Clint Edwards, FATHER-ISH

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

Clint Edwards: Oh, hey. Happy to be here.

Zibby: That's when you say, "Thanks for having me."

Clint: That was my que. I missed my que. [laughter] I'm not very professional. People are always like, why don't you go live? I'm like, because I'm so awkward.

Zibby: No, you're not awkward. You're so funny. I started reading this book not in the best mood. You know those moods when you're like, I just don't feel like laughing? I don't want to get out of my bad mood. I just want to marinate in it for a while. I was reading your book. You made me laugh a few times out loud. I'm like, gosh, okay, fine, I'm not in a bad mood anymore. [laughs]

Clint: That's good. That's the goal. I think I'm funny, and that's the most important part. My family, I think they're tired of me. They’ve known me for so long, my siblings and my mother in particular. I love to bring up at family dinners that I'm a recognized humorist. I'll be like, "You guys know I'm a recognized humorist. I'm a funny guy." Everybody at the table just groans. [laughter]

Zibby: You can always trust your family to put you in your place.

Clint: You can really. Yep, your family and your children. Definitely.

Zibby: Father-ish is your latest book, Laugh-Out-Loud Tales from a Dad Trying Not to Ruin His Kids' Lives. You have an amazing blog. You've written other books. You just have this way of making all these everyday moments in parenting life really funny and relatable. You end up really rooting for you. You compare yourself often, in this book at least, to Clark Griswold who was, as a child of the eighties, my dad hero of sorts or something. You're much less awkward, it seems, than Clark.

Clint: It's funny. My blog, it's No Idea What I’m Doing. Across platforms, I'm getting close to a half a million followers, which seems really cool. I still have a day job, so it can't be that cool. What is funny is I often have people say, oh, man, I wish we were neighbors. I wish we could have dinner or hang out. I'm like, you would be shocked how boring I am in real life. I think what I'm good at is just finding the humor in boring things. For the most part, I'm just this thirty-something-year-old dude wandering around in sweatpants. I'm not that interesting. I've just been lucky enough to be able to find some of that humor. I've been lucky my wife is willing to let me do it. She's allowed me to be able to write freely about our kids and her. They're the most interesting people I got, easily. I've been lucky enough to be able to just sit down and be able to find the humor in it.

Zibby: When did you start writing? Did this proceed your kids? Did you write as a kid yourself? Is it something that came up when you just had all this material in your head suddenly?

Clint: I don't know how far back I want to go on this.

Zibby: Go all the way back.

Clint: I was not one of those kids. I graduated high school, and I didn't know how to type. I'd never read a novel. I was a failure of the education system. When I met my wife, I was twenty-one. I told her I wanted to go to college, but I didn't know how to type. She was like, "I'll help you." She actually typed my papers when I first started college. I would handwrite them. My spelling would be so bad and my handwriting was so bad, she couldn't actually read it. I would sit next to her. She was living in this apartment across the street from the liquor store, just this run-down, crappy apartment. I would read the paper to her, and she would type them. That was when we first started dating. I couldn't help but fall in love with her. I was really scared to take English composition and all that sort of stuff when I got into college. Then I finally did. I had a really great professor. I got really lucky. One of the first assignments was to write a humorous essay. I wrote a story about when I crapped my pants my freshman year in PE. Everybody just thought it was so funny. I had so much fun writing it. The professor was like, "This is really unfortunate, what happened to you, but this was really, really funny and well-done."

That was when I got the writing bug. I changed my major from powerline technology to English. My mother was like, "What are you going to do with that?" I just told her, "Homeless." It's what she wanted to hear. It was the easier answer. My blog is titled No Idea What I'm Doing. It's because my dad had a drug addiction and I didn't know him very well. He was in and out of my life. That was kind of how I felt going into dad stuff. Anyway, I started writing a lot of essays that were funny. Then I started writing a lot of serious stuff. Then I eventually went and got an MFA in creative writing. I thought I was going to write this heartbreaking tragedy memoir like Liars' Club type of thing. I finished my MFA. I spent a summer as a stay-at-home dad trying to sell the book. I was rejected by -- I have a whole spreadsheet. It's a spreadsheet of shame. I have two hundred-plus agents and small publishers in there that rejected me. I was so depressed and so frustrated. I thought, you know, I got to do something different. I took the dust off this blog that I created as an undergrad and just started writing about my kids. It was something else. I didn't think anyone would be very interested in my kids, but maybe they would. The first thing I published on there was about being a stay-at-home dad. I think it was read by a thousand people. My head just exploded. I thought, what? A thousand people read this? The last literary journal I was published in was North Dakota Quarterly. How often do you read that?

Zibby: [laughs] Anytime I'm in North Dakota.

Clint: Always.

Zibby: I'll always pick it up.

Clint: Every quarter, it comes in my mailbox. I think the circulation was three hundred. It's a very respected journal and blah, blah, blah, but I'm pretty sure I read the essay, and the managing editor. I think those are the two people that actually read that edition. I was like, wow, a thousand people read it, so I just started posting on my blog every day for five days a week. I was like, let's see what happens. I did it for a year. By the end of the year, I had gotten the attention of the Huffington Post, so I wrote for them. Then I wrote for The Washington Post and The New York Times. I had this one post just explode on The Washington Post. Good Morning America came to my house. It was the worst experience. If Good Morning America wants to come to your house, you tell them no. It's so awkward. They were following me around, and my kids. It was eight hours or something. It was some obscene amount of time. I think I was on the show for maybe five minutes. I thought, okay, I should be able to publish a book. Then I sent it out. I started trying to publish a book about parenting. I got rejected like two hundred times again. [laughs] I have two spreadsheets of shame. I actually self-published my first book. Then eventually, I ended up getting the attention of Page Street which is distributed by Macmillan. That's who published my last three books. Sorry, you said go all the way back. It was a long story.

Zibby: That's what I wanted. That whole thing was really interesting.

Clint: It was a long journey. I'm here now. I just kept at it. I kept blogging, kept writing. Fingers crossed, hopefully, I'll make all sorts of money. I'll be able to be a full-time writer. That's my goal now.

Zibby: You said you have another day job. What's your day job?

Clint: I work in an athletics program. I tell the student athletes to do their homework, so I'm really popular, as you can imagine. I've been there six years now, something like that. It's a good university job. It's fine. I love helping students. I love education. I never really got out of the university once I got into it. At some point, I would love to just flip my desk and peace out and be a writer full time, but that's a lot hard than you think.

Zibby: At least, you have to put it out there. You have to get that goal out there. If you don't have it as a goal, it's definitely not going to happen.

Clint: I'm surprised how many people think I just write full time. They think that is what I do. I'm like, no, that'd be cool, though. It'd be great. Maybe someday.

Zibby: Maybe someday. It is a hard profession in that regard, unfortunately, because the talent is not commensurate with the compensation in the slightest in this industry, I will say. It's funny you talk about how you couldn't sell your book about parenting because I actually had the same experience. I was doing all this essay writing about parenting and all these everyday moments and whatever. I was like, this is great. I'll do a whole book about it. Everyone in the industry keeps saying, no, books on parenting don't sell. It's so hard. Meanwhile, I read books on parenting all the time. I love essays books like this. So do other people. I don't know. I think it depends on the book, like with everything else. I think blanket statements like, books of essays don't work or parenting stories don't work, it's not that. You just have to have the right storyteller.

Clint: I think a lot of people get caught up in the rejection. I'm telling you right now, I was rejected hundreds of times. It's got to be in the thousands by now across periodicals and essays and books and different things. It used to really emotionally cripple me. Now I just wrap my arms around it. I give it a hug. I pull it in. It is what it is. Rejection is a huge part of it. If I had given up after that first rejection or whatever, I wouldn't be selling books and having people message me and say that I helped them with X, Y, and Z. There's really cool stuff that happens with it. We're in a really cool time where, yeah, they say no; okay, cool, self-publish. Put it up on a blog. Put it out there. Keep trying. There are so many avenues to publish right now. It's a really cool time to be a writer. Think about this. I am living in the middle of nowhere, Oregon. I've started a blog, most of the time writing at the McDonald's PlayPlace at five o'clock in morning because there were no kids around and they had diet soda. I could just get jacked up on Diet Coke and write for two or three hours. I don't go there now, but I've been doing stuff like that for years. In the middle of nowhere, Oregon, I've been able to put together half a million followers and have three books out. What other time could you do that? I don't know. It's a cool time to be able to do it.

Zibby: That's true. I like that. It's very optimistic. Yet you also have this same sad side to you as well. I think a lot of humor comes from pain to begin with. You write openly on your blog about having anxiety and depression and even when you tinkered with your meds and even stories in this book about how your dad was there more for your older brothers and taught them to do more of the handy things. You missed out on that, and so you tried to teach your son, which ended up being another hilarious story. There's sadness in all of this. This is your way of challenging it. Yet you also share it, which is very unique for most -- not to make sweeping generalizations, but a lot of men aren't as comfortable sharing all of that. Tell me a little bit about that piece of you and coping with what happened with your own dad and coping with your own mental stuff.

Clint: I was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder. I was probably nineteen, I think is when that started to really hit home. Now I think I live a pretty normal life. I was never Jack Nicholson bad in -- what is that movie? As Good as It Gets. I was definitely never Bill Murray in What About Bob? I never got that bad. I definitely had a lot of, and I still struggle a lot with anxiety. A lot of it has to do with having kind of a difficult childhood. My dad was a drug addict. My mom has a lot of emotional problems that she hasn’t dealt with. I ran away when I was fourteen. I was just like, peace out. I left and eventually was raised by my grandmother. It took me a while to be open about my anxiety and my depression and stuff. Some of that's cliché masculinity stuff. It takes a while for you to even understand it yourself. I don't even know if I fully understand it. I will say that I've found a lot of humor in the tragedy. Some of the best medicine you can do is to just laugh at it and laugh at what you're doing, laugh at the anxiety. It definitely takes the power away.

I've been writing a lot more about my mental health and depression and trying to make sense of it. I was worried that people would give me crap or call me crazy or whatever. I already call myself that, so it's easy for them to do too. I've actually had way more people reach out and just say, thanks, I went on medication because of you. I reached out to my therapist because of you. You helped me figure out how to better manage my own anxiety. It's not like I think I'm saying anything really profound. I'm just writing about it and being open about it and being a presence. That really helped. I think that helps a lot of other people. That's cool for me as a writer. It helps me not feel so alone. Of course, this all is about me. I feel less crazy by talking more about my crazy, I guess.

Zibby: Wow. Why do you not have a podcast?

Clint: Why do I not have a podcast?

Zibby: Yeah.

Clint: Oh, man. Listen, I have no desire to hear my voice any more than I already hear it. [laughs] I have no desire to do a podcast. I have no desire to be a vlogger. I went live a few times. I just found it really awkward. I didn't like it. I just want to write. That's what I want to do. I want to write. I like to write. Writing is great for me to help me process the world. Parents listening to this, particularly dads, you want to be a better dad, write about being a dad. Sit down and just reflect on it. Think about it. Take some time to really understand, why is that moment sticking out in your head? Why did you feel like a jerk then? Write it down. You will be shocked how much -- it's been the best thing that I could've done for my marriage and my family, is for me to just sit down and be reflective about it. I can't count how many times I've been writing a blog post and I'll think to myself, man, I don't know why I can't stop thinking about that. Then I'll be like, oh, it's because I was being a dick. Then I'll go and apologize to my kid or I'll apologize to my wife. I was like, "I just realized that I was being a total jerk back then. I'm sorry." I apologize, and I can finish the blog post. Being reflective and thoughtful is one of the best things you can do.

