Lauren Fox, SEND FOR ME

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

Lauren Fox: Thanks so much for having me.

Zibby: I am excited to discuss Send for Me because this book is gorgeous and heartbreaking and just so great. It's so well-written. It was just really, really great. I loved it. I really loved it.

Lauren: Thank you. Thanks.

Zibby: Tell listeners, if you don't mind, a little about Send for Me and what inspired you to write it and what it's about and all the good stuff.

Lauren: All the good stuff. Short answer is that it is about a family, four generations of women, starting in Germany on the cusp of World War II and then jumping ahead in time to Milwaukee in the nineties. It's about family separation and the twin traumas of the Holocaust and that family rupture. I don't know if I think that there's a main character, but I kind of think of Annelise as the main character in the book. As the Nazis are coming to power in the 1930s, she is able to leave Germany with her husband and young daughter, but she has to leave her parents behind. The book is partly about her parents desperately trying to leave Germany and how she, in Milwaukee, is trying to have a life there and trying to bring her parents over. Then the contemporary timeline is about Annelise's granddaughter, Clare, who discovers a stash of letters in her parents' basement that were written by Annelise's mother, Clara, to Annelise as they were trying to leave Germany and how Clare, the granddaughter, is trying to live her life and trying to figure out how to pry herself away from her history and trying to figure out how to be in the world knowing her family's intense and traumatic history.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I understand that you actually found the letters. I shouldn't say understand. It's written in the book. You found the letters that your grandmother -- tell the whole story so I don't mess it up.

Lauren: The other half of the question is what inspired me to write the book. That is what inspired me to write the book. It's fiction. It's very much fiction. All the characters are sort of a mishmash of my family. I'm a fiction writer. I made them up, but the story is my family's story. When I was in my twenties, I found letters in my parents' basement. My grandparents had recently died. They had been living with us for years, so all of their belongings were in my parents' basement. I was going through them one day. I found -- I still remember this moment so specifically. It was a little brown box with a pink ribbon around it. In it were about seventy-five letters written on this crumbling onion skin paper. They were in German, but they were also in this German script. I can't describe it. It's like knife scratches on paper. It's just up and down. It's an old-fashioned German script that hardly anyone can still read. I found these letters. This moment stands out for me so vividly in my memory. I just knew that they were going to be important. It was almost magical. I just knew that these letters were going to be a key to unlock questions that I had had growing up.

I knew my family's history because I live in the world and I had learned about the Holocaust, but they really didn't talk about it. Trauma affects people in different ways. Some people process and talk about it. My family was so tight and so loving and so connected, but they just did not like -- my grandparents gave me little snippets of information throughout my life. I can count on one hand the number of times they talked about it. I was able to get these letters translated. It's kind of a process. I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I stumbled on a professor. He was in the German department. He had survived the war. He was half Jewish. He had survived the war in Berlin passing. That was a whole nother story. He took personal interest in my story and helped me translate the letters. It took us about a year. I would go into his office once a week with a couple of letters. He would read them out loud into a little tape recorder. Then I would go home and transcribe them. That is the inspiration for this book. It was really immersive. It was a really immersive project.

Zibby: Then you wrote in the letter in the book to readers that you tried to write it as memoir and then waited almost twenty years. Now you've come out with it as fiction. What was it like writing it as memoir? Now I want to read, by the way, the memoir version.

Lauren: No. [laughs]

Zibby: I don't want to read it?

Lauren: No one would read that.

Zibby: I don't care if it's good or not. I want to know more about your family after reading this. These were the actual letters, though, right, that you interspersed?

Lauren: Yes.

Zibby: How is their story different?

Lauren: It's different in so many ways. The emotional foundation of the story is the same. This is insignificant, but my grandmother's family owned a butcher shop. My grandfather was a cattle dealer. That's how they met. I've been a vegetarian my whole life. I was like, I'm not writing about a butcher shop. I placed it in a bakery instead. It was much more fun to research. That's not the significant way that the story is different. I always say fiction writers are like magpies just grabbing bright, shiny objects wherever they see them. It's such a weird thing to describe the process of taking a true story and fictionalizing it. In a world where there is such a thing as Holocaust denial, I felt a very strong obligation to tell this story, to tell it truthfully. I promised myself I would not change a word of the letters. In the process of reading them, transcribing them, editing them, every word of my great-grandmother's in my novel is true. Those are her words. Other than that, in order to get into my characters' heads I had to give myself full permission to imagine them. Basically, the long and short of it is the outline of my family's story is absolutely true. Then all the details are a combination of true and fiction and research.

Zibby: I'm glad you changed it to the bakery because those were some of my favorite scenes, and all different confections. Maybe you've already done this or whatever, but in conjunction with the launch of your book, you need to make all those things.

Lauren: Oh, no. I do not. [laughs]

Zibby: You don't?

Lauren: Not me. Someone else.

Zibby: Let me rephrase. You need to find all of those things and have them all displayed. The different confections that you referred to throughout the book, I want to know what they all look like.

Lauren: My grandma was a really good baker. My kids are like, "Mom, the reason your stuff doesn't turn out is because you're always like, oh, that won't matter." I did not inherit her talent.

Zibby: I know. I'm like, well, we don't have buttermilk. Let me just google and see what I can throw together.

Lauren: You can make buttermilk. I've done it.

Zibby: Yes, I've done it too. I made brownies the other day. We didn't have any vegetable oil, so I used avocado oil.

Lauren: That's not good. No. I would do the same thing.

Zibby: My kids were like, "Ugh, what's wrong with these brownies?"

Lauren: You're like, nothing, they're great.

Zibby: You got some extra healthy fat in there. Oh, my god, they were terrible. I threw them away. Some substitutions do not work. Like you, the urge to bake does not come with a lot of forethought. It's just like, let's do it right now with whatever we have.

Lauren: That's exacerbated by the pandemic. I'm not going to the grocery store, so let's make do with this rancid butter that I just found. [laughs]

Zibby: Totally. We'll just wait for the next delivery of food from FreshDirect in a few days. Okay, fine, you do not have to bake all these things now. I take it back.

Lauren: Thanks.

Zibby: No problem. What was it like writing this book? First of all, the words -- I dogeared all these different sections to show how great you are at even just describing things. Oh, gosh, when you were talking about the heartbreak with Annelise and Max at the very beginning of the book, this is just a scene where, in a teenage love, a guy decides he doesn't love someone. This is not that big of deal. Yet you write it in such a way. Let me read a couple lines. "Two days ago, she was a perfect composition of face and limbs and breath and heart. Now she's a ragdoll, lumpy, mismatched, stitched together, and stuffed with old cloth." Then she keeps going. Basically, she wanted to touch his hand, and he kind of pulled it away. "This moment is nothing, really. Her heart will mend. Even as she can practically feel it cracking, she has an inkling that it will eventually glue itself back together. Maybe it's even starting right now, the delicate process of repair. This is not a devastation like the ones that will follow, nothing like those great gasping winged monsters of ruin that will come later, the ones that will try to pick her up in their claws and fling her to her death. It's nothing like those, obviously. But still, years from now in another country with her handsome husband, this life irrevocably left behind her, she will remember it, the smell of coffee beans and cigarette smoke, the clink of dishes and the laughter drifting over from other tables, the sudden rearrangement of their relationship reflected in Max's face." So good. Let me find one from later. I probably shouldn’t. I don't know why I turned this down. Oh, that was funny about the polar bears. By the way, my daughter has a fascination with polar bears. I like when you said -- this is much later. You said, "How could you know the heart of your beloved before you married him? Courtship was a confection." I love that line. "Courtship was a confection. Crisis brought out the best in people or the very worst." Then you went on to say more. What a line. All of these lines. It's funny, when I pick up a book from Knopf, I know that it's going to be beautiful. I know the language. It's going to be literary and beautiful. I'm going to cling to every description of a detail. This was just so great. Tell me more about your writing. I keep looking because I kind of want to read another passage, but I can't decide.

