Robert Jones Jr., THE PROPHETS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Robert. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss your amazing, hugely successful, powerful book, The Prophets.

Robert Jones Jr.: Thank you so much for having me. This is such a pleasure.

Zibby: How are you doing with the success of this book? What do you think? Did you ever expect? Tell me about it.

Robert: I did not ever expect. I actually expected the opposite, that people would either ignore it, find it far-fetched, be offended by the topics it broaches. I did not expect the success and the acclaim that it has experienced thus far. It is so hard to internalize it because I had been so preparing myself for the bad or the negative that the positive surprised me. I think I'm still in a state of surprise, but ultimately grateful. 

Zibby: I like doing that too, sort of prepare for the worst and then everything is a pleasant surprise. For people who might not be familiar with The Prophets or Son of Baldwin, for that matter, would you mind first just talking a little about what The Prophets is about? Then what inspired you to write it?

Robert: Awesome. The Prophets is about Samuel and Isaiah, two enslaved men on a plantain in Mississippi during the 1800s who are in love. The book examines how that love transforms, inspires, angers everyone around them whether that be fellow enslaved people or the plantain owners and the family that owns these enslaved people. There's a thread in it that goes back to precolonial Africa to give a precursor to Samuel and Isaiah's love and origin point for how long-lasting and historical that sort of love is. It is something that took me fourteen years to write precisely because I could find no template to draw from. In all of my studies -- I was an Africana studies minor in undergrad -- I could find no examples of blackness and queerness prior to the Harlem Renaissance and wondered, where were they? Did they just pop up in 1929? Where were black queer people? Found only references that sort of alluded to sexual assault or some sort of depravity. My question was, what about love? The great Toni Morrison said if you cannot find the book you wish to read, then you must write it. I set about writing what would eventually become The Prophets.

Zibby: Wow, fourteen years. It's finally here. Do you ever get tempted to go back into the file on your computer and just keep tinkering around a little bit more?

Robert: If it was not for my agent, PJ Mark at Janklow & Nesbit, and my editor, Sally Kim at Putnam, I could've tinkered with this for another fourteen years. The writer almost never knows when it's done. You just revise and revise and revise because that's your training. Writing is revision. You will keep revising until you have written fourteen years' worth of books. They stopped me said, "Okay, this is done."

Zibby: It's time.

Robert: We can move forward. [laughs] 

Zibby: I love Sally Kim, by the way. She is one of my all-time favorite editors. She's amazing. So awesome.

Robert: A dream.

Zibby: Also, Son of Baldwin, you've built this enormous online community. Here's just a little thing about it for people who don't know, but I want to hear it from you. "Son of Baldwin is specifically interested in critical analysis and in leading and participating in conversations from the queer perspective, intersections of ability, age, body type, class, gender, gender identity, sex, sexuality, and others." Of course, this is now cut off. "White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy are considered." Then of course, there's a lot more. This is a big undertaking. Tell me about this.

Robert: Son of Baldwin started when I was first introduced to James Baldwin. I'm late to the game. I did not really know about James Baldwin until my freshman year of college when I was assigned an essay by him called "Here be Dragons" and was so blown away by the clarity and the brilliance and the beauty of that essay that I devoured and sought out all sorts of works by him and discovered that he was also black, queer, raised in New York City, and a writer, all of the things that I am. I adopted him immediately as my spiritual godfather. I was devasted to learn that he was dead because I was hoping to find him and talk to him, but he was dead. I said, shoot. Then I watched a documentary where his brother said some of James Baldwin's last words were, "I hope that someone finds me in the wreckage." It broke my heart because I thought, why isn't he more popular? Why aren't we discussing his works more? This was about 2006. I said, I know what. I'm going to start a blog. It's going to be centered around James Baldwin and all the things he talked about politically. In about 2007, 2008, I created the Son of Baldwin blog. Moved it to Facebook in 2009. The rest is kind of history because just by word of mouth, people started participating. The audience just grew and grew and grew into what it is now. 

Zibby: Wow. I read, though, James Baldwin in college. I graduated college in 1998, not to date myself here. I did a whole class on African American literature. He was prominently featured. He's not lost to history. [laughs] 

Robert: I just was wondering why he wasn't more popular. At the time, we would talk about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Those were the big names. I'm like, why isn't he that big? Obviously, part of that reason is because the queerness always makes certain people uncomfortable. Lately in the last maybe five to seven years, his memory, his work has really returned to form. I'm really, really glad about that.

Zibby: Isn't it amazing? I love what you just said about finding a spiritual godfather. There are all these people who have come before us and who are out there now who maybe we just wouldn't have heard about or don't cross paths with. Then it somehow validates our entire lives, whether there's something about them that's similar or a sensibility or something. It's just like, wow, I am not the only one like me in the world. How amazing is that?

Robert: That is what drove me, utterly. He confirmed my right to be. I bow down to James Baldwin. I adore him still. He has a huge influence on my thinking and my writing.

Zibby: When you were writing fiction, how did you even start to attempt this project? This book is amazing in that it has different -- dialectic is the word. You have different speaking styles for different characters. You have first person, third person. There is some that feels biblical. It's a lot of different tones and speakers all interwoven to create this masterpiece, essentially, of different threads. How did you sit down one day and you're like, I'll just start this thing? What proceeded it?

Robert: My first semester of grad school in the MFA program at Brooklyn College, Stacy Derazma [sp] was my fiction tutorial instructor. She gave us a project. She said, "It is your job to go out into the world and find objects a character that you're thinking about would possess."

Zibby: That's so interesting.

Robert: Because serendipity is real, I found a pair of shackles in the garbage on the street in Brooklyn.

Zibby: Stop. Seriously?

Robert: A pair of shackles. When I lifted them up, they were heavy. I said, oh, this person is enslaved. Oh, my goodness, I am going to have to write about a black queer character in antebellum slavery when there is no template for that. This is my sign that I'm supposed to be doing this. I set about sketching who the character who would've been held by these shackles was. That character eventually became Samuel, one of the main characters. I just basically sketched out what he looked like, what he smelled like, what he liked, what he disliked, who he loved, what he thought about, all of those sorts of things to build him into a person. Then I went about writing the book, which was initially going to be told solely from Samuel's point of view. Then I realized that Samuel didn't have enough information to really span the breadth of what I wanted to discuss in this book. I said, maybe Samuel and his love interest, Isaiah, will tell the story together. Then I said, no, that's still not enough. I need something broader. 

Then I realized the center and the heart of the story was actually that Samuel and Isaiah were in love, so that love needed witnesses. From that epiphany, I said, now these other voices are going to need to speak. Whether they affirm this love or they want to destroy it, they need to be able to tell their point of view. Then from a dream that I scribbled down some words in the middle of the night, the ancestors spoke. They said, you do not yet know us. I said, now the ancestors want to be able to talk to me. They want to be able to talk to these characters. They want to talk to the reader too. I have to now incorporate them in. Then they led me across the Atlantic to precolonial Africa to talk about the precursor to Samuel and Isaiah. I thought, how am I going to work to get all of these disparate pieces to work cohesively? Thanks to help of Sally Kim and PJ Mark, we were able to make it congeal. 

Zibby: Wow, that is quite a story. Oh, my gosh, I can't believe you found those on the street. It almost has this Greek chorus to it. Have you heard that a lot? I'm sorry.

Robert: No, it is totally that. It totally has that Greek chorus. In my mind, I'm thinking of how black women in church often sing gospel in harmony. That is kind of how I hear the voices of those ancestral interjections, as a harmonious, gospel sort of tone but with West African tenor, if that makes any sense. [laughs] 

Zibby: Did you do any travel? Did you go back to anywhere to investigate? Africa or anything like that?

Robert: I had the great fortune of having visited Africa before, so I just retrieved those memories of what it was like to be there, what the air smelled like, what the people looked like, what the comradery felt like. It felt like a homecoming, like that was the place that I actually belonged, like I belonged to that landscape. I took that feeling and tried to interpret it in a literary fashion.

Zibby: Very cool. A lot of the scenes in this book, I have to say, were very tough to read in terms of the graphic nature of the torture and depravity and just awful -- I wanted to close my eyes at certain scenes, which is tough when you're reading. What was it like to write scenes like that? Was that hard for you?

Robert: It was physically painful. When I would be describing a scene, my skin would start to burn a little bit. It would hurt almost as though I was becoming the character. I had to often stop and take walks and visit with my nieces, nephews, and nibblings.

Zibby: What's a nibbling?

Robert: Nibbling is a child of my sibling that is non-binary. 

Zibby: No way. I'm so out of it. I've never heard that before.

Robert: I have a nibbling who is non-binary. I took breaks. Partially, that's part of the reason why I took fourteen years to write this book. It became a conscious effort to say to myself, if I'm going to expect the reader to get through this, I'm going to have to give them something beautiful. I'm going to have to give them something deeply loving to balance out the hatred and the torture. I decided early on that the love would be imbued, as much as I possibly could, into the book so that there was some sort of balance.

Zibby: You speak so reverently about love. Tell me about the role that love has played in your life.

Robert: When I think about the fact that I'm here as a black queer person writing and reading and going to school and walking down the street and all of these things, I can't help but feel grateful to all of my ancestors who endured, because I must have been the outcome that they were hoping for, that endured whips and untold brutality and untold degradation to ensure that a me could exist. If that is not love -- they didn't even know me. They dreamed that it might be. That is the ultimate form of love. This was my attempt to testify on behalf of that love and to witness for it and to pay homage to it.

Zibby: That’s beautiful. That's really beautiful. What are some of the loving examples you have in your life now or that you’ve seen actually role modeled to you?

Robert: One of my best friends in the entire world, we've been best friends since third grade, Arlene Solavargas, one day when we were fifteen years old in high school, I picked her up from school. We went to adjacent high schools. I would walk to her school, pick her up, and we'd walk home together. She stops me and she goes, "Bobby." That's what my family calls me. "You see that guy right there?" I'm looking at him. I'm like, "Yeah." She's like, "That's going to be my husband." I said, "[Indiscernible]." That's my nickname for her. "He's just an average-looking guy. You're so beautiful." Low and behold, they started dating shortly after that and have been together ever since.

Zibby: What? That's crazy.

Robert: They have modeled for me what it means to be in love. She knew from the moment she saw him that that was her soulmate, her eternal love, the love of her life. He felt the same way about her. They have been together ever since. A marriage and a three children later, they are still together. We are still friends. Her children consider me their uncle. I have never seen romance like that in my life. It is just absolutely beautiful. Then in my own family, the way my grandmother loved me was unbelievable. She died when I was very young. I was seven. She told my mother, she said, "Bobby's going to miss me." The truth of the matter is, to this day, I still cry when I think about her on her birthday, on the day that she died all through my life. There have, of course, been examples of people who did not love me, who did everything in their power to try to tell me that I was unlovable. Thanks to the glory of the love of people like Arlene and my grandmother and other members of my family, I withstood and I'm here.

Zibby: It's so funny. Talking to you, you're so kindhearted and peaceful-seeming. I'm not explaining this very well. You seem gentle to me despite the brutality in the book. Then I saw the article in The Paris Review, "Let It Burn," where you referenced your past article called -- I'll just say blank -- "I Don't Give a Blank About Justine Damond," which got you in heaps of trouble, apparently, which I'm sort of shocked to even hear because you seem like someone who would care about not crushing a ladybug on the street. I might be wrong. I've only known you for like twenty minutes, but that's the impression I'm getting.

Robert: It is absolutely true that I even have a problem with killing a fly or a cockroach. Something about that bothers me. What also bothers me just as much is injustice. I cannot stand to watch another video of a black person being murdered on camera and the murderer just as though they were swatting a fly, that it utterly doesn't matter. That angers me beyond my capacity to contain anger. I don't want to be an angry person, but I can't help but be angry when I see what happens to black women, what happens to black queer people, what happens to black people in general, what happens to anybody who's marginalized in a society. It angers me deeply, and so I write with the spirit of that when I'm writing pieces like "I Don't Give a Blank about Justine Damond," which is really rhetorical. The truth is, I do give a blank about Justine Damond, but I'm trying to let the society know you only care because it's a white woman. If it was a black woman, you wouldn't care. I'm trying to turn it on you and say, here's your mirror. This is what it's like when you disregard our lives. This is what it feels like. It worked because so many white people got angry but did not see the connection. It's so bizarre. Americans have an inability to self-reflect. We always think of ourselves as innocent. I really wish Americans would wake up from that dreaming. I really do because America has the potential to be a nation that's transformative and that's a model for how the world should work, and it is not. It has not been since the beginning because it's a nation that's origins begin with genocide and enslavement and the degradation of women. This is unseemly. I really want us to grow into what it actually means to be humane. We haven't earned the right to be called human beings yet because we're so cruel to one another. Why?

Zibby: I totally agree about the cruelty. I can't understand it. It baffles me how evil people can be. I feel things very deeply. I'm getting the sense that you feel things very deeply. When someone is hurt, it hurts me whether I know them or not or whatever. I know this just sounds ridiculous, but the ability of somebody to go out and intentionally hurt somebody, especially based on their sexuality or their race or anything, it makes me cry. It makes me sick to my stomach, honestly, is what it does, as it does to so many people. It's hard to process, in a way.

Robert: It is. It is very difficult. Truly, I think of myself as a nonviolent person. I don't like engaging in violence. I was a bullied kid and had to fight. I had no choice because I had to fight back to defend myself, but I didn't like the feeling of hurting somebody else even though I felt justified because I was defending myself. I don't like it. I also don't like to be pushed to the point at which I have to do that. 

Zibby: I get it. I'm sorry you've had those experiences in your life. I'm glad that you've had people to pull you through and to show goodness to you so that you were able to channel all of it into art and now have it be sitting on my desk. It's amazing, really. Truly, congratulations. It's amazing. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors out there?

Robert: Yes, and particularly authors who are writing from sort of a marginalized existence. Everything in the world, everything in this country is probably going to tell you that your endeavors are not necessary or that writing is a frivolous endeavor or that art is secondary to other concerns. You will have to fight past that and all the obstacles that the society is going to put in your way for you to, for example, take care of yourself. I had to work three part-time jobs in undergrad and two part-time jobs in graduate school and then still had to find the time to write as a full-time worker in the workforce.

Zibby: And you graduated Phi Beta Kappa. That's insane. You're a genius. 

Robert: Thank you. You must continue because writing is one of the most valuable professions, one of the most revered and necessary art forms in existence. It is the writer who pushes the society to be better. Other artists do that as well, so I don't want to take that away from them. The writer is, as James Baldwin said, here to disturb the peace, which is to say, disturb the status quo so that people's lives can be easier, so that mechanisms that are here to oppress and to dehumanize are dismantled, and that we could look at each other in the face and say, even if I don't like you as a person, I don't agree with your religion or your whatever, I could still look at you in the face and say, you are a human being, so I respect you because you are here and you exist. Writers help us imagine those sorts of worlds and push us in that direction. I tell the aspiring authors don't give no matter what. Listen, I'm going to be fifty years old in April. This is my first novel. I could've given up because all of the lists are "Twenty Under Twenty" and "Thirty Under Thirty" and "Forty Under Forty" and make me feel as though my contribution as a fifty-year-old doesn't matter. Keep going even if you're eighty-nine when you publish it. Be eighty-nine and publish it. Keep going.

