog. This book just came out. I hate to even say there could be more that you could do, but do you have a big vision of where you're headed or what you want to accomplish or how you're going to help everybody in the world? Tell me.

Kendra: Man, I hope that this gives some permission to people listening because I did, and I think it's not that anymore. My dream for the longest time was I wanted to own a bakery. That's really what it was. I wanted to have a local place. I love feeding people. Everybody likes cake for the most part. I make good cake. That was my dream. I'm not sure if it still is. I'm in this place where I'm in the dreamland, but everything just went from clear to fuzzy. It's like a reverse Wizard of Oz. It was so colorful. It was technicolor. Then I'm back in black and white. I'm like, wait, where are we? I don't know. I think that that's just the nature of life. Again, funny sentence to say. We think that something is going to be really valuable. It doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't when it was, but things change. We change. For a long time it was to have a bakery. I think now it's just broadened. I don't know how it's really going to manifest.

I just want a physical place to gather people. Part of me is like, why would anyone come? How can I support my family and my staff by trying to get people to come and stay at this property that I have, or this building? Do I teach classes? What do I even do? It does feel overwhelming to think about that sometimes because I don't know what it is and I don't like when I don't know what something is, which is when I pull out different principles in the book. One that's coming to mind right now about the dreams specifically, there's a principle called go in the right order. You can go in the right order in cleaning your bathroom. You can go in the right order with anything. Really, the right order comes down to three steps. The first one is to name what matters. Everything starts naming what matters. The second thing is to calm the crazy. Usually when we're like, what is happening? something feels crazy. We need to calm it down. Then the third thing is to trust yourself with whatever comes next. For this, my order is naming what matters, is that I am present in the work that I am doing now. Also, I don't push down the dream.

I can be present and let the dream hang out in the room and be like, hey dream, you're a lowercase d right now. I don't know what you look like, but it's cool. You can stay. If you decide to get brighter or stronger or sharper and you can tell me something that affects my work right now, that's fantastic. Otherwise, I'm just going to let you hang out in the room. It's cool. That's what matters. Then the second part of calming the crazy is when I feel the, I don't have a dream, starting to spin out, which I do often, the calm the crazy of that is to usually call someone who knows my heart, to call Emily, to call my best friend, to talk to my husband, to call my sister, and just be like, hey, I'm feeling really sad about not having the dream about the bakery. Can you tell me some truth? Can you tell some good things? That kind of settles down my brain. The third step, trust yourself with whatever comes next, usually it's just to keep going. There's not necessarily a third thing. It's just like, yeah, you can live in this time where you don't know what your five-year plan is or you don't know what your big dream is. This might be what it is. That's okay. It's just being okay with being where I am. That was a roundabout way to answer, I don't know. [laughs] I don't know what's next, but that's okay.

Zibby: Honestly, in my disheveled set of notes here, calm the crazy was in all caps, underlined. I need to post it on my computer. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Kendra: There's so much good advice out there, things like write every day, write even when no one's reading, all of that. I think that my start small advice, honestly -- a lot of advice feels sort of in the clouds sometimes or the everyday part often feels overwhelming. Honestly, I would say read a book on writing that you feel excited to read. My favorite one is The Memoir Project by Marion -- what's her name? Marion Smith? Marion Roach Smith? Marion Roach Smith, I think that's right. I should look it up. It is a really beautiful -- even if you don't write memoir, there was something in reading that book that just made me go, oh. And to stop doing writing exercises. She was like, no more writing exercises. No more things to just doggy paddle around the idea. It was the good mentality perspective to get you compelled to write every day, to let other people into your writing, to pitch magazines to get your foot in the door, and that kind of thing. It was this really lovely permission giver, that book was, even though I'm not a memoir writer. She just writes about writing in such a way that was -- and it's so skinny. It's this tiny, tiny, little book. You can finish it in like an hour or two, but so rich. That would be my advice, is to read that book. That feels like something people can do rather than write every day. They're like, but what? [laughs] That's part of the problem. What do I write? Maybe reading Marion Roach Smith is a good place to start.

