Dr. Harold Koplewicz, THE SCAFFOLD EFFECT

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

Dr. Harold Koplewicz: It's a pleasure, Zibby. Always a pleasure to be here.

Zibby: This is such a treat because you and I work so closely with the Child Mind Institute which you founded in 2009, and which you run amazingly, which helps everybody in the world with childhood mental illness. Do you mind talking just for two seconds about Child Mind Institute before we talk about your amazing book, The Scaffold Effect?

Harold: Sure. In 2009, we decided, a group of us, that we needed an independent nonprofit that was exclusively dedicated to children's mental health disorders. If you think about it, this country has done this before with other disorders. St. Jude's Children's Hospital, for over fifty years, has focused with laser precision on childhood cancer. While that's a very important thing, there's only 15,000 kids in the United States who have cancer. There are seventeen million who have a mental health disorder which means that everyone listening knows and loves one of these kids. It's one out of five. If it's not your child, then it's your niece and nephew or it's your best friend's child. We thought that we needed that independent nonprofit that would play with everyone and collaborate with everyone but only be focused, no matter what, on the mental health needs of kids first and foremost in the United States and now, frankly, globally.

When COVID hit, we had to close the doors to the Child Mind Institute's physical sites in California and New York. In forty-eight hours, we became a tele-mental-health product. We now seen over three hundred kids every day on screens and a few kids in person in both sites. More importantly, we recognized that parents were desperate for information during COVID on how to deal with distance learning, how to deal with kids' anxiety on their demoralization because they're losing so many things big and small. We produced over 160 Facebook Lives on parenting during COVID. Every day, we had one for a while in Spanish and in English. Now it's once a week. We started to realize that parents want authoritative, scientifically sound information. Because of that, we don't take money from the pharmaceutical industry, from liquor, from tobacco and guns so parents can trust childmind.org. It's turned out to be very rewarding because the need is there. Parents, more so than ever, are reaching for information that can make them better parents and make their kids have an easier time.

Zibby: It's so great because you have this amazing website, childmind.org, which has been such a resource for me. You can google anything. It's always Child Mind that has the right answers. Then of course, you do all of this work to combat the stigma of childhood mental illness, which is so important, and the research to find a biomarker.

Harold: It was really interesting with stigma. For years, we've run a campaign called #MyYoungerSelf. You get important, influential individuals who will discuss in a minute or two, their struggle as a kid with either ADHD, anxiety, depression, dyslexia. This year, we went with #WeThriveInside. We got forty remarkable movie stars, politicians, poets who were talking about, how were they managing their mental health while they had to stay inside? What was going inside their head? Believe it or not, Zibby, we got two hundred and fifty million eyeballs, not only four or five billion media impressions, but two hundred and fifty million people came to watch one of those videos. COVID has been a horrific experience for so many kids and so many parents and so many families. It also forced us to be innovative and recognize that there had to be a new way to get information out there to parents and to give kids hope that this too will pass.

Zibby: Amazing. It's amazing. I'm so honored to be a board member. I know I'm not doing my part enough, but it's not for lack of loyalty. [laughs]

Harold: Zibby, as we are about to talk about The Scaffold Effect, one of the most important things -- we talk about childcare -- is self-care. You amaze me because the word juggling and being a master jugglery -- I know you have four kids. I know you're married. I know you're a dedicated daughter and granddaughter and sister. On top of that, you're an entrepreneur. You're a philanthropist. You really not only talk the talk, you're walking the walk. The fact that you're doing this, I think it's perfect because you're one of the moms who does find time to read so that the other moms, and dads by the way, who can't read can get some wisdom from you. I've always been a big fan.

Zibby: You're so sweet.

Harold: That's why it's an honor for me, A, to have you on the board of the Child Mind Institute, but to spend time with you.

Zibby: That's just so nice. Yes, I have to say, and you will be proud of me, that when I read the whole section on self-care yesterday morning, I was like, I am not doing any of these things. I was imagining myself talking to you and you were saying -- here, I have to find the right section. You would be saying to me, are you doing this? Are you eating greens? Are you exercising? Are you sleeping? Are you eating well? I was thinking, I am not doing any of those things. I finally got myself on the Peloton yesterday because of your column. Here, self-care checklist. This is for parents, by the way. "Exercise, sleep, green food, affection, nature walks, playdates with friends." I'm never too old for a playdate. "Alone time, creative time, romantic time, laughter, music, hobbies, volunteering, meditation." I don't know any mom out there who is finding time for all these things. If you are finding time for every single thing on this list, call me.

Harold: Think of it as a Chinese menu. You can just have a few, or à la carte. You can pick from the top or the bottom. I have to tell you, every time I'm on an airplane and the flight attendant says, please put the mask on yourself before you put it on your kid, it just seems wrong. If, god forbid, I was on an airplane and the oxygen was missing, I would race to give it to one of my sons. It doesn't help. You give it to your son, and then you might not be able to put it on yourself because you'll be dizzy or you'll be unconscious. The idea that we have to take care of ourselves is not in our DNA, but first ourselves so we have the strength to take care of our kids, and more than one kid sometimes.

Zibby: This just goes to the whole theme of your book, which is so brilliant. I can't believe it hasn’t been thought of before as the perfect analogy, this whole notion of scaffolding and that, really, it's your child that's being built, and the blueprint and the foundation and everything. You are just around the outside. You're just trying to help as it grows. Then once it's fully formed, you can start taking down the scaffolding, which I would like to have taken down --

Harold: -- And if you're child's been paying attention, they’ll know when to put the scaffolding back.

Zibby: Yes, when they need it.

Harold: They go off to college and they're struggling with essay writing, they’ll go to the writing center to get some extra help. That's a scaffold. If they need a tutor in math, they will get one. It's not that you're hovering all time. You've built a confident, strong building. I think the one part that we have to always remember, though, is that as you're building that scaffold -- you use pillars, structure, and support and encouragement. Then you have planks. The important part is to recognize that the building sometimes has decided to become a ranch, not a skyscraper. We can't force that. Otherwise, you're all going to be very disappointed. It's not going to be a sturdy structure. I always think about the fact that my oldest son was great at science. I wanted him to be a doctor. Now, I never said it out loud, but it just made sense. You're good at science. You're good at math. I love being a doctor. Why wouldn't I want my kid to be a doctor? At a certain point, it became very clear, he actually said it to me in high school, he said, "I hate blood, Dad. I'll have to become a psychiatrist if I become a doctor. I don't really like kids, so I'll always be the wrong doctor Dr. Koplewicz." He then, at a certain point, decided that he loved being a DJ. So totally out of character because he's a socially reticent guy. Okay, we're building a split-level. That's what we're getting. He was a white Jewish DJ, Mark Ronson, DJ Cassidy, and DJ Josh K. He was really into it. It looked terrific. He was at Brown, which is a perfect match. He was going to go off to LA afterwards.

The summer between his junior and his senior year, he went and worked at Goldman Sachs, which didn't make any sense to me whatsoever. It was kind of a cultural mismatch. He was still DJing. He was producing a documentary called Pigeon Men about Irish convicts who competitively fly pigeons. The whole thing didn't make sense that he was going to Goldman. At six weeks, they gave him a review. They said to him, "By the way, you're a bad communicator. You're not enthusiastic. You're intellectually not curious." To his credit, he stood up and he said, "You know, I could be a better communicator. I'm biochemically not enthusiastic. I don't smile enough, but I'm always intellectually curious." He ripped apart the five deals. They said, "We're surprised." For the next four weeks, he was a maniac. He would go to work in a taxi screaming at himself in the back of the cab. "Smile! Smile!" Why? It didn't make any sense to me. Of course, at the end of the summer, he calls us and he says, "I have good news and bad news." I said, "What's the bad news?" "I have to tell you the good news. The good news is I got a job offer from Goldman Sachs. If I sign right away, I get ten thousand dollars." "What's the bad news?" "I got a job offer at Goldman Sachs." I said, "This seems like a cultural mismatch."

I can't get over the fact that he decided, no, private equity is what he wants to do. He's running a private equity firm today. It's an example, Zibby, of recognizing I'm not getting a skyscraper. I've gotten used to getting this split-level. Then he says, guess what? I'm building a ranch. If you want to be a good parent, if you want your kids to feel confident, you still support, you still structure, and you still give encouragement. I find it fascinating because he speaks a different language. He spoke a different language when he was a DJ. Now he's talks this finance talk where I'm nodding my head pretending I know what he's talking about. That's what a good scaffold does. It moves around. It doesn't say it's set in cement, you have to do this. It happens to all of us, by the way. I think if you remember the pillars, structure, support, encouragement -- then there are planks that really are very important. The one plank that I have so much trouble with is dispassion. There's part of me that feels like, what the hell are you doing? Snap out of it. That just doesn't work, too much crying, too much yelling, too much laughter. It has to be their building, not your building.