Zibby: Can you please publish a list somewhere of "Fifty Under Fifty"? It has to be a little older, though, so you can be included. You should publish "Amazing Fifty-Year-Old Authors" or "Fifty and Forties." You start that. Make that a thing too. [laughs] 

Robert: Got it.

Zibby: Thank you, speaking as someone in my forties. Robert, thank you so much. Thank you for your literary contribution and for taking the time to speak to me about your life and letting me pry into your past.

Robert: Zibby, this was so fantastic because you asked questions that no one else asked me. It made me think about myself as a person and what I want philosophically to happen in the world. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for those wonderful questions.

Zibby: You're so welcome. Have a great day.

Robert: You too.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Robert: Bye.

Nancy Johnson, THE KINDEST LIE

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

Nancy Johnson: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. I'm a huge fan of yours. I listen to your show all the time. It's just a delight to be. Thank you.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice of you to say. Thank you. Your book, I could not put it down. I read it in a day or something. I thought it was so good. I loved the whole thing, but the beginning introduction and first couple chapters on the heels of the Obama election and all of that, I have never seen an election results situation like that in contemporary fiction. It was so strong. It was just so great. The leading down the road with all the people wearing white and that whole event, it was so visual and fantastic. Then of course, as the book went on, you just got more and more immersed. In terms of awards for openings, I felt like --

Nancy: -- Thank you. I think that's one of those times in history, everybody remembers where they were on election night. It was such a monumental time.

Zibby: It's so great to watch it through fictionalized people. It's different to take contemporary fiction versus historical fiction and -- I don't know. It's just really neat. It was great.

Nancy: Thank you for that. I'm glad you enjoyed that.

Zibby: Tell me about the inspiration for writing this novel. I saw in your bio you've won all sorts of prizes for first novels before. Tell me how you got into fiction after your whole career in TV and everything else.

Nancy: I'm from Chicago. I worked in television for eleven years as a reporter. I got tired of it because it turned into that whole if it bleeds, it leads kind of thing. I'd be on a really cool feature story that I loved and was interested in. Then the pager would go off and the scanners would go off and you've got to go to a triple homicide a couple counties over. I got tired of that. I think that was the training ground for moving into writing fiction. I've always been curious about the world and been a storyteller, but now I get to create the world of the stories. That's the best part of it. Also, just training in terms of writing for the ear and being able to hear the cadence of a story, so much of that's important in broadcast journalism. I use a lot of the same techniques when I'm writing my fiction. The inspiration for The Kindest Lie came November of 2008 when Obama was elected president. It was a bittersweet time for me personally. My father was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer during that year. It was so difficult. He was looking forward to Obama being president.

I remember at one point he was in hospital. You know how the doctors ask questions just to see how lucid you are, like, what's the date, what's your date of birth, that kind of thing? The doctor asked him, "Who's the president?" This was in October of '08. My father in this croaky voice said, "Barack Obama." The doctor said, "Well, hold off, not quite. Not yet." I knew that it was important for him that Obama become president, and so I convinced him to vote early. He voted early in October. He was very sick. By the time of election day, he was confined to the bed. Here was a man who survived World War II and the Great Depression and Jim Crow. He cast the last vote of his life for America's first black president. That was just so pivotal. That election was such a point of pride for us as a family. I think for so many in the country no matter what your political persuasion was, it was kind of that moment of saying, America, we did this. We made history. We overcame something by electing a black president.

The thing was, I had a lot of folks say to me, we are now in a post-racial era. I knew right away that was a fallacy, that there was nothing post-racial about it. All I had to do was go on my social media feed. Back then, Facebook was just kicking off and getting started. I remember going on Facebook and just seeing the ugliness and this bitter divide between black and white in America. So much of it was not about policy debates. I could've understood and respected that, but it was deeply personal and it was racially motivated, a lot of what I saw there. Then through the first two terms, those two terms of Obama's presidency, we saw so much racism, a lot of racial violence, so I knew it was not a post-racial period at all. This was something I was very interested in, was just how we were all in these separate entrenched corners, black and white America. Then I tried to think of, who are the characters that I could create in fiction who could inhabit this kind of world? I was interested in the tiny, small lives of people, of characters who could speak to these larger macro issues. That's where the idea for the book came from.

Zibby: Wow. That's great. Really beautiful. Yes, I would say we are definitely not in a post-racial era. I feel like things have become magnified and everything has been spilling out, good, bad, ugly, recently. There's no better time for a book like yours and the empathy that characters bring, just stories to show how all this racial divide I find just -- I don't mean to sound stupid. It's just that we're all people underneath. All this attention to color I feel undermines how similar we all are in so many ways. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox here. [laughs] Yes, that was a pivotal moment. You captured it beautifully in your story. Your story also contains a lot of secrets and the damage keeping a secret can do in the secret keeper and in the secret keeper's relationships. What happens when the secret comes out? When should it come out? I was actually thinking, I don't know if this was the kindest lie. Was it kind? I don't know. Tell me about choosing this title. Do you even see it as a lie, the secret that was kept?

Nancy: First, maybe I should tell you what the book's about a little bit.

Zibby: Oh, yeah. That would be good. Sorry.

Nancy: Just so people know what the book is about. It's about race, class, family at the dawn of the Obama era. It centers on Ruth Tuttle, a black woman engineer. She's a very successful chemical engineer in Chicago on the come-up. She's got this great husband, great life. He's ready to start a family, but she can't do that until she makes peace with her past. She's been harboring this huge secret that she gave birth to a baby when she was just seventeen years old. She never told anybody about it. Her husband doesn't know it. She decides to go back to her hometown, which is a dying Indiana factory town, of her youth to try to search for her son. When she gets there, she meets and forms this unlikely connection with Midnight. It's a white boy, eleven years old. He's nicknamed Midnight. He's adrift also searching for his own sense of family connection. He's really mired in that very poverty that Ruth managed to escape. When the two of them come together, they're just on this collision course of race and class. It ends up upending both of their lives. That's the background of the story. The title, The Kindest Lie, it's so interesting. I kept thinking, will the publisher change the title? A lot of times, you come up with a working title. Then it changes as you go along in the publishing process, but it stuck. I was excited about that. I chose The Kindest Lie because quite often, we keep secrets, we tell lies for the best of reasons, the best of intentions. That's what I meant by The Kindest Lie.

The grandmother in the story -- I don't want to give too much away. That's Ruth's grandmother, the character Mama. She's keeps a lot of lies. She tells a lot of secrets and tells lies, but she does it not to be malicious. She does it to protect her grandchildren. It's out of that love that she tells lies. Then I also think the other level of lies is that there are lies that we tell ourselves. Ruth, in this story, is lying to herself in many ways because she thinks she can outrun her past. She's got this nice, fancy life, chic in Chicago. She's upwardly mobile, great job, great husband, all that. She thinks that this is it. I can just live this life and not worry about what I've left behind in my hometown, and not just her son who she left behind, but also her family. They're the ones who convinced her to never come back. Still, she's left them behind, this community that she grew up in and the family that she was part of. In that way, she's lying to herself because as we find in the book, she cannot outrun her past. Then the other level on which The Kindest Lie works is America. When you look at it in a larger sense, I think America has lied to itself about how good it is, how decent and honorable it can be. It's not always decent and honorable to everybody in the country. We still have so much work to do as Americans. I think a lot of times we wrap ourselves in the flag. We like to lie to ourselves and pretend that we're better than we really are when there's really so much work to do.

Zibby: That was beautifully said. In the book when you were just talking about how her family wanted her to leave everything behind, it almost became not her choice. They were like, go, go, go, we'll take care of everything. A lot of the text, and maybe this is because I went to Yale, but I feel like there was a lot about Yale in the book and how her going there was a totally life-changing moment and from there on she could study engineering. She could get this amazing job. It was a huge turning point. It was the fork in the road, so to speak. You can go this way or you stay here. You obviously depicted what happened would she have stayed when we see what happened to her brother and the other people who work in a factory town and the effect of that. Tell me about that. Is it really one moment? Is it those one-decision nodes that change everything?

Nancy: I do think so. I think it's all about the choices that you make. Sometimes you have that one moment in time to make a decision. Your life can just go in a certain direction or not. I think that's really what Mama is getting at with saying, you need to leave this behind, and that sometimes leaving is the best way, that you have to make a decision or your life trajectory can change forever and it can go the absolute wrong way. I think that's what the message from Mama was. We have the scene where Ruth gives birth at home in her bed. It's a really difficult scene. I was really dealing with the two difficult things, going into labor, giving birth to a baby, but also at the same time dealing with the emotional labor as well of trying to decide, what do I do? I'm having this baby. In a way, she's like, I want to hold onto this baby. This is my child. Yet she's also dreaming of what's beyond this tiny bedroom in this little shotgun house in this little auto plant town. That's Yale. That's life beyond. I do think that there are times in life where we make a choice. Even if you make a choice, it may not be the wrong choice. Whatever the choice is, I think it just impacts the rest of your life and the way that's going to go. I think you also have to revisit too.

Zibby: It's like a sliding doors moment. Sometimes the decisions are the ones you make. Sometimes they're by chance. The decision of what to do with a child born either too soon or in the wrong circumstances is a very politically fraught one in and of itself. It is part of the book which also touches on politics in its opening scene and as a theme that courses through it. Was there any intention of why she had the baby? Were you trying to make any sort of statement, or was this just the mechanism to tell the story you wanted to tell?

Nancy: I think it was a mechanism to tell the story. You mentioned that opening scene with the election night. It's in that scene that Ruth and her husband, Xavier, at different points are thinking about what it means to have a child at this moment in time, in history. She's brought a child into the world and she's excited about this new era and this new president and all the promise of opportunity for black people in America, but she doesn't really know what situation her son is in. She's assuming the worst, that he's languishing in the poverty that she managed to escape. I thought that was interesting, this whole idea of a child out there. Children, we think of them as the future and think about what the opportunities are for them. We all want the best for our children. We want them to have a better life than you had. That's part of what the character of Mama is wanting. She's got a lot of unfulfilled dreams of her own that we find out about in the book. Yet she wants the best for her children and for her grandchildren. Just that legacy of generations and always wanting the next generation to go beyond and exceed the opportunities that you had, to me, that's really interesting. That's one reason for having childhood and motherhood be a part of this narrative.

Zibby: The scene where -- I don't think I'm giving much away, but when Ruth goes home and Mama has a gentleman suitor trying to fix the toilet and she feels like even though Papa is not here, having another man in the house rubs her the wrong way. You mentioned, sadly -- I'm so sorry about your father and having lung cancer. I'm wondering if that stemmed from some sort of situation with your own mom? Did your mom start dating again? Where did that particular scene come from? Just out of curiosity.

Nancy: No, that did not happen. She did not start dating again or anything like that. I was just really thinking how things change with loss, with the loss of Papa. He was the patriarch of that family, the foundation that they all clung to. Then when he was gone, that really interrupted everything in the lives of the characters. Mama's had a hard time moving on, and then Ruth too. Ruth was very tethered to her grandfather. I think that's one of the reasons that she got involved with Ronald, her high school boyfriend, and got pregnant. It's because she was looking for that love and looking for that male figure in her life. I was just really interested in someone who's not present but still has such a huge presence in the life of the characters in the book. It was very difficult for Mama to move on. It's kind of like she's trying to find herself too just as Ruth is trying to find herself. I thought it was interesting that you've got a black woman, seventy-eight years old. You don't usually see that kind of a character on the page and someone who's not just there to take care of the people in her life. She's doing that, of course, but she also has a love interest. To me, that's interesting for a woman that age to have that on the page. She has, like I said before, unfulfilled dreams of her own too. She's really her own person. I thought that was pretty cool.

Zibby: My grandmother recently passed away at ninety-seven. When she was in her early nineties, someone tried to set her up with a man who was ninety-five. She was like, "Don't be silly. He's way too old for me." [laughter]

Nancy: That is so cute.

Zibby: It just never ends.

Nancy: It's true.

Zibby: It just doesn't end. Tell me a little more about the writing of this book, the actual writing. Did you structure the whole narrative beforehand? Did you outline? Where and when did you write it? Tell me about all that.

Nancy: In the writing circles, people talk about being a plotter where you outline everything or you're a pantser where you write by the seat of your pants. I'm definitely more on the pantser side of things, so I did not outline anything. I never had an outline the entire time. Then sometimes it takes you a little longer. It took me six years. Of course, this was the first book, so it takes a little longer because you don't necessarily know what you're doing. You're kind of fumbling around in the dark as you write the book. As a writer, I'm definitely interested in what keeps me up at night. What are the burning issues that are on my mind? That was the whole thing with the election and the racial divide and the class divide in America. That's where I tend to start, is with what I'm really passionate about at the time. Then from there, it's all about the characters. I'm definitely a character-driven writer. I'm really interested in delving deep into the character motivations. Why do they do the things they do? What is it in their past that informs their present? Those are the things I definitely get excited about as a writer.

Then the ideas come to me at the most inconvenient times. I'd say most of the ideas I get or a lot of the most brilliant ones I get, or exposition or snaps of dialogue, come to me when I'm driving on the interstate. I'm here doing sixty, sixty-five on the interstate, driving along. An idea will hit me. For safety reasons, I can't write it down. I usually pull out my iPhone. I use the voice memo function of the phone and just talk into it. It sounds really weird later when I listen to it, the ramblings when I'm on the interstate. You might hear horns honking or crazy noises. If I don't do that, I lose it if I don't get the idea down right then. Then I'd say in terms of where I write, because we're in the pandemic, I'm usually writing at home. When I was writing this book, I wrote some of it at home but a lot of it at Starbucks. People wonder, how can you write in a coffee shop? For some reason, that whirl of the cappuccino machine is kind of cool. I like the rhythm of that. I can write to that kind of noise, and people sitting right next to me talking. Maybe because of my news days, I'm accustomed to just writing on the side of the road or in the back of the police car going on some kind of drug raid or wherever. It doesn't matter. I can write pretty much anywhere and block out the noise. That's my writing process.

Zibby: Back to you at Starbucks. What is your go-to Starbucks drink when you're working on your writing?

Nancy: Funny thing is I don't drink coffee. [laughs] I don't like the taste of it. I love the smell of it, but I don't like the taste of it. I drink hot chocolate. I'm really into things that are sweet. I like hot chocolate really strong, five pumps of mocha, no whip cream. Sometimes the whip cream cuts down the chocolate-y part of it. I love chocolate.

Zibby: I am totally with you. Whip cream is a distraction.

Nancy: It's a total distraction from the -- nah, that's okay. Sometimes they make a mistake and they put it on there anyway.

Zibby: I am a fan. I just actually tried the Starbucks peppermint hot chocolate for the holiday theme. I would not do that if I were you. I would skip it. You can skip it.

Nancy: Oh, really? That probably also cuts down on --

Zibby: -- On the chocolate.