Lauren: Now I just want to sit here and have you read to me from my book. This is weird. [laughs] It's very satisfying.

Zibby: I love this too. Let me just read this one passage. So interesting as we talk about men needing to be strong emotionally and this whole "man up" thing that people are finally rising up against, essentially. This was an ode to the tenderhearted man, which is great as I have some of those in my life. You wrote, "Julius knows he is tenderhearted. He comes from a long line of tenderhearted men, fathers who cry when they hold their babies for the first time, who tiptoe into darkened bedrooms just to touch the soft cheeks of their sleeping children, husbands who at times are filled with so much lighthearted gratitude and affection for their tired and faithful wives that they will, without suppression or regret, pull those surprised wives into their arms and hold them for a moment. Sternness is not in his nature. Discipline is not his forte. He has never tried to be something he is not." Beautiful. You know everything about this man now. It's great.

Lauren: That was easy for me. That was easy because I come from a long line of just that kind of man, my grandpa, my dad, really unusual men of that era, just so soft and lovely.

Zibby: That's amazing. Tell me about writing and your learning to write like this and your writing of this particular book and just how you craft your sentences and all of that.

Lauren: It's so funny because I think about this question while I'm writing. Of course, every writer is like, how will I capture this in the interview that is yet to come? I think about this all the time. Then also, I have no idea. There's some weird alchemy that happens. It's not like it isn't a ton of work and laborious crafting, but there's also just this -- it's the only time in my life when time goes by and I don't notice it, is when I'm writing. It's a weird thing to try to describe the process of writing, which I'm sure you know. Also, this story has been living with me for over two decades. I really gave myself permission and also just was so in the moment of this story. This is my fourth novel. More so than any of the previous three, I was so immersed in it. The first version of this novel was, as we said, a memoir. It was composed of lots of really, really short scenes, some of which were half a page long. I really gave myself permission to try to craft the sentences. I spent a long time on the sentence level part of the story. That carried over to the novel. My last three novels were much -- I wouldn't say they're lighter because the last one I wrote is about a woman and the death of her best friend. It's not like the subjects were lighter, but my writing style was a little more contemporary and light. This one, I just really allowed myself to write it the way I wanted to write it and craft the sentences with as much time -- my last book came out six years ago. It took me a long time to write this book. I don't know if I can describe it on a more granular level because in some ways, it's just a distant memory.

Zibby: That's okay. Where did you like to write? Did you outline it? How did you structure the story?

Lauren: I always outline because it gives me this probably false confidence. I feel like if I outline the plot, then at least I know step by step where I'm going. I'm free to change it, but at least I have a map. I forgot the first part of your question. How did I structure it?

Zibby: Also, where did you do it? Were you at where you are right now at this desk, or were you somewhere else?

Lauren: Exactly. Right here at this desk. Also, back in the days when my kids were in school, not upstairs in their bedrooms in school, I had the house to myself from eight AM to three PM. That was my writing time. I could just walk around. My floors were very clean because I would sort of Swiffer and think, just wander around the house, pace and walk and think. A slightly messier version of what you see is where I write.

Zibby: Swiffer as ultimate writing aid. I like that. Ode to the Swiffer, essay coming next. [laughs] How old are your kids?

Lauren: They're eighteen and thirteen, so they're all grown up now, kind of.

Zibby: I have a thirteen-year-old upstairs and two other ones also in school, so I get it.

Lauren: That's really fun.

Zibby: Really fun. [laughs]

Lauren: They're old enough to do it on their own, but it still sucks.

Zibby: Yeah. Are you working on anything else now?

Lauren: Just Swiffering. No. I am not working on anything else right now. I think it was Rick Moody who said writing a novel is like burning down your house. You have to rebuild from the ground up. I have a couple of ideas like tumbleweed floating around in my brain. Right now, not much else. This one was such an exorcism for me. Because it's my family's story and because I sat with it and it lived in my head and my heart for so long, it's really weird right now to feel like, what's after this? I have no idea.

Zibby: That's okay. What did your family think about this book? It's, in part, your whole family's story.

Lauren: My brother's just reading it now. It's been radio silence on the other end, so I'm eager to hear what he has to say about it. My mom has read it three or four times. She'll be like, "Honey, I'm reading it again. I'm crying again." My parents are just like, what a great job you did tying your shoe. They would support me no matter what. My mom and I talk all the time, but not so much about this. I think she feels really pleased that I've taken on this project. I think she feels like our family story has been honored in a way by the writing of this novel. I hope she feels that way.

Zibby: It's true. It has. All these lost stories, time is going by. What's great about this book -- I read a lot of Holocaust-era stuff, as most Jewish people do/are, and also just readers in general. I find this time period very -- I'm drawn to it. I keep trying to understand it. I never will. I'm like, it must be different. They must have felt different. The thing about this book is you're like, no, nobody felt different at all. It was just like as if we were there. You write about it, even little things like the objects. There's one part of this book where Annelise is feeling guilty about it, but even mourning her chandelier or something like that. When so much has been lost, how can she mourn the beautiful things that she used to have in her life, or a special carpet or anything? Her life before was very much like lives today, all the details you had. That's one of the things I found that set this book apart, is the detail, you're crawling on your knees feeling the carpet fibers type of detail versus, life was fine when I walked back and forth to the bakery. That doesn't sound right. I've read a million great other books. I'm not trying to say anything. There was just something about how real it felt and how it could so easily be right here, right now.

Lauren: I'm thinking a couple things as you're saying that. One is I came to this book when it came to light that families were being separated at the border and that children were being put in cages. I was like, oh, this is still so relevant. How is this still so relevant? I think that the fact that it's such recent history and we're still trying to -- it's a futile attempt to try to figure it out, but that's what this book is, an attempt to process it. The past is still with us. It hasn’t gone away. I thought a lot about those physical details because our lives are made up of those domestic moments, the lines of a vacuum cleaner as you vacuum your rugs and the beautiful lamp that you have that has a crack down the middle. Our lives are made up so much of those physical details. Those really weren’t any different. I did so much research on this time period. Really, what it comes down to is it was just our lives without the technology.

Zibby: I think about even the ashtray with the two dogs with their backs together, oh, my gosh. I feel like now I've seen that. If I saw it in a store, I'd be like, oh, that's that one.

Lauren: That's the one. Somebody said fiction writers aren't any more insightful than anyone else, they're just really good at observing. I actually feel that way. I'm just looking at stuff and seeing weird things. That's my writing process. [laughs]

Zibby: There's also this inherited trauma which people talk about and which comes, obviously, from not just Holocaust-era survival stories, but from many ways that people have had family members go through things or pass things down. When there's something around you even if it's not spoken about, what does that do to future generations? Here, even when you talk about -- now I'm forgetting the name of the granddaughter.