Zibby: I feel like you were hard on yourself when you told the whole story of your son going to camp and how you brought your own emotions about your separation and your unfortunate time at camp. Actually, I found you beating yourself up. I was like, I don't think you did anything wrong here, personally, by telling your kid how sad you were about it.

Harold: The only problem was that my wife, their mother, loved camp. From the time she was seven to the time she was fourteen, she couldn't wait. She actually swam in college and played tennis in college. She was a natural athlete. I wasn't. I was also separation anxious. That's what it was. I missed my mom and dad so desperately. It was hard to sleep. It was hard to concentrate. My kids were really good athletes, not because of me, because of the genes they inherited from their mother. When they went to camp and I came up there, Joshua was really struggling. He said, "I want to go home." When we walked into the woods, he said to me, "Dad, there's no one here to love me," I felt like, oh, my god. He knows how to throw a ball. He knows how serve in tennis, but he's got the separation anxiety. I literally got weepy. He then was comforting me. The fact that he then started comforting me was the part that is not dispassionate. It's all right to show your kid that you're upset, that you empathize, you have warmth, but it's not his job to say, "Dad, don't cry." It's my job to say, how are we going to work through this? How are we going to figure out your life at camp so it's easier, that it's more fun? There are times where you say, okay, we declare victory. You're coming home. Parenting, in my opinion, is the best thing you could ever do. I remember distinctly holding my first kid in the delivery room and thinking, this is amazing. All that oxytocin is in the air. Everyone's so euphoric. The baby actually looks like my father-in-law and my mother. It's this weird sensation. Then you realize that there's no book. There's no test. There's no license. Yet it can be the most rewarding experience. It truly changes you. Yes, getting married changes you, but all of a sudden, it's this one-way street where you realize you are the scaffold. They're not scaffolding you. You really have a terrific job in letting them be who they're supposed to be and just help them guide the building along.

Zibby: You also bring up this really important point which I think has not been articulated quite as well before about parent burnout and how to tell if you're -- you have all these great ways for parents to identify what's going on with their kids. You have how you know if it's a normal level of anxiety versus a problematic level of anxiety versus an anxiety disorder. Then you let us do it as parents too, and how to know if you're actually going through burnout. You have normal, problem, disorder. "Several times a day, you think, I'm a bad parent. That means you have parental burnout disorder." Oh, my gosh, I must have it. "You are exhausted." Well, I don't feel any resentment. "When you look at your child, you don't feel the same connection you once did. You feel extreme irritation and frustration as a parent without reason. You react with verbal or physical abuse --" no, of course not -- "to your child." Let's talk about parental burnout for a minute because with everybody at home with their kids for eleven months now...

Harold: Zibby, I didn't write the book thinking about COVID. You better than anyone know how long it takes to come up with an idea for a book, write the outline, get a publisher, write the book. Then it takes almost nine months for the publisher to publish the book. This wasn't what I was thinking about. Now since we're in the middle of COVID, more so than ever, I think everyone has to scaffold their kids, and they have to scaffold themselves. I think that most of us wake up, and it's Groundhog Day. Again? Again with the mask? The news is so disconcerting because we're going in the wrong direction. We're going in the right direction. We're running out of vaccine. It's really important to stay in the moment. If there was ever a time to help you prevent burnout, is to just worry about the moment. Breathe one breath in, one breath out. I think of the fact that I love to hike. I was hiking in Chile. Lots of young people are around me, ten, twenty years younger. Someone said to me, "Oh, my god, it's so much fun hiking with you because you're so determined and so gradual." I'm thinking, I'm trying to get one breath in and one breath out. [laughs] I'm walking slow because I'm barely breathing.

That's how we have to deal sometimes. I'm in the moment. I'm going to appreciate the flowers and the sounds of the birds. I'm going to get one breath in and one breath out. I will get through this. I will take breaks. I will step back and say, I need a second wind. I think that right now, to prevent parent burnout goes back to great childcare is self-care. There's so many easy ways to restart yourself. Can we get back into sleep hygiene? Can we try to get close to eight hours? Can we force ourselves to turn off everything at twelve o'clock and stay asleep until eight o'clock? Okay, seven o'clock? Or can we go to bed at eleven? Can we get on a routine? Routines work for kids, but they also work for us. Even if we just do a minute of mindfulness every day, just sit with our thoughts for sixty seconds and no matter how disturbing the thoughts are, don't judge them, that in itself will help. I think we also have to be kind to ourselves. My intern has just said to me, "Be careful. After COVID, there'll be three types of people, hugs, chunks, and drunks."

Zibby: That is so funny.

Harold: I've never had so much liquor brought to the house.

Zibby: Wait, say it again.

Harold: Hugs, chunks, and drunks. If I'm not careful, I'm going to be a drunken chunk. You can't, tomorrow, lose ten pounds. You can take a walk every day no matter what. If you can't take a walk, you can get on the elliptical. If you can't get on an elliptical, you can at least do some stretching. Simple, bite-size pieces. Just think about it. You're not only doing it for yourself, you're doing it so that you can be a better parent. If you don't want to just do it because you deserve it, you're doing it because without having strength, without having sleep, without eating well, without also having some fun -- this is the hard part of COVID. It's really hard to have fun, especially for extroverts. People like me, it's one thing talking to people on a screen, but it's so nice to have human contact. It's freezing cold here in the Northeast, so you're not going to be able to have a meal with someone. You're going to have to have a brisk walk. There's ways around this if you know what you need. If you take care of your own needs, then I really think, again, you'll have the energy to offer structure, support, and encouragement for your kids. This is hard. I don't want to minimize how challenging it is to be a very good parent.

Zibby: Can we talk for just two seconds about anxiety in the time of COVID? I know this isn't even in your book. I hope that I've made a good case for everybody to read The Scaffold Effect. The subtitle is Raising Resilient, Self-Reliant, and Secure Kids in an Age of Anxiety. I just want to talk a little more about anxiety. Typically, anxiety, and an anxiety disorder in particular, is when you have irrational levels of fear about something. That's part of it. There is actually something to be super afraid of. When my daughter says she's really worried and talks about it a lot, I'm like, I'm also really worried about it, but who knows because I also have so much anxiety I don't even know what to say. [laughs] There is actually a big deal. It's not like we're on a plane worried if it's going to crash and the odds are not really high and it's irrational. It is actually possible. It's happening to everybody. Especially in families like ours where we've lost people in the family like Kyle's mom and grandmother, we've seen it up close. How do you deal with a combination, basically, of anxiety of PTSD when things in the world are literally anxiety-provoking? Does that still mean you have anxiety? Is it abnormal?

Harold: I think it's normal, but how do you manage anxiety? Again, the scaffolding works even if you have an anxiety disorder. More so than ever, I think we need to scaffold ourselves and scaffold others. What do we say? We're wearing a mask. We wash our hands frequently. We do social distancing. We are doing everything possible to avoid getting this virus, but it's a very catchy virus. If that happens, things are better today than they were last March. The doctors are better at treating it. Even if we get it, we will be able to get a different type of treatment than we had before, but we're not going to get it. We're going to try every possible way but still live our lives in a new way. We're clearly not going to go to a big party. We're clearly going to only go to people that we know are following the same rules and regulations. It's normal to be scared. I'm uncomfortable also, but I'm getting used to this new normal. It reminds me, after 9/11, I was doing the Today Show a lot. Katie Couric was the host. We actually were friends. We were neighbors. I was doing a piece with her. I said, "The president's in charge. Nothing bad is going to happen. We learned from our mistakes." Katie actually said on the air, "How do you know?" I said, "Because we learned from our mistakes." I thought, is she going to say, "Chicken Little, the sky is falling"? Once we were off the air, Katie said to me -- her husband had passed away just a year before. She said, "I feel like Jay just died again. The kids are back in my bed. We're so regressed. I'm on TV four hours a day instead of two hours."