Zibby: That's great advice. Your essay on when the dog was choking on the gingerbread might have been the funniest. It's a David Sedaris-level humor thing. It's true. It's what you just said. At the end, you're like, can you believe I made the dog say you're welcome? or whatever it is you did. Just so funny. The other great thing about this introduction, even, in your book is you say there are no parenting experts. No one is a parenting expert even if you call yourself one, parents who view themselves as one. It doesn't matter how much TV exposure, what you put on the label underneath your title on a book. No one knows what they're doing. That is just the most universal feeling because it's true. Your whole thing about control, we have no real control over these constantly changing animals. I have four kids. It's just impossible. It's always impossible. You have to just buckle your seatbelt.

Clint: We were talking about my son going by the name Flip. Whatever you think your kids are going to do or whatever you hope or if you even think they're going to be interested in anything you've ever done, throw that all out the window. They are definitely their own little people. They are interested in their own little things. Parenting has been the hardest thing I've ever done. It's the most rewarding. I love the heck out of my kids, but they're definitely confusing. I can't figure them out.

Zibby: I also feel that the more kids I have, the more I realize I have not that much to do with even how they're turning out to begin with. They're kind of born the way they are. I didn't know that at the beginning. I thought whether or not I had the kid on my lap or next to me in the music class would actually make a difference in their development overall, and what music class, the fact that I even had them in music classes. Whereas these guys, I'm like, whatever. [laughs] It makes no difference. They're born basically who they are just like you and I were. All we can do as parents, I think, or what I've come to realize, is just not mess them up. Protect who they are. Just try hard not to mess it up.

Clint: One of the things that I've struggled with is for a long time, I would compare myself -- we were talking about keeping the expectations low for this interview. I did the same thing as a father. I thought to myself, I'm doing better than my dad. Well, my dad was a drug addict. He was in and out of jail. The best relationship I had with my dad was when I would visit him in jail because I knew where he was. I knew where to find him. For the most part, he was sober. That's a pretty low bar. It was a while there before I got into it. I was like, why am I still comparing myself to this guy? I should be raising my bar even higher. The thing with this book, too, is so much of it -- the original pitch was a Christmas book. I wanted to do a book all about Christmas. That's why the first several essays are about Christmas. The publisher was like, "I don't know if that's going to work." We eventually settled on a book of fails. Ultimately, this book, it's a collection of all my mistakes. So many of these mistakes, I went into it thinking I was screwing it up and then found out that it actually wasn't that bad. I actually didn't do that bad of a job. I think that's ninety percent of parenting. You think you're screwing up your kids in every avenue. Then you start to realize that you were there and you were trying, and that was enough. That's cool.

Zibby: It doesn't even have to be such a verb, like to parent. Growing up, my mom -- this is back when there weren’t a lot of parenting books. She was definitely more interested in romance, best-selling salacious reads, and all this other stuff. She had this one little parenting book. It was How to be a Better Parent or something. I remember seeing it and being like, what do you mean? You're reading about how to be a parent? Don't you know? Doesn't that just come with the territory? What do you mean you're reading about it? It blew my mind. Then I think about the eight trillion books that I have, which mostly go unread. I like to read the funny things about actual parenting. There's no real roadmap, but here we are.

Clint: We're all lost. It's fine. I like to think that my kids think that I know everything, but I'm just really good at googling. That's really the fact. They’ll ask me questions, and I google them. [laughs]

Zibby: That's true. Now they don't even ask me. They're just like, "Siri..."

Clint: Yeah, that's true. My kids are pretty good at asking Alexa how to help with math now because they know Dad's of no use.

Zibby: Redundant. I might as well not even be around. Anyway, so what are you going to do next? What's coming next? You're going to keep doing your blog. Do you have another book in you that you're thinking about?

Clint: Yeah. My thought right now is I might do more parenting books, but I'd love to write a really funny mental health book. I would love to write something that's a really funny look, just dark funny look at my own mental health and trying to understand. The goal would be to help others know how to overcome this sort of stuff. I'm not saying I'm the best at it. I'm still living with it. I will say that one of the best things I ever did was to try and -- so much of what my father did with his drug addiction -- whenever I discuss him with my therapist, they're always like, "Was he bipolar?" I'm like, "I don't know. He would've never gone to a therapist." There's so many parts, these crazy parts of my life, when I'll talk to a therapist about it, he was probably having a manic episode. Then you get jacked up on pain killers and just make it worse. Understanding how to take those lessons of bad mental health management that I learned from my parents and unpacking it, undoing it, and learning how to have healthier habits. I'm hoping to write something in that vein, but funny. We'll see. We'll see if it works out.

Zibby: That sounds great. Awesome. Normally, I end by asking people for advice for aspiring authors, but you've given so much advice along the way. Give me your last final shreds of wisdom.

Clint: This is the best advice I can give to any writer, and they hate it. They hate this advice. You need to write every day. There are authors that will disagree with you. I can tell you, when I was in grad school, this John Reimringer -- I'm probably messing up his name. He wrote a book called Vestments. It won a Minnesota Book Award. He came and talked to us. He pulled out these calendars. Each day had a couple stars on it. Each star represented an hour that he wrote. He would give himself a star. There were weeks where he didn't have anything. For the most part, he had years of these calendars where he gave himself a star. He said, "I recommend to people to write two hours every day." I remember thinking to myself, that's not even a part-time job. I just dragged my family halfway across the United States to get a creative writing degree, and I wasn't writing part time. It was right then that I said, I'm going to write at least two hours a day. Geez, that's been ten, twelve years ago. I write way more than that now. If you write every day, you'll get somewhere. You're going to write to no one for a very long time. That's just the facts. That's when things started getting better for me. I always would say, if you're married, sit down with your spouse and establish that schedule. I write in the mornings. The whole family knows I write in the mornings. If you bother Dad during writing time, he's a jerk about it. I am territorial. This is my time. I have claimed it. That's when you're going to get the most writing done. Write, write. Figure out a time. Establish it with your family. Then be a jerk about it. You'll get more done.

Zibby: Awesome. I love it. Clint, thank you so much. Thanks for talking to me about your views of parenting and your books and all of it. This was really fun. I can't wait to read your next book and follow along. It's been really awesome.

Clint: Thank you. It was awesome being on here. I appreciate your time.

Zibby: No problem. Take care. Happy Thanksgiving.

Clint: Bye. You too.

Zibby: Bye.

Hope Edelman, THE AFTERGRIEF

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Hope. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss The AfterGrief, which I'm trying to show here, Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss. It's such a pleasure to be with you today.

Hope Edelman: Thank you so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Would you mind please telling listeners what your latest book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Hope: My first book and several of my books were about early mother loss. I wrote a book about the long-term effects of losing a mom when you're a child, teenager, or young adult because that was my story. I was seventeen years old when my mother died of breast cancer. There were no books for girls like me or adults like me who had lost a mom when she was younger. Then over the years, I started living more into my own experience. I discovered that even decades later this early loss was still coming up for me in new and different ways, some that I could anticipate or expect and others that just blindsided me. At that point, I knew lots of women in the Motherless Daughters community. I'd met a number of their brothers. I had a lot of friends who had lost fathers or siblings. They were telling the same story that the experience of grief was much more protracted and, in fact, extended over a lifetime in some ways.

That's how The AfterGrief came out. That's what I'm calling the period that comes after that acute phase of grief when we're really wondering how we're going to make it through every day without this person in our life. Then slowly, slowly, the intense pain starts to recede. We enter this next phase where we're adjusting and adapting to the loss constantly over time. That's what I call the aftergrief. I interviewed eighty-one people who had lost parents, siblings, close friends, or romantic partners, most of them before the age of thirty, and then asked them how that kept showing up for them ten, twenty, thirty years later. In my case, thirty-nine years since my mother and sixteen years since my father died. They're still a big part of my life. I think of them all the time. I miss them from time to time, sometimes very painfully still.

Zibby: It doesn't matter how much time has gone by. If you're missing something that you perceive to be so central to you, it never really goes away. Does it? It doesn't really ever disappear.

Hope: I don't think so. That's why I think that expecting things to last a certain amount of time or using measurements of time often backfires on us. I'm frequently asked, how long before I move from the acute phase of grief into the aftergrief? People want to have an idea on what calendar date they're going to cross the threshold. I can't answer that question for anybody. It's so individual. For some people, three months. For some people, six. For some people, two years. It depends on so many factors. I think once we release ourself from this idea that there's going to be an end point on the calendar and learn how to just move with the ebbs and the flows and think in terms of intensity and duration rather than an end point, it's a much kinder and gentler way to move forward without someone important in our life.

Zibby: You point out so aptly that most employers give people maybe no time, maybe two weeks. You think you're supposed to be back on your feet. Of course, that's impossible. Two weeks is nothing. You can barely put your shoes on two weeks later.

Hope: Oh, Zibby, the average is three days of paid leave.

Zibby: Three days, oh, my gosh.

Hope: That's the average for the American worker, three days of bereavement leave. Then you need to take personal days, sick days, or if you have mental health days, maybe, at your company, or you have to start going into unpaid time off in order to sufficiently mourn the person who died. In many cultures, three days isn't even enough time to have the funeral because there are preparations and there are rituals that you need to go through. People are going into unpaid time off just in order to mourn their dead, which I think actually is a tragedy in this culture.

Zibby: Not to mention the fact that you're so cognitively impaired when you are in the intense beginnings of grief, for the most part. The idea that you have to go through all that sludge and then perform at work as if you were at the top of your game is close to impossible. It's not even good practice for the companies to have employees who are a fraction of themselves. If you just gave them a little bit more time, it might help. Anyway, I don't know why I've even gotten into this.

Hope: For some people, work is a really welcome distraction because they can compartmentalize really well. Then they feel like, okay, I can just leave the intense distress over here. I can go to work and get some relief and then come back. Not everybody can do that. Those who can't, I think, shouldn't be expected to.

Zibby: You're right. You're absolutely right. Work can be a total refuge. You had so many passages that I found so interesting. You wrote, "A terrible disconnect exists between what the average person thinks grief should look and feel like -- typically, a series of progressive, time-limited stages that end in a state of closure -- and how grief, that artful dodger, actually behaves. This means a whole lot of people getting stuck in the gap between what they’ve been told to expect after someone dies and what they actually encounter when it happens." I loved your expression the artful dodger so much that I wrote it here in blue Sharpie because it's such a good description. It's something that comes in and out and creeps. It's that creeping feeling. You don't know where it's going. It's so sneaky, almost.

Hope: Right. I'm also a child of the seventies. I grew up on Oliver. Remember the Artful Dodger?

Zibby: Yeah, me too. I knew where it came from. [laughs]

Hope: That little boy with the black hair dancing in the streets of [indiscernible] London.

Zibby: I'm pretty sure my brother was the Artful Dodger in that play. Now I might be wrong, so forget it. You also wrote that "Mourners who are able to make meaning of their experiences exhibit lower levels of complicated grief and better mental and physical health later on. In fact, making meaning after a trauma is the most powerful predictor of good long-term outcome among adults." I wanted you to discuss this notion of complicated grief versus whatever the opposite is, regular grief.