Lauren: Clare.

Zibby: Even the fact that Annelise's granddaughter, Clare, goes through this whole moment where she's going to weddings and feeling left out and wishing, how do you find the love of your life? and all of that, maybe there's something to the heaviness that she doesn't even realize she has that she's carrying around with her and that's informing everything. What do you think?

Lauren: Absolutely. I was reluctant to write the present-day character because, weirdly, it almost felt too easy, that part. The inherited trauma, I feel that. It's kind of hard to describe because it's so much in the air you breathe when you inherit this kind of history. I'm just going to pivot and talk about my personal life because so much of me is in Clare. I'm super close to my mom and very strongly feel this obligation to take care of her in a way. I used to joke when I was in my twenties that all I wanted to do was move back to Milwaukee, have a couple babies, and just hand them straight over to her. Of course, I wasn't joking. That is what I did. There's a feeling when you inherit this kind of rupture that you want to write a new story of your own. I tried to piece this together for years. What part of my psychological makeup is whatever? What part is just me? What part is what I was given? In some ways, it's the same for everybody. What's the difference between who you are and who your family is and what they gave you? Maybe that's just intensified for people who inherit a particularly difficult history. I wondered it for years. Was I just depressed, or was I feeling this familial, generational trauma? I guess it can be both. I still don't really know. I just think the question is really interesting.

Zibby: Me too. I feel like it's hard to get around. It's in there. It's just hard to sift out, if we use our baker's analogy, as we turn that little flour thing. That's as close as I'm getting to baking today.

Lauren: Thankfully.

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Lauren: Whenever I'm asked that question, I have the same answer. I say it to myself all the time. Look up from your phone. Look around. Pay attention. I'm always head down looking at my phone too like we all are. I often wonder what the next generation of writing is going to look like because I feel like the most important thing to do is to pay attention to the world and be really just wide open to it, eyes and ears and all senses. Look up. Pay attention. This book has been a part of me for over two decades. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Work as much as you can. I don't write every day. I would love to say that I do, but I can't. I don't. As much as possible, put your butt in the chair even if it's terrible. Often it is, but the writing process, it's not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be work. You have to do it every day. Well, you don't have to do it every day, but you have to do it as much as you can.

Zibby: All good advice.

Lauren: And read. Read so much. I've heard people say, I'm a writer, but I don't like to read. You can't. You have to read. You have to be a part of the conversation with other writers and other readers. That's my favorite. I'll take an hour during the day and just read and be like, nope, it's my job, I have to, as you well know. [laughs]

Zibby: I do that too. I'm the same way. I'm like, yeah, sorry, I'm just going to sit here.

Lauren: It's work.

Zibby: It's work. Do you have a genre you like the most?

Lauren: Right now, I'm reading a lot of historical fiction because those are the conversations I've been having. I was never particularly drawn to it before, but I'm loving it now. I love contemporary fiction. I'm so Catholic in my taste. I have one book in my office, one book in the living room, and one book upstairs. I'll just read wherever I am and whatever is good.

Zibby: I'm the same way.

Lauren: I know you are.

Zibby: I've now made this into my work or whatever, but I've been like this forever. There's always a book [indiscernible]. It's very comforting to know that no matter where you are in your own life, you can escape into someone else's in a moment's notice.

Lauren: Completely. You'll never be bored. You can tune everything else out.

Zibby: Bored, lonely, forget it.

Lauren: I know. It's a secret. You're never bored or lonely. Why doesn't everybody know that?

Zibby: I know.

Lauren: My kids are like, "I don't like to read." Okay. It's their rebellion.

Zibby: I asked my son who's six and is obsessed with the iPad because obviously with COVID, that's what happens, I'm like, "You used to like to read last year." He's like, "Yeah, but it's not as entertaining." It kind of broke my heart. How can a graphic novel even compete with the bells and whistles of his video games?

Lauren: Just pretend you don't care. Just act like that's fine. Then he'll be like, maybe I should read.

Zibby: I do restrict the time somewhat, so I'm hoping that -- I don't know about you, I've never wanted to force reading on my kids because I don't want it to seem like one of those things. I never want to be like, now you have to read, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know.

Lauren: No, I don't either. How can you? My kids, they don't do anything I say anyway, so that wouldn't go over. [laughter]

Zibby: Good point. Very good point. Lauren, it was great chatting with you. Congratulations on this beautiful novel. I'm really excited for you. I hope it finds a home with lots of people because it is quite different, I feel, than the widely written-about time period. I feel like this book is different. It really stands apart. I hope people delve into it and meet your lovely women.

Lauren: Thank you so much.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Lauren: Thanks. You too.

Zibby: Bye, Lauren.

Lauren: Bye.

Helen Fisher, FAYE, FARAWAY

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

Helen Fisher: Pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: How are you?

Helen: Fine. I feel like I know you because I've just watched a few of your podcasts the last couple of days.

Zibby: Thanks for preparing. [laughs]

Helen: I love your bookshelves in the background with all the color coordinated.

Zibby: Thank you. What is behind you? What is that? What are you counting?

Helen: This lives here. I love it because when I have Zoom meetings, people do comment on it. Over time, it gets colored in. This is a grid that I use now when I'm writing a novel. I know that at about eighty thousand words, I know that I will be near the end. This starts off as a blank grid. Every time I write a thousand words, I color a square in so that I can see myself making progress.

Zibby: I love that.

Helen: It just helps. Although it says the end makes eighty thousand words, this bit was never there. It was always eighty thousand. The actual end was here at 102,000. I finished it last Friday.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Amazing. Congratulations.

Helen: Thank you. What a relief. I loved writing it. It's just nice. When you get started, you feel like, yeah, I'm getting there. Then just one square at a time. That was the most exciting part of my day was getting the colored pencils and coloring a square in. Monday to Friday when I'm writing, I have to write at least a thousand words. I have to color a square in. Then as I got to the end, you can see there was four thousand on that day. You get that momentum towards the end where you think, I've got to get it out.

Zibby: Wow. How many days did that take? Were they consecutive days? Do you work weekends?

Helen: Actually, I was trying to work out how long it took me because I was planning to start this in September when the kids went back to school. I think I wrote a little bit towards the end of August. Essentially, that was about three months. I finished on the 30th of November, but that was finishing a read-through as well. I think it's about three months. It was good. If it was Monday to Friday, I had to do at least five thousand words. Some weeks, I was doing ten thousand words because I was hitting two thousand a day.

Zibby: This is an ingenious system.

Helen: You see, now and then, I can't see where I've got [audio cuts outs]. I had two days there where I wrote three thousand on the first day, then three thousand on the next day. Then it was one thousand. I didn't beat myself up because I'd already hit my quota. It's so hard to keep going sometimes. That's just taking that one chunk at a [audio cuts outs].

Zibby: That was an amazing way to start off this podcast because I usually ask for advice at the end. This was the best advice ever right off the bat. I love it.

Helen: I actually saw a grid like this on Twitter when I first went on Twitter. I don't know who put it up there. Somebody had a little grid. I thought, right, I need a grid like that, just that way to take one step at a time. It's quite useful for pretty much anything you do that's a project that's quite a long time.