Nancy: On the chocolate, yeah. It's all about the chocolate.

Zibby: The best thing at Starbucks, and then I'll get back to your writing, is the chocolate-covered almonds. Have you ever had them there?

Nancy: I have not had those.

Zibby: They keep being sold out everywhere. I feel like somebody else knows that they're so good and is snatching them. If you ever see a pack, they're the best chocolate-covered almonds, extra chocolate-y.

Nancy: I will look for those. People probably are hoarding them.

Zibby: Really good.

Nancy: Okay, I'll try that.

Zibby: Are you hard at work on another book now? You must be. I can't imagine that you're letting it go at this.

Nancy: No, I don't want to be just a one-book wonder. That's for sure. I can't say a lot about it yet, but I am working on something new. The thing is, I'm still waiting to finalize these initial three chapters and summary, which is called option material, to send to my editor to see if she wants to acquire it for William Morrow. Fingers crossed about that. I can say that it's again about race, class, and identity, so some of those same themes that I'm always interested in but at some different moments in history. I seem to always be fascinated by certain moments in time like the big national moments and how individuals fit into that, individual lives fit into those big moments. That's what I'm looking to do again. A lot of people have asked me when I've done other interviews or just check Goodreads, people want to know about a sequel to The Kindest Lie. I don't have any plans for that, but if Hollywood is listening and wants to continue the story of Ruth and Midnight on the big or small screen, that would always be fun. I think there's probably more to tell about where those characters go from here. Hopefully, somebody will do that.

Zibby: You could do a whole spinoff about the lesbian couple. I'm forgetting their names. They were really interesting too. You had that one scene where one of them confides to Ruth, "You're so lucky that you can just touch the person you love in public. It's not that easy for us," and the feeling of being emboldened after the Obama win and how much more public they were in their displays of affection.

Nancy: I think that could be another story too.

Zibby: That could be another good book if you're running out of material.

Nancy: Yes, I think that would be fascinating.

Zibby: They also have -- I'm late to this party. Have you heard of Scribd?

Nancy: No. What is it? I'm even later than you to the party.

Zibby: They have audiobooks and books. It's almost like Audible in a way. They summarize. They’ll have articles, excerpts. My point is they have Scribd Originals. They're like ten thousand words. You could do a Scribd Original on just the two characters.

Nancy: I love that idea. I'm writing that down, Scribd Original. It's audio?

Zibby: No, you can read it too.

Nancy: You can read it too, okay.

Zibby: I'm interviewing someone who wrote one shortly.

Nancy: I'm thinking about those -- aren't there Audible Originals too?

Zibby: There are Audible Originals. This, you read. There's probably an audio version as well.

Nancy: That's another format, I love that, to extend the life of the story and of the book. That's actually a good marketing idea too, to do that kind of thing.

Zibby: I know.

Nancy: You're good. I like that.

Zibby: I'm good. [laughter]

Nancy: I need to hire you to feed me all the best ideas. I love that.

Zibby: Part of this podcast is my unsolicited advice.

Nancy: That is the best. I really like that.

Zibby: I'm kidding. Speaking of advice, what advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Nancy: I would say for authors to really be true to yourself, to whatever the intention is for the book that you want to write. Stay true to that, to what's authentic and real for you. I talk to so many writers who say, "You know what? I think I might want to write about vampires because I heard vampires might be coming back in vogue. I'll do domestic suspense because I hear that's kind of hot. If I put 'girl' in the title, it'll definitely sell." I don't think you can write to trends and do your book any justice because then you're just writing to market. You're writing what you think people want to read and what you think is going to sell. I think what's going to sell and what's going to be successful is what comes from your heart, from your soul, from your passion. That would be my main advice. Just write what's true to you.

Also, be gentle with yourself too. Going through the pandemic, everybody is just going through so much emotionally right now. Our lives are crazy even though we are tethered at home and sequestered. Be gentle in terms of how often you write. I don't necessarily believe you have to write every single day to be a successful writer. I think you write when you feel compelled to write. Also at the same time, I think you have to be disciplined too. If you ever want to get anything done, I think you have to keep plugging away at it and not always writing just when you feel like it because you may not always feel like it. Sometimes you do have to push yourself, but don't feel that you have to do it every single day. As long as you're getting words on the page and you are telling the story that only you can tell, that's going to resonate with other people because it's your story.

Zibby: That's great advice. You make me want to stop what I'm doing and start writing.

Nancy: Start writing. There you go. That's my gift to you.

Zibby: Thank you. Thanks, Nancy. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." As you can see, moms also don't have time to do podcasts. Thank you for your great book. Let's stay in touch.

Nancy: Definitely. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure.

Nancy: Buh-bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Cherie Jones, HOW THE ONE-ARMED SISTER SWEEPS HER HOUSE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Cherie, to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Cherie Jones: Thank you, Zibby. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Cherie, tell listeners, first of all, what your book is about and what inspired you to write it. It's so good. It feels like a book from almost another era, like it should be in the canon that you read in school under literature. It just feels like a classic book in a way. Talk about How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House.

Cherie: Thanks so much, Zibby. How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House is set on a beach in an island a lot like Barbados in the mid-1980s. The protagonist, her name is Lala. She's a hair braider. She essentially braids hair for tourists on the beach. It's about this one summer when her life just changes in unimaginable ways. Without giving out too much of the plot, what actually happens, she has a baby. There's a murder on the beach. It's all about how those two things are connected.

Zibby: By the way, this seems like every potential parent's nightmare situation of having a child. Not to be graphic, but it starts with unexplained bleeding and then waiting in the ER forever and not getting the attention that she needs. Her husband is not there for her at all. She has to make her way home. It's the most unsupported woman going through pregnancy alone that I've ever read about.

Cherie: That is reality for a lot of women. That was the story that came to be about Lala. I hope that people can understand and appreciate that and just go with her on her journey because I think she does grow a lot through the novel. In terms of what inspired me to write it, I tend to be inspired by voices without -- I don't know how that sounds. [laughter] Essentially, I will hear a character's voice in my head. They will start telling me parts of the story. The process of writing is really about getting that down on paper. The initial process is just trying to understand what I'm hearing and somehow translating that into text that I can work with. Then the editing and the story development is really about getting to the story behind the story. In this case, I was on a bus home. I was living in the UK at the time. I was very tired after a long day at work. I just started to hear the voice of this character in my head. There were a lot of things that we had in common. As the bus ride continued, it just became clear to me that this was going to be the project that I would work on next.

Zibby: Wait, Cherie, I thought you actually sat next to this woman on the bus. I thought that she was bothering you. You're saying that was actually just an analogy. I literally thought you were on the bus on your way home and you sat next to a woman who insisted on telling you her story.

Cherie: [laughs] No, this is a woman who sat in my head on that bus ride.

Zibby: Wow. The whole time, I'm thinking, I wonder if she'll ever read this story. Did their paths ever cross again?

Cherie: That happens to me a lot in terms of my short stories and other projects. It tends to come to me as a voice. I just hear parts of the story. Then it goes from there. I was also inspired a lot by things that would've happened during the 1980s. I consider that the decade when I came into myself as I know me. There are lots of things that happened then that I was really inspired by that I wanted to include in the novel. Even the hair braiders on the beach in Barbados, that's something that was very much a feature of beach life in the 1980s. You hardly see those braiders anymore here. That was one of the things that inspired me as well.

Zibby: I have to say, I grew up going to Jamaica all the time in the eighties. That was also part of that life and culture, so I knew exactly what you were talking about. Of course, in the book, I would be in the house that you were supposed to hate the family. [laughter] I would be somebody that Lala would not want to be dealing with at all. Anyway, that was me. I was like the kid in that house. Not really. Nothing terrible happened to me there. Yes, the hair braiding culture and all the amazing things that beach life had to offer back then, it was so perfectly encapsulated.

Cherie: That was very cool. I was really happy to get the opportunity to go back into that time and space.

Zibby: What's the last voice you heard? Are you hearing any voices right now?

Cherie: [laughs] I'm not hearing any voices right now. It started off as a short story. There was the initial process of writing it out. It didn't start to become a novel until about 2013, 2014, somewhere around there. Strangely enough, about three years in, I just stopped hearing Lala anymore. It was as if she basically told me everything that she needed to say. There on in, it really was about crafting the story, trying to get to all the other things that she didn't say. I like to say sometimes that the characters who talk a lot don't always tell the whole truth. Part of my job then is trying to find out what the rest of it is and then just crafting that into what the real story is. That was what that was like.

Zibby: It's almost like you're the therapist of your characters. It's someone coming into therapy and they tell you their story, but you have to figure out what they're not saying to get the whole truth.

Cherie: Yes, exactly. It really is a lot like that.

Zibby: You're the therapist for the invisible characters. It's pretty cool. Who knew?

Cherie: I'm glad you think it's cool. Other people might have other words for it. It's great to know that you understand where I'm coming from.

Zibby: I think it's great. Look, writing fiction is an art. It comes from a place of the mind that nobody can totally explain. The more people I talk to about it to try to unlock the mystery of, how do you write fiction? there's no clear answer. It just comes. It can be in a dream. It can come in a voice. It just somehow gets into your mind and then gets on the paper. It's like magic. I don't think any explanation is weird.

Cherie: That is really what the process is like for me.

Zibby: There was a lot of painful emotions and situations that rose up in this book. Parts of it were tough. It was emotional to read it. Did you have to pull at all from your own life? Did you have any of this trauma in your own experience at all, or was this all from the voice in the bus?

Cherie: One of the things I would've mentioned earlier is that Lala and I did have some things in common. Being a survivor of domestic violence is one of them. I was able to draw certainly on -- some of the information about Lala's psychological state and process was perhaps a little easier for me to write because I would've identified with some of it. The actual experiences of violence were not mine. That aside, there were a lot of similarities, and not just me, but just from observing and listening to other women that I know. Yes, that did inform the narrative. Yes, it did.

Zibby: I'm so sorry. How did you get out of that situation?

Cherie: The thing about that situation, that's one of the things that -- people can try as hard as they can to help you, but something internal has to happen first. For a lot of women, it has to do with the welfare of the children who are involved. For many women, they won't leave or seek to change the circumstance even if they're suffering quite a bit, but they will try to change it because of a child. That's consistent with some of the trauma and the psychological impact that violence has. I think it's something internal that happens. It's helped by external circumstances. It's helped by a desire to do better or give better to your children. Certainly for me, that was a very big part of it. What's also important for people to realize is that it's often not a situation of just getting up and one day and deciding, okay, this is the day to leave or this is going to be end of it, and that's the end of it. It's often a cycle of running and returning, running and returning. That makes it even harder for people who are [indiscernible] to the situation to understand. I'd say it's something internal. In my case, for short, it was a desire to do better for my children and eventually myself. That's what it was.

Zibby: It's also another layer of difficulty. Even if the children are the driving force to getting to a better place, you still share children with the person who's committing the offense. You can never really extricate yourself a hundred percent when you share the most precious thing in both of your lives.

Cherie: Yes, that's a very difficult situation.

Zibby: Have you ever written about your experience in your own voice, not one of the character's voices? No? You're not interested?

Cherie: That's one of the things that made it especially hard to write this book. Mentally, there had to be that separation between whatever I might have gone through or experienced and the story I was trying to tell. Even in terms of being able to try to explore and understand the lives of some of the other characters like Adan, for example, or even Tone, that required a very big step outside of myself. Having had those experiences made it easier to write in one sense and then made it quite a bit harder in another.

Zibby: Wow. I'm glad you could use your experience to inform this particular voice and share. Being able to extricate is, as you mentioned, close to impossible for so many people. Seeing this up close in fiction might be the way to get through to others. That might be the way the story sinks in, which is so important.

Cherie: I really do hope so. Somebody asked me recently, who's your ideal reader? Who's reading the book? Who would you want to read the book? I thought about it for a bit because I couldn't say that I had written this story with a specific person in mind, or a type of person. When I was asked the question, I thought, maybe there's somebody who's going through experiences like Lala's. I really hope that at least one person like that will pick it up and read it, but it's for everybody.

Zibby: That's amazing. I'm divorced. I'm remarried now. I have four kids with my previous husband. I wrote an essay, not a book, recently. In terms of having someone in mind, there was this woman I met shortly after I got divorced. I was on a beach vacation with my new boyfriend who became my husband. We were all in love and happy back then. Not that we're not, but you know, now we're married. It was right in the beginning. She was there with her kids and all bedraggled. Her loser husband was not paying attention to her. She just looked at me and she goes, "Ugh. What I wouldn't give to have that." I was like, "No, no, I just got this. I was you a year ago," not exactly of course. Whenever I write about that or try at all, I think about that one woman and wonder. I'm sure she didn't even remember that moment. Of course, there's no ideal reader for anything. You just hope that somebody's life improves. I sort of feel like all you can do from the pain in the past is help somebody in the present.

Cherie: Exactly. I really do hope that somebody reads it and gets that type of value from it.

Zibby: Are you working on any new projects? Do you have more books coming out soon?

Cherie: I certainly hope so. Currently, I'm working on a collection of flash fiction. It's so interesting. While I was doing my master's in the UK, I had a pretty bad case of writer's block. A classmate suggested that I try flash fiction just as a way to get out of it and to get back into the projects that I was assigned to do. I started writing flash and just fell in love with it. My flash stories tend to be a lot more, I'd say surreal. I'm working on a collection right now. I'm also working on a new novel that's set on a cocoa plantation in Trinidad, mid-nineteenth century. That is requiring a lot of research. I'm really enjoying it. That's in very early stages.

Zibby: I am going to sound really stupid now, but what is flash fiction?

Cherie: [laughs] Flash fiction, people call it by different names. No, you don't sound stupid at all. When my friend first suggested it, I thought, what's that? What are you talking about? I think a lot of people maybe don't know a lot about it. It's also called micro-fiction. It's essentially a much smaller word space in which to write a full story. A full story has to be developed in a small space. It tends to be three hundred words or less for one full story. Other people have different word limits. It's a very short, short story. I think that's the best way to describe it.

Zibby: Wow, that's tough, a whole story in three hundred words. Actually, that's kind of what Instagram is all about. It's like a little post. Turns out I'm a flash story author. I didn't even know it.

Cherie: Who knew?

Zibby: Who knew? This is great. I'm going to put it in my bio. [laughs]

Cherie: That's really what it is. It's really challenging to try to develop and execute a full story within a smaller space. A lot of it is about distillation. It's about not only what you say, but what's not said and so on. I really enjoy it.

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

Cherie: My advice to aspiring authors would be, one, read a lot. Read as much as you can. Read as widely as you can. Then I would essentially say just keep working and keep developing your craft. If it's an aspiring author who wants to be published in the traditional way, then I would say everybody's journey is different. Just [indiscernible] to appreciate your journey is yours. Just keep at it. If you're meant to be writing, you're going to write whatever the circumstance is. Whether you're published or not published, whether people understand your voice and your perspective at any particular point in time is not going to stop you from writing. The point is just to keep getting better and developing as you go along. That's what I'd say.