Hope: Complicated grief is a term that's used to describe about fifteen percent of mourners who can't seem to get out of that acute phase of grief. It's like the grief channel gets stuck on high or it gets stuck twenty-four/seven. They're not able to compartmentalize and go to work and come back. They're at a high level of distress and can't turn the nob down. It's now believed that those are typically people who have preexisting susceptibility to anxiety or depression. That gets really amped up when somebody they love dies. It is about fifteen percent of the population. The rest of us, over time, figure out how to adapt on our own. I think there are still mourners' needs. I would even create the mourners' bill of rights, things that we really need and deserve in order to adapt well on our own. Not everybody needs therapy. Not everybody is a talker and needs to talk it out. I think we all need some form of self-expression. We all need some sense of safety and security in order to grieve, which is why some people experience postponed or delayed grief. Complicated grief is a known category within the bereavement field. It affects about fifteen percent of people. They really do need some professional assistance in order to work through whatever trauma they may have that's lingering or feelings of remorse or guilt or anxiety or depression that needs to be addressed concurrently with their bereavement needs.

Zibby: I'm actually surprised. I felt like the statistics on what percent of the population has anxiety or depression would make me think that far more than fifteen percent would have complicated grief. I don't know what the rates are off the top of my head.

Hope: They say complicated grief. That's a term in the bereavement world to explain the people who are really at the highest level of distress and can't get out of it on their own, but I think everyone's grief is complicated. You had a difficult relationship with that person. It can be complicated because you have children to take of and you need to attend to their needs over losing a grandparent, for example, or a mom or a dad, and don't have time to attend to your own. Those are complications that can arise with grief. A number of people who have anxiety and depression can manage it on their own or are already managing it when grief comes. This fifteen percent, typically, it's like the volume knob gets turned all the way up, like I said, and they're not able to turn it down on their own or with the assistance of the people they already have on their team.

Zibby: You mentioned how much therapy and talking can help, but that obviously some people are not talkers. What if you have someone who ends up in the fifteen percent who doesn’t find talking helpful? How do you help that person if therapy doesn't help?

Hope: I recommend that anyone in the fifteen percent work with a bereavement professional or especially a trauma-informed bereavement professional if the loss was due to a traumatic form of death like a suicide or a homicide or an accident that was disfiguring. Sometimes really watching someone suffer for a long period of time is traumatic for us. There's something called shock trauma which is when something happens very suddenly and unexpectedly. There's also a category called strain trauma which is taking care of someone or watching someone who's ill deteriorate over a long period of time. I would recommend almost anyone in the fifteen percent who feels like they might not be able to -- they can decide, is that for six weeks they're too sad to get out of bed? That's serious. Is it six months later they still can't concentrate at work because they're still having images or flashbacks about how the loved one died? Those might be examples of complicated grief. I think that everyone needs a form of self-expression. It doesn't have to be talking. Some of us are talkers and we don't have anyone who will listen. People shut us down. They don't want to hear. Especially months later, they feel like we should be over it, which is why the introduction to the book is called Getting Over Getting Over It. I think we just have to get past this idea as a culture that grief is something we get over. Forms of artistic expression or physical activities are also terrific ways to externalize our feelings, whether we're doing it through cardio or we're doing it through dance or writing. Writing and journaling is known to be a really excellent way of helping people release and process the emotions that come with grief.

Zibby: I think reading too. I know it's more of a receptive type of act versus productive. I think taking in other people's stories and having that in your head make sense with your own can help.

Hope: I think so. I think that's why certain book clubs can be really helpful if people are really responding to the material or reading book like The AfterGrief and then talking about it with somebody. That's bibliotherapy and a form of talk therapy. You just need a compassionate other that you can confide in. It's really important, really, really important. All the research shows that -- this was one of the most fascinating things I learned when I wrote this book. It was a subset of social psychology. It's also a form of psychology called constructivist psychology. It's about how we make sense of the world around us. This is how we make meaning. We do it by creating a story that tells what happened and that makes sense to us. Sometimes that's hard when someone dies if we don't know all the facts or we don't really understand what happened or why or we weren’t there to witness it and we have to piece it together from other people's accounts. That can take a while.

We need to create a story that makes sense to us emotionally and cognitively. There's something called the story development phase after a death where the survivors piece together the story to make sense of it. Oftentimes we find that even within a family, members don't have the same story to explain what happened. They may make a different meaning out of the loss as a result. We see that a lot when a parent dies. Siblings have different stories about what happened and what it meant to them and what it means to the family as a whole. After you create that story, you really need to be able to tell it in some way, whether it's writing it out as a memoir or putting it in your journal or talking to a friend or talking about it in therapy. The confiding part of story development is extremely important, psychologists have found, for people's adjustment over time. You have to be able to share that story in some way, whether it's with one person or the public at large.

Zibby: Maybe this is why I post on Instagram all the time when I'm going through grief. I'm so mortified by it now. That's how I process everything. I know I'm not alone in that.

Hope: Social media gives us an opportunity to confide. Even if we're doing it with a long list of strangers, we are still putting it out there in the world in some way and getting some feedback.

Zibby: I was also so interested in your book that you went back to the women who you had interviewed years and years ago for your Motherless Daughters first book. I loved the image of you rooting through files and being like, who can I google and find information about at this point? You reunited with, I think you said something like twenty or fourteen or something like that of the original crew and then interviewed them along with other people. What were your main findings?

Hope: That was something else. I felt like the Edleman PI firm for a while trying to track down these women. It had been twenty-seven years since I had first interviewed them for Motherless Daughters. A lot of their last names had changed. They had gotten married or they'd gotten divorced. A few of them had passed away. Some of them, I just couldn't locate. It wasn't really that sophisticated, to be honest. My private investigating firm was not really that high level. It was mostly Google and Whitepages and Facebook and LinkedIn. A couple of the women I had kept in touch with over the years. I was really young. I was twenty-eight years old living in New York. This was before the internet. I had found these people by putting an ad in the back of The Village Voice or word of mouth. I traveled to a couple other cities. These women had now dispersed all over the world twenty-seven years later. I had sat down with them one on one and taped the interviews. Some of the interviews went on for two, three, four hours, really extensive, in-depth interviews. Then I had to use portions of it in the book and kept in touch with some of them after the book came out. They were all pseudonyms in the book.

I couldn't not find, when I was writing The AfterGrief, any studies that had tracked people over decades also to see how their stories had changed and evolved. When I say we make a story of the loss to make sense of it, that story, it's always in motion. It's always in a state of evolution. We're going to reach a point in our development later when we're going to look back at those same set of facts and we really see them differently. New information might come in. We might meet someone that tells us something about our loved one that we didn't know that maybe changes our perspective a bit. I was really interested. How do stories change over time, stories of loss? There weren’t any studies. No studies tracked people longer than about seven years at the most. That's because it's expensive to have a study that lasts that long. It's hard to keep participants in it for that long. There are all kinds of scientific reasons why those studies would be difficult to maintain. I couldn't find anything that tracked people over decades. Then I remembered, oh, I have all these transcripts of interviews and tapes from these interviews that I did with the original Motherless Daughters. There were ninety-four of them. I managed to find about eighteen without doing too much work, a couple days up to weeks of searching for them. I located eighteen of them and was able to reach them through emails or through LinkedIn or through Facebook. I think seventeen of them agreed to be reinterviewed.

I reconnected with a number of them in person because they still lived in New York. I flew out to New York. I sat down with them again twenty-seven, twenty-eight years later, and the rest of them by Skype or FaceTime, always seeing each other. It was extraordinary. It was extraordinary to see each other again after all this time. I learned that their stories were very dynamic. Obviously, they changed a lot. Most of these women had been in their twenties and thirties when I first spoke with them. Now they had had very rich and full lives. They'd been married. Some of them had been divorced. Some of them had children or they were single moms. A number of them had lost their fathers as well by that point or had other major losses in their lives. I said, just as I had the first time, "I'm just going to ask you to tell me your story of mother loss. Start wherever you'd like. Tell me the story." The second time, I said, "As if we've never talked before. I want to see what your story looks like now or sounds like now." I asked the same kinds of questions I had the first time, but not leading questions. I was just asking them to fill in some part of it that I thought could be flushed out more. Then we sat down together or separately but together and looked at the original transcript and looked at the one that came several decades later.

It was really fascinating to see which parts of the story that had been so important to them when they were younger didn't even show up on the later version and which parts did show up almost verbatim because it had been important parts that they'd been telling over the years, so they were telling it exactly the same way. What really struck me, Zibby, was how many of them talked about that first interview as a watershed moment in their story. I think it was, for many of them, the first time they had been able to confide in someone. They had been carrying a story for all these years. People had told them, you should be over it by now. It's in the past. Don't wallow. Don't dwell. Family members maybe didn't want them to talk about it or had silenced them, in some cases very deliberately. It was the first time that someone said, I want to hear your story, and I want to hear all of it. I'm going to give you hours to tell it. Quite a few of them said, that interview was a real turning point for me. It was when I feel like my healing really advanced or, in some cases, really began because somebody wanted to hear it. I didn't have to carry it alone anymore.

Zibby: Wow. That must have made you feel really good.

Hope: It did, but all those interviews helped me as much as they helped them because I was on the same journey that they were. I was as thankful to all of them as they were to me. Those original interviews were really more of a conversation than a Q&A.

Zibby: If there is somebody who has recently lost a mother, or say in the last five years, knowing what you have researched about the aftergrief, what can they expect in twenty-some-odd years?

Hope: You can expect that there will be certain moments when that loss feels almost fresh and new and painful again. That's because they might be experiencing it in a new way. There's a category of grief that I identified in this book that I call new old grief. That's when we experience an old loss in a new way. We can't grieve the loss of the person in this capacity until we get there. For example, I was seventeen when my mom died. I was thirty-three when my first daughter was born. There was absolutely no way I could grieve my mother's absence as a grandmother or as a resource to me as a new mom when I was seventeen. I couldn't even have those emotions when I was pregnant with my daughter. Although, I felt them coming. I really could only miss her that way and understand what she had lost when my daughter was there in my arms, healthy. It was sixteen years after my mom had died. Even after all the work I'd done, you'd think that I, more than anyone, wrote this book, have been traveling the world talking about mother loss, that I would have a handle on this. It turned out that, no, I was no different from anybody else. I was still mourning the loss of my mom as a new mom in a way that I couldn't before.

Then another big one, and this is a big transition for women too, is when you reach and pass the age your mother was when she was died. If your mom died young, most of us are going to do that. I've worked with women. I'm also a grief and loss coach. I've worked with clients whose moms died when they were twenty-nine, thirty-five. My mom was forty-two. This is young. Forty-two was a really wonky year for me. I was like, wow, I'm as old as my mom was. When I was seventeen, she seemed so old. Forty-two is not very old. Then I turned forty-three. That was like, whoa, I'm older than my mom got to be. My inner relationship with her and my inner representation of her really needed to shift, especially as I got even older and then I'm looking back at her. I think women who have lost their moms just a few years ago can be aware that that's ahead. I'm creating resources, and there are resources that exist. I'm actually working with people now who help create rituals to offer free templates for a way to honor reaching your mom's age and passing it and also for acknowledging death anniversaries every year, particularly significant ones like the first, the tenth, the twentieth, almost like wedding anniversaries.

We have ways to acknowledge wedding anniversaries, like a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, but we don't have any way to acknowledge, wow, my dad or my mom has been gone for twenty years. That's a long time. I want to do something. I don't know what. There's nothing in the culture that we can do. If you have a culture within American culture, there may be some kind of ritual that your family might perform like a Day of the Dead celebration or ceremony. If you're Jewish, you can light a candle. Once we're done with a funeral in American culture, there really isn't a whole lot of ritual for us to connect with, to maintain those connections, and to bind the past, the present, and the future for a sense of continuity and allow that person to walk forward with us in a meaningful way. I know there are a number of initiatives happening now, especially in the COVID era, to help people through these transitions. My hope is that they will extend to the larger culture over time.