It can overwhelm you. It can distort your cognitions because you get so anxious you think to yourself, I'm going to wash my hands one more time. You have to balance it with saying, I'm going to do everything that I'm supposed to do to keep my kids safe and keep my husband safe and keep me safe and, if possible, my parents, but I'm going to live a different kind of life. I'm not going to indoor restaurants. If I do go into an indoor restaurant, I know there's a certain amount of risk and I'm willing to take it. I think that's what we have to do with our kids. Schools are struggling with this. They're in session. They're out of session. They're online. I think I told you that my wife teaches middle school students art. It is so challenging on a screen. I hear her. It sounds like a reality television show. The kid, Jason, has fallen off the screen. "Jason, where are you?" Then she's doing stretching. Why is there stretching in an art class? "Everyone stand up and stretch." She's not accepting, which I keep saying, everyone has to readjust their expectations for this year. It's like talking to a wall. No, she is going to still teach the kids perspective. They're going to make Greek masks. How are you getting the material to all the kids? She's writing progress reports. She actually will tell you, "I'm doing it because I think it's good for the kids to know that there's still a routine. We haven't given up yet." There is limitations. I think that's all right. That’ll make you less anxious if you think to yourself, this is not a year where I'm expecting everyone to get As. Some of us are driven to always do our best. That's part of the anxiety. This is one of those years where best is actually going to be different. Zibby, being a podcaster, this is a year for podcasts. This is a year for reading books. This is not the year to go to the theater or go to movie theaters or go to the ballet.

It's a different year. Managing that for our kids and modeling that for our kids is really very, very important and very hard because you don't want to tell them, don't worry. You have to say to them, what are you worried about? The other thing that I have to tell you that in The Scaffold Effect I would hope people will take away is there's one piece where we're talking about awareness. It's very interesting to tell kids and tell ourselves what is wrong. We're hardwired to fix things, particularly parents. If you could remember, can I catch my kid doing something good? Can I say three specific positive things to my child for every one critical thing? By the way, as a husband of forty years, it's not a bad thing to consider with your spouse. I forget it all the time. It's kind of like, where's the coffee? Where's this? Is no one going to iron my shirts? No, no one's going to iron your shirts. [laughs] It's this kind of rapid complaining, complaining, complaining. After a while, it's very hard to hear the good stuff when you say, god, you smell great or you look so beautiful. I think that if we consciously are aware that we have that negative tracking -- it's part of the things that we do all the time. We are looking to fix things, so we're always watching what the kid's doing wrong. Then the second thing we do is confirmation bias. We're watching only Fox. We're only watching MSNBC. Most importantly, we see certain children as bad and certain children as good. Then they can't get out of the box. We have to pull back. That's the whole concept of making a new blueprint. I think that's so important, Zibby. Otherwise, COVID is just going to make parenting extra hard. Scaffolding is going to make it somewhat easier. It gives you that structure, no pun intended, to try to make things easier for you on a day-to-day basis. It's a do-over. I love the idea that parents are allowed to say, I think that was a mistake, I'm taking a do-over. It's not written in ink. It's written in pencil. We're erase. We'll do it again.

Zibby: I love it. That's one of things that was so effective about this book. Instead of just giving theories or general ideas, you give such specific advice that is really actionable. I think that's something that we're all -- I speak on behalf of parents everywhere -- very grateful to receive in such a non-judgmental way. It's awesome. Thank you. Thank you for coming on this podcast. Thank you for this amazing resource, The Scaffold Effect, for parents everywhere. It is a must have on your bedside table, really awesome, particularly now. Congratulations on the book.

Harold: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you so much for having a conversation with me. It's always a pleasure.

Zibby: Now you see why I am often too busy for board meetings. [laughter] Because I do this all day long. No, I'm kidding. I'll be there next time. Bye.

Harold: Thank you.

Gabrielle Korn, EVERYBODY (ELSE) IS PERFECT

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

Gabrielle Korn: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. I'm so excited to talk about Everybody Else Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes. Amazing cover. Love all these cross-outs. Instead of, I am perfect, everybody else is perfect. Fantastic. Congratulations on your book.

Gabrielle: Thank you.

Zibby: Can you tell listeners, what inspired you to write this memoir?

Gabrielle: I was the editor-in-chief of Nylon Media, a job that I got when I was twenty-eight. I was thrown into this world of having a high-profile position in a really visible industry. On the outside, my life looked really shiny and glamorous. The truth was that in order to reach that level of success so young, I totally sacrificed my personal life. I started feeling like I was surrounded by dualities. There was what my life looked like during the day. Then there was what happened when I went home, which was, I was a total mess. I was struggling with an eating disorder. I was dating people who didn't treat me well. I was just throwing my whole self into work and doing things like fighting for representation and body positivity and wasn't really listening to any of those messages myself. I realized that that was true for a lot of the women that I was working with. I started writing about this disconnect and the trap that women's media creates and how we had all become part of the machine even while we thought we were fighting against it.

Zibby: Wow, that was a great description. Love that. One of the pieces of the book that I found super interesting is, you wrote a lot about being a lesbian in this industry and how at times in your life -- I kind of wish you had put, and maybe in the final -- I'm sure you didn't. I kind of wanted a slide show of all your different looks because you often described how, at this point, your hair looked this way, and at this stage, you looked like this, and how now that you sort of can pass -- this is you, I'm not saying this -- as somebody who is straight, and so you wonder with some frequency when to bring it up. Is it weird to bring up in a work context? How do you handle that? You had this whole passage where you were ruminating on that, which I found super interesting. I was hoping you could talk a little about that, not to lead off with our first question talking about your sexuality. Let me just get right to it here with you, Gabrielle. I'm sorry. [laughs]

Gabrielle: No, it's important. I, especially when I was first starting out in media, was more often than not the only lesbian in the room. When I first came out, the first thing I did was cut off all my hair and within six months had just shaven my head entirely. It was really important to me at that point when I was nineteen to be visibly queer because it was such an important discovery and I didn't want to have to explain myself. Within a few years, it started to feel like a performance. It didn't feel natural. I had always been super feminine, at least aesthetically. I missed it. When I became a beauty editor, gradually, I slowly became more and more femme. What I lost was being read as queer. What I gained was being comfortable in my own skin. It eventually got to a point where I don't really care if people read me as gay are not. I know it'll come up. It's fine, but it used to make me feel really uncomfortable, especially in women's media which is, for lack of a better way to describe it, straight lady land. There I was feeling like I had a secret if I didn't tell people or just feeling like an outsider even though I was an insider. I just kept trying to change my exterior to make it feel more comfortable, but it was more an internal struggle.

Zibby: And so ironic that you were writing about beauty and a lot of your issues were about how you should get your inside out. I think this is something not just with sexuality, but with so much stuff that so many people deal with every day, whether it's some personality element or some part of your racial identity or any kind of thing that's inside because we all hold so much in our interior lives. How much do you want to broadcast that to the world? In what way are you supposed to do it? I don't know. I find it such an interesting question.

Gabrielle: Totally. I think with an identity that isn't read as neutral -- I think white heterosexuality is read as neutral. If you are anything but that, the choices that you make in how you appear to the world speaks volumes to what you think about yourself and what you think about your worth. It's a constant conversation for everybody to figure out. How vulnerable do I want to be? Do I want my body hair showing because I love having body hair, or do I not want it showing because I don't want to deal with people staring at me?

Zibby: And which people to let into that.

Gabrielle: Yeah, exactly.

Zibby: Some things, you can't necessarily hide, not that you would want to hide anything, but some things are just so obvious. Others, you get to -- I don't know. I had this idea. This sounds so ridiculous. There should be a line of clothing where you can put things like "struggling with ADHD" or "just lost my mother" or all these things that you may or may not want people to know, but they wouldn't know by looking at you. Then if they did know, they might have more compassion and empathy when they spoke to you as opposed to just making all sorts of assumptions based on maybe your blazer.

Gabrielle: Completely. I think as people grow up, we realize that absolutely every single person is struggling with something that you'll never know about. Realizing that allows you to have empathy for people and be kind even if it's hard. I think there's definitely a period of time that most of us go through when we don't realize that and we feel like we're the only person struggling and everybody is staring at us. It's just not true.

Zibby: Yeah. The T-shirt line would have to have lots of different options.

Gabrielle: Totally. Customizable.

Zibby: Also, so many of the issues that are hidden, it's the specific combination of those things that makes your own experience unique. I'm speaking in generalities. I'm sorry. When I read this part of your book, it just sparked this whole thought. Your eating disorder kind of feeds into this -- no pun intended. I'm sorry. That was terrible. I have not had enough sleep. That's why I can excuse myself and my bad puns today. Tell me about that part of your life and how it stands today. How did you get from there to here? How do you cope with having it all in the past? Go there.