Zibby: I just actually found a flip chart of paper stashed away in the kids' stuff. I literally said to my son, who's turning six, I was like, "Should we just throw this away?" Then I was like, how can I throw away perfectly good paper? Where I am going to put it again? What are we going to use it for? Now this is great.

Helen: You've got the flip chart paper, but have you actually got the flip chart, the thing with the stand?

Zibby: Yes.

Helen: Good. They're brilliant for Pictionary and stuff at Christmas.

Zibby: Ours actually, if you pull it off, they have Post-it sticky so you can pull it and stick it on the wall.

Helen: Nice one. Love it. We love our stationary things, don't we? I love anything.

Zibby: Yes, totally. I'm the same way. So your book in the US is called Faye, Faraway, but it is not called that in the UK. Tell me about that and your frustration, perhaps, with the toys and what we call them here versus where you are.

Helen: It was never anything I thought about. This is the proof in the UK. It's Space Hopper, as you know. This is my first novel that's been published. I didn't have an agent or anything. I was writing it because I wanted to write something. I just called it The Space Hopper. It was a little bit of a, what should I call it? Anything. I picked that. If I knew then what problems it causes when you get your heart set on a title, I probably would've just called it Book. [laughter] It was called The Space Hopper. Then my agent said, "Let's perhaps change it to Space Hopper." When it was picked up by a publisher and then the US were interested -- first of all, the UK side did want to change it. We went through all sorts of different ideas. One of the reasons it needed to be changed was because -- I don't think Americans know what a Space Hopper is. Do they know what Space Hopper -- no. I didn't really know that. I am half American, but I was very young when I moved here. I didn't realize. I was googling it thinking, we'll just call it the American version of the Space Hopper, but that was Hoppity Hop. I was like, we can't call it Hoppity Hop.

Zibby: Oh, yes, Hoppity Hop, those little things you bounce -- yeah.

Helen: In England, Space Hoppers are iconic. They represent the seventies, practically, or seventies childhood. I don't think in America that Hoppity Hop has the same relevance. For Americans, was...

Zibby: I remember having one in the seventies, but not everybody, maybe. I don't know.

Helen: We just thought, well, we won't go with that. We'll change it so that we've got a title that works across the pond both ways. The flip chart was full of names, different ideas. They were flooding in, the different names, the different options. Some of them were like, eh. Some of them were like, yeah, that's okay. Some of them, we were starting to be a bit brutal with each other. "Don't like it," that sort of thing. [laughs] In the end, we came up with something. I think it was Twenty Questions for Jeanie Green. We settled on it, or sort of settled on it. Then I had in meeting in London with my editor and another colleague from Simon & Schuster over there. Every time the book was mentioned, they said Space Hopper. I was going, Twenty Questions for Jeanie Green. They were going, Space Hopper. I said, "Why do you keep calling it Space Hopper? We've had our tears. We've put it to bed. We're changing it." They said, "The thing is, everyone in the office keeps calling it Space Hopper. It sort of stuck." They then decided that we would have it Space Hopper over here and just something else in the USA. I think the preference is to have it the same name everywhere. On this occasion, they just decided that it was a really strong, iconic word and image to have in the UK, strong enough to keep it. Then Faye, Faraway, which it's called in America, has got a very different feel to it, I think. The cover that's going to come out does actually have a Space Hooper on the front. Have you seen it? There's a girl. She's a bit blurred. I love that little nod to the Space Hopper. That's the story behind the name of that.

Zibby: I found it so interesting because how you market a book -- they say not to judge a book by its cover, of course, but your covers and names both make it feel very different in both places. I'm glad you told me about the backstory and all of that. Either way, it's great. I feel like Space Hopper is sort of a double entendre, but it's fine. Faye, Faraway is still intriguing.

Helen: I know what you mean. I have to say, whilst they both give me a very different feeling as well, I love them both. I love both the covers. I love both the names. The Faraway is a reference to The Faraway Tree. Do you know The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton? Again, an English writer, quite iconic here. She wrote about a million books. Growing up in England, Enid Blyton was everything that I read. As a child, I loved her books. There's a book called The Faraway Tree. It is mentioned in the novel. Faye, when she goes back home, sees this book on the shelf.

Zibby: Now that we've established the different tones and titles and everything, let's talk about what's in the book and the content of it which, by the way, I cannot stop thinking about. I did not see any of that coming. I keep spinning around in my head and going back to the beginning to see how it all works. It's thought-provoking and amazing. It was so cool. I love how you did the whole thing. I read somewhere that that wasn't even your plan at the beginning. Is that true?

Helen: I didn't know how it was going to end at the beginning. I don't think I'd be able to write a novel like that now because I like to know the destination, at least, and then find my way there, but I didn't know. What happened, I was at a friend's house. She was there with her teenage daughter. She said, "Tell us about your novel." I said, "It's about this." Then the teenager girl, Megan, she was going, "Then what happens?" I told her the next bit. I didn't want to bore them, so I didn't carry on. She's like, "No, no, then what happens?" I told them the whole thing up to where I had written it. I was about two thirds of the way through or maybe three quarters of the way through, maybe not quite as far as that. I was chatting to them. I don't want to give anything away. It was a bit like, I'd love to do maybe this. I'm driving home. That's where my characters, that's when they come to life and they start doing things, when I'm in the car on my own. Driving back home that day, I thought, oh, my god, I think I could do that. I didn't put my foot down. I didn't speed because I don't do that, but I certainly sped up with my writing. I just couldn't stop then. I was really worried I'd get hit by a bus before I got the ending down. I was really happy with the ending. I felt that it worked. Oddly enough, it's almost like it was lurking because when I went back, the things that make it work were sort of there anyway. A lot of them were there anyway. I was quite pleased. They do things on their own, the characters in there. They know what's happening before you do sometimes.

Zibby: It's true. Wow.

Helen: Thank you. Thank you for liking that because I'm quite proud of that ending.

Zibby: It's great because I feel like it's hard sometimes to keep people's attention. I hear this all the time from busy people asking me, how do you get to the end? It's great when there's a plot that -- I didn't know there was going to be anything special at the end. It just made me want to keep reading anyway. It was really enjoyable. Also, even from the very beginning -- I just want to read your opening sentence and maybe a couple other passages. You said, "The loss of my mother is like a missing tooth, an absence I can feel at all times but one I can hide as long as I keep my mouth shut, and so I rarely talk about her." So sad. I just wanted to know -- I'm sorry to even ask this. It's probably none of my business. Did you lose your own mother? Is that where this plot is coming from? No? She's around?

Helen: My mom's still alive. She's eighty. No, the physical losses of parents are none of mine. I do have friends who lost their parents when they were kids. That's where the nugget of the idea came from. When you write about loss, which I had never done before -- in fact, when I was writing this, I had the idea for the story and I didn't really latch onto the fact that it was about grief and loss really until afterwards because I just wanted to get the story down, the plot. Sometimes the grief got in the way a little bit. When I wrote the first draft, I was a bit like, and then she cried and they move on. They’ll get it. I sort of did that. I left the grief out a little bit. When I went back and I had to work on it, that's what I had to work on. When the grief and the emotion needed to be there, it actually dropped out of the -- when I first wrote Space Hopper, I didn't have an agent. I scrapped all my money together and I sent the manuscript off to an editor. When she came back, she was really positive, but she said that. She said, "The thing you need to work on is when the emotion is supposed to be higher, it just drops off the page." I start telling and not showing. It's almost as though I've gone, ah! I can't deal with the grief. I had to face that head on. I dealt with loss from a personal perspective because I didn't ask my friends how they felt about it. I didn't delve into their personal feelings of what it was like to feel loss. I have done that with the new novel that I've just finished. I have really looked at grief face on. I avoided it in Faye, Faraway and Space Hopper at first. No, it's not my loss. My parents are both alive.