Zibby: I hope so. I feel like there's such a lack. You're so right. Everybody at some point or another -- I guess maybe not every single person. Almost every single person goes through losing somebody at some point in their lives. Yet there's not that much. There are experts like you. There are obviously books on grieving and things like that, but that's not enough. Your message, your ability to scale it, is so important, and having things be a part of life as opposed to -- we all know, okay, we go to a memorial service. Then what? There should be a hundred percent more goalposts and ways that the community can help you too. I'm not sure if I mentioned in an email, but we lost my mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law both within six weeks this summer. I have my husband, who's thirty-eight, and my sister-in-law, who's thirty-three, they’ve been living with the kids and me this whole time. We've been going through this process together. Especially in COVID times, there's no community that you can be a part of. It's all virtual. Maybe a cousin will check in on text, but it's not like what you had before. There are so many, many, many people who are going through this right now, not just for COVID, but in so many ways. What would you say to that, not my story itself, but the probably millions of people who can't be with somebody who's grieving or feels they're doing it more or less alone?

Hope: I know. This is so important right now. It's really important. A hundred and twenty years ago, grieving was a social phenomenon. People came together. The village gathered to mourn the passing of one of their own. Our facsimile of that now that has survived 120 years of Western culture is the funeral and the eulogy and the memorial service and, in some cases, the celebration of life. It doesn't extend much beyond the event itself, but it's something because it brings people together. They sit and they listen to stories. They share stories. They even laugh about warm and funny memories that they can share. It's much harder to do that now. I think the Zoom funerals and Zoom memorials don't really fulfill the need that especially the mourners have for human companionship and human touch. That said, they do offer an opportunity for people who can't physically get to a funeral to still be part of the village, people who can't afford to fly on short notice or can't leave children or can't leave work and otherwise would not be able to take part in the ritual. My hope is that we get back to in-person gatherings and memorials as soon as we can, as soon as it's safe, but that we also livestream them so that the people who can't make it can still be part of that village, and the village is more expansive. Our villages now are dispersed. They're not all in the same geographic perimeter. Our villages are spread out all over the world in some cases. We want to find a way to bring them together.

People have asked me or said, we've had to postpone the funeral or memorial for our loved one who died, and not just to COVID. People are dying of all other causes as well in the past nine months. They’ve said to me, what do you think? It may be another year before we can do it. I said, doesn't matter. Where's the law that says the celebration of life has to occur within the first week or two after a death, or the first month? There really is no written guideline or mandate that says we have to do it within a certain period of time. Again, I think we have let go of our idea of the calendar structure and say, we'll do it when we can. It's really important. I say, if you can't do it for another two years, people are still going to remember your loved one. They're still going to have stories of the person who died. We're going to find out what it means to us to come together a year or two later instead of doing it right after. We might find, in some ways, that it's actually richer and more meaningful. I don't know because we haven't tried it yet. I think it's really important that we do it no matter how long we have to wait.

Zibby: It would be nice if each year on the anniversary or the birthday or the death or something that there was an event or something that marked it, not just for you. I think it's great, all you're advocating for and all the rest. Tell me a little more about your work as an author on top of a researcher and coach and grief counselor. Now you're doing all these live seminars. I saw on Instagram you have a new six-week course or something coming up. Tell me a little bit about that and then also when it is you managed to fit all of this into your life.

Hope: I do offer online courses and online support groups now. This is kind of an offshoot of the retreats that I was leading in person. Claire Bidwell Smith, author, therapist, friend of yours, and I in 2016 started offering live retreats for motherless daughters who really wanted to meet other women who could understand their experiences as adults. We started in Ojai, California, with twenty-three women. That grew into a whole company that I'm now moving forward. Thirteen retreats have been done, one of them virtually, twelve of them in person. We do ones for women who were children and teenagers when their moms died. I've done one for women who were just in their twenties, a couple for women who were adults when their moms died. The needs of those groups are very different. When COVID came, I started moving into more online offerings. Yes, I do offer some online courses. I also do individual and group coaching.

How do I fit it in? My kids are older now. It would've been almost impossible to do it when they were younger at this level because not having had a mom after the age of seventeen, I was really committed to being a mom who was present and gave my kids as much of me as possible. They're now twenty-three and almost nineteen. My youngest one just started college in September. I'm able to dive more fully into these kinds of offerings. It just happened to coincide with COVID and this incredible need for grief awareness and grief education and grief advocacy. It is a little bit of being at the right place at the right time. Maybe I should say the right place at the wrong time because nobody would've wanted to think of COVID as the right time, of course. There's an expanded need for this work. I'm just trying to fill those gaps.

Zibby: Excellent. Do you have any advice -- I'm going to ask two questions -- any advice to aspiring authors, particularly of your type of work that involves a lot of research and more analytical thinking mixed with memoir, and also to those who have a relationship with grief that they continue to wrestle with?

Hope: In terms of writing, I write straight memoir too, short pieces and long form as well. This book is a hybrid. This book integrates my own story with research. I became, in a way, someone who tried to decode my own experience and understand it. It combines research, interview, and personal writing. I find it difficult to maintain a really solid writing schedule, and so I binge-write. I'll go away for four or five days. I'll take everything else off my calendar. That's how I've written most of my books. I've just had to binge-write them. Same thing for this book. The majority of this book was written between February and June of this year because COVID took everything else off my schedule. I just sat down at my dining room table day after day after day and worked on the book. I can multitask like a ninja, but I can't always focus on writing to the extent that I need to if I've got three or four other things going on. I tell people, whatever works for you. If you read that Stephen King gets up every morning at five AM and writes for four hours and you feel somehow less than because you can't do that, don't worry. My circadian rhythm is to write late at night. I do my best writing between five and ten PM. I can do all my administrative tasks during the day and then write between five and ten or, like I said, I just go away and binge-write. Again, it's a matter of finding what works for you.

When my kids were young, I couldn't always go away for four or five days. Occasionally, I was able to negotiate with my husband at the time that he could take the kids from -- he'd pick them up from school on Friday. I would drop them at school Friday morning. I'd take off. There was a hotel in Ventura, California, an hour and fifteen minutes away, which was just far enough away that I could get home easily in case of emergency, but they would not be dropping by for dinner if the kids were crying that they missed me. It was the perfect distance. They knew me there. She's back. The writer's back. I went one weekend every six weeks, maybe, from a Friday morning until a Sunday at three o'clock. I got a late check-out. I would bring food into the room and eat all my meals there and just sit at the desk and write. That's how I wrote Motherless Daughters. That came out in 2006. My kids were five and nine when that book came out, so they were probably four and eight when I was doing those weekends there. That's what worked for me. Now I have more time to write, but other, more responsibilities. Your other question was about people who were having trouble with their grief. Was that it?

Zibby: Yeah, or just still trying to get a handle on it.

Hope: There's no right or wrong way to grieve. There's only your way to grieve. If someone says, I'm having trouble with grief, I first ask them, what are your expectations of what grief should look like and what it should be? Let's deconstruct those at first and see if you're holding yourself to a standard that maybe isn't one that you can meet for various reasons. A lot of people, especially men, think they haven't grieved because they haven't had these outward displays of emotion that we normally associate with grief. Some women, too, have said to me, I don't feel like I cried enough. I don't think I grieved my person. Someone says to me, I never grieved the death of my mom or dad when I was young. I said, what do you mean by you never grieved it? They say, I didn't cry enough. We want to look at that. I say, I firmly believe that we grieve to the best of our ability at any point in time. Maybe at that point in time your ability was very limited because you didn't feel safe or, if you were a child, you didn't have adults around you to help support you in your grief. Maybe you had other survival needs that were more pressing at that moment and you couldn't focus on your own emotions because you were taking care of other people or you had a demanding job that had to support your family. Men often say to me that they feel they didn't grieve because they didn't cry.

In fact, there's so much more research now about the difference between how men and women grieve. I see this among spouses. I see it among partners and siblings. They don't really understand each other because men don't typically have these -- or the masculine way of grieving, I should say. About fifteen to twenty percent of women grieve in a more masculine style. Fifteen to twenty percent of men grieve in a more feminine style. The feminine style is reaching out and talking, emoting, showing your emotions. The male grief patterns are more about working through your feelings by doing, which is why some cultures have the women sit in a room with other women and cry for days in a row and have the men plan the funeral. Working through the details, for the men, is a way that they are processing their emotions around grief. Men tend to want to fix things or solve problems and work through their grief that way. Women don't always recognize that that's what the men are doing. Men often don't understand why the women can't pull things together and be more instrumental and need to talk about it all the time. It's just different patterns of grieving, but they're both working through their feelings of loss.

Zibby: Wow. Hope, thank you so much for chatting today. I'm going to share your episode far and wide for those many people out there who need it. Thank you for all the research and the personal stories and everything that went into The AfterGrief and for creating this concept so that people who are continuing to be sad for the rest of their lives know that there's a reason why and they're not doing anything wrong.

Hope: I just want to also emphasize this doesn't mean you're going to be grieving for the rest of your life. It just means you're going to be remembering and thinking about it occasionally, missing that person because they were really important to you. They will continue to be important to you.

Zibby: Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time.

Hope: Thank you so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Janet Evanovich, FORTUNE AND GLORY

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

Janet Evanovich: My pleasure. Fun to be here.

Zibby: Tantalizing Twenty-Seven, your latest book in the Stephanie Plum series, Fortune and Glory, congratulations on this one. Are you still getting excited when this is the twenty-seventh book in a series? Do you still get excited for pub day and all of that?

Janet: Yeah, I do. I usually get a little bit more excited when I can actually do book tour and go out and see everybody. This is a new experience for me, all this virtual stuff. It's fun to have it out there because that's why you write the book, so that other people can read it, especially for me because I think of myself as being the fun author. I don't kill any good people in this book, only bad people. I look forward to it.

Zibby: You might argue that killing people at all does not make you a fun author. Just saying. [laughter] There are some books where nobody dies at all. I read a lot about your background and how you got started and how your manuscripts were rejected and your romance novel career. I would like to hear a little more from you about how you became this powerhouse author of this hugely successful best-selling series in such an unexpected way if I were to tell you at age twenty that this is what would happen. Can you tell me a little more about getting started and how you kept the resolve to keep going?

Janet: I was this amazing overnight success that took twenty years. [laughter] I wasn't published until I was in my forties, which is amazing since I'm only thirty-five now.

Zibby: Exactly.

Janet: I was always the kid that could draw. I was not a big reader. I read comic books. I loved comic books. I still have a subscription to Uncle Scrooge. Being a writer was not something that I thought about as a kid or in high school or even in college. I was always a visual artist. Then I had a couple kids. I was at home. Painting just wasn't working for me. What I realized is that what I always loved about painting was telling the story about the picture I was doing. I loved reading stories to my kids. All of a sudden, it was this thunderbolt moment that hit me. God, maybe I should be telling stories instead of painting pictures. I had no background. I didn't know anyone who was a published author. I had very small literary background. I think I had English 101 in college. It took me to a long time to learn my skills to figure out where I wanted to go. I started out writing bizarre books because as a student in the Douglas College Art Department, I had teachers like Roy Lichtenstein and big guys that were really kind of out there. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted to say, who I was, where my voice was. The difference was that after about ten years of sending out stories and not having any success at all, I realized that it wasn't enough for me to write for myself. I love to write. I enjoy it. I get up in the morning, and I go into my own world. It's the world's best job. You sit in this chair at five thirty in the morning. I go into some place. It's almost like being an actress and assuming another role. What I realized is that if people weren’t reading it, it wasn't any fun for me. It wasn't enough that I was enjoying it.