Zibby: Excellent, and to listen for the voices that you might hear.

Cherie: [laughs] Yes, and to listen for the voices if that's your process. I know that's not the same for everybody, but it certainly is for me.

Zibby: There you go. Thank you, Cherie. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for your fantastic novel. I can't wait to read your flash fiction. Best of luck with everything. Thanks for dealing with all of my interruptions here.

Cherie: No, that's fine. That's absolutely no problem. I understand totally. I have four kids of my own. I know how hectic it can get. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Cherie: Take care. Buh-bye.

Tod Jacobs and Peter Lynn, NOT A PARTNERSHIP

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Tod and Peter, to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for coming on my show.

Tod Jacobs: Thank you so much for having us.

Peter Lynn: Thank you so much.

Zibby: Thank you also for your contribution to married couples everywhere with your book, Not A Partnership: Why We Keep Getting Marriage Wrong & How We Can Get It Right. Tell me about how the two of you teamed up to write this book to help everyone else.

Tod: Maybe I'll jump in here. Peter and I had been working together, teaching, counseling at an institute in Jerusalem that I cofounded back in 2005. It was not our intention when we opened up this institute to primarily deal with issues of marriage and relationships. What the institute really is based in is best and brightest young men in their, let's call it the twenties and thirties primarily, average age around there, close to thirty -- these are guys who want to take about a year off minimum, two years maximum. They want to come and they want to delve into classical Jewish text, philosophy, Jewish law, Hebrew language, character building, leadership training, ethics, things like that. One of the things we found over the years was that these guys were amazingly well-prepared for pretty much everything in life. They had, many times, Ivy League backgrounds. They had incredible academic backgrounds, incredible professional backgrounds in a whole host of professions. Yet there was kind of a common theme. Everybody seemed woefully unprepared for something that they all claimed was the most important thing that they were looking forward to. That was their married life someday. Yet they didn't really have a clue how to do that successfully. I think that's a common theme that we see in our society almost no matter how well-educated you are and what kind of professional background you have.

Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Then of the other fifty percent that remain married, how many of them are really sparkling, perfect role modeled kind of marriages for people to grow up and say, aha, that's what a great marriage looks like? People are marrying later. It's a bit of a mess for many, many people. We just started delving into a combination of things. One was, Peter has an incredible background in positive psychology. I started delving into a lot of the classic mystical works and later what's called works of character building that are classic Jewish ways of preparing people for marriage, young men, young women. We found that pulling those two things together, we started doing marriage education. After doing that for a decade and a half, we looked back and we saw, wow, the couples that were formed out of the training that we were involved with have a divorce rate that is one tenth of the national average, which means some people get divorced. Still, it's a five percent divorce rate instead of a fifty percent rate. We thought, this is maybe something that we should be sharing more broadly. That was really the decision to think about doing a book, which we subsequently did.

Zibby: Did the people who came to the counseling opt in? Is it a representative sample, or is it people who are particularly already invested in making their marriage work?

Tod: This is mostly an opt-in group. In other words, ninety-five percent of the students who come to us are unmarried when they come, again, whether they're in their twenties or in their thirties. Very few of them are already married or have been married. It's almost like a clean piece of paper, a clean piece of parchment to start writing some of the foundational ideas of marriage on. Obviously, they have to unlearn lots and lots and lots of bad paradigms we all grow up with and got used to, whether it's from Hollywood movies or social media or all the kind of influences that have an influence on the way we think about relationships. We just found that, A, they got more interested in having a real relationship as they became less fearful of it. B, we found that by having some level of preparation for what a great relationship looks like and what the role of a spouse is, we found that people were way more ready for it and then when issues came up, much more prepared to deal with the issues as well. By the way, we've been kind of holding the hands of those who invited us to remain part of the counseling in their relationships as time went on. We've seen the ideas not only play out in terms of preparing for marriage, we've also seen them play out in fixing problems that have come up and dealing with problems that have been difficult in the early years or even, in some cases, the middle years of marriage by this point.

Zibby: About how many people do you think you've counseled in person at this point?

Tod: Probably upwards of a hundred and fifty, something like that, different couples.

Zibby: That's great. Amazing. The part that spoke to me right away that I just loved -- you give so much advice, obviously, in the book. You were talking about how in order to invest in a marriage, you have to give more and how people have the wrong framework to think about marriage and how the way you love a dog, the more you take care of something, the more you love it, or him or her or whatever. You said, "There was a great rabbi who pointed out that people have the concept of love exactly backwards. We go through with the assumption that if someone will do for me, will care for me, will give to me properly, then of course, I will love them in response. But the truth of the matter is that it's exactly the opposite. We love where we give. Why do parents love kids more than kids love parents? Because they give more." You keep going. You say, this is the rabbi, "You have to flip the whole paradigm and start giving and giving and giving to her, and then you'll love her. Then you'll have a real marriage." Actually, you had said this to a group. Someone responds by saying, "Whoa." [laughter] This is a highly educated group. You were on a roadshow, right? You were in finance before.

Tod: Yeah, we were on a roadshow. It was three or four of us from JP Morgan -- my background was as a Wall Street analyst -- and a few senior consultants from McKinsey & Company. Again, high-powered, highly educated group of people. I think everybody on the plane was married at some stage. The oldest person on the plane was probably in his late fifties. It went down to this young guy who I was talking to in that story. The beginning of the story was, we're thirty thousand feet in this private jet and this young analyst starts complaining about his wife. She's just not doing it for him anymore like she used to. She doesn't take care of him. She's not as kind to him. She's not as sweet to him. He's falling out of love with her. He's just kind of tired of it. That's when I told him, "You got to flip your paradigm. This rabbi taught us that you love where you give. If you want to start loving your wife, instead of waiting for her to give to you so that you'll love her in return, try giving to her. See what happens." The beautiful ending of the story was that two months later, he comes up to me in the office. He says, "You won't believe it. I'm madly in love with my wife again. I've fallen in love with her again because I decided I had nothing to lose by taking your advice. I started giving and giving and doing things for her and buying her things and taking care of her and taking her out," and whatever it was. He said, "Suddenly, I find that I'm totally in love with her again." We've seen this play out just countless times. You want to love, start giving.

Zibby: Wow. It seems so simple and so obvious. Yet it's just not how any of us think about it. How crazy that you can literally turn love back on in a snap just by shifting something? I feel like love is so elusive. I had it, but now it's gone. I fell out of love. It seems like it's such a whimsical thing. In fact, it can be very intentional.

Peter: That's one of the things to add to that. We speak about it so often in the book. Great marriages are built. When people make proactive efforts to build their marriage, and especially via this -- we always say the book speaks about the ultimate PDF manual of how to make your marriage function at full capacity. That's basically one word, which is giving. When people proactively engage in their marriage by giving, it's unbelievable to see. What's fascinating is that the person who benefits the most is the person who's doing the giving, just all of the great feelings that it brings. You see this. In my background in the field of positive psychology, there's a whole world called positive interventions. Meaning, what can you do in order to bring more positivity to your life? Tell me some practical things. According to the research, the fastest and quickest intervention for you to get out of your bad state of being, whatever that is, you're having a bad day, a rough week, the fastest thing you can do is start giving to someone. You'll see the quickest result as far as the change in your mood. It's really quite amazing to see. You see it across the board.

Zibby: Although, I would say, I'm thinking of moms in particular who might argue with this and who give so much that they almost have nothing left. You can overdo it, right? I feel like if you're always caring for other people and never even so much as taking care of yourself, that's also not good.

Peter: Listen, when people don't take care of themselves, then a lot of times the giving comes from an unhealthy place. Of course, there's a healthy degree of, this is giving in a normal capacity. This is giving in a healthy manner. We've all seen it manifest in unhealthy ways. You're right. When it happens in an unhealthy way, when people don't take care of themselves, then the whole system falls apart very fast.

Zibby: What else do I need to know? Now I've decided I want to quickly change my mood. I'm going to start giving immediately, perhaps in a new way or to people I don't normally give to or to find fulfillment in my own happiness. I'm just pretending, theoretical me. Obviously, I already do everything perfectly. [laughter] Now I can turn around and give back to my husband. What else do I need to know a hundred percent that you have found is the undiscovered gold of marital happiness?

Tod: The way we constructed the book, the book has big-picture paradigms, conceptual frameworks that we feel are critical to having a healthy marriage and to thinking about it properly. Then the second half of the book is all practical implementation of, how do you get there? We think that if you really boiled down the big picture of concepts, they boil down to three paradigms. One of them we just spoke about, which is that you love where you give. A second is to, and maybe it's really the first, is to get a definition that's a little deeper than we normally think of in terms of what marriage is. When we started looking at the book, we said, how should we define marriage? You can define it legally. You can define it the way Webster's defines it. You can go on HuffPost and see what they call marriage. Really, what we found was that there's a much, much deeper picture you can start out with. Then you begin in accordance with it. The picture as we've defined it is that marriage is two people coming together completely committed to acting in the capacity as a spouse that my beloved needs me to act in and committing that through thick and thin I will help try to give that person the life that they want and deserve. Obviously, an unhealthy version of that would be a little bit what you were describing a moment ago which is that if somebody is the one-way giver and the other side is dysfunctional, doesn't notice it, has no gratitude, it can be very, very problematic.

If two people walk into a marriage not with the idea of, what can I get out of this? but, what can I put into this to build that person? then what happens is that two people can really build something much, much bigger than the two of them, not lose themselves in that process, but really find themselves in that process and become bigger in that process by building the other. It's almost a cosmically unbelievable dynamic that two people can build something so special. It is focused on the other. As Peter pointed out, the biggest beneficiary, ironically, winds up being you yourself. It's not that you kind of manipulate and it's a calculated thing. I really want a great life, so I'm going to try and give to this person so I really become -- no, it really is focused on the other, but it turns out that the consequence of that is that you yourself wind up becoming bigger. The bigger you become and the bigger you see yourself and the more you're able to give and the less selfish you are, a person can really have an incredibly happy experience. Paradigm one is, define marriage as a vehicle for giving and for building the other person and for building something much bigger than the two of us.

Zibby: Sorry, just to jump in. That implies you're both able to do that and that you both want to give to the other person and that you possess those traits and skills. I know you mentioned this. Obviously, it can become very problematic. You have abusive spouses. You have people who cheat on their spouses or narcissists or all sorts of people who are not upholding their end. Then it doesn't matter how much the other person wants to put in. You can't do anything about it. Then it's almost a lost cause. It's almost like it starts before all of this. You have to choose someone who is on the same page with you about the giving itself. It almost starts before the practice. It starts in the choice, essentially, right?

Peter: That's what we speak about so much. Like Tod was describing, we find that especially the students we were dealing with and many places we've lectured at is that we find that people spend so much time preparing for so many things in their life, especially their professional lives, getting ready for it, and this degree and that degree and you name it. Then we saw as people are walking into the most important thing in their life -- you ask them, what's their number-one priority? They're going to say their marriage. They were totally unprepared. What we feel is so important is if people have these ideas clear before they go into a marriage, they're going to make a much healthier choice. Now, let's be very clear. Things do come up. People have psychological issues that come up. These things need to be dealt with, a hundred percent. Imagine if you have two people who get married and they're on the same page as far as what they're getting themselves into. That's already so far ahead of the game, which can really be a game changer especially as things could become rocky later on.

Zibby: What if people really change? That's another thing. You can feel like that and say that at the beginning. Yet as life progresses and things happen, someone kind of deviates from the emotional contract, if you will.

Tod: You're a hundred percent right. Look, there's many stages at which we think this information, this education can be helpful. Obviously, in a perfect world, we educate our children, our students to be ready for marriage. By the way, most people that stand and face each other to take those vows or whatever marital ceremony that they're going to have, whatever that looks like, generally speaking, if you asked those two people, what's on your mind right now? they will tell you, I just want to make the other one happy. When people enter into that relationship, what we're talking about is top of mind. The problem is they don't realize that a lot of things are going to happen in the early stage of the marriage. First of all, the freshness is going to wear off. There's a natural explosive energy in the beginning of a relationship which people think, mistakenly, is what's called love. As soon as that begins to fade -- by the way, that's not called love. That's a free gift called inspiration getting me involved with this person, helping me see the greatness of this person and downplay some of the -- nobody's perfect. We need some way of seeing something in a person that just really draws us to who that person is.

When that fades, what you're left with is a choice. Am I going to now decide that I am committed to rebuilding and getting back through a process of work and toil and sweat and energy? By the way, which is pleasurable if you do it correctly. That shouldn't sound so negative. I know it does, but it shouldn't. That thing that you got for free in the beginning, you can actually earn through the process of building your marriage over a period of time. Really, the ultimate goal is that the two of you are as in love but in a much more meaningful way that you've earned as you were in that beginning stage. Part one is, let's hope that you think about this before you get married so that you can face this. Probably, lots of your listeners, and certainly lots of our readers, are people who are now in a marriage. As you're describing, financial problems came up. A health problem came up. This issue came up. Things like infidelity, by the way, that's very, very hard to put back trust into a relationship. That's a little bit outside of -- that often needs professional help. Many times, that's going to wind up being in a broken marriage. There are also dysfunctional people, no question about it. There are people who absolutely cannot function in a marriage because of their narcissism, selfishness, dysfunctionality, etc., but that's not the vast majority of people. It doesn't need to be.

What we found is, somebody may be married, and the marriage is not so fresh. It's not going so well. They're getting a little tired of each other. This one's kind of ignoring and in their own space. This one's kind of ignoring and in their own space. The old habits begin to resurface about being kind of a selfish person like they were before they got married. What we have found is by refocusing on the idea of giving and making it fresh and beginning to build respect again -- I'll give you a classic example. When two people meet and they're going out, they do everything possible to impress each other. When I was dating my wife-to-be, when you were dating your spouse-to-be, how did we dress? How did we speak? How did we smell? How did we look? How did our hair look? How courteous were we? You say to somebody, now try to build that snapshot in your mind of what you were like when you were dating. Now take a little snapshot of yourself on the average evening at home.

Zibby: Ugh. [laughs]

Tod: That's a cringeworthy moment for most of us. That's an embarrassment because if you think about it, why am I not still doing that for the most important person in my world? By the way, when I go to work, I don't look like that. When I go to work, I don't sound like that. When I go to work, I'm wearing nice clothing. I'm made up. I look good. I smell good.

Zibby: Now you're making me feel bad. [laughs] When am I supposed to wear my sweatpants? No, I'm kidding.

Tod: But you can wear your sweatpants. That's fine. You're not meant to be formal at home. I say you. We. We are meant to remember that the person across the table, across the room, in the other room is the person that is the most important person in my entire universe. That's the person who deserves the best I've got. That's the person who deserves the most respect from me. Unfortunately, what we do is we let our guard down because we want someplace we can be ourselves, so to speak. We've talked to couples about this. The pushback is usually, hey, come on, I was acting when I was going out. I got to be myself when I'm at home. The response to that is, no, sometimes you need to act at home as well. The classic example there is when you come home and you're in a rotten mood and your three-year-old runs up to you and says, Mommy, Daddy, come sit with me on the floor. I want to show you my fingerpaintings. I have four hundred fingerpaintings. I want you to see every single one of them. You're tired. You're in a horrible mood. Your boss yelled at you. You lost a deal and whatever it is. Aren't you going to act? Aren't you going to put on a huge smile and say, nothing I'd love to do more than sit down with you on the floor right now for the next hour and look at bad fingerpaintings? It's all that. Now, it's acting, but it's not acting in a negative way. It's becoming really what I want to become if I have control over myself. I want to be a good father. You want to be a good mother. We want to be good spouses. It's just really rising to the occasion and not letting our lower self drag us down in ways that affect others in very, very negative ways which they don't deserve.