Zibby: Now I have to ask about your next novel now that I have the visual of how many words you've gotten done and all of that. Facing grief head on, so what is the plot of your next one, if you can share it?

Helen: I don't know how much I can share, actually. This was a two-book deal. This is still under contract with Simon & Schuster. I will tell you the stage I'm at because it may end up being changed. The stage that I'm at is I've finished and I've sent it to beta readers. I only sent it a week ago to them. They’ve all come back. They’ve all finished it. I was really pleased. It's been really positive feedback. It doesn't really mean anything ultimately because, of course, agent and editors have to like it, but I've had really positive feedback. The central character is a young woman who loses her leg in an accident. She's a very talented sculptor. She lives in Cambridge. She's got good friends. She's very cool. She's gay. She's a boi lesbian. She's just a great character. She's very funny and cool. She lost her parents when she was young. There was a lot of grief to deal with because there was not only the leg, but there was the way that grief -- actually, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about this. One of the podcasts I watched when I was trying to see what you were like --

Zibby: -- Uh, oh. [laughs]

Helen: Is it Hope Edelman?

Zibby: Yes.

Helen: She wrote something.

Zibby: The AfterGrief.

Helen: The AfterGrief. She was talking about parents and how and you lose a parent, that grief never goes away, but it evolves. Then there are days when it's really hard, and days where you're sort of getting on with life and it doesn't impede too much, and other times when it's just terribly difficult. With my character in the new novel, she carries her grief, again, a bit like Faye in Faye, Faraway. She carries it, but she's not walking around -- you wouldn't know. You wouldn't know she's grieving, but she carries her grief. Then when she has this loss, this physical trauma, grief from the past -- it's just too much. It's a loss too far, really, to deal with without her parents being there. There are a cast of characters who are there for her. A bit like in Faye, Faraway, I like nice people in my novels, quirky and unusual, yes, some of them, but generally, good people. I don't think that's unrealistic because they're the sort of people I have in my life. I'm not surrounded by nasty people. I am grateful for that. I've tried to do something similar, that cast of loving characters that we can hopefully get that heartwarming feeling off.

Zibby: What do you think it is that makes you drawn to writing about grief?

Helen: I've thought loads about grief in the last few months because I was asked to do a webinar in the summer called How to Write Grief in Fiction. I was like, "I don't know how to do that." She said, "But you wrote Space Hopper. There's a grieving woman in it." I thought, oh, yeah. Well, I don't know how to write it. If it's worked in Faye, Faraway, in Space Hopper, the grief, some of that was, either it came a little bit naturally or I got a little bit lucky. When I was asked to do this webinar, I did lots of research. They said to me, "You do a webinar on how to write grief in fiction." I was googling, how do you write grief in fiction? [laughter] I don't know how to do it. It was really eye-opening. Of course, I did what you do at the beginning of something. You say, I'm not the expert, but don't let that put you off listening. I found out some really interesting things that are helpful to me. I'll tell you all those things that were so helpful to me and that have really helped with writing this.

When I wrote Space Hopper, like I said a minute ago, I don't think I was drawn to the grief. I think I was repelled by it. I really found it hard to touch it because it was like touching an electric fence. I had to go near it in order to make things happen in the book, but I really didn't want to touch it because it felt like it was going to hurt. I did have an emotional time in terms of writing about the grief in Space Hopper between mother and daughter just because of what I tapped into to try and make it work. I don't know how many people do this. When you're writing and you're trying to feel it, I'd be at the keyboard going, [sigh]. I'd be trying to feel it and trying to tap in, trying to remember what it was like to feel hurt or feel abandoned or feel betrayed and try and tap into that. I think you've got to be willing to feel the hurt yourself in order to get it down authentically. Otherwise, how are you going to do it? You can't pretend. It's a bit like pretending you like a Christmas present. You've got to really pretend you like it. Otherwise, they're never going to believe you. With Space Hopper, I wasn't drawn to grief. I just didn't think about it. It was a side effect. I was interested in the other parts of the plot. I'm more interested in it now. I've been reading it to my son. I've felt much more removed from it, so I've been able to look at that part of it. I'm rambling now. What am I talking about?

Zibby: I love it.

Helen: Ask me another question. Move on. [laughter]

Zibby: There's another line I wanted to talk about. You said, "I realized I knew nothing about this woman even though I loved her with all my heart." I underlined it as I read. So often with our parents, we feel like we know them, but we have a side of them. It's perhaps carefully chosen, perhaps not, but it's a side nonetheless. There's so much we don't know about our parents. Now as parents, there are things that my kids might not know about. I hope they're not listening. Nothing specific. Nothing too revelatory in any way. There is this sense of, can you love someone wholly if you don't know all of them? I don't know. It just raised some question marks. I don't know if you gave that line any thought or it was just a throwaway, but it made me pause.

Helen: I give every line a thought. I mean that. I really think about every line. It's interesting, that one. I've sometimes been with my mom, and then one of her friends will turn up. I'm watching them going, who are you? I'm looking at my mom thinking, you're never like that when you're just with me. That more than the grief, I'm quite drawn to the fact that you present yourself in different ways to different people. I think parenting is the strongest version of that. We feel like we know our kids or they know us because we're around them so much. I know that I have friends who I am a completely different person around compared to other friends. I guess with parents it's the same. I don't know if there's a generational thing as well. My parents would've wanted me to think that they had always been good and never stepped out of line. My daughter asked me the other day if I'd ever skived off school. Skived, is that an English...?

Zibby: Like cut school?

Helen: Yeah, cut school. I did once or twice, but it was horrible. I said to her, "Yeah, I did. Then I found myself sitting on the other side of a hedge outside the field and feeling really weird and lonely. Then all my friends were in the classroom. They might be bored or annoyed, but they weren’t on their own. I felt really out of place. I just tried to get back into the school." It was quite nice to be able to share it. I think we do that a bit more these days. We think it might be useful to tell our kids that we weren’t perfect because then they can let us know when they’ve done something wrong or whatever and not feel so intimidated. Then you don't want to be a really bad influence. Yeah, my mom skived off. I'm going around smoking. [laughter] There's a line to be drawn, isn't there? I think it's better to talk more. I'd have loved to know my parents a little bit better when they were younger.

Zibby: How old are your kids?

Helen: My son's ten. My daughter's twelve. How old are yours?

Zibby: I have thirteen-year-old twins, boy/girl. Then I have a seven-year-old and an almost six-year-old.

Helen: You've got four kids. Wow. Lovely.

Zibby: I do. They're all doing homeschool as we speak. So far, we haven't been interrupted, so it's a miracle.

Helen: They're not going into school at the moment?

Zibby: No. Hopefully, after the...