When I realized that what I wanted to do was to write for other people and not for myself, that just made a huge difference. I started looking at audience and what books I was reading. I was a young mother. I knew about love and relationships and happiness. That was where I started, with the romance novels that I was reading. Actually, after about three years of that, I needed money. By then, my kids were looking at college. My husband has a doctorate in mathematics. He has a good job, but we were competing with two-income families. I was a stay-at-home mom. I really needed to get smarter about it. Not only did I have an audience to read my books, but I could help out with the family income. That was when I turned to the romance novels. Halfway through that, my son was at Dartmouth. The romance novels were not making enough money. I wasn't reaching enough audience. It was a very finite audience that I had with romance novels. I decided to go into crime fiction. I had little snippets of adventures and crimes creeping into my romances anyway. I had a hard time with three hundred pages of relationship. It wasn't my thing. There were many things I loved about romance. I tried to bring them over into the mystery genre. I wrote romance for, I guess it was five years, did twelve books, and then took a year off and tried to retool and figure out where I wanted to go.

Decided that it was in crime fiction. What I was going to do was I was going to take all the things I loved about romance and squash it into a mystery format. That's what I did and sold the first book to Scribner. Had a fantastic editor, a really nice lady. She thought she was buying a mystery. It wasn't much of a mystery. It really was kind of a sexy book with some romance in it and some characters that I found interesting. I knew I wanted to do a series, so I set it in New Jersey because that's what I know. I gave my heroine, Stephanie Plum, a lot of my own history so I knew where she was going. I put it in Trenton. I spent a lot of time in Trenton. My parents lived just outside of Trenton at the time. That first book did not get me a lot of money, but it got me a start. I didn't sell a lot of books. Mostly, I sold them to my relatives and my neighbors. By the second book, it started to pick up. By the third book, I was learning a lot about myself and a lot about where I wanted to go and a lot about my audience. The audience is the best part. I love my audience.

When I have signings and I go out and I get to meet everybody, it's amazing. Whole families will come out to say hello to me, four generations and husbands. The husbands say things like, "I finally read one your books. I really liked it." They were shocked because their wives had been reading me and had been laughing in bed. Finally, they took a look at it to see what it was too. I probably answered about fifteen questions now. Once I get started, especially about how this all happened to me -- I'm the American dream. My grandparents immigrated to this country as indentured servants, domestics and factory workers. My dad and mom were the first to graduate from high school. My dad worked in a factory. My mom was a homemaker. I was the first to graduate from college. We didn't have money for me to live in a dorm. I commuted. I was a commuting student at the state college in New Jersey and was an art student. Hate to admit this on air, but sort of supported myself with some shoplifting of groceries and art supplies when I had to.

Zibby: Oh, no!

Janet: Here I am. It's amazing. This is a fantastic country. I'm the proof of the opportunity that you can have. I've been very lucky.

Zibby: It's so nice to hear you say that because I feel like the American dream right now is this elusive concept. I feel like it's so much less attainable than it used to be. It seems so impossible to achieve it. It's so nice to see an example, particularly from a woman who's saying, look, I can do this, and so can you. That's amazing.

Janet: Absolutely. I think it's a lot of baloney out there that the American dream is not achievable. I think it's more achievable than ever before. It's that people are trying to tell us that it isn't. We don't hear about all of the successes. We have a tendency to have people out there with a lot of the negatives. That not a bad thing because we need to broaden the scope of what's available to people. My gosh, we have so many opportunities in this country. Look at the standard of living that we have and the standard of living that we can have, that we can bring out into even more people, the healthcare that we have, the fact that in such a short amount of time we found better ways to treat COVID. We have a vaccine right on the horizon. Unheard of. Just amazing. What I find really, really fantastic is that when COVID hit -- it just did terrible things to the economy. There are a lot of people out there, all those little small businesses, that are just dying. They're just struggling to survive.

At the same time, there are a lot of people that took the American spirit and said, you know, I could make some money out of this. I'm going to start making masks. I'm going to do takeout in my restaurant. I'm going to deliver curbside. There's still a lot of opportunity out there. Maybe it's not as available to everyone, but it's there. I'm a real believer in the American spirit. I just think it's there. People are going to find it. You have to persevere. It took at least ten years to get published. I started writing in my thirties, all this bizarre stuff, sending it out. Nothing. I started collecting rejection slips. I started out in a little shoebox. Then it got to be a bigger box. I had rejections that were written on bar napkins in crayon. It was bad. After ten years of rejections, I gave up. I went out and sat on the curb in front of my house with this big box and cried my eyes out and burned every rejection. I wish I hadn’t done that because I would've liked to have had them now. The next day, I borrowed a suit from my sister, and I went out and I got a job with Manpower. I worked at Manpower for -- I don't remember. I think it was maybe three, four months.

I had given up. It was my dream, and it was crushed. Because we needed the money, I just didn't feel like I could keep going anymore. After work, I went to pick my daughter up at an ice-skating rink. She was ice skating. I was standing there waiting for her. My husband and my son came up. They put their arms around me. They said, "Your editor just called." This was a hundred years ago, and I can't think about it without getting very emotional. There was my dream. My dream came back. My life just started over. I made two thousand dollars on that first book. The very next day, I went into the office with a box of donuts. I left it at the office. I took my hairspray and my extra pair of shoes, and I went home. Right there, I just quit. I just walked right out. Then I didn't sell another book for a couple years. We sort of had to give up eating oranges to make ends meet. Eventually, I started getting multiple-book contracts. Here I am.

Zibby: Wow, what a story. That's so amazing. It's so inspiring. When you were telling it, I had goosebumps everywhere. That's amazing.

Janet: It's been good.

Zibby: Congratulations. The role modeling of all of it is just great. It shows if you just stay with it and you keep doing something that you love, it will pay off in some way, shape, or form. Yours was a particularly big payoff. I will grant you that, but still. Tell me a little more about starting with the romances and how, for instance, your son at Dartmouth felt knowing those scenes were out there. I read that you said somewhere that you stopped writing romance when you ran out of positions to put your characters in. [laughs] Tell me a little more about that and being a mom and having all this sexualized content out there.

Janet: It wasn't that sexualized. As a romance writer, it was a very positive genre, which is one of the things that I love about it. It's one of the things that I think is such a great reflection of women. We're nurturers. We try to be positive people. It was a positive genre. The romances ended happily. They were about basically good people. I didn't have to kill anybody in a romance. When I started doing this, initially, my family was a little embarrassed. They were like, oh, god, Mom is writing this book. My husband, "Is this a reflection on me?" It turned out that it was actually a very good reflection. My son was very popular in college. He told everybody his mother was writing soft porn. [laughter] That was good for him. My husband found out that he'd be in the elevator and women would come in and would want to talk to him. I noticed that his ties started getting a little flashier. He really milked it. When I eventually moved over into the mystery genre and I started with Plum, then he could tell everybody he was actually Ranger and everything was patterned after him. My family really got into it. We all work together now. We're a little family business.

Zibby: I saw that. You have Evanovich Inc., right?

Janet: Yeah.

Zibby: What does everybody do? How do you make sure to work together in a seamless way?

Janet: We all have different talents. At the same time, we're sort of like water. When there's an opening, we flow into it. There's not a lot of ego involved. We actually like each other. We pretty much live together. We move around like a little herd. In the beginning, it was that -- my daughter went to film and photography school, Brooks in California. She had some aspirations of her own and then decided that maybe that wasn't who she was. At the time, the computer was just starting to really have an influence. She said, "You're sort of halfway supporting me while I'm doing my thing in San Francisco. Why don't I set up a website for you?" She started my very first website. It became a full-time job for her because she turned it into this entertainment site, really helped to grow my audience, made it fun, made it a lot more fun. That was initially what she did. My son is brilliant. He took over family finances. He had some legal experience, so he was the contract reader, as was my husband. Everybody edited. They were all my first editors. They still are. As we went along, they sort of modified their roles. Until now, my husband is still editing. He's still reading contracts. He keeps track of foreign sales and that kind of thing. My son and my daughter are doing more creative things. They're still my editors. They edited me for so many years that they picked up a lot of writing skills. My son has been working as a coauthor with me. He actually has been a coauthor for longer than people realize.

When books would come in and they weren’t exactly in my voice and they just needed some extra help, Peter and Alex would jump in. They would do some writing for me because I had a pretty heavy schedule just doing original writing. They really did a very heavy editing job for me for several years. Now they're branching out. They're doing their own thing. Alex is in charge of everything that is on the computer, all my media. She interfaces with publishers and publicists and my agent. She's really the one that says, "Your fans aren't going to like this." She always toured with me in the early years. She was the one who read the emails. She was the one who got in the lines and talked to people when I only had a couple minutes. When I was doing the big book tours, I'd have two, three thousand people out at a night. We'd start signing at five thirty. We'd end at two in the morning. I was moving along pretty fast saying, "Hi. How are you? Would you like your name on this?" Then they'd have to move along. Alex was there. Alex got to go down the line, and she got to talk to everybody and made friends and exchanged Christmas cards and found out what they thought and what they liked and what they didn't like and what they wanted to see. She's just been huge in the development of my career, the Plum series, some little side series that we've done just to give me some variety for fun. I'd like to clone myself so I could do more of those side series.

Zibby: It turns out that the secret weapon in your whole crime series is your children. That's pretty awesome.

Janet: It's true.

Zibby: First of all, how high are we going to go with this Stephanie Plum series? Do you have a number? Are you stopping at thirty? Is this an indefinite amount? Then also, what's the next project to come out after this one?

Janet: No, I don't have a number. As long as I'm enjoying it, I'm going to keep doing it, and as long as people out there are buying the books. The difficult thing is these two guys in Stephanie Plum's life. There's this tendency, you want her to make a choice. You want her to have babies and live happily ever after just like I did. That doesn't work in that series. The fun of it is the adventure, the not knowing, the choices that she has, and the life that she can have that the rest of us really can't. It would be scandalous if we did. I don't have any set number for her. The next book that's coming out is one of the coauthor books. It's The Bounty. It's in the Fox and O'Hare series. It has a new coauthor. I've had a lot of coauthors. I'm like death on coauthors, I think. I don't know how James Patterson does it. I don't know how he keeps these same great coauthors. It goes on to infinity. My coauthors are with me for -- they're all friends, is part of the problem. Lee Goldberg, I knew him for years. Same with Phoef Sutton.

They come on board. We have some fun. We write a bunch of books. Then they say, "I think I'm going to go be a big shot in television again." They were all A-list sitcom writers. I have a new coauthor on this book. The last coauthor in the Fox and O'Hare series, my son jumped in and did. He did that at the last minute. That book almost didn't come out. Peter said, "Okay, I can do it," and stopped his life for about two and a half months and helped us get the book out. This book is in another new direction. That comes out in March. Then after that, I have a spinoff from this book that's out there right now. It's about a woman, Gabriella Rose. Whenever I do these little miniseries, I always like to do something that -- the heroine is very different from Stephanie Plum just to give to myself a break so I can have some fun too. What I find is that when I go into some other woman's head other than Stephanie Plum and then I go back to Plum, I always know a little bit more about her because of what I've learned about this other person. That book should come out sometime in the summer. It's about Gabriella Rose.