Zibby: Wow. This is amazing. First of all, you need to give this to every rabbi. I don't know if you already do this. I don't know what your marketing plan is or was or whatever. Any rabbi who's marrying people should be giving this to their congregants, at least. I have a bunch of cousins who are about to get married. Now I'm like, oh, perfect. Obviously, I can give this to married friends, but that's a little bit insulting. [laughter] You guys need some help. Here's a book. As a gift, this should be the go-to gift, and not just for Jewish people at all. I happen to be Jewish. This is just lessons culled from Judaism that apply to any relationship. It should really be for anybody.

Tod: We tried to make it universal. You don't have to be religious. You don't have to be spiritual. You just have to want a real relationship for this material to speak to you. That's certainly what we believe.

Zibby: It's common sense. You're not hawking anything totally out there. This all makes perfect sense, as you laid out so nicely and neatly in the book interspersed with lots of personal stories and work. It's something that everybody really needs to hear. Do you do personal sessions? I feel like I want to have the two of you talk to all these people I love before they get married. You should take couples. You should charge a fortune and have a bunch of people come and get the download. Marital insurance, you could call it.

Peter: [laughs] Right. You should know also -- I just wanted to push back a little bit. What we do find is that people who are married -- you're married ten years. You're married fifteen years, even more than that. I find that if you take a couple, we tend to think, this is the way it's going to be. This is what it is. What we have found is that when you take couples who have been married for a period of time and they make the switch to, hey, let's put some work into this, let's try and change the patterns a bit, you can take an okay marriage or even a good marriage and with a little bit of effort and some marriage education, it's awesome what can happen. You can now take a couple that's been married who are in their forties and their fifties and their sixties, and they find that spark again. It's funny. For me, I'm almost more excited about reaching out to those couples than I am about the ones before they get married. I agree with you. Before they get married is crucial. So many couples out there, in some way, give up when they’ve gotten to a certain place in their marriage. They have a certain amount of kids. They say, okay, this is what it is. The answer is, it doesn't have to be that way. With a little bit of effort and some tools out there -- we do not lack access to tools. There are ten trillion social media platforms that are discussing marriage and relationships. There's so much out there. With just making a small amount of effort to say, let's change things up a little bit, let's learn some new things, it can take a marriage which could really use a bit of freshness, it can take it to that next level. It's really amazing what can happen.

Zibby: Wait, I think I cut you off before. You said that there were three things that divided up the book. The second one was where we had started. Then you introduced the first one. You have to finish off now with the third before we keep everybody hanging here.

Tod: Absolutely. The third paradigm is that marriages don't happen, they are made. As much as that sounds sort of obvious, if you actually take a look and think about how we grow up thinking about love, it's all passive. I fell in love. I was swept off my feet. Especially now where we're in a world where things don't last very long and we crave newness, you combine the social media experience where I'm always seeing that everything in everybody else's lives looks always fantastic and fresh and wonderful, and then I've got this vision that love is passive and I just fall in love and if I could just meet the right soulmate -- by the way, they say in corona, you don't need a soulmate, you need a cellmate, a C-E-L-Lmate. At any rate, this idea that it's kind of passive and I find my soulmate and then everything's just supposed to be fine as long as I find the right person, we think that that's almost completely wrong.

Obviously, you need to try to find the right person. You need to find a person whose values you share, who you're attracted to, who you respect, who respects you. You get that person. They get you. That's the fundamental gating factor for committing to somebody. The point is that once that commitment happens, you have to realize that it will require giving, work, thinking about it, prioritizing it. Without that big picture that paints everything I do in marriage, I will fall naturally back into the Hollywood romance vision. They meet. They sweep each other off their feet. Usually, something bad happens that separates them. At the end of the movie, they fall into each other's arms again. The curtain goes down. That's the end of the movie. Of course, we all know that the next day the curtain comes back up. That is now act two, scene one, where the choice is going to be made. Oh, wow, that person is not quite as exciting as I thought they were, not quite as funny, not quite as attractive. I've been duped again by life.

Or I can say, wait a minute, I got into this and now I'm going to start actually prioritizing it, working on it, building it. A is get your marriage vision right. B is realize that you love where you give. The more you give, the more you will love. C, realize that this will be a process of making this work and investing in it. My background is investments. I will tell you, I never found a higher return investment than marriage because the well-being and the intimacy and the trust, almost everything a person wants and needs to have a meaningful, happy life can lie in a powerfully good relationship. We believe that it's not something that just happens to that lucky few. We really believe that anybody almost at any stage as long as it's not totally been destroyed by dysfunctionality and abuse and things like that can really restart their marriage and get it moving again.

Zibby: Wow. Thank you, guys, so much. See, you gave. I'm just taking, but it still improved my mood. Now I'm going to go give this back to the people in my life who I think could really use it including everybody listening. Fantastic book. Fantastic advice. Loved the whole framework. I am sad to not be on Zoom with you guys for the rest of the day so you can help me through all my inevitable stumbles. It's just such a good reminder to step up for your marriage. Just step it up. Do little nice things. Maybe leave a little note somewhere. It doesn't have to be such a big thing. Little things make such a big difference. Thank you for this reminder. Thank you for all your time.

Peter: Thank you so much for having us. We really, really appreciate it. Keep up all the great work.

Zibby: Thank you. You too.

Tod: Thank you very much.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Tod: Bye.

Peter: Thank you.

Morgan Jerkins, WANDERING IN STRANGE LANDS

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Morgan. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Wandering in Strange Lands. I'm so excited to talk to you.

Morgan Jerkins: Thank you. Likewise.

Zibby: Wow. This was a labor of love. This is a lot of travel and research. Oh, my gosh. First of all, tell me about when you decided to write this book and why. Then I want to hear about the journey to getting all the information.

Morgan: It's going to be weird of how I got the inspiration for this book because the book went through many different iterations of what the scope was to be. I will say that the impetus for the book began with a movie. It was Get Out. I was watching it in Magic Johnson Theater, Harlem. There's a climactic scene where Daniel Kaluuya's character, the black male protagonist, has his hand around his white girlfriend's throat. She and his family has been trying to basically steal his body for the majority of the movie. As soon as the police car pulls up, everybody gasps. Now, in a regular society, police would mean safety. Yay, he's coming to arrest the white girl. But we as black Americans know that the police often does not mean safety. I was fascinated that when we were in this theater, for example, we all had the same instinctual fear. I'm not a native Harlem. I've been living here for five years. I had a feeling that other people in this theater were not all natives to this neighborhood. That really fascinated me, this idea of fear of state violence, fear of the state, and our precarious position on any type of American soil. I wanted to first investigate that intergenerational fear and trauma. When I spoke about that to friends of mine who were actually professors who were based in the Boston area -- this is after the book was sold. They told me, "This sounds like a migratory story." That's how the book started to develop. Not into just fear; that fear is a subcomponent. These migratory patterns and how we are connected and also disconnected because of the violence of the state, that's how the scope grew.

Zibby: Wow. I actually thought what you just said was one of the most memorable parts of the book and has applications for really everything in life, was how you can really pass down trauma from generation to generation even if you haven't lived it yourself, which I didn't even realize could happen. If I had a traumatic experience, have I now doomed all my -- [laughs]. When does it have to have happen? It must have to happen before you have kids. Or is it just a societal thing? What do you think?

Morgan: I don't know. Late last year, I got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a guest professor at Leipzig University in Germany. When I was there, one of the classes I taught was a literature seminar, Black Women's Interiorities Across the Diaspora. I had one student there -- I still think about him to do this day. He was from Israel. We were talking about the intergenerational trauma of slavery. He was likening it to intergenerational trauma if those were the descendants of Holocaust survivors. As I mention in my book, this research has already been investigated by those such Dr. Rachel Yehuda where she studied epigenetics and how trauma affects gene mechanisms through Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Then there was also Dr. Joy DeGruy who coined the term posttraumatic slave disorder. It made me think about it.

If you have a whole generation of people who have undergone just unspeakable stress to their psyches and their bodies, how could they not pass that down to children? It's hard because you think, I'm my own person, and also because America's very individualistic in a way, for better or for worse, because of how we're dealing with or not dealing with the pandemic. That really got me to thinking about certain things, certain fears that I have, certain trepidations. If I just listen to a conversation happening with my mother and her siblings or even my grandparents, I'm like, now I see the echoes and the rippling effects. That's something that I really wanted to demonstrate in Wandering in Strange Lands, is just that echo that happens from coast to coast, region to region despite the fact that black Americans are distinct, but also overlapping in terms of the disenfranchisement that we face.

Zibby: Wow. I thought maybe, for instance with the Holocaust, it was more environmental, that if you're born into a family where the parents had experienced a trauma, it was the environment, all that energy that just transmits when you're around people who have gone through something awful, versus, does it actually shape your DNA? I don't know. It's so fascinating. Although then, it's also discouraging in a way. Hopefully, with all the progress that gets made, then the future generations can have that sort of lifted.

Morgan: Yeah, or just don't forget the history. That's another thing. I remember I read this -- I don't know if you saw this article. I think it was published last week where it said twenty-three percent of Americans, young adults, didn't think that the Holocaust happened or don't know about the Holocaust. I'm like, are you kidding me right now? There are people alive today whose parents were Holocaust survivors. What is going on with the public education system or just the American education system that we have forgotten?

Zibby: Don't even depress me any more. [laughs] I can't even go there. It's like people who think the pandemic is a hoax. There are some people out there who just don't respond to facts and science or reality. You can't really do much, right? I don't know.

Morgan: Just to bring it back around to the book --

Zibby: -- Yes, please. [laughs]

Morgan: I'll try to bring it back around to the book. You see, that is something that I also wanted to elucidate in Wandering in Strange Lands, is the different realities that we inhabit. A lot of times in African American communities, there can be a collision course between oral history, stuff that's passed around in communities, and what is actually documented. Sometimes for people who are from communities that are disenfranchised, communities that have been violated, they don't always take the documentation at face value because they often know who has the power of this documentation: those who are generally white, privileged, with a lot of networks. They're not. They're the complete opposite. They have this suspicion. That was something that I learned early on. Something that I always did before I traveled anywhere was that I got in touch with people from that area. I wanted them to know who I was, what publisher I had to deal with, my website, just so they knew that I was a real person, but also because -- for example, when I went down to the low country, Georgia, and I was doing research on the Gullah/Geechee communities, doing field research, one of the women there, she told me, "We've had people come down here, interview us without our consent, turn our stories into scholarship without proper acknowledgment." They’ve already been violated. Even though I was black like them, I was coming from New York City. I was already a New York Times best-selling author. I taught at an Ivy League institution. I was the institution. I had to really tread lightly. That's something I didn't lose sight of.

Zibby: Morgan, tell me more about your story. Tell me how you got started writing, how you became a best-selling -- give the CliffsNotes and all that stuff because it's so impressive, just awesome.

Morgan: Thank you. I thought that I wanted to be a doctor. My father was a doctor. Every time you ask a child what they want to be, doctor, lawyer, whatever. I thought I wanted to be a doctor.

Zibby: I never wanted to be a doctor.

Morgan: That's great.

Zibby: Just throwing that out there. Science is not my thing. I have so much respect for you and doctors and everything.

Morgan: Science wasn't even my thing either. I just loved the narrative of people's lives and their bodies. Anyway, when I was in high school, I was bullied a lot. I'm not a confrontational person. I internalized a lot of that low self-esteem. I wanted to escape. Because I didn't have a passport at the time, plus I was a minor, the only way I could escape was through fiction. Every day when I'd get home, I hurry through my homework and I'd start writing fictious stories as a way to cope. I continued to do that well into college when I matriculated at Princeton. I knew that I wanted to be a writer, but I had a lot of colleagues who were applying to med school, applying to law school, going into banking. It was like, oh, my god, am I going to waste my degree and I should maybe try to get a job at Goldman Sachs or something like that? When I graduated from college, I didn't get a job anywhere. I didn't get a job. I was applying for entry-level positions at publishing houses and literary agencies assuming that that would be my way in. Granted, I had already done unpaid internships like I was told. I was told you had to do unpaid internships in order to get a foothold. As you know, that puts a lot of economically disadvantaged people with the short end of the stick. I did all of that. Graduated from the number-one university in the country. Still couldn't get a job. I returned home jobless, heartbroken.

The only thing that I had as an anchor was that I was in an MFA program at Bennington, which is a low-residency program. I had some insecurities there because I was the youngest and I was the only black person in my cohort. I was like, oh, my gosh, am I the token? even though I had a wonderful experience there. When I was online, I was spending just an extraordinarily large amount of hours online, particularly on Twitter. I'd see people my age exchanging content. I was like, oh, you can exchange content and you can get paid for it? Then I'm going to do that. Because I had so much time on my hands, I was able to amass a large amount of bylines in a short amount of time. Then everything just started to take off like a rocket. In 2015, I moved to New York. I also got an agent. I also met the woman who would become the acquiring editor for my first book through Twitter as well. The week that I was graduating from my MFA program, I was fielding calls from editors interested in acquiring my first book. That was in June 2016. January 2018 is when This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America was released. It debuted on the New York Times best-seller list. Then from there, I taught at Bennington as a teaching fellow. I taught at Columbia University, Leipzig University. I've done speaking engagements. Of course, I just released my sophomore book in August of this year.

Zibby: Wow, that is exciting. Wait, can you tell me, please, what it's like to write a book and have it come out and be an instant best seller? Tell me about the call you got or when you found out.

Morgan: It was funny. I was on my book tour. I remember what it was like. I was in Atlanta. It was about an hour or so before I was going to get picked up to go to the bookstore, Charis Bookstore, or Charis. I'm pronouncing it wrong. C-H-A-R-I-S Bookstore, I think that was the one. I was interviewing people for my second book. I knew I had a deadline. I wanted to hit the ground running. I was literally on the call with a scholar from UCLA. Somebody is calling my other line. I'm like, who is calling me at this hour? Why is my editor calling me at this hour? All of a sudden, I click over. I'm like, "I'm sorry. I got to take this because somebody is frantically calling my other line." I click over. Then they tell me the news. I click back over, mental/emotional whiplash. I tried to get through the interview, but a part of me wanted to scream at this lady who didn't know me from a can of paint, as my folks would say. That's how it happened. Then on the way to the bookstore, I cried. I was in the car with my mom. Had the book event. Family members showed up that lived in Atlanta. Friends of mine from college showed up. Then when I came back to the hotel, my publisher sent me flowers. Then I ordered room service with my mom. Then I passed out. It was the best. My experience as a debut author was incredible because I could not have asked for better blowout. I knew that it was picking up steam because of the amount of anticipated lists that it was on. In terms of just the book tour, the people that came out during my book tour, and the reception, I would want that for any debut author. I was very lucky or very blessed.