Helen: Over here, the kids are going to school, which is a bit different. It's good that you're able to homeschool so well. It really wasn't working here.

Zibby: It's remote. The teachers are on. Not to say I got the supplies and all the rest of it. I thought this book was amazing. I love your personality. I'm so excited for what's going to happen when this book comes out. I just had to get that out. I want to know, aside from the flip chart which I am obsessed with, and I'm going to go start one as soon as we get off, and aside from the motivation and the regular writing, what advice do you have to aspiring authors who are trying to write a novel that gets picked up and that you start -- I know you started writing later in life and this is a dream come true. Maybe tell me a bit about that and then go into your advice. Then I'll leave you alone. [laughs]

Helen: No, don't leave me alone. I'm loving it. The first thing I wrote, I was about forty-four. A friend had said to me, "Why don't you write something?" I'd had this idea. I gave her a chapter every week. This isn't Space Hopper. This is something I tried before and I ended up abandoning. I wrote the whole thing. I was just very pleased to have finished it. Then I abandoned it because I'd had the idea for Space Hopper. I've got a couple of bits of advice. One of them kind of relates to this. Have you heard of the author EL Doctorow and his famous quote which is writing a novel is like driving home in the dark? You can only see as far as your headlights will allow, but that's enough to get home if you just keep doing a bit at a time. When I write, I kind of know what I want to achieve in that bit of writing. I write that. Then in between then and writing the next time, I think about what needs to happen just for the next little bit. I do think, for me, it's useful to have a plan of the whole novel first. Taking it a step at a time, that's where that comes in too. If I can take it one step at a time and fill in one bit at a time and gradually see myself getting there, that really helps.

When I sent Space Hopper out to agents, I got a lot of rejections. I started sending out in October 2018. Between October and December 2018, I had about fourteen or seventeen -- I can't remember how many it was -- rejections. Honestly, they ground me down. I had just got to December. I thought, I can't take this anymore. If I can't do it with Space Hopper, I can't do this. I can't do it better than that first time. I just can't go on. Then quite a strange thing happened. In the October that I started sending out, my ex-husband's fiancé who I get on well with -- haven't always got on well with, but we do get on well. She loves books. I didn't realize at the time quite how much she loves books. She said to me, "Can I read your novel?" I was like, "I don't know if that's a good idea." She said, "I'll read it. I won't tell anyone." She read it. She said she loved it. She said, "I've deleted it."

I got all those rejections. In December, I gave up. I cried myself to sleep every night for a very long time. I thought, well, I was happy before. I can be happy again. I kind of got over it. I didn't write anymore. I just left it. Then in February 2019, this girl, Sarah, sent me message. She said, "I've just finished reading a book. It's not the same as yours, but I got a similar sort of feeling, that seventies vibe and just that mother-daughter thing. It just reminded me of your book." That's it. She just wanted to tell me. I was like, that's nice. Then the next day, I was in Waterstones, the bookstore, with my kids. I saw the book that she was talking about. I flipped to the back thinking, I wonder if the agent has been mentioned. She was. I thought, I'll just send it to one more agent, her. I sent it to her. Then I googled her. She's a super agent. I thought, I've got no chance here, but I sent it anyway. A few days later, I had a message from her assistant saying -- it's Judith Murray from Greene & Heaton -- "She's loving the first chapters. Can you please send the rest of the manuscript?" I was in the cinema at the time with my kids and my friends and their kids. I was like, yes! I didn't even want to watch the film. I was like, I've got to go home and send this. Somehow, I managed to get through the film. Sent the manuscript.

It all happened very quickly. That was February. I met my agent on the first of March. My point is, and every aspiring author is told this, you've got to find the right agent. If you don't, it doesn't matter how brilliant it is. If it's not for them -- they have to get passionate about it. I would say read stuff, if you can, that you think is something like yours. It's just got that same feel. Find the agents that worked on them. Genre, for me, wasn't enough. I'm sorry, I'm going off on a bit of a tangent. One of the problems for me with Space Hopper and Faye, Faraway was that because it had a time travel element but it's not science fiction, it's not fantasy, it's not really about time travel at all -- it's about loss and grief and hope and a longing that a lot of people have, everybody has. If I sent that book to agents that were interested in science fiction and fantasy, they weren’t going to be interested. If I sent it to any other agent, they're like, oh, it's time travel. It's not for me. That was really tough for me to get the right agent. Luckily with Judith, I guess she saw beyond the time travel element.

Zibby: What was the other book?

Helen: It was The Queen of Bloody Everything.

Zibby: Now I have to go read that.

Helen: That's really strongly set in the seventies and a very strong mother-daughter relationship. No time travel.

Zibby: Very interesting. Last parting advice and then I'll let you go for real.

Helen: Just read lots. This is another massive piece of advice. I found something that really triggered in me -- I don't know if you're interested in this. I found it fascinating. Everybody says read a lot because, actually, you're getting ideas. For me, sometimes I'm a bit boosted if I think, I think I could do better than that. Then sometimes I read something, and it's so great. I over-awed. I'm like, I'll never ever be able to write something this good. There's something else as well. Space Hopper is written in the first person. This novel is written in the third person. I read loads when I was writing this or just before I was writing it and while I was thinking about it and then when I was actually doing it. If I'm writing in the third person, I can't read in the first because when I come to write, I have to switch the way around that I'm thinking. If I can read really good stuff in the same person as I'm writing in, that really helps. I found that when I wrote Space Hopper, I sometimes thought, I mustn't read because if I've got time to read, then I've got to time to write. I was really pushed then because I was working. My mom had had a stroke. The kids were at school. I'm a single mom. It was quite hard to get those slots of time. In me, reading seems to trigger a writing button in my brain. I would advise that. Sorry, I talk so long about stuff.

Zibby: I love it. This is what it is. It's a podcast so I can listen to people talk about really cool stuff. In my mind, this is perfect. It's a perfect podcast. Helen, thank you so much. By the way, it almost reminded me, in terms of feel -- I don't know if you've read Rebecca Serle's In Five Years. Have you read that book?

Helen: No, but I'm going to write it down. I don't need to because I can watch the podcast. [laughs] What's it about?

Zibby: It's a similar alternate reality thing, but it's really about love. You might want to check it out.

Helen: I do want to check it out.

Zibby: Thank you. You're so delightful. I don't know if we'll ever end up in the same place, but it would be great to grab a drink or anything at some point.

Helen: I would love it. If we're in the same place at the same time, that would be fantastic.

Zibby: In the meantime, congratulations on your book.

Helen: Actually, I'm right outside now. I'm going to knock on the door.

Zibby: Wouldn't that be funny? [laughs]

Helen: I've got a mask on and everything. Your room is massive, so we can sit quite a long way away.

Zibby: It looks big in this Zoom. It's really not. I promise. My ottoman is three feet away from me. I don't know what it is with Zoom. I know it looks much bigger. Anyway, have a great day. Thank you so much.

Helen: And you. Lovely to meet you.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Helen: Bye.