Zibby: Very exciting. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Janet: If it's important to you, just don't give up. Keep trying to do better. Keep learning. Join a professional organization like International Thriller Writers, Romance Writers of America. That really helps because it allows you to get a peer group. It allows you to learn some things about agents and the process and publishers. Basically, you got to keep your ass in the chair. You really do. I like to tell people it's like a job. If you took a job working at 7-Eleven and they expected you to be there for three hours at seven o'clock at night, you'd do it. You'd get there. If you had a cold, you'd show up anyway. You'd take some pills. Writing is like that. If you want to do it, you think of yourself as a writer. When people say, "What do you do?" you say, "I'm a writer. I'm not published, but I'm a writer." Every day, if it's only for a half an hour, you sit down and you write because that momentum is very important. It's important that you believe in yourself even when you have ten years of failure like I do. Look at me. I was rejected for ten years. I was not giving up. Until you make my ten-year mark, don't worry about it. Just keep going.

Zibby: And be ready to forgo oranges for as long as necessary, I guess.

Janet: You have to do what you have to do.

Zibby: Do what you have to do. Thank you, Janet. Thank you so much. It's such a privilege to chat with you and hear the backstory and all of your encouraging remarks from the American dream to your first novel to everything. Thank you for sharing your time with me and with my audience.

Janet: You're welcome. It was great being here.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Janet: Bye.

Alexandra Elle, AFTER THE RAIN

Zibby Owens: Hi.

Alexandra Elle: Hi. Hello.

Zibby: Hi. How are you?

Alexandra: I'm good. How are you?

Zibby: I thought we were waiting for naptime to kick in. [laughs]

Alexandra: She went down sooner than I expected, so that's great. My husband is now wrangling our two-year-old. Our twelve-year-old is upstairs on Zoom school. We should have some good chat time now.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. I have four kids, so I totally understand how it goes. None of mine are that little anymore. Thank you for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." As is evident, you really don't have time to read or to write. [laughs] I feel like I need to whisper.

Alexandra: I have to make the time.

Zibby: You have to make the time.

Alexandra: No, it's okay. You're in my AirPods, so it's okay. I can hear you up close.

Zibby: Very smart. The twelve-year-old you mention who's upstairs, is that the one from the book who was -- is that the one who was in kindergarten when you decided to -- there was something you decided when she was in kindergarten, to change your job.

Alexandra: Yeah, to quit my job.

Zibby: To quit your job and all that. So now she's twelve.

Alexandra: She's twelve now, yes. Our two-year-old is Ila who is the -- I talk about our TTC journey with her, and then Maximus is our third daughter who was our surprise, at the end of the dedication.

Zibby: Amazing. Can you please tell listeners what After the Rain is about?

Alexandra: Oh, my goodness. After the Rain is my fourth collection of work. I've been joking and saying it's like my big girl book because while the other books are very near and dear to my heart, After the Rain really gives this memoir experience of the different lessons that I've learned throughout motherhood, throughout my life so far. I've been thinking about the words to put with, what is After the Rain? For me, it feels like a collection of hope and a collection of camaraderie. I want people to be able to see themselves in the pages no matter how different their experience is from mine, but just knowing that there's this collective healing that's possible throughout the book.

Zibby: It's amazing. You talk a lot in the book about how you yourself have overcome trauma. That's, in part, how you found all the tools that you needed to get through your life and that you're now so generously sharing with the rest of us. You touch briefly on some of the ways in which you felt like you were not loved as much as a child, which broke my heart when I was reading, sitting on the steps and the gold flap of the mailbox while you waited for your dad and then he never showed up and how that broke your heart and made you feel like you were unlovable. Take me back, if you don't mind, to some of the experiences that you felt were really difficult for you as a child and made you not feel like you could love yourself.

Alexandra: I always had this on-again/off-again relationship with my biological father. I have not had a relationship with him for the past, I would say, seventeen years. It's been a very long time. In that regard, that's just been the norm. Mostly what I talk about in After the Rain is my relationship with [audio cuts outs] since she was my primary caregiver. She did the best she could with what she knew. Our relationship has come a long way. She's an amazing grandmother to my girls, an awesome mother-in-law to my husband. We are now at this stage in our mother-daughter relationship that we can really lean into our relationship from two women's perspective versus this mother-daughter dynamic. It feels really supportive. Also, good boundaries are in place for the growth of a healthy relationship now as a thirty-one-year-old woman. Growing up, she didn't really have the tools to love me, I would say. I'm able to see that clearly now as an adult. Instead of penalizing her or judging her for what she didn't do, I'm able to see that she had her own experiences, her own traumas, her own stuff that she was going through.

When we don't tackle those things, it's hard for us to love our children in the ways in which that we should. Becoming a mother, I knew that I wanted to -- I needed to love myself in order to give my then one daughter and now my three daughters the best of me. Self-love was definitely a bloom-in-process, I like to say, but also, my greatest teacher in a way because now I'm able to not only mother my children from this place of love and understanding and attention and presence, but from a self-mothering standpoint, which I find is really important. We don't often talk about how motherhood also gives birth to us in a sense. Being able to do that three times over now and really learning the different methods of care for self, I'm able to show up and care for my kids in a very different way and love my children in a very different way from how I was raised. That is really the greatest lesson in all of it. No matter the trauma I went through and the triggers and the hardship, what did I do with those lessons? It has spilled over into how I show up in my motherhood today.

Zibby: That's beautiful. I was going to get to your mom. I wasn't only going to talk about your dad. I promise.

Alexandra: I just don't have a relationship with him, so I'd rather not.

Zibby: I get it. It was just the disappointment. It was just that feeling of disappointment and sitting there. Parents always end up disappointing in some way or another. That was such a moment. Then your mom screaming at you in the car when you were trying to scooch away the day that she was in a bad mood. I get it. You're only thirty-one, oh, my gosh. I'm forty-four, and I'm finally getting to a place where I'm like, okay, maybe it's their issue and it's not directed at me.

Alexandra: It's not mine. Right.

Zibby: I feel like you have a full-on leg up on the world from a maturity standpoint, which is great.

Alexandra: It's been a long time coming. That's absolutely for sure. [laughs]

Zibby: I don't know. You still are ahead of most of the world in terms of that sort of self-acceptance and all that. What makes you want to share this? You've learned so much. You've reparented yourself, as a therapist would say. Why share it? Why give it to everybody else? Why not just go about your life? I know you love to write. You've been writing for your whole life and all the rest of it. What is about this message that you really want to just get out there, and why?

Alexandra: Community and letting folks know that they are not alone in their struggles and what they go through. I think it's really important to share stories that folks can see themselves in or that they can feel like, man, I'm not the only one who went through that. Man, I'm not the only one who went through something. Now I can be on the other side of that. That's the big messaging in After the Rain. What comes after the rain? The light comes. The rainbows come. The clouds part. We can see hope and resilience and triumph. Also, knowing that we're going to have stormy seasons in life. It's not just going to be after the rain and then, boom, we're just going to have these sunny days. No, as human beings, we move through things. Our storms are what teach us something. While a lot of what I share in this book is absolutely personal to me, it's also really pivotal to my growth and the type of woman I am, the type of person I am, the type of woman I continue to strive to be, which is one who is able to greet not only self with compassion, but others with compassion. To know that you don't have to pretend to be perfect. You don't have to pretend to have it all together. You can show up flawed on the page. You can show up flawed in life and still be worthy of moving through whatever it is you're going through. I think that that's really special and important. I find that a lot of times, we are chunked in this circle as women that we have to be strong and not have any traumas and not have any triggers. If we do, hush, don't say anything about it. That is not supportive to the collective to hoard these stories that have shaped us and maybe that have hurt us, but also that have shown us the benefits of healing and facing things head on.

Zibby: I totally agree. I do feel like, and I don't know about you, at least on social media, I feel like there's been a shift to people sharing a lot. Some people are still caught up with perfection. Here I am on the beach. Look, I'm so amazing. I'm like, I can't even look at this bikini right now. Other people, I feel like are really like, my husband just told me he's gay. Now I have to live with that. Here's how I'm crying on my pillow. I feel like there's been a shift to sharing the most intimate. I don't know. Do you feel like that? Not that your book is exploitatively sharing. It's a perfect balance. I don't know if you've noticed too, or just anecdotally.

Alexandra: I've noticed people's vulnerability being more accepted. I think that that's special. I do think there is a line in which we have to be mindful of the stories that we're sharing because, yes, they're our stories, but they are also other people's stories. I let my mom -- she read the first copy. I bookmarked every chapter about our story. I wrote her a beautiful letter. We had a really healing moment before anyone else got the book. I got my husband's blessing to share about our hardships from the fertility to the infidelity that we faced prior to getting married. We have to be very mindful of the stories that we hold in our bodies, but also other people's stories that we decide to walk into and tell. That is something that I find extremely delicate. It's not something I take for granted at all, especially as a writer knowing that I have multiple stories that don't just include me. It's not just about me. That goes back to my work as being really centered around community and how it's so important that we are mindful of what we say, how we say it, and what we share.

Zibby: Very true. How do you stay so mindful? How do you keep all of these principles that you espouse in the book that are so awesome? Then there you are trying to get your kids down for a nap. Life keeps coming up.

Alexandra: Life will continue to come up. [laughs]

Zibby: How do you keep it top of mind? How do you make sure that in the moment you're remembering all the things that you know deep down and you don't let it -- I know there was a scene at the beginning of the your book where somebody at your office said something super rude to you that I honestly couldn't even believe. You were on the street. You were trying not to scream back at him. You managed to pull it off in a very clever, awesome way, but you just wanted to scream and rage on the sidewalk. How do you pull it back?

Alexandra: How do I pull it back? I used to be really bad at pulling it back. It's interesting. I think it's important how we leave people and how we engage with people. Maya Angelou has a quote that's along the lines of, people will remember how you treated them. They will remember how you left them feeling. Even when someone is like that boss in that chapter, Change, that you're referring. I could've easily been just as awful back, but what would that have done? Nothing. It would've made me look like a jerk just like it made him look like a jerk. It's not worth the energy. Linking this to holding it together while in quarantine, while mothering three, while also being a wife, while also working from home, it takes a lot of practice and self-awareness. I know when I'm on edge. Everyone in the house knows when mom's on edge. My husband knows. He's home full time with me. I understand the privilege there. I'm able to literally step away and say, hey, I need a moment. All of this really requires being self-aware enough to name what we need and putting some of our baggage down and letting other people help us.

In motherhood, that can really get challenging because I kind of feel like sometimes we just get it done. That's what we do. We get it done. Also, our partners, if we are in partnerships -- in my position, my husband, he can also get it done. I have to be able to name what I need. I think that that's really special. That's how I'm able to keep myself together. I can be like, hey, I need five minutes. Hey, I need ten minutes. Hey, I'm going to go take a drive. I need to go run these errands. Then also recognizing that in my husband too. When I'm working all day and he's hands-on with the kids all day, making sure he's getting his time. It's just a community effort. Holding it together requires me to take care of myself so I can take care of others. I often say this in my work, self-care as community care. If we look at taking care of ourselves as an extension of showing up in our relationships, in our work, etc., then we're really able to find that balance. It's not always perfect. It's not always pretty. It's definitely a practice that's worth leaning into.

Zibby: I hear about self-care all the time. I feel like we need a new name for it. Self-care sounds indulgent. Self-care sounds like I'm kicking it and being selfish, almost, but it's not like that. It's essential. You have to do it. I feel like if there was a different name, maybe I wouldn't feel guilty doing it. [laughs]

Alexandra: I've just been shifting to taking care. Then also, self-care as community care is how I teach it when I'm teaching workshops and when I'm on my podcast and when I'm showing up in these community spaces where it does feel like self-care is a selfish thing. Audre Lorde says it best. It's not self-indulgent. It's a political statement at that, especially for women, to be able to even take five minutes to go pee in peace, to go wash your face, to take a second to get back into your body. It doesn't have to be a latte or a manicure or a face mask or a massage. There are these other means of refueling and renourishing that are also extremely important.