Zibby: That's amazing. After that big tour with so much emotion and success and everything, now you have a book coming out into this much quieter time in life. How are you handling that transition?

Morgan: It doesn't feel quiet. I think it's been hard for everyone. I know that I am surrounded by a lot of literary citizens who, we could be a bit self-deprecating when we're promoting our work. When it's huge professional news, we often lament online about how weird we feel about promoting our stuff because we live in a society that often devalues art or devalues writing, and especially devalues it as something that should be a monetary pursuit as well as a self-motivated, passionate one. It's a tricky balance. It's definitely a tricky balance when millions of people file for unemployment. Stimulus checks that were sent months ago was only $1,200. It feels decadent to be like, I wrote this book. Here, I'd like you to read it. My book was originally slated to come out May of this year. I live in New York City. New York was the epicenter of the virus. I always tell people that it was nothing like I've ever experienced before because I couldn't hear a thing. What I mean by that is that -- I live near Central Park. I couldn't hear a dog bark. I didn't hear a bus approaching its stop. I didn't hear people arguing on the street. The only thing I heard every single day or night was the ambulance sirens and me just praying that I didn't know anybody in those vehicles. I was surrounded by death.

When the city went into lockdown mode, I'm just trying to get my head together. When my editors emailed me at the top of April and asked if we could push to August, I was happy about it. Usually, I'm an impatient person. I'm like, let's go, let's go, let's go. Because I was trying to get myself just emotionally prepared to reset for this different routine that I was going to have do, I liked the extra time. Then as we know, as time went on, then George Floyd's murder happened. Then the protests happened. All of a sudden, my book took on this different kind of urgency that none of us could've predicted, obviously. In the beginning, I was happy because I thought, August is great because I thought, silly me, that everything would be opened again. Also because there's so much traveling, August is time for vacation, I thought we could pitch it that way. Because of the protests, then things started to [indiscernible]. Then things just started to move really quickly. When you say that it takes on a quiet form, it didn't feel that way at all, at all.

Zibby: I take it back. I shouldn't have said quiet.

Morgan: I'll say this. It definitely felt quiet in the sense that -- I'm a Gemini. I pride myself for being able to work a room anywhere I go. I know that I could command attention. I project my voice in a way. Maybe it's because of the insecurity complex of being short. I'm very short, so I try to project as much as I can.

Zibby: How short? I'm very short too.

Morgan: I'm five feet tall.

Zibby: I'm 5'2".

Morgan: Every time people meet me, they're always like, I thought you were taller than what you were. Not every time they say this. A lot of times when people meet me, they're like, I thought you were taller than what you were. I take that as a compliment because I guess my personality's large, but also because I know how easy it is to be invisible, not only because of my height, but because I'm also a black woman. I guess that has something to do with it. I love going on book tours and going into bookstores because I can project. You can see people's gestures, their faces, the different comments they make as you're telling your story. You get energy from them. When you're doing a Zoom call, you don't get that same interaction even though you do feel tuned in because people do Q&A stuff. It's different because now you have to deliver twice as much energy. You're not going to get that back. As I was doing these book tours in August and even though they were only an hour long, I would be wiped out after them.

Zibby: I can relate to that. It's also the contrast of, you're sitting in one place doing your normal life and then all of a sudden, your space has to completely transition. Usually, you go somewhere. I'll go somewhere and have to perform or be on or whatever. Here, I can just be my focused self and then next thing you know, it's like -- [laughs].

Morgan: Yeah, exactly. When I was in Atlanta when it was announced that I -- I told the crowd that I just got the best-seller list. I was with them. Twenty minutes before it was go time, you meet the booksellers. They're so nice. They show you around the store. They say, "Here's where your book is. Let us know if you want any water." You could say [indiscernible]. Also, sometimes they have a pet, a resident dog or a resident cat. That bookstore had a resident wiener dog. You saw the dog move in and out of the crowds as people were enjoying themselves. It accounts for so much. Even when you're signing books, that accounts for so much. I'm not going to say I took it for granted, but man, I would've loved to have gotten my wardrobe together and picked out the finest makeup palettes, go to the bookstore, and especially in August, and go and have a nice wine spritzer with friends or family afterwards. There's so much that could've been done, but you know what, I'm lucky with podcasts like this one. Also, independent bookstores and booksellers, we've really got ourself into shape. The thing about this whole time is it's unprecedented. It's not like you can go to somebody and be like, what did you do during this time when it happened twelve years ago? None of us knows. Despite the fact that we don't know, we have been able to reorient, I'm sure with difficulty, but we're doing it. I think that that's pretty inspiring.

Zibby: I agree. I think there's some things that came out of it that will make regular life better going forward.

Morgan: I sure hope so.

Zibby: I feel like so much of life was running around, getting places.

Morgan: The pandemic has made me prioritize rest a whole lot more. Again, I live in New York. New York is very fitness heavy. I was really focusing on, I want to lose this much weight by the time my book comes out, May 12th. I had it all planned out with a personal trainer. Then of course, the lockdown happened. I was getting so upset. I was like, man, if the lockdown didn't happen, I would be able to bench press my weight by now. I would be able to do this. I realized, but you're alive, though. Your body has kept you alive. Okay, you had junk food two days in a row. So what? You're working under stress. This pandemic has really forced me to do a whole reset and to shift my thinking about my body and stuff like that.

Zibby: I've never even tried to bench press my own weight. The fact that that was a goal of yours, I applaud.

Morgan: I was getting close. It wasn’t a goal. I was just getting there. It wasn't a goal. When I started bench pressing 110 pounds, I was like, I could get here. I'm almost there.

Zibby: I am beyond impressed. That is up there with the instant New York Times best seller.

Morgan: I don't know if I could bench press that now, though. Not anymore.

Zibby: What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Morgan: Oh, man. This is going to sound really weird. If you have an idea in your mind that kind of makes you afraid, that's probably the one that you should investigate, I would say. If you have an idea in your mind, that it comes to you in flashes -- I know a story is important when I can see certain scenes visually or certain lines come to me. If you don't write it down, it's going to keep pestering you. It's going to haunt you in a sense. I would always tell writers that. Also, don't ask for permission. I say this especially for female writers or writers of color or female writers of color. Don't ask for permission. That's the way that I had to be with my career. When I didn't get those jobs that I told you about, I definitely sulked, but I also was like, listen, I may not be the best writer out there, but I'm going to work harder than the best writer out there. That involved me pitching relentlessly, getting rejected a lot, and doing it all over again and just trying every single angle I could to shoot my shot, basically. Don't ask for permission. Don't wait for somebody to say, yeah, it sounds like a good idea, go for it. Just start writing. Don't worry about it being perfect the first time. First drafts are supposed to be bad. That's why it's a first draft. You can revise in layers. I try to encourage writers to do the same.

Zibby: I love that. Morgan, thank you. I feel like we didn't talk too much even about your book which I felt like was so awesome. I learned so much about your family and your background and all your amazing research skills and all this. Readers will just have to get the book and find out the backstory, so to speak, Wandering in Strange Lands. Thank you, Morgan. This was such a nice chat.

Morgan: Thank you. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Zibby: You too.

Morgan: Take care.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Morgan: Bye.

Oliver Jeffers, WHAT WE'LL BUILD

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

Oliver Jeffers: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, this is like Christmas in my house. I don't even celebrate Christmas, but it would be like Christmas. It's the greatest thing to be interviewing you. My kids were freaking out. I have four kids. They are obsessed. My little guy loves How to Catch a Star and obviously the Crayons and everything else. Delighted to talk to you. Let's start with talking about your new book, which I only have on my iPad here. What We'll Build, beautiful illustrations, per usual, and thought-provoking text. Tell me a little bit about your latest book. What inspired this one? Why now?

Oliver: Why now and what inspired it are both the same things, which is we had a second child, a daughter. I joked that I better write her a book because I'd never hear the end of it if my son had a book and she didn't. Really, I was going through similar internal dialogues about the state of the world and what it's like to be raising a child, and especially this time around. It's not the first time we've had a child, but it's the first time we've had a daughter. She's actually the first female Jeffers in four generations. So quite some time just thinking about the timing and the feeling in the zeitgeist of this moment where so much change is possible, not guaranteed, but possible. The idea of raising a daughter in what will hopefully no longer be a man's world, it feels like a special time to be trying to do that. That was one aspect of it. Here We Are, if that book was about trying to understand the world as it is and break it down in its simplest terms, which covers the strangeness that comes with being a parent for the first time, then we had already experienced that. Our thoughts were able to turn more fully to the future when looking at this brand-new bundle of life in our arms. If Here We Are is about explaining the world as it is, then What We'll Build is about possibly changing it. In the quiet hours in the middle of the night as I was nursing her back to sleep, I would just be imagining these things and saying these [audio cuts outs]. I just started to write it down. Then it came quite organically and quite naturally.

Zibby: Wow. You just have to keep having kids. You'll have more and more original content. How old is your son?

Oliver: He's five. He turned five in the summer.

Zibby: I have a five-year-old also. He must eat up these books like crazy. How cool to have a dad who does this?

Oliver: He does, but I don't try to ram them down his throat either. I was never a big reader when I was a kid because it always felt like something that you had to do for homework. It was more like a chore. It wasn't until I discovered books on my own terms that I became an avid reader. That was later in life. I had this deep-seated fear that if I tried to make him do something, it would actually put him off. He does, he goes to books, but he actually likes reference books more, books that explain things. He's definitely more like his mother in that sense. She's an engineer. He likes things to be explained logically. He also likes dinosaurs and diggers. My daughter, on the other hand, I think is a lot more similar to me in terms of chaos and creativity. [laughs]

Zibby: What types of books got you reading?

Oliver: What types of books got me reading? There are books that I enjoyed whenever I was a kid, for sure. The first book that I read because I wanted to read it was a Roald Dahl book. I had read The BFG for school. It was the first book that didn't feel like homework. It felt like a treat. Then I just went and read his entire backlog. Honestly, it wasn't until much later in life that I became a read every single day type of person. I mostly read nonfiction, believe it or not. There's so many interesting things that have actually happened in the world. I want to find out about all those things and how everything affects everything else. I can't even remember what it was, but there was something that I didn't understand. I was like, let me read about that. Because it was on my terms and I wanted to find out about it, it was a very different experience.

Zibby: Interesting. I remember growing up my parents had these encyclopedias which were all really fancy and bound and everything. I remember being like, wow, I could just learn about anything I want. I'm just going to pull this thing out. Let's see what I find. The power in that.

Oliver: We moved to the US fifteen years ago. I realized that all the classic books that they teach in schools here -- in Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, they were Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, things like that. When I got the USA, I realized there was a whole different genre of classic books that were American classic books. I'd found a list of the one hundred classic American novels. I've been slowly working my way through them. I've discovered John Steinbeck that way, and [indiscernible]. That's been a real pleasure.

Zibby: Take me from what happened when you started reading Roald Dahl books to here. When did you know that you wanted to produce books? When did you start illustrating and writing? When did all that brew up inside you?

Oliver: From when I was a kid, I've always loved drawing and making things. A lot of the art, looking back on it now, has been very narrative driven. There is that old Picasso quote. All children are artists; the trick is just remembering how whenever you grow up. When people ask me, when did I start making art? I tend to ask them, when did you stop? We all made art at some point. Then all adults just sort of stopped and moved on to different things. I just never did. When did it occur to me to actually make a book? When I started thinking about real-life jobs and so on, once I learned that making art was a real-life job, I knew that that was going to be for me. I started to work my [indiscernible]. The university experience is very different in the UK and Ireland than it is in the USA. Here, you have to start specializing, really, from the age of fifteen. Then you pick your degree, your subject. Then you pick where you want to go. Whereas in the US, it's you pick your college and then you pick what you want to study. It's a much different system here. I think it suits fewer people here because who knows what they want to do when they're fifteen?

I'm one of the fortunate people that did know because I knew that I wanted to make art. I got into art college. It was only at the very, very end of my art college when I thought I was going to be a painter -- which is still something that I do. I have two completely separate careers. I had this concept for a series of canvases, but it occurred to me that maybe these canvases would be better served as a book. I made a book in my last year of college. Then I went about trying to get that book published. When I was showing that to publishers both in London and New York, the question was asked, "Do you have other ideas, or is this a one-off?" I was like, "I've got lots of idea." I didn't really. I was just like, I think that's the answer they want to hear. Ever since then, the switch was very easy for me. Books came very, very naturally. Just today, I realized that it's almost twenty years since I first made How to Catch a Star.

Zibby: Wow. It's so relevant and so beautiful. I go to bed reading it with my son. It's so crazy. Your ideas are in my house every night. It's just the magic of picture books. It's really unbelievable.

Oliver: I try not to break it down and take it apart to see how it works, ever, because I just fear that it won't ever be put together. It's such a strange thought that the work that I did alone in the studio then has a life of its own. It's easier just not to think about that than to really contemplate what that means.

Zibby: You keep, obviously, creating lots of stories. Do they just occur to you? How does something trigger you to decide, this is going to be my next book?

Oliver: I have lots of ideas for stories that never really fully materialize into stories because every good story, every good picture book, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some of these ideas that I had, they might have just been the middle. It was a gimmick or an interesting visual or didn't have one of those three things or couldn't really be fleshed out enough into a picture book. My sketch book was whittled with those ideas. Then at one point, I thought, these don't have all that it takes to be a full picture book, but maybe I could do a book of short picture books. That book became Once Upon an Alphabet. That really was me just plundering through my sketchbooks and lifting out the choices ideas and then attributing one to each letter. There was a few holes where I had to think up ones from scratch.

Honestly, each book happens in a different way. Stuck is partially based on a true story. The Incredible Book Eating Boy, the whole story came from both an art project that I was doing with a scientist in quantum physics and just a simple drawing that I made. I connected the two things. Then The Fate of Fausto, I don't really know where that came from. I took a drive up the North Coast of Northern Ireland. I pulled the car over just on the cliffs in the absolute middle of rural nowhere. I took a nap as I was watching this storm come in. I woke up and that book was just on the tip of my tongue. I put pencil to paper. It came out pretty much as is. Who knows where that came from? Here We Are was originally written as a letter to my son. The same with What We'll Build. There's not a formula. Each one is slightly different. Sometimes they're quite tricky to pick the lock of. Stuck, that's based on really getting a kite stuck in a tree and really getting some other stuff caught in the tree, but I didn't know how it ended. I sat on it for six months, eight months, maybe a year before watching my nephews play and just forgetting about one game and moving on to the other. I realized, maybe it doesn't have to end. Maybe he just gets distracted and moves on. That proved to be the perfect ending. It's different for every case.

Zibby: Then my daughter wanted me to ask you how you came up with the design for the crayons.