Gabrielle: The thing about having an eating disorder is that until it's diagnosed, you don't know that it's an eating disorder. You just think that it's what you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to eat. I was really not aware of it for a really long time. Looking back on my life, I can remember different periods of time that I became really skinny because of things that were happening that were beyond my control. It probably started in middle school and came and went during high school and then came back right after I came out and was really struggling to figure out how to find my queer community, how to reimagine my place in the life I was already leading. The only representation I had access to was, of course, the women on The L Word who were rail thin and six feet tall. I was like, oh, that's what I'm supposed to look like, great, I can do that, and just kind of stopped eating. It came and went for the next ten years, I would say. It came back with a vengeance when I started climbing the ranks at Nylon. What was true was that the skinner and, to that end, blonder that I got, the more attention I got, the more money I got, the more I was noticed by straight style photographers. The correlation between my weight and my success was very, very real. I was chosen by my boss to be on camera and to be the brand face.

It really felt like if I wasn't this skinny, this wouldn't be happening for me. I'm not sure if that was untrue based on what I know about how the industry works and that particular generation of people who were making decisions for me. It just spiraled out of control during that period of time. What ended up happening was I got really sick. The person I was dating at the time who I was trying to break up with was basically like -- I had been in therapy. She was like, "You have to tell your therapist that you're not eating." I told my therapist. Then everything kind of fell into place after that. She convinced me that I needed to see a doctor. The doctor set me up with a nutritionist. I had this group of women that I really respected saying to me, "You have anorexia. You need to learn how to eat." I eventually just had to realize that it was outside of my control. I had lost the privilege of making decisions for my own body because I was doing a bad job.

I wrote about this in the book. The thing that really got to me was in analyzing my different levels, the doctor told me that my T3 was dangerously low. T3 is something you get from good fats like fish oils. It lines your brain. It helps the synapses connect. She was like, "This is affecting your thinking. It's going to take you two years from your recovery to fully heal from the damage you've done to your brain." I was like, my brain is the only thing that I believe in. Being smart is the thing that I've always had. If I lose that, I don't know who I am. It's not worth it to lose that. I committed myself to my recovery. It's an uphill battle. I think it's something that will always be with me. There's nothing like being quarantined for a year to really flair some things up. I also am in a loving, nurturing partnership. I'm in a better job situation. The things that felt like they triggered me just have been removed. What's really important to note about eating disorders is that they happen in context. People don't just catch anorexia. There are things in your life that make you feel like you have to be a certain way. Keeping that in mind, I've been able to really forgive myself for certain things. I wasn't doing these things in a vacuum. I was responding to things around me. If I can be aware of those things, then moving forward, it makes it a lot easier.

Zibby: First of all, thank you for being so open. I'm sorry for totally -- I feel like I have the right to pry, which I do not, just because I read your very private memoir. I feel like I get to continue the conversation that you had with me, but you didn't know you were having it with me.

Gabrielle: I'm glad you asked because it's important. There were moments when I felt like this is too personal. Oh, god, what have I done? I had some really great conversations with my agent about it. She was like, "This is not about you anymore. This is about the people who need to hear this." That makes it feel less scary. Since you're watching me over video, you can see that I'm someone who turns red when I'm nervous.

Zibby: I'm not trying to make you nervous. I hope I'm not making you nervous. I'm sorry.

Gabrielle: No, you're not. It's just vulnerable.

Zibby: I have so much respect for you for sharing with the world everything that you've gone through. I also feel like sometimes it's a little different when you write about it. I feel like I can pretty much write about anything because I'm just putting it on the computer in front of my own face. Then if somebody reads it and talks to me, even if it's something stupid like, "My son went to school and I feel sad," and then somebody sees me and is like, "Are you doing okay?" I'm like, oh, you know that I'm sad? [laughs] It's a nameless audience versus a face. Now here I am prying.

Gabrielle: No, it's great.

Zibby: I'm very interested in eating disorders personally. I studied them, majored in that in psychology in college, and worked at an eating disorder clinic. It's a personal interest of mine for various reasons. That's in part why I was interested. Actually, I don't know if you've seen Taylor Swift's new documentary. Have you watched that by any chance?

Gabrielle: I can't say I have. [laughter]

Zibby: I don't even know why I did. I have a teen daughter, among other children, who should've been watching it instead of me. My husband and I were like, "Hey, in the mood to watch a Taylor Swift documentary?" I was like, "I really want to watch it." In the documentary, she said the same thing as you, which is she didn't know she had an eating disorder either. She just thought that's what you were supposed to do. She was getting really famous and all this stuff. Everybody wanted her to be thin, she felt. She's like, "It was an eating disorder. I was not eating. It was an eating disorder." She had to then deal with it. Now she feels like people are just as judgmental with her for having recovered from it and not being as rail thin as she was before. Anyway, if you're super bored.

Gabrielle: Me and Taylor Swift have a lot in common. [laughter]

Zibby: It's one of those things. Actually, yes, we're all just people trying to make it through this crazy world. Even though she has performed in front of millions of people, she struggles with some of the same exact things. It's not so different in a way. Yes, we might not all have the same trappings. Off on my Taylor Swift tangent. Tell me a little bit about writing this book. I was saying how I felt writing, but maybe you didn't feel that way. How did you feel writing this book and putting your feelings out on the page like this? Was it really challenging, or was it something you felt just so needed to be said?

Gabrielle: It was both. I had moments where the writing came really easily and moments where it was really painful. I was like, I need to figure out how to do this, how to write about these things without retraumatizing myself, because you do have to sit in the memory of hard things and figure out, practically speaking, what is relevant and what's not relevant. How do I describe this thing? It's taking this objectivity to your trauma that I think is, in a way, really helping and in another way was awful. The hardest part was that for the majority of the book, I was working an insane job and had no time. Basically, the majority of what I wrote happened on the subway in my phone in my notes app because that was my forty-five minutes a day where someone wasn't asking me questions, hopefully. [laughs] It was hard to find time. Then when I had time, it was right after I left my job at Nylon and I had nothing but time. That was also hard because I had to write a new conclusion to the book. I think my feelings hadn’t fully settled about what had happened. I had to try to have empathy for my future self about how I would feel about the things that were so immediate. That was also really good because that kind of became my healing process too, was forcing myself to reach some sort of resolution and have a positive takeaway from things that ultimately didn't feel positive at all.

Zibby: Wow. That's the definition of learning and coping. This was your tool. We all get to hold it. What is your new job? You referenced that you have a new -- what's your new...?

Gabrielle: I am at Netflix. I joined the editorial and publishing team, which is kind of marketing. It's social media focused. I'm running the social media platform that is dedicated to the LGBT community.

Zibby: That's amazing.

Gabrielle: It's really, really fun. Social media was one eighth of what my job used to be, so it's really incredible to be able to just focus on it and know that I know how to do it and that’s just what I have to do. It's also really amazing that I didn't create this job. I wasn't the person who said we have to do representation. They already knew. They created the department. I'm just stepping into the role. It's so different.

Zibby: That's great. Do you have any social media tips? Anything I should do? I feel like you're the guru now on every level.

Gabrielle: I guess it depends on what your goal is. I think the most important tip for social media is to take break from it, honestly. [laughs] If you want to grow your platforms, you have to use all of the new tools as they're created. That's how the algorithm will prioritize you.

Zibby: I've heard that. Like the Reels and all that?

Gabrielle: Yeah. Personally, I cannot do Reels.

Zibby: I am not good at Reels.

Gabrielle: I just won't do it.

Zibby: I recorded myself walking through the house or something. I was like, this is not funny. Nobody wants to watch this at all, me cleaning up my kids' toys. This is so boring.

Gabrielle: It's such a specific kind of whimsical humor. I'm like, I'm tired. [laughs]

Zibby: I'm not good at it. Not that you're actually asking, but my goal is not so much to build my platform. It's to make it better. My Instagram is private. Maybe I shouldn't say this. I don't let that many people follow me because I put a lot of personal stuff out there. I was getting very nervous by some followers. I was like, I don't care if I have a zillion followers. That's not what I'm trying to do, at least for my personal page, but I would like to make it better and more engaging. I use it mostly to write. Like you were saying with your book, I have something painful happen and I put it -- I can't believe it's become this, but it's my real-time diary in a way even if it's a paragraph of how I'm feeling. I get so much immediate feedback. It's amazing. I have found it to be, not for my podcast page, but at least for my personal page, this untapped resource like a support group of sorts. Different people rise to the top of the bubble depending on what the issue is. That's interesting too.