Zibby: Starting small, I love it. Thank you so much. I am so happy that I met you today through Skype and through this podcast and got to be entertained by your personality.

Kendra: Same.

Zibby: I feel like part of our brains are very similar. Hearing you say all that stuff really helped me. Thank you. I'm really, really happy we talked.

Kendra: Me too. This has been a delight. Thanks, Zibby.

Zibby: No problem. Thank you. Have a great day.

Sandy Abrams, BREATHE TO SUCCEED

Zibby Owens: Sandy Abrams is known as the C.E.'Om founder, not CEO, C.E.'Om. She has written two books, Your Idea, Inc. from 2010 and Breathe to Succeed. She shares her simple and powerful breath and mindfulness tools that fueled her entrepreneurial journey over the past twenty-five years. Now she is a C.E.'Om and currently leads the Breathe to Succeed and Beverages and Breath workshops, customized Breath and Mindset training for entrepreneurs, leaders, employees, women's groups, and she speaks at a variety of conferences. She also just launched the "C.E.'Om" podcast which she says I inspired her to do which makes me feel just awesome.

Welcome, Sandy. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Sandy Abrams: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Zibby: Breathe to Succeed: Increase Workplace Productivity, Creativity, and Clarity Through the Power of Mindfulness, that pretty much summarizes the book, but why don't you tell listeners a little more about it and what inspired you to write it?

Sandy: I wrote Breathe to Succeed after practicing breath and mindfulness on my own in small moments for thirty years. I felt this SOS in the business sector a few years ago. I had written a book in 2010 called Your Idea, Inc. which was to help other first-time entrepreneurs launch their own business. That had me speaking at a lot of business events and women's conferences. That's where I began to see that technology had hit the tipping point. We all had this new level of low-grade stress from constantly being connected to our devices. I felt like I had something to share about my simple-but-powerful breath tools.

Zibby: That's awesome. You have an acronym for 3D breath. 3DB or something?

Sandy: Yeah, I call them 3DB. That was my go-to breath tool, the most simple thing, 3DB. That's all it takes to actually transform energy. Today, between pandemic and George Floyd and the stress and anxiety of our times right now, we all have time to breath three deep breaths. One of my favorite quotes is from Einstein that says we cannot solve problems with the same energy that we created them. Breath transforms energy. Right now, I'm on this mission to help everyone, not just the business sector, but help everyone just go inward for a few seconds every day with simply three deep breaths. Great for parenting as well. Moms do have time to breath because we can multitask when we're breathing. We could be making food for the kids. We can be doing whatever and you can take three deep breaths mindfully while you are busy doing all the other things that moms do, right?

Zibby: Totally. I loved how the angle of this skews to entrepreneurs and CEOs and how you call yourself a C.E.'Om. Instead of a CEO, a C.E.'Om, which is so clever. I do think there's something specific to business leaders or people really stressed out at work who need to reframe how to manage all of that and to give people tools not just at home, but also in work is amazing. Aside from the three deep breaths, what's a go-to thing that somebody right now who's sneaking time at work to listen to this could do to have a better day?

Sandy: First of all, there's a lot of science behind the power of breath and mindfulness for wellness and for mental health and for boosting immunity, so much science behind that. I'd love to read you an excerpt from the book about that. Then I'll share a tool. Is that okay?

Zibby: Sure. That's great.