Oliver: Well, they're crayons. [laughs]

Zibby: I know, like faces and making them so human, how you came up with it. I didn't say it was a great question, but that's her question, so I'm going with it.

Oliver: It was fun to come up with the design for the crayons box because I wanted it to be completely unique and not associated with any existing crayons brand. I think it was based on, I saw an ad in a magazine for a packet of candy with that color spectrum, an old-time magazine or something like that. I was like, oh, that's how that will do. Really, it's the simplicity of it. When I saw that story, I just knew that this book had to be done so simply. You couldn't overdo it because it would ruin the obviousness of the whole thing. The letters had to be written as if you got them in a stack. The crayons themselves had to be characters. That's gauche paint. It's the simplest way that I could have drawn them and made them look like physical objects. Then, of course, everything else in the book is a crayon drawing. It was like, what are the laws of logic that would apply to this if this really happened? Then I just went from there.

Zibby: Wow. Some books you illustrate only. Some books you write and illustrate. Are you still a for-hire illustrator? I can't imagine you are.

Oliver: No, I never have been. I always said I would never illustrate somebody else's book until I was tricked into looking at the Crayons manuscripts. The editor that I work with, then in New York, called me into office and then says, "I've got to leave to take a phone call. Don't look at anything on my desk." Of course, I went over and looked. That was sitting face up. I read it and was like, this is a really great concept. It's so obvious what should be done. I was like, I hope whoever does this does it the right way. Then my editor came back in. I said, "Who's illustrating this?" He's goes, "No one yet. Why? You interested?" I was like, "I knew exactly what you were doing." I couldn't not do it. Then the only other book I've illustrated that hasn’t been a Crayons book was with Eoin Colfer. We're friends. We just basically said, yeah, we should work together. Artists and authors that meet at literary festivals always say that sort of stuff, and it never happens. Then about two weeks later, Eoin says, "I've got this idea that I think might be perfect for you." I read it. I was like, "That is pretty good, actually. What about I do this way?" He's goes, "Perfect." Then it was just that simple. Then actually, there's another book, but it's unclear -- people said, who wrote it? Who illustrated it? Sam Winston and I both said, "We both did. We both wrote it. We both illustrated it." That was born out of just meeting this person, becoming friends, and realizing that all of our work, it overlapped so much. We said, "We should do a project." We started doing what we thought was an art project that then morphed into a picture book. It's been organic every single time.

Zibby: All the authors out there who would salivate for your help with illustrations can now just say, forget it, that's off the table.

Oliver: Totally. I still work in the fine art world. My schedule over the next couple years is mostly based in public sculptures and paintings. It's a strange mix. I've always laughed at authors who, they want to collaborate. It's like, yeah, that's fifteen minutes of work for you, and it's a year's work for me. It's not that straightforward.

Zibby: What is it like? Tell me where you do the drawings, what materials you use, the process of illustrating a book.

Oliver: Again, it's different book by book. My studio was in Brooklyn in New York. Although, I haven't been there in some time because we were traveling before this pandemic hit. Then we came back to Northern Ireland to be with family. What We'll Build is, that's all paint on paper. It's acrylic paint and a little bit of ink and some colored pencil on paper. Here We Are was some ink washes. That was then finished on Procreate on an iPad. The Incredible Book Eating Boy was all collage with acrylic paint. Lost and Found, How to Catch a Star, they were all watercolor. Then The Fate of Fausto, just because I wanted to make life exceptionally difficult for myself, I experimented with a completely different media, which is lithographic printing. There is no original piece of art for that, per se, because it was all made on stone and on metal plates layer by layer, color by color. Then those plates and stones were sort of destroyed in the process of making them. It was completely different. I really didn't know what was going to come out the other end of the printer.

Zibby: Have you figured out what it is about your style that is so appealing to others? Maybe that's too self-referential. Maybe that's more for me to say. Have you kind of analyzed it, like when you start a new project?

Oliver: I try not to, but I think there's a directness and a simplicity and an honesty to it where I'm just clearly enjoying myself. That's just the way that I write. That's just the way that I do a straight line. That's just the way that it will look if I do this. I'm not trying to be anybody else. I'm not trying to be something I'm not. There's maybe an integrity and a mild sophistication enough in it that I'm not trying to pander to anyone. I don't know. Eoin Colfer's son who was eighteen at the time asked me with all sincerity, he was like, "Why are your drawings so popular?" I thought about it for a second. I was like, I think that might be an insult. [laughs]

Zibby: No, that is not an insult.

Oliver: It sort of was like, they're so simple and so easy, why do people like them? I was like, I don't know.

Zibby: That's funny. Trust a child to say something like that. What advice would you have for an illustrator or an artist, a child who was like you as a child, just sketching and not wanting to stop? How do you have them not give up?

Oliver: Two things spring to mind. One, if you look at successful people, there are plenty of successful people that have all drive and little talent. There are almost no successful people who are all talent with no drive. The advice that I generally tend to give young and aspiring artists and illustrators is an Oscar Wilde quote, which is, be yourself, everybody else is already taken.

Zibby: That's a great quote. What's coming next? What are your next books that we have to look forward to?

Oliver: That's a question I don't know. I haven't been in my studio in well over a year. As I say, we were traveling from the start of last summer. We planned to take a year off to travel. It took us about five years to prepare for it. We set off end of last July. We were intending to return just at the end of the summer. Obviously, in about February or so, that all came crashing to a halt. We ended up moving somewhere that we don't normally live. I'm just trying to find a new rhythm and see what's going to happen next. I do have a book project in mind, but it's too early to say anything. If that doesn't work, frankly, I have no idea.

Zibby: Are there more Crayons books coming?

Oliver: No, the last one, The Crayons' Christmas, has come out. I think there was a Crayons' Book of Colors. There was a concept book like that. The art was made quite some time ago. I think that's already come out. That's that.

Zibby: That's it. End of the line for the Crayons. They really quit. [laughs] Thank you for coming on this show. Thanks for all the hours of great quality time that I've spent with my children because of you. Best of luck with the new book. Thank you.

Oliver: Thank you. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate the kind words. Buh-bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Shelli Johannes on body image

Zibby Owens: My first guest is Shelli Johannes who is the coauthor of the very popular best-selling children's books Cece Loves Science and Libby Loves Science. She is just a rockstar. I recently had her on my other podcast. She has been posting lots of comments and interesting stuff in the moms' group. I wanted to hear her story. This is my first episode. This podcast will undoubtedly morph over time and potentially include more experts or more whatever. Right now, I just want to hear from other women, other moms, other people who are going through the same stuff and hear about everybody's journeys. Bear with me. I'm going to fine-tune this as we go. I hope you enjoy this conversation I just had with Shelli, who is amazing. Hopefully, it'll make you all feel a little bit less punitive and less hard on yourselves when you hear some of her advice and her story. Enjoy it. Please offer any feedback. I'm at zibby@zibbyowens.com, or you can DM me @MomsDon'tHaveTimeToLoseWeight. I hope to hear your feedback. Enjoy.

Welcome, Shelli. I can't wait to talk to you on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Shelli Johannes: Nice to see you.

Zibby: Thanks for being, first of all, my first guest on this podcast and second of all, my first guest on both podcasts. It's pretty awesome.

Shelli: I've already made a record. I didn't even know it.

Zibby: You've already made a record. It's not even noon. This is great. [laughs] The point of this podcast is just to hear stories from other people that people can relate to. We all go through very similar struggles with our bodies, but in different ways and different forms. I just wanted to hear about your journey. I know that's a really, really broad question. I just want to have you take me through some of the highs and lows and see what we can learn and share and benefit from.

Shelli: The reason I joined your group is because -- I've never really joined a group before, but when it was moms who don't have time lose weight, I just felt like it would be a larger community of people that had tons of different stories. It wasn't a Weight Watchers group. It wasn't a SlimFast group or a very specific -- the women who get up and do the five AM workouts, I tried that group. Trying to find my people. I've always struggled with weight. I don't even know it's just weight. I think it's more body image. It started very young. My mom was a beauty queen from Florida, very fit, very tall, very thin, and had a very specific body style. I remember when I was younger, I was a gymnast, and so my body style was very different, just muscular and bigger. Weight was a big issue, a big topic in my family. It really started there. I think it just stuck with me. It's always stuck with me. Do you need to eat that? The slight comments, some more derogatory, but a lot of times just those little slight comments that you just don't think kids will hear, maybe. Do you need to eat that? Do you need three cookies instead of two? Haven't you already eaten enough today?

Zibby: Wait, is this the voice in your head, or is this you talking to your actual children?

Shelli: These are not me talking to my children. These are my parents talking to me, so when I was younger. I think that voice, we get those voices in our head which are just people who have made impressions on us, has always stuck with me. Do I need to eat that? Am I thin enough? Am I good enough? Am I fit enough? That's really where it started, was super, super young. I remember being in high school, and I was never the thinnest one. I was always the bigger one of my friends. I remember the first time doing the weigh-in. They do those at school, the nutrition weigh-ins. I remember everyone afterwards talking about their weight. I was embarrassed because my weight was higher because I'm more muscular. I just felt, oh, my gosh, if I weigh X amount and they weigh twenty pounds less than me, I must be fat. I remember that's where it started, really a lot in my teen years, my mom putting me on Weight Watchers when I was fifteen. Then I think we moved to Atkins diet after that. Then I think we moved to South Beach Diet after that. I could never find something that worked for me. It kind of got me on this fad diet roll. That's really where it started. I've always been someone who worked out. That has benefitted me as I've gotten older because I'm a little bit obsessive about working out. I think that was because I was always trying to lose weight and always trying to count my points and always trying to count my calories and making sure that I burned off enough. Then when I got into college, it kind of took a downward spiral where I went on a Jell-O diet.

Zibby: Wait, what was the Jell-O diet?

Shelli: All you ate was Jell-O for a week.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, I missed that one, but I got all the other ones.

Shelli: Unhealthy. This was in the nineties when that whole fad diet things were coming into play. Then I went on the pineapple diet. I don't eat pineapple now. I had sores down my throat. I just went down this really bad path. I don't think it was a path anybody sent me on. I think it was just messages that had somehow gotten on the wrong track. That's really where it started.

Zibby: Then what happened throughout college? What happened after? Did you stop the fad diets, or when you started working, or what?

Shelli: I went on the fad diets. I remember going on the Jell-O diet. This is kind of embarrassing. I'm kind of sticking myself out there. I went on the Jell-O diet, and I lost a lot of weight. I was like, finally, I found a diet that works for me.

Zibby: Starvation. [laughter]

Shelli: And sugar. That's what kept me going throughout the day. I have tons of energy.

Zibby: There's water in Jell-O, right? [laughs]

Shelli: Right, no calories to count. I know, it's horrible. I look back on my teen and college self and feel bad because I wasn't over, over, overly weight. I wasn't having any health problems. When I saw myself in the mirror, I looked big. I did go through a bulimic stage in college. I don't remember what pulled me out of it. I think I remember my mom and dad coming up for a game at UGA and my mom looking at me and saying, "Are you eating? You look way too thin." That was the conversation. You look great. You look thin. You look like you've lost weight. You look like you've been working out. I think that still goes on in my family. You look great. How are you keeping weight off during the pandemic? You look good. I don't even know if they're really aware of it, but I was. That didn't last long because, I'm not making a joke of this, I really don't like to throw up. After my mom's comment and then just the process I had to go through, I couldn't do it. I don't know how I pulled out of it. I think it's always been there. It always sits in the back of my head.

Zibby: Now fast-forward to here. What's been going on since? I feel like having kids is then another huge time where our bodies are like -- you have to focus on them because they're changing so much.

Shelli: And you're weighing all the time. Your weight's going up. I remember when I was pregnant. I was probably about maybe five to ten pounds away from my husband's weight. I remember thinking, oh, my god, I cannot weigh as much as my husband.

Zibby: Oh, my god, I had the same thought, FYI. Same thing.

Shelli: They were like, "We're going to take your baby two weeks early." I remember thinking, yes, that means I don't have to weigh in. I will not make his weight. That was a thought that went through my mind, which is so embarrassing that that is the first -- it wasn't like, is my baby going to be okay? What's a C-section going to be like? It was, yes, I'm not going to gain that extra five pounds in this last two weeks. I'm going to make it. I'm going to skim by under the weight of my husband. That was really hard. I came back after the first one because I do work out. The second one, I didn't come back. I think I mentioned to you that I have a nerve disorder, and so I started taking medicine. It keeps weight on. I couldn't get back. It was very frustrating. I still am kind of there. I still struggle. I was just talking to Kim this morning about coming on your web page. I was like, "What do you hear me talk about from weight as a friend?" She said, "I just think you're always trying. If you go do really well --" I'll go off my medicine and I'll do really well, and then I'll need my medicine, obviously. Then I'll put weight back on. I'll kind of beat myself up about it.

I joined yours to be like, you know what, this is a time for me to just focus on, I need to love myself. I just turned fifty. I had weight goals for when I turned fifty that I didn't meet. I always said, when I turn forty, I'm going to be this. When I turn fifty, I'm going to be this. That was hard because I'm a very goal-oriented person. If I set a goal, I will kill myself to make it. It will almost be to my detriment. Like we were talking about, if I say I'm going to do something, I will do it, and I will do it now. I don't succeed until I meet that. It's a really tough journey to learn how to love yourself and look in the mirror and see yourself for who you are and not have it be a weight number. It's how you feel. Other people will say, "You don't need to lose weight." I'll say, "I carry my weight really well. It's probably these jeans." I will offset it because I'm like, they don't really know what's behind this. They don't see me the way I see myself.

Zibby: I feel like I'm carrying this secret shame of the actual number. If anyone knew, oh, my gosh. I figured out how to dress for it. Maybe I could hide it enough. The thing is, here you are, you're a best-selling author, so accomplished in so many ways. I keep hearing you say about how your body is so athletic. That should be celebrated. You gain weight because of medicine. Even though you have the answers right there of why, perhaps, you're not like the other girls, it's hard to intellectually process that. One of my daughters is super athletic, gymnastics or whatever. I look at her, I'm like, I hope she never has an issue with this beautiful athletic body of hers because it's not stick -- I don't know.

Shelli: I think media and society, that's what's pushed. That's what's celebrated, is those sickly models that are so thin. You're seeing them on the camera. Being a mom -- my daughter is sixteen. She was a soccer player. When she got to be about maybe ten and started being a little more concerned about weight, twelve -- she was a soccer player, and they had to a run a certain amount. They never weighed them, but they definitely had to be in shape. I hid my weight scale. She was always like, "Do you have a scale?" I was like, "I do not have a scale. I don't keep a scale around. It's not about the number. It's about how you feel." I was like, I have to change this message for my daughter because I don't want to repeat the same mistakes. I think sometimes we say things to our kids and we don't realize the message we send is not the message they take in. That's scary to me. That was why we started the books, the same reason. From a weight perspective, I didn't want her to get so focused on a number. Of course now, she's like, "We need a scale." I'm like, "It's not about a number. It's about how you feel. How do you feel today? Do you feel healthy? Do you feel unhealthy?" She's like, "Well, I have been eating a lot of sugar." I'm like, "You probably don't feel healthy, but you're beautiful. Everybody has different body styles." I see her going through the same thing. She'll be like, "But she's a size two. She's small." She's a size six. I'm like, "Honey, you're a size six. Don't look at magazines. You have to go by how you feel. You can't get so caught up in what people are telling you you're supposed to be that you lose sight of who you are." It's scary.