Gabrielle: It sounds like you're using it in the exact way that you should be using it.

Zibby: Okay. Thank you. I'm glad. I can always do it better. I like to do everything better than I'm always doing it. I feel like you can relate to that.

Gabrielle: Of course. I'm familiar. [laughter]

Zibby: Just going to go out on a limb and say that. I'm sure you're super busy, but in terms of writing, where do you stand with writing in your life? How do you get that need met now?

Gabrielle: I have actually been doing a lot of writing this year, or in 2020. Just having reasonable work hours has been life changing. Not having a commute has been life changing. It's never been hard for me to think of things to write. It's been hard for me to find the time. I really committed myself this past year to filling my free time with writing instead of just thinking, oh, I should write that down. I started writing a novel.

Zibby: Ooh, that's exciting.

Gabrielle: Thank you. We'll see. It was the most fun I've ever had doing a thing. I'm hoping that it resonates with someone somewhere. In hindsight, I just wish that I had taken three weeks off from work to write Everybody Else Is Perfect. I could've saved myself so much sleep if I had just done that, but it really wasn't possible. I was so tied to my office. I'm really envious of people who are full-time writers who can just do that and live comfortably. I think it's a really hard thing to do. I like having my health insurance.

Zibby: Also, having heard from lots of full-time writers, the excess of time can be a constraint as well. It can be overwhelming when your day is cleared to write and be creative. The image of you writing on your phone in the subway is from another lifetime, the being packed together and holding up your phone and that whole thing, but you fit it in because you had to. It's like, give a busy person something to do... Like you said even still, when you had all day, that was also hard. I feel like some writers, although grateful, and I don't want to speak for other people, but it can be oppressive having that much time and having to produce something of high quality when so many other distractions are always around. It's always glass half full, I think.

Gabrielle: Totally. I think it's also important to be experiencing the world while you're writing about it. There is a really real reason why I didn't have any ideas for a book when I was twenty-two. That's because I hadn’t lived at all. If it weren’t for the experiences of the past ten years, I'm not sure if my perspective would be something that could fill a whole book. You have to have experiences to have something to say. I think that's also what makes it hard when you have nothing to do but write. It's just you. It's so solitary. You talking to yourself only gets you so far, at least for me.

Zibby: It's true, especially for nonfiction. That's completely true. Imagine how much more you'll have to say when you're my age. I'm forty-four. You're going to have so much more that's happened. Then I think of people who are seventy writing their stories. Every year, there's more material. Even something that I was thinking of doing before the pandemic -- I had left this half-finished book proposal. I looked at it recently. I was like, oh, because I hadn’t lived the last two parts of my book. Then I put them in. I was like, okay, now it’s done. What is your parting advice to aspiring authors? I know we've talked a lot about writing, but if you have any parting advice.

Gabrielle: The thing about writing is you have to just do it. I think within the aspiring, it's so easy to feel like if you just wish for it hard enough it'll happen. It's not going to happen like that. You have to just commit yourself to doing a lot of hard work and making time for it and putting yourself out there and pitching it.

Zibby: Yep, that's pretty true. That's great advice. Thank you. Thank you for your book, Everybody Else Is Perfect. Thank you for letting me talk to you -- I'm a total stranger -- about all these personal issues. Thank you for being brave enough to share them, and respectful and all that stuff. Thanks.

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

Zibby: You too. Take care.

Gabrielle: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Christina Baker Kline, THE EXILES

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

Christina Baker Kline: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Zibby: As were chatting about before the podcast, we just did this fantastic event for the North Castle Public Library together last week, but it wasn't recorded. We're going to do it again as a podcast. At least now I got all this inside information about you from that, sort of like an extra prep session. I promise this is being recorded, so we're all good. [laughs]

Christina: Perfect.

Zibby: Let's start with The Exiles. Can you please tell listeners what it's about and what inspired you to write it?

Christina: The Exiles is the story of the convict women who transformed Australia and the Aboriginal people whose way of life was destroyed when British colonists landed on their shores. That is the epic version of the description. It's about three women, essentially, who are transported. There's one Aboriginal who ends up living with a British aristocratic family. It's not so exciting for her, and fun. I read a piece in The New York Times maybe a decade ago that was in a column that Lisa Belkin used to have called Motherlode. Zibby, I think you've contributed to it.

Zibby: Yes, I did. Much less highbrow of a piece, though. It was my being sad I couldn't go to Kids In Sports or something with them anymore and I had to sit on the sidelines.

Christina: I was a mother of kids in the parenting needy ages, and so I always read it. This one column happened to be about the convict women and how they took care of their children on the ships, which were often repurposed slaving ships, headed to Australia for four to six months at sea. I read that and I got this tingle. I realized this is what I want to write about next. It was totally intimidating because it's in the 1840s. It's in Australia and England, neither of which I've really written about. I've written a little bit about -- one of my novels has a character who's English. I grew up in England for nine years. I was born there. I have dual citizenship, so I feel a little bit on sturdier ground with that, but not so much with Australia. I knew it would be a big project. I had been obsessed with Australia ever since going there as a Rotary fellow in my twenties. I loved it. I became really interested at the time in the story of the convicts because, of course, Australia was founded as a penal colony. Twenty percent of Australians today are descended from convicts. Also, learning about what had happened, it's a similar parallel or inside out version, I suppose, or our own story of British settlers coming into America and taking over. It was fascinating to research. I have taught in a women's prison. I did a book on feminism with my mom and interviewed all these women for it. Those experiences, all three of them came back when I wrote this book and came together.

Zibby: I can't believe that twenty percent of the people in Australia still are descended -- isn't that crazy? You would think that it would be mayhem and disorder. Yet it's the place everybody just wants to go visit. They're so laid back. What do you think that's about? That's crazy.

Christina: I do think that the Australian sensibility is in part because of their origins as a penal colony. These people came from a very stratified world in Britain where there was no social mobility. You could not go up and down the social ladder. There were no social programs. The poor were just stuck at the bottom. They got to Australia. Even though the journey was difficult and prison life was definitely not fun, if you got out -- in fact, one descendent of a convict said to me, "Our character is forged out of having survived all this and then being able to start anew," and having all kinds of social mobility once they got out, becoming entrepreneurial, for example, and also this irreverence and this kind of humor that you see a lot of Australian people share. I do think that there's something about that journey that was very specific. It makes them different than Americans. Religion was never part of the forming of that country. It's a very different feeling.

Zibby: I am deep in American history these days. I've been helping my thirteen-year-old daughter study for her social studies test, so it's very fresh in my mind exactly how we became a country. That's all super interesting and timely for what's going on in my house at least.

Christina: I love how these separate colonies show us different iterations of the effect of British colonialism.

Zibby: How did your family end up -- you were you born there and why did you leave, in the UK?

Christina: My parents are Southern. They met at college. My dad was actually in seminary. He was going to become a minister. They were raised Southern Baptist. He got a fellowship for a summer to go to Cambridge and study with Owen Chadwick, this very famous theologian. My father was the first person to graduate from eighth grade in his white trash Southern family, basically, whereas my mother had come from a long line of teachers. They were these two very different backgrounds. I think she influenced him because he agreed to go to Cambridge for the summer. He thought it was just for the summer. Then he fell in love with learning there and became a professor. He got a PhD studying with Owen Chadwick. He became a professor of British labor history of all things. My parents became total hippies and threw off their Baptist shackles. It was also at the height of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement and the women's movement and all that. They were very radically involved with all that stuff.

Then when we moved back to the South and my father -- they were sort of rabble-rousers. Finally, my father was fired from this conservative college -- he was teaching in an all-male college -- for anti-American activities for housing draft dodgers or something. They moved to Maine. He became a professor at the University of Maine because I think that was as far as you could get from the South without going to Canada. [laughs] That's just a circuitous way of saying that that was how we ended up in England. My parents became huge anglophiles. My mother's sister married a novelist. We have relatives over there now. My children even have dual citizenship because I was born there. That's kind of wonderful. If Trump had -- sorry to be political, but if things had not changed, we were very much considering -- I don't know if you know Jane Green.

Zibby: Yes, of course.

Christina: She's just relocated to London.

Zibby: I know. I've been watching her redo her house on Instagram.

Christina: Don't you love it?

Zibby: [Indiscernible/crosstalk] her room, her wallpaper, painting, whatever. Yes, I love it, her bathroom. It's fantastic.