Sandy: Okay, good. I have these pop-ups throughout the book that share just scratching the surface of the science behind breath. Here's one. "In an article titled 'Neuroscientists have identified how exactly one deep breath changes your mind,' Moran Cerf of Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, says, 'Breathing at different paces or paying careful attention to the breaths were shown to engage different parts of the brain. Humans' ability to control and regulate their brain is unique, i.e., controlling emotions. These abilities are not trivial. When breathing changed with the exercises, the brain changed as well. The findings provide neural support for advice individuals have been given for millennia. During times of stress or when heightened concentration is needed, focusing on one's breathing or doing breathing exercises can indeed change the brain.'" On that note, one rule of thumb with breath is that if you make your exhale longer than your inhale, that taps into your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest part of your nervous system. It brings on a feeling of relaxation and calm. I'll walk you through this. Everybody breathes at different paces, but for people who haven't had any breath practice before, I love doing an inhale of four and an exhale of six because it's just very simple. Keeping that exhale longer than the inhale is the science behind getting into that feeling of relaxation. Are you up for a breath or two?

Zibby: I'm up for a breath or two.

Sandy: Through your nose, take a long, slow, deep inhale to the count of four. Two, three, four, and then slowly exhale through your nose or mouth. Six, five, four, three, two, one. Let's do one more. Inhale. Two, three, four, and exhaling slowly. Six, five, four, three, two, one. That can be done anywhere, anytime when you really want to feel relaxed or calm.

Zibby: It makes me feel like I want to go back to sleep. [laughs]

Sandy: I've got a breath to energize as well. I love to say there's a breath for every energy that you want to manifest. Breath alone is super powerful, but when you pair it with mindset tools, meaning you tell your body how you want to feel -- right now, you just said, now I want to go to sleep. If you start telling your body, I am energized now, I'm rejuvenated, and we do a lion's breath which I'll share with you right now, you will feel more energized. That's where the magic begins, really, is when you pair breath with mindset tools. Lion's breath is a breath that I taught my kids when they were little. They're twenty-two and twenty-four now. I'm happy to say they still do lion's breath. It's a great tool because it's immediate. It gets rid of any stagnant or negative energy. If you do three of them, it's really energizing. I know we're on audio, but I'll try to explain this as best I can. Close your eyes. Inhale through your nose, a long, slow, deep inhale. On the exhale, bulge open your eyes, stick out your tongue, and sigh everything out.

Zibby: I'm not doing that. [laughter]

Sandy: Yes, you are. What happens is this, usually when I do lion's breath in group settings in real life, it makes everyone laugh like you just did. That's another thing you can do. Laugh out loud even when you're not feeling it. It's energizing. Again, it's science. It changes the chemistry in your body. You begin to feel happy simply by just laughing. Those are great things to teach the kids too, laughing out loud and lion's breath.

Zibby: I will do the lion's breath to my kids because they're used to seeing me look ridiculous, but I'm not going to do it to you because I just can't. [laughs] Now at least I have the tool. That's awesome. That's so awesome. I was really interested in your book about how you ended up even becoming someone who's on the other end of this call helping people with their breath and how you started out as an entrepreneur and sold a business. You had some expression like "unbeknownst to me" or "to my own greatest surprise" or something that suggested that you were as surprised as anyone to have sold a business as a multimillion-dollar sale and became a beauty product that was everywhere. You just killed it. Tell me a little about that and then how you transitioned to this.

Sandy: First of all, I didn't sell the business. I actually still have it. It launched quickly. I built this business, as I said, much to my surprise. I have a broadcasting journalism background, not a business background. I was just one of those people that saw a void in the marketplace for a product, moisturizing gloves. My product was called Moisture Jamzz. I wanted to make something that I needed. I was really embarrassed of my hands when I was in my twenties. I had really dry, ugly hands. My grandmother told me about this beauty secret that's been around for generations, which is simply put on any moisturizer -- her preference was Vaseline. This was back in 1993. My grandmother, at the time, was ninety-three years old. Then you just slip on white cotton gloves. It helps to heal your hands and make them look younger and healthier. I lived in Los Angeles at the time, beauty-conscious LA. There's tons of beauty supply stores. The only product that they had was a thin, white, all-cotton glove that just fell off my hands. It wouldn't stay on. I decided I could make a better version. There was also, at that time, a very robust garment industry in Los Angeles.