Cait Flanders, ADVENTURES IN OPTING OUT

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

Cait Flanders: Oh, my gosh, thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: Adventures in Opting Out: A Field Guide to Leading an Intentional Life, this is so timely. I feel like we have all sort of opted out of everything not, perhaps, by choice, but here we are. Everyone's taken a new path from what they thought. Yet here comes your book. Tell listeners a little about what made you take a new path. What did you opt out of, and why? I'd particularly like to hear more about -- this is like a hundred questions in one. I really want to hear more about quitting drinking. You talked a lot about that in the book. I feel like that was a whole other book waiting to happen.

Cait: You're right that we have all unintentionally opted out this year. I think that we are forced to opt out of a lot of things that we used to do. The book is about making intentional choices, so deciding that something is no longer working for you or even just -- one of the things I like about the book or just the idea is you don't always have to make a different decision because something bad has happened. Sometimes you make a different decision actually when everything's kind of okay but you're still noticing that you just want something different. There's something that you've been curious about, and it's time to follow that path or just see where your curiosity leads you. Things that I've opted out of in the past, drinking was the first one. In terms of timeline, I stopped drinking in 2012. I was only twenty-seven years old. If I was a little older, it might not seem as big of a decision. I think quitting drinking in your twenties, it changes a lot about your life. It changes a lot about your lifestyle and who you connect with and how you spend your time and also how you, at least for me, how you deal with things.

I'll just list things that I've opted out of, drinking, I would say shopping. There was a year, actually two years, where I didn't buy anything except for a few things if I absolutely needed them, shopping, that consumerist lifestyle. I've changed career paths multiple times, so originally being someone who -- I'm from a government town. The story is truly, once you get in, you're in for life. You're set. My parents both worked for the government. To say one day, actually, I'm going to go to the private sector, that's actually a big deal. Then eventually leaving that to work for myself. Then even within that, within working for myself, switching from being a full-time freelancer to now being a full-time author. There's a whole bunch of changes in there. Then I've also moved multiple times, decided to live in different cities. The last or biggest move that I made was at the end of 2018. I gave up my apartment so that I could travel full time, which looks a little bit different this year. [laughs] That was the last one.

Fundamentally, deciding to stop drinking taught me everything that I would need to do the other things, being that it teaches me still, but taught me how to be comfortable being the only sober person in the room, so essentially being comfortable being the odd one out and choosing that, choosing to be different from most of the people that you're around. It meant that I had to change my coping mechanisms because drinking was something that got me through, whether it was awkward situations, social life, certainly my dating life, and got me through tougher moments. I don't think that I had identified that, really, until I stopped, but I really was someone -- I didn't and still don't identify as an alcoholic because I wasn't chemically dependent on alcoholic, but I used it to get through everything. Any bad, negative feeling that came up, I used drinking as a coping mechanism. To wipe all of those things out has been a lot over the years. Not drinking anymore has taught me everything that I need.

Zibby: Were there any moments -- I know you reference some of them, especially as you tried to stop drinking where you would go a little bit and then you'd kind of regress and have a bender of a weekend and things like that. I know you're not identifying as an alcoholic, and that's cool. Just as getting rid of any coping strategy, was there a moment that was like, you're hitting bottom where you're like, I better stop the drinking? It could've been, I better stop the X, Y, Z at that moment. Tell me your deepest, darkest, worst moment that made you change your life.

Cait: [laughs] There's two things. I don't identify as an alcoholic, and I actually think that there's something interesting about that. Things don't need to be the worst in order for you to want to change it.

Zibby: That's true. You're right. Sorry.

Cait: No, I'm more saying from the intentional side of things. I think that what I've done with drinking and all kinds of thing is, I'm looking at, what are the results of my actions? Which ones don't actually feel good? Drinking was one, though, where I did think about not drinking multiple times. I think the first time I very seriously considered it I was probably twenty or twenty-one. I will say this. Basically every time I drank, I got blackout drunk. That could look different every time. Maybe I just lost an hour of the night. Maybe I lost everything after the first hour of the night. I was twenty, twenty-one. I remember going to this party, and then I don't really remember anything. Then I woke up in my bed. I was very confused. It took me four days to piece together what happened, contacting multiple friends and trying to figure out how I had gotten home, and figured out that what had happened was I had called a cab. I had left the party. I guess I was tired. I sat down on the sidewalk waiting for the cab. I must have fallen asleep there. My friends' parents found me. Then they put me in their van and literally carried me into my house. I have no memory of any of it. That was probably extreme, but in terms of the blackout it wasn't. It was extreme in that someone saw me in it and had to help me through it.

Zibby: Just curious here, were you drinking that much, or do you maybe have some sort of reaction to alcohol?

Cait: I was definitely drinking that much.

Zibby: Wow. I was like, maybe there's an allergy. I'll just solve your problem right here. [laughs]

Cait: Oh, my gosh, if only it was that easy, but no. There was this thing about drinking, too, for me where it truly made up a portion of my identity that I was someone who could drink. I could keep up with the guys. I never got sick. I rarely got hungover. It was almost like those were points of pride. Because I wasn't really good at anything else in my teens and early twenties, that is what formed, truly, a huge piece of my identity. Then to give it up in my mid to late twenties was a massive shock.

Zibby: Wow. Also, it's hard when everybody around you is drunk and they all find themselves hilarious, and they're mostly not funny.

Cait: No. [laughs]

Zibby: When you're the only sober person in a crowd of drunk people, it is not that amusing.

Cait: My dad, he got sober when I was ten and a half, eleven years old. I do believe that that is one of the reasons that the topic of sobriety even seemed like something that would be possible because then I grew up in a house where my parents didn't drink. That was my role model growing up. I remember having conversations with him in the early days that I couldn't get on board with. He would say things like, it's kind of funny now to watch other people. I'm like, no, it's not. It's really annoying.

Zibby: It's really annoying. I've been there too. It's annoying. I back you up. [laughter] Luckily, now there are no parties, so it's not even an issue. I didn't mean to focus too much on the drinking. There's so much in your book, obviously, aside from that, and your whole analogy of the two-pronged mountain and coming down and all the different ways from packing to everything where you traverse this path. One thing I thought was interesting, and I guess it's sort of related to this being an outsider now in your friend group with the drinking, is how to deal with the aftermath of making a decision that might be right for you but that sets you outside the comfort zone of your entire life. I was looking at some of the things that you had pointed out. This is sort of like the warning bullet point list. "You might feel as though you don't have anything in common with anyone anymore. You might feel like you have nothing to contribute to conversations. You might feel like you can't relate to experiences." You go on and on. I mean, not on and on in a bad way. You elaborate. This could be applied to so many things. I felt like I could've written that bullet point list when I got divorced as a mom with little kids. Suddenly, everybody else is married. You're like, well, that's not my experience right now. I don't have a husband at home who I'm annoyed with or whatever it is they're complaining about. I think it's interesting because people don't really talk about what it's like in life as adults to suddenly -- I'm envisioning a Jell-O mold and you squish out just enough that you're not really in the mold anymore, but you're still attached to the Jell-O. [laughs]

Cait: It makes me think, one of the pieces around why it can be applied to so many different things is, that was a piece of your identity, which means it was how people connected with you and/or how you connected with other people. Then it's gone. That can be so many different things that we're going through. It can also be bigger things like if you are grieving or just healing from something and you're deep in process. That can be a very isolating period of time. That is certainly something that I think that we've probably all collectively, but at different times, been dealing with this year. It is hard. It is hard to feel like no one sees you or hears you anymore. No one really gets you anymore. It's especially hard when you chose that, when you chose to enter that space. It's not even that I wrote the book being like, here, I have all the answers. One of the main reasons I wrote it was because I just thought, we have to acknowledge this.