Christina: She's so fun.

Zibby: She is so fun.

Christina: We're sort of living through her. I'm sort of living through her.

Zibby: Yes, me too. This also gives more context because the other night we discussed your dad and how you didn't mean to but ended up emulating his deep research skills and how you thought you were a novelist only in that you sort of poo-pooed that whole cerebral sitting just pawing through research. Yet your historical fiction has become a cross between him and what you thought you were going to do. Now that I hear his trajectory, it's even more interesting.

Christina: He was sort of an autodidact, I guess you would say, growing up. He just was in love with learning, always. He was meticulous. He has like a dozen books. I'm really proud of him. His brother and sister then went to college also, and then of course, subsequent generations. It's this American success story of education changing your life kind of thing. I started out writing contemporary novels. I loved that. I stumbled into the Orphan Train story because my husband's grandfather was an orphan train rider, was featured in this article. None of us knew. He was dead. We discovered that he had this whole past that my mother-in-law never knew. Orphan Train, only a third of that novel is set in the past, a hundred pages, but that's what people think of when they think of the novel, and obviously the title and all of that, but also because it was just such an -- people didn't know the story even though a quarter of a million American children went on trains to the Midwest in a labor program ending in 1929. That was how I got into researching.

I realized it's terrifying to write about the past. I remember reading a book by Kathryn Harrison, a novel, that was about foot binding, I think. She wrote contemporary books, novels and memoir. Then she wrote this book set in the past. My first though was, why would she do that? That's so weird. Then my second thought was, that's way too hard. I could never do that. I would never presume to understand any culture other than my own. That seems ridiculous. Then Orphan Train, I sort of was terrified every second that I was writing the stuff set in the past, but I learned I could do it. Then the next book was a whole different challenge about Andrew Wyeth and the subject of his painting, Christina's World. Then this book was an entirely different challenge. Writing Orphan Train made me realize -- here's a big lesson for aspiring writers. Don't box yourself in. Don't tell yourself what your style is or what your subject is or what your interests are or what you're capable of. You never know. If you take chances, you'll surprise yourself, always. It might not always work. In the case of my writing these books, I wrote my way into learning that I could write this way.

Zibby: And that you obviously liked it. You must have enjoyed it to be able to [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Christina: Yeah, that was the thing. Right, that was your original point. My father, his research style and everything, I thought, I will never do that. I do do that. I take notes the same way he did. We both write longhand. We talked about that the other night. I love that part of it. With that said -- I did an event with Lily King last month.

Zibby: I love her too. She's amazing.

Christina: I know. I love her too. She's so great. She has written a contemporary novel after writing one set in the past. She's like, "Oh, my god, it's so much easier." I was reminded that it is a little easier to write about the world you know. At some point, I will definitely do it again. Maybe I'll bring some of what I learned about this stuff to the present day. We'll see.

Zibby: But then you said your next one, you're making the same mistake again by delving into Civil War history. [laughs]

Christina: It's so stupid. The Civil War is the worst period to write about because there are so many real experts. What am I doing? It's about two couples. I'm just going to hew closely to their world. We'll see.

Zibby: It's great. You obviously enjoy challenging yourself on some level. That's okay. Maybe it's too easy. Maybe you thrive on it. I don't know.

Christina: You know what? Here's another secret that's not secret. I think that writing about the past in some ways makes plot easier because writing about the present is sort of amorphous. If you're writing about people in your own world, in a way, then you have to make terrible things happen to -- something has to happen in a novel. You put people through misery in one way or another. That's sort of the plot of every novel. In some ways, writing stories set in the past gives you more of a frame for the story. That's what I have trouble with. The words on the page are one thing. Really, the structure and the plot, I could just write and write not have a plot, but that is not how a novel works.

Zibby: I was just talking to people about some Holocaust-era fiction and how just knowing it's about World War II or the Holocaust or something, you already know the general plot. You might not know the substories and exactly what the book's about, but you already are moved and emotional. You know where your emotions are going to go because of that. This is going to come out the wrong way. It's not cheating, but you're relying on an inherent structure, which is sort of what you're saying about some of your stories, not cheating though of course.

Christina: No, I totally know what you mean.

Zibby: It's like riding that wave.

Christina: I am flabbergasted at the ongoing interest in novels about World War II. Of course, I get them all across my desk in advanced reading copy form because I write about the past. It's amazing to me, the appetite for World War II fiction that doesn't end. In fact, I was talking to an editor about it who said, "We really thought it was a trend." They have all these trends in publishing like chick lit, whatever. Then you never hear that anymore. She said, "What we're finding is that there's an endless appetite." Not all the books succeed, but you're exactly right. I actually, Zibby, had never thought of it that way, that it is about knowing what you're getting in a certain way when you read a book about World War II, especially a novel. Not to generalize too much, but a novel by women with a certain kind of figure on the cover is going to yield a certain kind of story about World War II.

Zibby: If you like that, then you can just keep dipping into that well.

Christina: One of the things for me is that I don't want to -- maybe somebody I will, but I don't want to revisit the same territory. Even though I've written three books set in the past, they're all very different from each other. They're all very different parts of the world and in the past.

Zibby: It's not like the past is limiting. You can write about anything anywhere. The world is your oyster. You could do this forever. You probably will do this forever. There's an endless amount of really interesting things. Particularly with The Exiles, I didn't know a lot about this at all. I feel kind of like a moron with all the things that I've learned from you about it. Even the idea of being trapped on a boat with your children for three to six months, even that alone, that little tidbit when I can't even drive from here to the grocery store with all four of my kids sometimes, I'm like, how do people do that for months on end with no iPads or no nothing to distract them?

Christina: Oh, god, I know. It's just amazing what they went through. We don't know the stories of the poor and the dispossessed because those are not the people who write the history. History is wars and presidents and generals and treaties and robber barons and the wealthy and the educated, the people who are in power. The people I write about are not the people in power. They're the quiet stories. They're the stories that nobody has heard. This story of the convict women, as you say, every continent has its own stories like this. A lot of them are still ongoing. That's one of the things that writing about the past opens you up too, is the realization -- I think we talked about this the other night too. I'm sorry.

Zibby: That's okay. [laughs]

Christina: The realization that, yes, things have changed in some amazing ways and it's great to recognize that, but a lot of things stay the same. Character is the same in some ways. In other words, the feelings people had in 1840 are as real and as deeply experienced as the ones we have today. I think that's what I try to do in these novels, is to stay very close to the bones in terms of making my characters feel as if they could live now so that readers experience these situations through their eyes in a way that feels familiar in some ways. I'm not trying to approximate what someone wrote like in 1840. I'm writing as a contemporary writer about the past. If the books succeed at all, I think it has something to do with that, that impulse to make it feel fresh and modern, to make 1840 feel as relevant as 2020.

Zibby: Which you totally did. You also do it by letting the reader into the inner world of your characters. If you were to see a picture, not even that there were pictures, but a sepia-toned brown and white picture, people seem so different, but they're not. The child -- I always forget her name.

Christina: Mathinna.

Zibby: Thank you. Mathinna, she's an orphan who doesn't want to go off with strangers. That's any child today. Of course, you poke fun at the people who actually were real people in real life with their snootiness and wanting to dabble in basically child snatching for their own amusement. You immediately put us there. It feels so real, which is great.

Christina: When I was researching Orphan Train, I was at New York Public Library a lot. The Lewis Hine collection of photographs of immigrant children working in factories, The Lives of the Poor, really interesting stuff. A friend of mine on Facebook, Margaret [indiscernible], is doing a project. She's working with an expert colorist. They're taking his photographs -- it's stunning. I'm going to send you one of them. It looks like my child or me standing there because she makes it as if it’s today. This kid's standing on a factory floor. You're like, wow, this is not this cracked sepia-toned photo. This could be now. It's cool. That's sort of what I'm trying to do, is a written form of that idea of colorizing, of making a story come to life that seems as if it's in the dusty pages of an old book.

Zibby: Tell me about all the different movie-ish adaptations of the various projects you have going on.

Christina: My three latest novels have all been optioned, two for -- does the big screen even exist anymore? -- for movies and the latest one for a series, which is where everything is going these days. The team that bought The Exiles is all female. They're half in Australia, half in Sydney, half in LA. They're just so fun and wonderful. I'll be executive producing and hope to be quite involved. COVID has delayed everything. They did Big Little Lies and The Undoing that we saw recently on HBO.