I just pounded the pavement. I learned about fabric. I learned about pattern making. I created a product. I started sharing it with people. Before I knew it, I had gone to get a manicure and I had given a sample pair of gloves to the manicurist who was in Beverly Hills at the time. InStyle magazine put it in, I forget, it was one of the first three issues of InStyle. It was a full-page picture of Moisture Jamzz. I was like, wow, this is really working. I had no credit card to accept payments at that time, no merchant account or anything like that. I realized people are interested in this. I just started figuring it out. That's the great thing about building a business. You can learn it on the go. That's why I wrote my first book, Your Idea, Inc. That's what led to this because I tapped into the power of breath and mindset so frequently building my business that I really felt like the time was right to share that. That's what led to this book. Without those tools, I wouldn't have had the confidence to walk into fifty sewing factories and find the right one or to ask questions of the Bed Bath & Beyond buyer. I didn't know what wholesale, retail, what pricings and margins -- breath constantly gave me the confidence to keep going every day when I really felt like I didn't know what I was doing. Long-winded answer, but there you go.

Zibby: Now you lead groups and teach people like Oprah how to catch her breath. [laughs]

Sandy: Oprah really inspired me. I have shared a deep breath with her, and grateful for Oprah and other people who, as you mentioned, I do call them C.E.'Oms, people who lead mindfully. She is one of those people. I think that it's so inspiring that some companies like Google many years ago started with a chief happiness officer. Today companies like Vayner Media have a chief heart officer. Hyatt has a chief well-being officer. There are companies, big brands now, that are realizing the power of mindfulness and breath and meditation in the workplace. Workplace wellness is my passion. I'm on a mission right now to share breath one deep breath at a time, really.

Zibby: By the way, in the book you quoted Bill Gross from Idealab. I worked there after college for a couple years. I was the twentieth employee. I never see him in books. It was amazing.

Sandy: That's a small world. I love that.

Zibby: Too funny. Are you working on another book now? I should ask.

Sandy: No. There was nine years in between my books. After my first book, and I'm sure you can relate to this, I never thought I would write another book. I'm not a writer, but when I feel like I've got something to say, then I'm willing to share it and I'm willing to do that labor of love and write another book. As of right now, I feel like this book has so much time and space that I can share with people that I'm not looking for book number three yet. I feel like you do about how writing inspires you all the time and it's cathartic. That's how I feel about breath. I just want to share breath for several years.

Zibby: For someone else who wants to write a book but doesn't even really love writing, what tips you would have having survived two?

Sandy: My number-one tip for people who ask me that is just write like you're talking to a friend. I made the mistake of starting my first book as using my journalism background and trying to make it sound very journalistic. Then I had asked my editor, "Could you just take a look at my first two chapters? I don't want to write everything and then find out I'm on the wrong track because I'm not a writer, per se." She looked at my first two chapters and said, "Okay, hit delete. Let's start over. When you spoke with me, I felt your enthusiasm and I felt your passion. That's not what I'm feeling when I read this." That was the best advice ever. Since then, I've written hundreds of articles about entrepreneurs and business and wellness. I'm always using that advice, just writing as if I'm talking to a friend giving advice. Then I realized that it carries my voice that way on paper. That's the advice I would give people.

Zibby: Amazing. Sandy, thank you so much for coming on my podcast. Thank you for the only breaths I will probably take today that I will be aware of. [laughter] Thanks for something that will break my kids out of their next tantrum by looking at how crazy I look.

Sandy: I promise you they will love lion's breath. Thank you for having me, Zibby. Thank you for everything you do for authors and for lightening the energy in the world right now. Thank you.

Zibby: Thank you, Sandy. That was nice of you to say. I'm trying. Thanks. Have a great day.

Sandy: You too.

Zibby: Bye.

Sandy: Bye.