Zibby: It's so true. I feel like sometimes I just need to listen to the things I'm saying to my kids. I was so afraid of saying the wrong things that I've been only body-positive around the kids. I was like, I am not going to do any of this. I've read all these articles. I'm never saying I feel fat or this. I have pain in my body right now, and I would like to eat better for the inflammation, basically, but I can't let them hear me say all that stuff. It's so corrosive. I think our generation, our moms -- my mom had me on diets like you. She took me to some diet center. What I wouldn't do for that body, by the way, back.

Shelli: Oh, yes.

Zibby: There was nothing wrong with my body, seriously. Anyway, whatever. That was the culture.

Shelli: I look at pictures and I'm like, what was I thinking? I look at the pictures. What was I thinking about myself? Why was I so hard on myself?

Zibby: You know, it's funny because that also follows you. I remember a vacation I took maybe five years ago and being in my bathing suit with the kids in the water and being self-conscious. Are people watching me as I wade in here with my kids all climbing all over me? I had this thought at that time, wait a minute, maybe one day this is the body that I'll wish I had. Now I do. [laughs] You always are thinking things could be better. Yet life changes. There are extenuating circumstances like your medicine which is so much more important, getting rid of pain.

Shelli: I will try and get off of it. My husband will be like, "You look beautiful." I'll say, "I'm trying to find that line between looking old and -- I don't want to be old and too thin, but I don't want to be fat." That is what I go through. I'm like, there's a fine line. I need to find that line, so maybe I don't need three a day. Maybe I could do two a day. It's almost like the stages of grief. It's like I'm in negotiation constantly now. Maybe if I do this. Maybe I could do this. Maybe if I could do this. Then there's also that point -- how old are your daughters?

Zibby: I have a thirteen-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old daughter and then two sons.

Shelli: I knew you had four kids, but I wasn't the sure the age. My daughter now is sixteen. I found myself telling her more stories about my journey because I don't want her to feel like it's odd for her to think those things. I've said I've had a tough relationship with food and it really is about health so that if something ever does happen, she can come to me. I did go through the period where I never talked about weight. I never said the word fat. I never said the word weight. I always talked about healthy choices. Let's make healthy choices. These are fun choices for cupcakes. I even remember my very first book -- I know you've written a picture book, right? You've got one coming out?

Zibby: Yes.

Shelli: My very first book was when I was in fourth grade. It was about a fat, smart cookie. I'm in the process now of reworking that to be like, that would be really awesome if I could rewrite that book for myself. It was about a cookie who was constantly eating bad. Everyone was constantly telling her she was fat. That was in fourth grade. I won an award for that essay. I remember in fourth grade saying, oh, my gosh, even my weight won an award. I was rewarded for writing about weight. To me, it was really a sad story about this cookie that was too fat and always ate wrong and tried to do better and just couldn't. It’s funny how those things kind of bleed into even creative aspects that aren't bad.

Zibby: I wrote an essay when I was fourteen about how I felt about my body, I had gained some weight when my parents divorced, and how I felt like people were even treating me differently and how I felt about it. I ended up publishing it in Seventeen magazine. That started me writing freelance essays, essentially. By the way, now that I look back, I'm like, wow, how did I do that at fourteen when I look at what my kids are doing? [laughs] Anyway, it inspires so much artistic production, thought. It's such a waste, actually. Think about what else we could've accomplished. When we think about where we are now, and now here we are joining this group and trying to be there for each other -- again, that's why I did this. When I got all these comments, everyone had such different tips. There's no one-size-fits-all thing. Forget it.

Shelli: It's stories. I loved reading all those stories.

Zibby: Everybody had so many stories. I want to hear all the stories. What are your goals now? How can the group help?

Shelli: One goal is I'm trying not to focus on a number because I think I've been so overly focused on numbers my whole life to my detriment, to an unhealthy -- as you get older, I just turned fifty, and so you start realizing this is the only body am I ever going to have. I better celebrate this vessel and take care of it the best way that I can because I don't get another one. I don't think when you're younger you realize that. You don't realize what the fad diets and what the yo-yo diets, they would call them, or just the mental anguish of what that actually does to my body -- with my nerve thing, I really can't work out very hard. I just have started walking. I think I posted some of these in there. I'll just say, you know what, I don't feel like walking, but I'm just going to walk around the block. Then I'll listen to your podcast. I'll end up walking around thirty minutes for a podcast. Then I'll be like, yeah, I could probably watch one more. I ended up, just started walking and walking and walking. Over the pandemic, I've lost a lot of weight. I think I told you I lost fifteen, but then I started the medicine back up. I've gained five. That was disappointing right before my fiftieth birthday, which was why I posted. Your post came right at that time where I was super vulnerable. I was like, yeah, and then this happened. Then I look back, I'm like, wasn't I just an open book? [laughs]

Zibby: I love it, though.

Shelli: I am trying to find a way to be healthy but still have the things that I love, which I think is why I told you I gravitate towards Weight Watchers. I just feel like when I get in those areas where I'm like, no, you can't do this and you can't eat this and you can't have this and it's past eight, I find I set myself up to fail. I never am successful when I do that. Now I'm trying to be like, okay, I can have the special gluten-free cinnamon bun, but I'm going to have to have a salad for lunch. My daughter ended up coming to me saying, "I don't feel healthy. I would like to figure out how to eat healthy." I showed her the Weight Watchers SmartPoint and was like, "This is not a diet. This is a way to acknowledge what you're putting in your body and make choices and see what the choice gives you. If you come out and you want a granola bar --" She'll say, "It's got too much sugar. It's six points. I think I'm going to have an apple and a string cheese." I've tried to teach her, but that's been hard for me because I don't want to send the message that she needs to lose weight and that she needs to go on a diet.

Now I'm trying to focus on getting ready for her to go off to college and making those healthy choices so that if she doesn't feel healthy and doesn't feel good that she can say, well, I am having Lucky Charms every morning. Maybe I should have an omelet and a piece of cinnamon toast. That's half the points of what Lucky Charms would be. That's a struggle when you have a sixteen-year-old, is to figure out, how do you teach them how to eat healthy without talking about weight and exercise and how you feel? What are the good choices? What are the bad choices? Why are they bad? You can't just say, it's got sugar. The way I can say is, these two granola points are ten points. This caramel rice cake with a string cheese is two points. It's healthier. It's rice. It doesn't have as much sugar. I really struggle with that. When you said moms who try to lose weight, I thought that maybe some moms would also have tips for, how do you get your kids on the right path? How do you teach your sons to work out when they're super thin? His doctor's like, "You need to put on weight." In my mind, I was like, oh, god, don't tell him that.

Zibby: How old is your son?

Shelli: He's thirteen. He's in that space where they're like, you need to put on weight. You need to get some fat in your body. You need to do this. I'm trying to teach him different skills like, what's good fat? What's bad fat? You have to work out. His metabolism's so high. He can't put on weight. It's hard. It is hard being a mom when you're looking from your lens out that isn't a healthy lens and trying to teach a healthy lens.

Zibby: How do you actually eat? What's a go-to meal for you? I know you've referenced some of the points meals and stuff. What's your general eating? Then what's your biggest downfall?

Shelli: My biggest downfall is cheese. That's my biggest downfall. I try to eat eggs in the morning. I love cheese, so I use the cheese as my points. I sometimes eat cheese in the afternoon, but I'll have a salad with some cheese or vegetables with some cheese. If I cut out cheese, I'm just not happy. [laughs] My creamer in my coffee, I will not stop my coffee creamer. It just makes me happy. I like the Delight White Chocolate Raspberry. We stock up on it every Christmas because it only comes out for a couple months. I'm like, two points a tablespoon, I just measure it, and I'll take it. It helps. It's not about the points. I think it helps me be very conscious and aware of what I'm putting in my body because I know that the higher the points, the higher the carbs, the higher the sugar, and the lower the points -- if I have string cheese and a pickle, that's still cheese to me. I can't buy those big logs of cheese. I will eat the whole log. I could probably eat it in a day if I didn't pay attention, just slicing them and your slices get bigger and bigger and bigger. I have to buy the ones that are either sliced or that are individual.

Zibby: That's like me with banana bread. I'm like, I'll just make a slice here in the thing. Then next thing you know, it's like half the thing is gone.

Shelli: Two-inch slice.

Zibby: Yeah, exactly.

Shelli: You're like, one slice of banana bread is only... But I've had three slices in just one.

Zibby: It sounds like some goals and things to look forward to are maybe just getting rid of the scale entirely. Maybe you don't even need it in the family, or just shoving it away for a while. Focusing on the amazingness of your athleticism and that your body was built for more than just being a scrawny model, and that that's a good thing. That's a blessing. Not that saying this for the millionth time will do anything, but just to keep in the back of your head. Counting points. Those are already lots of goals. Keeping walking.

Shelli: That's what I'm trying to do. I'm keeping walking. This last weekend, I went with my daughter, we had a mom-daughter trip. We ended up doing a lot of, I think I mentioned it on one of the posts, we ended up doing horseback riding, which was mountainous and rugged. We ended up doing ziplining and hiking Tallulah Gorge. I have not been able to walk since. I did too much. I remember going to Tallulah Gorge going, "We could go down the suspension bridge." My daughter was like, "Are you sure we could do that?" I was like, "Yes, we can do that." Then I got down. Then I was like, oh, we got to go back up. [laughs] That wasn't smart. I kind of overfatigued my muscles. Then I end up laying down for three days being upset because I'm not walking and beating myself up because I should be walking, but I'm trying to take care of myself and let my body heal from the overexert-ness of a weekend. Then I eat because I'm not walking. I find when I walk, I just get outside and get that energy outside, get out of my small world, which is hard right now in the pandemic because we do live in small worlds. My refrigerator is there all day long. I'm not busy and in the car saying, I'm hungry, but I didn't bring a snack with me, or I only have a banana. Now it's just staring at the refrigerator waiting until, is it snack time? Is it snack time yet?

Zibby: You're like, lunch? Is it lunch yet? When's my feeding time? I'm like a child or something. What would you say to yourself? You're going to have bad days coming up. You're going to have great days coming up. To be more forgiving, what would you want to say? What do you want to remember? Maybe if you replay this or you're having a period of feeling very vulnerable or bad about yourself, what would you want to remember that's really important, like a don't-miss-the-plot kind of message to yourself?

Shelli: I try to talk to myself the way I would talk to my kids. I'll hear myself something. I'll be like, I would never say that to my daughter. Why would I say that to me? I would never say, get off your ass and go work out even though you're in pain. I would be like, you have to listen to your body. Your body is telling you that it can't do that today. Embrace your body. Love your body. Know that you can do that tomorrow. I try to think about now, a little bit more consciously, what would I say to my daughter? If I wouldn't say it to my daughter, then why would I say it to myself?

Zibby: I love that.

Shelli: That helps me because I will get in my head and be like, you only lost a pound. You only did that. Why would you do this? I would never ever say that to my kids. We almost have to retrain that message. We almost have to change those messages that have somehow gotten wired in our heads, that inner voice that is just like, get off your ass. You got to work hard. Work harder. You said you were going to do this. How come you're not doing it? Change it to be a little bit more nurturing and be like, I'm doing the best I can. I did great yesterday. Today's been a bad day. Tomorrow's a new day. It's a hard one, though. I struggle with that question every day.

Zibby: I love your advice. That's advice that could help me, talk to myself like I would talk to my child, talk to myself internally like I would talk to -- we seem to treat ourselves with so much less care than all the people we take care of all the time.

Shelli: Oh, my gosh, I'm so cruel to myself. I feel bad for myself sometimes.

Zibby: Sometimes when I hear my daughter being down on herself, I'll be like, "Hey, that's my daughter you're talking about there." I have to stick up for her being rude to her. "I don't want to hear you being mean to yourself. That's someone I care about there. Stop it."

Shelli: Right, I like that. I like how you're making it the third-person situation, say, hey you, little mister, [indiscernible]. Internal family systems is some kind of therapy that I've read about in the past about how all your different voices in your head -- I have those voices in my head. I have the lady who's just like, your nerve problem, and this and that. She's a hypochondriac and always worried about her nerves. Then I have the person who's like, you're not doing enough. Got to get out and get busy. I'm trying to put those voices -- I think Elizabeth Gilbert talks a lot about that in her Magic book. Put those voices in the backseat. They're the two-year-olds. We don't need to hear from those voices. Bring the other voices that are more positive and nurturing and loving, let them sit in the front.

Zibby: I love it.

Shelli: Those other whack-a-dos in the back, they shouldn't be driving.

Zibby: Right, so just be kinder to ourselves and speak to ourselves the way we'd want anybody else to speak to us. Not to say that's going to help. I know this has been more of just catching up, us talking about our struggles, but I think it's all relatable. So many people wish they had a different body and structurally, they don't. It's kind of a shame now that I'm in my forties when I think about the body types I longed for before. Why? Why is that necessarily any better? I don't know. Anyway, this is also a much bigger conversation. All to say it's a blend of self-acceptance and yet working hard to keep our bodies functioning at their best which sometimes means not having all the extra stuff and staying active and somehow [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Shelli: And maybe realizing what those triggers are. When you posted, it was very intimate. Something triggered that all of a sudden. We have these feelings, and then something will kind of weigh us down. What was that for you?

Zibby: When I posed that I wanted to eat everything in my kitchen?

Shelli: Yeah.

Zibby: I don't think I explained the whole reason. I had just heard some really bad news. I had had such a long day. I was just so sick of being careful and having to focus on this. I was just like, ugh, I don't want to do it anymore. [laughs] Then the group helped so much because I got all these tips. I went out for a walk with the dog. I waited five minutes. I chewed gum. I did all these things. Then next thing you know, the craving passed. I handled it another way, and I lived. I think it's also habit breaking. Anyway, there's a lot. I'm just so happy you shared your story. Thank you for being so open and your advice. I hope the group helps. I hope you continue to keep posting all your stuff because it's so great.

Shelli: Thank you for starting it. Thank you for having me on here. When you said, "Let's kick it off," I was thinking, really? I don't know if I'm the expert to talk or person to talk about...

Zibby: I didn't want to start with an expert. I just wanted to be real. It's just one woman to another. We're in it together.

Shelli: That's why your podcasts are so great. It's amongst moms and women to women. I'm also looking for tips on, how do we raise our kids in a healthy environment with positive messages?

Zibby: Yes, me too, so that I don't mess them up. [laughs] Thanks, Shelli. This was fun. Now I'll be thinking of you as I go about my eating today. It's nice just to have a partner in crime, if you will.

Shelli: I totally get it.

Zibby: Face to a name and all the rest. Thanks for coming on.

Shelli: Good to see you today.

Zibby: Bye, Shelli. Thanks.

Shelli: Bye.