Zibby: Which we watched start to finish from eight PM to two AM nonstop. We could not get off the couch, whole thing. I couldn't believe it. This is last weekend, by the way. [laughs]

Christina: Don't you live somewhere near where they filmed? The house?

Zibby: Yeah, I live in the middle of every scene. I felt like I was in the movie. I'm glad I watched it while I was in the city because she could've been walking down my block as I was watching it.

Christina: I just found it really fun and stylish. I think all of us got a little boost in the dark days of November watching that.

Zibby: Yes, though I have heard from some Upper East Side moms, "Nobody would dress like that." We'll leave that alone. Anyway, Christina, thank you for doing another conversation with me that's so fun. I feel like I could just chit-chat with you about your work and why you do the things you do. Next time.

Christina: Next time, we'll talk about you because you have a very interesting life. I want to hear more about it. I can't wait until we can hopefully get together in person.

Zibby: Me too. That’ll be great.

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

Zibby: Thank you. This was so delightful. I'm thrilled to have gotten to do it twice.

Christina: Yay! I hope it's entertaining for people.

Zibby: It was entertaining for me, so that's all I care about. [laughs]

Christina: That's good. Have a great day, a snow day. Hope to see you again.

Zibby: You too.

Christina: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Shani M. King, HAVE I EVER TOLD YOU BLACK LIVES MATTER

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Shani. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm delighted to chat with you today.

Shani Mahiri King: Thank you, Zibby, so much for having me. I completely identify with the title, "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Just yesterday or the day before, my wife was like, "Shani, when's the last book you read?" I honestly couldn't remember the name of the last book I read. Don't even ask me what the last movie I saw was that is not a child's movie. I have no idea.

Zibby: As of yesterday, we're trying to go through the entire Home Alone -- it's more than a trilogy. There are like five of them. I don't even know what you call that, quinci... I don't know. We're working our way through the kids' movies as well. Yes, one byproduct, unfortunately, is sometimes less time to read. I'm bringing books like yours, which are quick to read, yours, not always, on this podcast to people who -- or maybe they wouldn't have discovered them otherwise. I only have a PDF version. Do you happen to have your actual book, or not?

Shani: I don't happen to have my actual book. Part of the reason is I'm in São Paulo right now, so it was be a heavier lift to get me an actual copy of it. Like you, I've just seen the PDF version.

Zibby: Well, it looks great. [laughs] Tell me the whole backstory of this children's book, Have I Ever Told You Black Lives Matter. Tell me about the illustrations, the people you profiled, how you came to do it, the whole story. How did this come to be?

Shani: Zibby, all of my books begin from the same place. They begin from conversations with my kids. I wrote a book before this, Have I Ever Told You?, that is really a book that is what I did say to my kids and what I wanted to say to my kids. That last book I wrote about four ago before the last election. I just felt like there was a lot of political discourse that my kids were, in different ways, exposed to. I didn't want that discourse to diminish who they thought they were. That's why I wrote Have I Ever Told You? This book, Have I Ever Told You Black Lives Matter, comes from a similar place. It involves, in part, some conversations that I have had with my kids, but also conversations that I've wanted to have with my kids. For a long time, I've wanted my kids to be aware of all of their history. I'm African American. My wife is Nicaraguan. I'm Jewish. My wife is Catholic. I was born in the United States. My wife was born in Nicaragua. We've moved around quite a bit.

My kids have a lot of history, which is part of the palate from which they can draw their own identities. For a long time, I have wanted my kids to know more about all of their histories. One of the histories is black history, is African American history. My kids are six and eight. I'm not sure, Zibby, how old your kids are. My kids don't usually like to just sit and listen to history monologues by their daddy or by their mommy. Occasionally, I'll talk to them about history when I pick up books. It was always challenging to me to try and figure out how to expose kids to their history unless we happened to go on a trip to Nicaragua, for example, or a trip to a particular African American heritage site. The Black Lives Matter movement happened. It's happening. It was just a reminder, a similar kind of thing, that I really want my kids to be proud of who they are, and so I wrote Have I Ever Told You Black Lives Matter.

There are two parts to the book. The first half is really an inspirational narrative of a speech or story that you may want to tell your kids or they want to read. The second half involves over a hundred biographies of people mentioned in the first half which gives really curious and inquisitive kids the opportunity to ask questions and get them answered about people mentioned in the first half. Another feature of the second half of the book is that there are quotations from each of the people mentioned in the back, each of the people in the biographies, which allows kids to be inspired by these people in their words. They're really people from every field and endeavor, anywhere from science to athletics to sports. It's not only historical, but it's contemporary. You have anyone from Charles Hamilton Houston, whose grandfather was a slave and led the legal fight against segregation, to Jay-Z and Beyoncé who are modern-day -- there are lots of names that you could give them, but business moguls, entrepreneurs who inspire people in their own way.

Zibby: Wow. Yes, that's all amazing. My kids, by the way, are also -- I have a six-year-old and a seven-year-old and then two thirteen-year-olds. I'm in it with you with them not particularly wanting to sit down for a history lesson. I feel like unless it's a holiday, I can't really get them to focus. Why are we celebrating this? Wait, you mentioned that you are Jewish also. I haven't met, I don't think, any African American Jewish people before. Tell me about that.

Shani: I was basically raised by my mother, by a single mother, since I was four, so my entire memory. She's Jewish. I actually don't know what religion my father was. He wasn't really involved. My mom's Jewish. My biological mother is a white Jewish woman from Revere, the Boston area. If you hear her speak, you will know that she's from Boston. The phrase that we've taught our daughter is, I park my car on Harvard Yard. My mother has a very, very strong accent. I'm not exactly sure why I don't. I'm not particularly religious, but I was raised Jewish, culturally Jewish. We celebrate the Jewish holidays. In our household now, my wife is Catholic, I'm Jewish, so we celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas just because that's what I did when I was growing up. I celebrated Hanukkah. My wife celebrated Christmas. We do that for our kids to expose them to both religions.

It's interesting. We were just speaking with both our daughter and our son yesterday. The topic of religion or God or the afterlife came up. I told the kids my view. Gabby, my wife, told the kids her view. My daughter, she just had this look of sort of frustration on her face. We're like, "Suriyah, what's wrong?" She was like, "It's just confusing." I was like, yeah. [laughs] It is very, very confusing. One of the points that we wanted to make to her was that no one knows, from our perspective ultimately at the end of the day, what the real story is, what the real answer to fundamental questions -- is there God? It's a belief. What the fundamental answer is to what the religious history of the world is, no one knows. What's important is that you can believe whatever you want to believe. You shouldn't judge someone else for believing what they believe. That, I think, got across to her and to Matias as well. Whether there's anything deeper than that that got across to them, I don't know.

Zibby: I guess we'll find out what actually stuck in twenty, thirty years, something like that. We can circle back then. [laughs] Coming from a mixed-race family, do you feel that you also need to tell the story of the Nicaraguan history to your kids? Will you be getting to that book, or is it because this is so of the moment and, of course, there's so much national, not even national, just worldwide focus on making things more in common parlance and all the rest?

Shani: I have a couple of thoughts, Zibby. First of all, I've always wanted to, as I mentioned, teach our kids African American history. I always felt like I'm proud of all of my heritage and who I am. I want my kids to have an opportunity to be proud of who they are. There are some children's books that talk about different aspects of African American history. I wrote this particular book because I hadn’t really seen a book that covered it in exactly this way, this breadth of coverage in both the digestible way in terms of first half, but also a deep way in the second half that allows kids to explore and can even be a resource for educators. The Black Lives Matter movement was a reminder and helped, but it's something that I wanted to do anyway and I've wanted to do for a long time. Also, it's a time during which our kids, as you know being, among other things, a mom, our kids really need us. It's challenging. It's challenging to be the same kind of solid presence for our kids when we're dealing with this craziness and this pandemic among other things too. For a lot of reasons, it's a time where our kids need us. I wrote it not only for my kids, but because I have the opportunity to write it for other kids as well.