Zibby: It's more like baseline emotional regulation.

Alexandra: Exactly.

Zibby: It's getting back to basics. This is not an option. If you can't pull your emotions together enough to finish bath time, then you need to do something, versus screaming at the kids. I feel like so often those intense feelings, snapping -- even just loading the car up yesterday or whatever with all the kids and the dog and the bag and the this, I could feel myself snapping at everybody. I'm like, I'm losing my patience. Why? Where do we have to go so badly? We were just going home.

Alexandra: It's a balancing act. It's hard. It's not easy. It's not pretty. I know Instagram makes self-care look so beautiful, but it's really the nitty-gritty is when you're deep in it.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about writing this book. Tell me about how long it took and where you wrote and your process and all of that.

Alexandra: It took me a year and a half, two years, to write this book. I was eight months pregnant with our youngest when I turned in my manuscript. I remember my editor saying, "We will try to give you some time so you can be in postpartum." I was like, "I'm putting a boundary. After I have this baby, y'all cannot email me for like a month." It's just funny. We laugh about it. Not only was I writing this book, I was growing a baby. I was giving birth to two things simultaneously. I did a lot of writing here at home. I also had to get through. I kind of got stuck in the middle. It was really hard. My husband was home with our two. I went to a hotel, back when you could do those things, not in COVID. I went for a weekend. I just knocked it out. I remember feeling really, really accomplished that I was able to do that in a quiet place, in an unrushed place. Writing a book from home is really hard when you have kids. Our middle child, she was still very little. My two youngest are twenty months apart. It was very intense. I needed that time. To be able to go and finish in peace and in quiet was really amazing. It took a while. Then once I was in flow, it was just like, boom, here it is. Then by eight months pregnant, I was ready to turn in the manuscript. It was great after that.

Zibby: Wow. I love how you sprinkled in quotes. It's such a great book, inspirational. Even if you don't have time to sit and read every single word, your quotes, even just getting a quick dose every time you open it is just fabulous. And a great cover, which always helps everything.

Alexandra: Thank you for that. Isn't it beautiful? I love it.

Zibby: It's beautiful.

Alexandra: They did so good. It's so beautiful.

Zibby: It really is.

Alexandra: Funny story about the cover. We went back and forth on the cover, oh, my gosh. We finally got it to where everyone was like, "You know, I think the first one that we looked at was the one." It's just hilarious, the things you have to go through when the manuscript is done. You still have to get the little things together like the cover. Where is the gold foiling going to go? Is it going to be debossed or embossed? and all those things. Then you get it. It's like, oh, it was worth it. The one we first started with was the one that we ended up going with after like twenty other mockups later.

Zibby: Your first books, you self-published. Now you're in the traditional publishing world.

Alexandra: My first two books, I self-published. Then I was with a different smaller publishing house for Neon Soul and Today I Affirm. Neon Soul was a collection of poetry. Today I Affirm is a journal. Then I got picked up by Chronicle for this, for After the Rain and then a partner journal that's coming out. It's called Encourage. It's really amazing. Being self-published at first was definitely wonderful. I learned so much. I was able to build my audience and build my readership in a really authentic way. I'm four years into the traditional publishing world. I really love who I landed with for After the Rain. Chronicle is just -- they're wonderful.

Zibby: That's great. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Alexandra: Write the story. Just write. I tell this all the time to the folks in my journaling courses and who come to my workshops. Just write the story. Just put it on the page. Everything else will fall into place. Something that really supported me when I first got into publishing my work eight years ago was a friend told me, "Stop hoarding your story. You never know who's going to need your story." I remember thinking, no way. She was like, "Yes way. Just put it on the page." Since then, I keep that at the forefront of my mind, especially when I'm sharing things that are intertwined with adversity and uncertainty because we never know who needs our story and who will benefit from it. We're never alone in our struggles. I think that that's really important to center in our work.

Zibby: I'm literally writing it on a sticky to put on my computer right now. You never know who needs our story. I love that. I'm putting it right here next to you. That's great. Alex, thank you. Thank you for using your precious naptime moments to chat with me today. Thank you for your lovely, soulful book that I'm sure will help countless people out there. Thanks.

Alexandra: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care. Buh-bye.

Alexandra: Bye.

Sara Evans, BORN TO FLY

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

Sara Evans: Thank you for having me. I love this title.

Zibby: Thank you. I loved your book. I literally woke up really early one morning and took it outside and sat in my favorite chair with no one bothering me and read it cover to cover and loved it.

Sara: No way!

Zibby: Yeah. Usually, I'm interrupted. I have four kids. I'm usually interrupted all the time and things happen, but I just was able to do it, I guess because I got up so early.

Sara: That's awesome. What did you think?

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, I loved it. I really loved it. I have to say, I feel like I keep making mistakes because especially the parts about the parenting, I'm like, oh, no, I think I'm going against one of Sara's rules today. I don't have a napkin. [laughs]

Sara: Do not let them sit down and eat without a napkin. Otherwise, they’ll wipe it on their pants. Then you'll miss a grease stain and it'll set in their shorts and stay there forever.

Zibby: I know. I know. I know all the things you say are so right. Then sometimes I don't do them.

Sara: As long as you're not spoiling your kids to the point where people don't like them. That's the main thing.

Zibby: That's true. People still like them, I think. [laughs] There were so many things to talk about in your book and your career and how you built your life and your family and all of this inspiring, amazing stuff. What I was particularly drawn to was your whole blended family, perhaps because I'm remarried. I have four kids. I loved all the stuff you talked about about being a stepparent and how the role of a stepparent is not to act like a parent and how you say the press likes to think that you're a mom of seven, but really, you're a mom of three and a stepmom to four, and how there's such a big difference. I was hoping you could talk a little more about that.

Sara: That part was really important to me to write because having been a child of divorce myself and knowing how difficult it was when my father moved out and then he remarried -- he had a stepdaughter that was the same age as me. That was incredibly hard for me to know that I wasn't able to live with my dad and have him all the time, but this other girl who was my same age did. It was heartbreaking to me. My dad did not handle it right. My stepmother did not handle it right. Then they ultimately divorced. He remarried and had two stepchildren. Here it is, two other sets of families got to have my dad and I lost him at twelve because of their divorce. It's been one of the most painful aspects of my life, anytime I think about my dad and the way that I felt so abandoned by him. I really wanted to write about stepparenting.

I knew that when Jay and I got married, his kids would be having all of those feelings. Our dad is now raising three other children and living with three other children. He's going to be closer to them than he is with us. I really wanted to make sure that that was not something that they felt. I talk about how one of the things I did was get all their names embroidered on their pillows so that when they came to our house every other weekend and every other week in the summer and holidays, that they would know, this is my space, my spot, it's got my name on it. Having that visual for them, I just tried to do little things like that. Mainly, I never tried to be their mom. I wasn't looking to have four more children, raise four more children. I have three children. I never wanted to assume, I'm your new mom. When you come here, I'm your mom and you need to call me mom and act like I'm your mom. I really didn't want that. I wanted it to be exactly what it was. I'm married to your dad. It's my job to facilitate you having an awesome weekend with him.

Zibby: That's so nice of you. You should be the spokesperson for stepmoms.

Sara: I really should. I really could be. Also, I never had the situation of my kids because my ex-husband never remarried and my kids almost never see him and saw him. I didn't even have to go through that experience of having my kids be with another woman, but I was sensitive to that. It did bother me every time the press would try to paint this picture that I'm raising seven kids. How do you do it? I'm like, I'm not raising them. Their mom is raising them. Jay and I have them every other weekend. It was something that I didn't want to offend their mom. That was a tricky situation to navigate through. The main thing I did was just play sports with them and have fun with them. Also on the flip side of that, it's hard to be a stepmom because you don't ever, ever get the nod that the real mom gets. No matter how much you do for them or try to make them feel loved and try to let them know that you're not trying to take their dad, that your kids aren't trying to take their dad from them, you never will ever get the true nod that they give to their own mom, which is perfectly normal. But sometimes you feel like, wow, I'm doing so much and making such an effort and getting nothing in return. [laughs] There were those emotions too at times. Everybody, and especially the children, are innocent victims. The bottom line is divorce is just a very destructive thing, very destructive. You should avoid it all costs.

Zibby: [laughs] Too late for me.

Sara: Me too.

Zibby: And half the population, so I don't feel that bad, I guess.

Sara: You shouldn't feel bad. I'm just saying it's definitely something that should not be taken lightly and not be done quickly.

Zibby: Yes, I completely agree with you. It's really horrific. One of the other things in your book that I thought was so awesome was your complete ownership of the fact that you're athletic because so often, women just don't talk about that. You could either be some sort of a female athlete and then the athletes talk about that in their books, but somebody like you who's basically a rockstar, it doesn't always come out that, hey, you know what, I'm a really awesome softball player or I can play tennis really well or whatever. I just loved that.

Sara: Thank you. It's kind of a running joke because I do always brag about what a great athlete I am. It's funny because people tend to box you in. They think of me as being a singer, and that's it. You're a great singer. It's fun to sometimes say, I have other talents too. I absolutely love playing sports. I love to play tennis. I love to play basketball. I love to play softball. I was doing an interview about an hour ago. I talked about how I'm such a great athlete. The guy was like, "And you're very humble too." I'm like, no, I don't see it as bragging. Like you said, it's just an unknown fact that is fun to tell people about.

Zibby: That's not very nice. [laughs]

Sara: I know. I hate when people say that. Oh, and you're humble too.

Zibby: Right? Oh, my gosh, I think it's amazing. My little daughter is in here with me now, and she hears. It's great. I want to raise daughters who feel awesome about being athletic. It's really important to have role models who don't just sing. There are plenty of role models who are amazing in that regard. To do both, that's amazing. It's just great.

Sara: I find that a lot of athletes and musicians, they kind of are connected. A lot of times, if you're a great musician, you're also a great athlete. If you're a great athlete, you have a lot of musical talent. My husband is a former NFL football player. He's the most amazing athlete I've ever seen, but he also is very musical. He can dance so well. He has perfect rhythm. He can sing. I think there's something in the brain that says, my brain is telling my body, do this. You do it. Being a singer is being an athlete. I just went and got my vocal cords checked last year to make sure everything looks good. He was like, "Your vocal cords are pearly white. They look like the vocal cords of a twenty-year-old." He said, "You're basically a professional athlete because your vocal cords are a muscle. It's just like a throwing arm. Your vocal cords are doing something basically athletic." It's just interesting to me, the ties to that.

Zibby: Yeah, for sure. The brain is such a funny thing. I've found other things. I've found a lot of writers are also great photographers. There are all these things that kind of go hand in hand.

Sara: Exactly. Like if you're a makeup artist, usually you're an incredible painter and you can draw. All the connections there, fascinating.

Zibby: It's kind of not fair. It's like, really, your husband gets to be an NFL athlete and also all the rest of it? [laughs] Maybe he could've scattered those skills around to other people who can't do either thing.

Sara: But you know what? Those are really the only two things I'm good at, music and athletics. Also, I think I'm a great mom.

Zibby: That's great. I bet you are a great mom. You certainly, not shamed me, but you've given me great advice in this book that I feel like I needed to hear.

Sara: I'm so glad. What's the biggest piece of advice that you feel like you needed to hear? I'm interviewing you now.