There are so many self-help books that just sort of give you ten steps to follow, or here's the goal in making these changes, but I don't often read a lot about just people describing the actual human experience that you are going to have when you decide to change your life. It's not just that you change. A whole bunch of other things change because you have changed. It's not as simple as saying, just let go and it'll get better. Trust me, I'm a firm believer in nonattachment and how that can help us in certain ways. Doesn't mean that hard things don't come up or that you're not going to have to navigate difficult feelings and difficult situations. I thought, we just need to at least be addressing this. If this book is even just a conversation-starter, maybe someone else will write all the tangible ways of how to navigate all of it. I just thought, we have to start acknowledging this. We can't keep writing self-help books that are promising simple solutions and don't talk about the actual emotional ups and downs that come with it.

Zibby: Maybe it could've been called Adventures in Opting Out: What Comes Next or After the Self-Help Book Ends or something. It's almost like a continuation. Okay, you decided you're going to have a big January and stop doing X, Y, Z. Now what? You also have obviously moved so much in your life. I know you talk about as a child how you moved so much with your family and then as a grown-up and now, of course, traveling or whatever. I'm curious what you're doing now in place of being a nomad. I wonder if there's a correlation between kids who moved a lot or military families or just people who have had to have change and the ability to pick up and change again. I would think yes. I would think, well, you've learned to adapt. You know it's possible, and so you're going to try it, versus people who maybe their parents are married and they’ve lived in the same home until they go to college. They go to college, and they come back to their hometown or something. Then they're forced to make a decision like, maybe I'm drinking too much. Maybe then they don't have the mental roadmap, if you will, to put that into place. What do you think?

Cait: I think that makes perfect sense. I think that an extra piece of that would also be around probably relating to people and/or building relationships and also maintaining relationships. I get a lot of questions or just comments from people saying, you seem to have friends all over or friends from all these different periods of your life. I don't think I had ever really actively thought about if that was true or how that was possible. I have reflected on it a bit more this year, obviously, as we're all communicating at a distance more and people are really learning how to check in with each other more. I actually think that also came from moving around all the time and also having a dad who -- he worked for the coast guard his whole career, so he was home for twenty-eight days and then gone for twenty-eight days. I've also learned a lot about how to maintain long-distance relationships, essentially. I do think that you're right. I think that if you have really been raised where things are constantly changing, you do learn just how adaptable we are. I would say that that, the word adaptable, is something that has really resonated for me this year and also has been nice to see other people recognizing in themselves, that they are more adaptable than they thought.

Even I, at the very beginning, had really intense anxiety about what this year was going to look like. Reminding myself, if I can settle into whatever this looks like, let's say, for a year and a half -- we were all promised two weeks, two weeks, and things get better. I just thought, that is not going to work for my anxiety. If I can settle into whatever this life is, this is my life for a year and a half, I will be able to at least get through it. I have to find whatever my base is for this. To answer your other question, I've been at my dad's house this whole year. Literally, what else could I do? We had finished everything for the book. I had a flight booked to go back to Europe where I would've probably spent most of the rest of this year. I would've come home for the holidays. Those were the original plans. It was like, well, what now? We just had conversations. My dad's still gone half the year. It was just like, I'll pay rent. I'm a grown-up. I'm not going to live at home rent-free or anything. I'll pay rent. We'll be roommates for up to eighteen months and see what happens after that. It has worked and also been challenging. It's challenging to live with your parents as an adult. The silver lining of it is I think we'll have a much different relationship as adults now than we would have if I had just left home at twenty and never come back.

Zibby: I see another book in formation here. What do you think?

Cait: [laughs] A Year with Dad.

Zibby: A Year with Dad, yeah. Living at Home: Adventures in Living Back in the Nest or something. A lot of people can relate to that. I actually wonder what it's going to be like when everybody tries to leave again. This whole two weeks, and now it's been -- you said you kind of got used to this eighteen months or longer. I am not allowing myself to look forward anymore. In my head, I'm like, this is life now. It will never change. Then I'll be pleasantly surprised. In actuality, of course, things will probably, I hope, God willing, get back to normal at some point. How are people going to cope with that? Maybe you become so close with your dad and everybody feels a sense of loss. The closeness that we're all having with our immediate quarantine-ers is going to lift. Then we'll all be inexplicably sad while we're out in the world again expecting to be jumping up and down for joy. Who knows?

Cait: Who knows? If people don't stick with it, I think there will be a longing for how slow and present people were this year if that part goes away. We've been forced to look at a much smaller perspective than usual, which is immediate family, closest friends, our home, our hometown, wherever we're staying. We're so localized right now. I do think that when it expands, my assumption is there will be a bit of longing for that.

Zibby: You're probably right. Then we'll all need to opt into that. Aside from my book idea, are you working on any other writing projects right now?

Cait: Kind of. I don't know that either of them are going to become anything. I do have, I don't want to say that it's a novel, but I'm playing around with fiction for the first time since I was probably eighteen. I don't actually know that anyone will ever read it. Even for now, it's nice to be trying something different and something that's a little bit challenging, or a lot challenging. I don't know that I would call this maybe an opt-out, but thanks to COVID and the fact that everything is online, at least here still, I actually decided to go back to school just part time. I'm taking two classes at my local university in January. It may just be two classes and I'll never take any more again. I thought, I have a curiosity. I'll follow it a little bit. We'll see what happens.

Zibby: That's so cool. I love that.

Cait: We'll see. [laughs]

Zibby: In the meantime, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Cait: Oh, my gosh. I almost feel like this year has shown to not be afraid of whatever your idea is because we do only one chance at it. Even if no one ever reads it, just following it. I didn't actually know that anyone would understand what Adventures in Opting Out was going to be. It does only take one person, whether it's another writer or it's an agent or one publisher. It only takes one person to say that they get it, that they can see it, so just to try it.

Zibby: It's true, and perhaps take a few classes. See what you can drum up.

Cait: Take a few classes.

Zibby: I think another, just to give lessons on your behalf from your book, is that any big life change is also great copy for a memoir. [laughter] You can go a year and stop shopping, and there's your book right there.

Cait: Apparently. That one was really interesting. I wrote about the shopping ban on my blog with no intention ever of writing anything about it after that. I just thought it would be over. I was done. Then other people said, hey, that could be a book. I went, okay. That is true. Also, too, you do not know who is reading your content and who might think that you have more to say.

Zibby: Very interesting. It's a good encouragement for just writing something and putting it somewhere because you never know. If it stays inside you, no one's responding to it. That's for sure.

Cait: Yep, that's definitely true.

Zibby: Basically, I'm just giving my own advice. [laughter] Thank you for coming on my show where I just don't even interview you. I'm kidding. Thank you, Cait. Thank you for your advice, and mine. Thank you for sharing all of your adventures. I can't wait to see your next book about your time with your dad.

Cait: He's going to laugh so much. I can't wait to tell him about it.

Zibby: At least an essay.

Cait: An essay, I could probably do that.

Zibby: There you go.

Cait: Awesome. Thank you.

Zibby: Bye, Cait. Thanks.

Cait: Bye.