Zibby: I know. Your whole keeping the kids humble doing chores around the house, not letting them just sit around, you go get stuff, don't let them be complacent, all of the -- like I said before, just even something as simple as a napkin or sitting down and having a meal and enforcing all of that. I mean, I know it all. It's just, I don't know. [laughs]

Sara: I can't remember who, what speaker it is, or if I got it from the rules that George Washington wrote. What were those called? Do you know what I'm talking about?

Zibby: No, not really. I don't know what the name would be.

Sara: It's a famous little book that he wrote as a kid. It's basically good manners and what to do and not to do, common sense. One of the things is, don't make extra noise or whistle or tap your fingers on something when you're around people because that's annoying. That's something that George Washington thought was important. One of the other things was, I think this is where I heard this or read it, but he said don't ever stop doing the things that are important. In other words, it is important to get a plate and sit down with a meal. Do things that are proper as often as you can so that you don't just totally make your life be so basic that -- not basic because I almost want to go back to the basics, I guess is what I'm saying.

Zibby: In your book, when you were saying -- I'll just read you a passage that was particularly relevant. You said, "So all you're doing when you refuse to discipline is ensuring that your precious child will have a hard time in life and in relationships. Why would any loving parent do that? Because they are being selfish, in my opinion. They are being lazy and parenting in ways that make them feel good, like letting your child play Xbox all day. Why do some parents do this? Because it's easier than making them stop." That's just so true. At the end you say, "When kids are little, they're going to cry. So let them cry. You're doing your JOB," all caps. "They will thank you for it later. When you don't push back on a child who's being willful or disrespectful, they sense that you don't care, and that is heartbreaking." Meanwhile, I read this, and my son was playing video games all day. Now he's back in school, so I feel better. I was literally like, oh, gosh. She sees that I'm now letting my kid [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Sara: It's so true. Your child is born this blank slate. It's so sad to me when you see parents who won't discipline their child, afraid to upset their child. They are parenting in ways that make them feel good. With so many divorced families in the world, there are so many divorced dads who aren't raising their children when they have them in the time that they have with them, who aren't raising their children the way that they would've. Now they're raising them out of guilt, out of, I don't get much time with them, so I want everything to be great. That's selfish on your part because the child did not ask to be raised in a divorced situation, and so you still need to be that dad. Be hard on them. Discipline them. Spank them if they need a spanking, all of those things. You can't parent in ways that just benefit you emotionally. You have to parent in ways that benefit your kids long term.

Zibby: It's so true. Another part of your story that I related to a lot was how you talked about your weight gain when you had kids and the pressure to get fit again and just your lifelong relationship with your body. Where do you stand on that now?

Sara: I'm not any better. I have a daily struggle with food. I feel like I really do have somewhat of an eating disorder in the sense that every time I eat, I'm mad at myself. Every time I eat, I guilt myself, even if I'm starving and just about to drop over from hunger. Then every time after I eat, I have this remorse and fear. I hope I didn't just gain weight. Now am I going to look fat for the rest of the day or tomorrow? It's a very unhealthy relationship with food and a very unhealthy body image. I work on it a lot. Since I wrote this book, this past May, both of my girls decided to sit me down and confront me about it. It was very difficult for me because I had to swallow my pride. I can't be a hypocrite. I talk in the book about, you have to apologize to your children when you've done something wrong. You have to not be afraid that that will undermine your authority because it won't. It will make them trust you more. They basically said, "You have to stop talking bad about yourself. You have to stop talking about, I'm fat or I'm skinny." They really got onto me hard. They said, "You have two teenage daughters. You cannot do that. You're beautiful. You're our mom. We only see beauty when we look at you. Every time you criticize yourself and criticize your body or criticize that something about you is aging, that hurts us. It's also probably causing harm to us psychologically, so you have to stop." I really have tried a lot. I try to be so mindful when I'm around them not to ever say, ugh, I feel so fat or I'm trying so hard to be skinny. I'm a work in progress. I'm not at all where I should be.

Zibby: There are no shoulds on this journey. It's a lifelong thing. Most women are struggling in some way, shape, or form. It's easy to say I should be over this by now, but that's not the way it works. I think that's amazing. It shows what kind of mom you are to raise daughters who would then sit you down to have a conversation like that. That's really self-aware and mature of them to be able to talk to you about it. Were you sort of proud of them at the same time? I feel like I would be hurt and proud.

Sara: I was. I was hurt. My feelings were hurt. I was tempted to be defensive. I wanted to defend myself and be like, you have no idea what it feels like to be in your forties. You guys can eat whatever you want and you're skinny. Both of my daughters are stunningly beautiful. They have very naturally skinny bodies. I wanted to be defensive. You don't know what it's like. I basically just was pinching myself the whole time. This response could mean everything. I responded with, "You're right. You're right." [emotional] I don't know why this makes me cry. Sorry, I'm probably just exhausted.

Zibby: I understand. Look, it's hard to admit our vulnerabilities. It's hard for our kids to see our weaknesses. Yet they're on display in front of them more than anybody else.

Sara: That's right. In some ways, I feel like I'm just entering this. I feel like I'm losing even more control of how my body responds to food as you age and your metabolism slows down. In some ways, I'm like, oh, my god, I'm just beginning this fight. Now it's a whole new fight. I used to be able to say, I'm going to starve myself for this video shoot so that I look great. It's hard because models and actors are rail thin, yet women are told two things at the same time. You should look like this in order to look like this model does in this Free People dress. At the same time, we're shamed for talking about our bodies. Oh, you shouldn't talk about that in front of your daughters because it might cause them to be anorexic or whatever. We're given two messages at the same time. It's not fair. If they really want to make young girls have a healthier attitude about their body image, then they need to use more realistic models for their clothes. They're not going to do that because the clothes won't look as good. It's a really, really tough thing to overcome and figure out.

Zibby: I couldn't agree more. I'm forty-four years old. I'm like, I used to be able to eat this cookie every night, or whatever it is I'm currently treating myself with. I used to be able to go a couple days without working out and nothing would happen. Now I'm like, huh, everything is tight today. Really? Just because of that same cookie? [laughs]

Sara: Absolutely. I feel like in all these years of not eating and then eating and not eating, my metabolism is really shot. Honestly, two days of overeating or even eating like a normal person can potentially undo any strides I've made and just make me feel totally fat. Again, it's a really, really tough thing. I don't know that I'll ever be over it. All of my best memories in life were times when I was skinny. All my worst memories in life were times when I was fat. That's how I divide it. It's terrible. It's crazy to think that way. When I'm skinny, life is great. I love clothes. When I'm skinny, there's no stopping me. I'm on top of the world. If I feel fat or I am fat, then I feel like a complete loser. I probably need therapy. [laughs]

Zibby: I could recommend a few people. I'm really interested in all of this and have had close friends and everybody really struggle with inpatient eating disorders, to be honest. In college, I worked at the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders and almost became a psychologist. Of course, I've had my own struggles with my own body forever. I'm not like you, I'm not on stage. How I look, who cares? I'm behind a microphone here. I don't have a public persona like you do, so it's totally different. Just as a woman, I'm kind of like, you know what, am I happier thinner? I'm pretty happy right now. I'm definitely not at my low weight. Maybe that's not the answer. Maybe I am going to be this way. Maybe now I'm thinner than I'm going to be. Maybe eventually I'll wish I looked like this. [laughs] I did this whole study a couple years ago for an article I was writing where I -- because my grandmother is still -- she's ninety-seven. Until a couple years ago, now she's starting to have dementia, but we would be having dinner and she’d be like, "Oh, god, I shouldn't have that cake. Oh, my gosh, do I look as fat as that woman?" I'd be like, "Gadgi, come on. Does this never end?" Then I started wondering, does it ever end?

Sara: I don't think it will ever end for me. I was raised that way too. My granny was always talking about, stay thin. Don't get fat. My mom would say, you're just ten pounds away from being famous. That, of course, was a joke. Have you seen Marvelous Mrs. Maisel?

Zibby: Yes, of course.

Sara: You know how she would get up every morning and measure her waist, every morning, to make sure that she had not grown an inch or gained any weight whatsoever? My weight and my body is probably what I think about more than anything all the time on a daily basis. It's not debilitating in any way, shape, or form, but it’s definitely distracting.

Zibby: We all have our things. Everyone has their things. All we can do is just work on it. It doesn't mean we're going to fix it. It doesn't mean that sometimes our innermost struggles aren't publicly showing. That's the thing with weight too. Maybe addiction or other things, you can hide. Weight, if you're having a bad week or three or eight months or whatever, people see it.

Sara: Exactly. Being in front of the camera all the time definitely adds to it, and having to be on stage. If I see a bad picture of me on stage, I talk about this in the book, it can ruin my day. I'll never forget -- I'm sitting here with my manager right now. One time, he and my stylist and I were on the tour bus. This Country Weekly magazine came out with a photoshoot that I had done and an interview for the magazine. They didn't give us final approval on the pictures. One of the pictures in there was absolutely terrible. It was from the back. I had on really tight jeans, so I had back fat. It was so devastating to me. They both couldn't really grasp why. I think even my stylist kind of laughed about it. I went back to the room in the back of my bus and sobbed. I sobbed in my bed because I was so embarrassed, so embarrassed, by that.

Zibby: I think that it's so important to be talking about this because here you are, we started off talking about how great you are at sports and how athletic a body you have. You're so good, your vocal cords and your athleticism and your singing. You have all these amazing skills and things your body's given you. Yet a little thing like a bad picture -- I understand why it gets to you because I feel the same way. I get it. It's just such a shame that so many of us feel this way, especially given all you've accomplished. I feel like so many people out there would be like, if only I could be Sara Evans for a minute. Here you are looking at one picture and crying. It breaks my heart, honestly. What do it mean to be a success? What does it mean to be a successful woman? All that stuff.

Sara: There are definitely different aspects and different levels. Your life is like a big circle. You've got all these points to your life and then all the stuff in the middle. That is just one aspect of my life. Overall though, honestly, I'm incredibly grateful for having been given this talent to sing and this life that I've had. My children are the biggest blessing in my life. I am incredibly grateful. Again, like I said, it's not debilitating. It's just something that will probably always be a part of who I am. I want to be skinny, and that's it. I think so does the world, so do ninety percent of the women in the world. I felt it was necessary to talk about in the book to say to other women, I get it and I'm right there with you.

Zibby: That's amazing. It's great. I'm so glad that you did it and that you're opening up the conversation. It's really, really important. In addition to all your other stuff, you've written this great book. It's a really great book. It helps people relate and feel less alone and all the rest of it. Having written the book, would you have any advice to aspiring authors out there?

Sara: Oh, gosh. I don't know that I'm qualified to give advice to an author because I can't even imagine writing an amazing novel. I recently just read East of Eden again. I've read it like four times. I can't even imagine the talent that it takes to do that. I would just say, with an aspiring anyone going into anything, my biggest lesson that I've learned in life is that you have to be fully committed to something and willing to work very, very hard. Also, you have to surround yourself with great people, people who truly understand you and get you and love you and want to support and advance your career, but at the same time understand who you are as a human being and what your priorities are. Whatever you aspire to do, make sure you connect to really great people.

Zibby: That's excellent advice. That's really great. Sara, thank you for talking. I'm sorry I made you cry.

Sara: Oh, it's fine. [laughs]

Zibby: I'm really happy that we got a chance to talk. I find your candid thoughts about this personally just super helpful. It's something that doesn't get talked about enough, really, especially for women our age. Thank you for opening up. Thanks for writing the book.

Sara: Thank you. This was like a therapy session. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Of course. It was my pleasure.

Sara: Have a great day.

Zibby: Bye, Sara.

Sara: Bye.