In terms of the Nicaraguan history, yes, we have made many stops on that train. My wife is a very proud Nicaraguan, as is her mother. Her mother, my suegra as we would say in Spanish, or sogrina in Portuguese which I'm learning now, is also a proud Nicaraguan. We eat gallo pinto. We eat queso frito. We eat nacatamales. Yes, we are exposing them to Nicaraguan culture as much as we can. One of my wife's biggest, I don't know if it's a frustration, but I think something that makes her a little sad is that we can't travel as freely as we would otherwise be able to do. So far in our lives, we've been very fortunate to be able to travel. One thing that we haven't done is we haven't taken the kids to Nicaragua. Nicaragua really is a fundamental part of who my wife -- she spent a lot of time there. She's very close with her Nicaraguan family. She's fluent in Spanish. That's something that we would like to do more of when we have the opportunity to travel more than we can now. We want to expose our kids to all of their history. Then like you were saying Zibby, ultimately at the end of the day, who knows what they're go be like? Who knows how they're going to identify? We just want to give them the opportunity to explore aspects of their identity.

Zibby: Very true. Not that this is any of my business, but I'm wondering, how did you meet your wife?

Shani: It's interesting. Whenever somebody tells us their story of meeting, they're like, I saw X from across the room, and it was love at first sight. They have these amazing stories. My wife and I don't have that kind of amazing story. We met, actually, at work. I had been working in private practice as a lawyer in New York. Then I moved to Northern California. My wife was born in Nicaragua but moved here when she was four and reared in Oakland, California. I had been in private practice. She was working at a not-for-profit organization that represented only children in different kinds of substantive proceedings and dependency proceedings and education proceedings and immigration proceedings and guardianship proceedings. I had reached a point in my legal career where I had always wanted to do this, but I reached a point where I could. I was moving to California. I just thought it was a good point to switch gears, to switch from private practice to representing kids, to child advocacy, which is something that I'd always wanted to do. I interviewed at this not-for-profit. I got very lucky and got a job there. They were fantastic people, fantastic lawyers. That's how we met. We were friends, and that's all she wrote. That's where we met. Then we moved to Florida when I got a job as a law professor at the University of Florida. We moved to Gainesville, Florida, which I had never thought of at all before moving there because I grew up in the bigger city, Boston, and then moved to New York. My wife grew up in Oakland, and so I had never really heard of Gainesville other than the Florida Gators, the football team. I didn't really know much about Gainesville. Then we moved to Miami. Now we're in São Paulo for the time being.

Zibby: Wow. That's a journey. I love it.

Shani: That's how we met. She's great. She's much smarter than I am. She is an incredibly kind person. One amazing thing about her is that she's really busy. She's a really busy lawyer doing high-stakes and complicated litigation, but she has an unbelievable ability to be emotionally available to our kids. As is the case for many parents, you work. It's impossible.

Zibby: That's how you met your wife. That was a great story. I also wanted to know, what plans do you have for more books? and how you're doing this with your regular job. You already have a lot going on. This is such a service you're doing by combing through all these biographies. If the fonts were different, this could've been a huge biography, middle-grade type of project. The bios were smaller at the end. Tell me about your upcoming stuff.

Shani: The way that I usually write -- I don't know how other people do it. I'm sure it's different for everyone. The way that I usually write my children's books is I just sit down when I happen to be thinking about something and write a draft. That's how both of these children's books worked. The second one involved, you're right, considerably more research than the first, but it was really even rewarding personally. I knew many of the people in the book, but I didn't know everything about every one of these people in the book. What's next? A couple of things that are in the conceptual drafting stage. One is more Have I Ever Told You? books from different perspectives. This happens to be a book about African American history, but there are many different kinds of Have I Ever Told You? books that could provide access to kids to different histories. You mentioned, do I plan to expose my kids to all of their different histories? Yeah, and I'd like to write more Have I Ever Told You? books.

Another project is slightly different. I mentioned to you, Zibby, that I think that my kids are, even though they complain sometimes, maybe a little bit too much, I think they're very fortunate kids in so many ways. One of the ways they're so fortunate is they have gotten to travel more than I could've ever imagined. Last summer, because of my wife's job, we spent about a month in Panama. The summer before that, we spent about seven weeks, eight weeks, in Buenos Aires. Another conceptual project is a project that is a children's book that explores the story or path of children who are from traditionally underserved populations traveling to these different locations and how they experience them. I never thought about traveling in the way that my kids travel. One thought was to provide a window and access to the experience that my kids are having to other kids through a children's book. Those are a couple of things that I'm working on. In terms of how I find time to do it, it's really so much fun for me to do. I feel like particularly during this time when there is so much going on and we really need to be there as much as we can for our kids, it's the least that I can do to try and use this platform to try and speak to kids.

Zibby: That's amazing. I can't wait to see what comes next. It's so funny, in The New York Times today, there was a whole thing -- you know that At Home section? I don't know if you read The Times. They have At Home. Today, it was like, you're at home with your kids for the holidays. What are you going to do? If you're the type of family who used to love to travel, you can do these things. I was reading it like, what? What am I going to do? [laughs] There were all these resources to pretend as if you're traveling with your kids. They all seemed pretty shoddy, but having a book like yours would fall into that great category.

Shani: I do read The Times. My wife and I had the exact same -- right now, our kids' school has -- wait for it -- a five-week break. We have five weeks. We had received recommendations from the school as to things that they should do. For one of my kids, for my older kid, it's thirty minutes of reading three days a week and this math program which probably takes her about ten minutes. Then for my son, it's about fifteen minutes of reading. Now, I'm not a mathematician and I haven't done the exact calculations yet, Zibby, but that leaves a lot of hours during the day.

Zibby: For Roblox? [laughs]

Shani: For what? I really appreciate people working hard to try and help come up with ideas. I think there are things that will take up the time. Maybe we'll do some baking. It's a challenge. My wife and I were talking about it. One of the approaches that I take is that this is really an unprecedented, at least in my lifetime, time during which some of the rules that we normally have I think are just going to have to be off the table. Ultimately at the end of the day, my wife and I will do the best that we can to give our kids some stimulation during the day. At the end of the day, they're not going to have as much as we would like. We're not going to be able to do the things that we would normally do. As long as they're relatively happy, they're going to be okay. This is one of those situations where I think my wife and I just have to continually remind ourselves that, you know what, let's just put one foot in front of other. We're going to do our jobs. Our kids will get some stimulation. If they watch their iPad a little bit more than normal, it's okay this time because they're going to be just fine. Listen Zibby, I know that I spent a lot more time in front of the screen when I was a kid.

Zibby: Me too. I'm always saying that. I'm always referencing commercials and shows from the eighties and whatever. At one point, I talked to my mom. I was like, "Did I watch TV all the time?" I do remember reading a lot, but there was not a show I appear to have missed. Honestly, all the kids are going to be fine. We're all going to be fine. Actually, it might even lead to some course correction on the overparenting front because we all see that, you know what, they're fine. They're in the other room. The world's not coming to an end.

Shani: You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of when your kids are little and -- I don't know if you did this. You read all of these parenting books and blogs. People have such strong opinions about what you should do and shouldn't do and how things will ruin your kid if you do them or don't do them. Should you let your kid cry? Should you not let your kid cry? At the end of the day, all the kids are fine. They're just fine. It's the same thing now. I really do wonder if this will result in a course correction because the kids are going to be just fine.

Zibby: I say this all the time, but the more kids I have, the more I realize that I have nothing to do with how they turn out. All I can do is mess them up, but they are who they are from day one. I'm just like, who did I get? [laughs] As long as I love them and make sure that there's some boundaries and I'm not mean and I'm a loving parent, the kids are going to be okay. All this philosophical parenting talk, I didn't see this coming. Thank you for coming on my podcast. Thank you for your book. I can't wait to get a hard copy to read to my kids who, despite all their time on screens, somehow don't like to read books on screens, of all the things. I'm jealous of you being in Brazil. I hope you survive these five weeks.

Shani: You too, Zibby. Thank you so much for having me. If it makes you feel better, yes, we are in Brazil, but just like you, I am inside. We could be anywhere right now. Good luck to you in this next five weeks. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Take care. Buh-bye.

Shani: Bye.

Jarrett J. Krosoczka, STAR WARS: JEDI ACADEMY

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

Jarrett Krosoczka: Thank you, Zibby. Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: You have written so many different amazing things. I almost don't know where to start. When I first got pitched you coming on this podcast, I was like, oh, my gosh. All of the Star Wars books, my kids have been reading for years. I was like, they're going to think that's really cool.

Jarrett: That's so sweet.

Zibby: Then, as I showed you, the picture of my seven-year-old who was reading Lunch Lady in bed and absolutely loved it. Then I loved Hey, Kiddo, oh, my gosh. I've never really read a memoir in graphic novel before as a grown-up. I just want you to talk about everything, but let's start with Hey, Kiddo. This was really moving and amazing. Your story, I know you've done this TED talk that a billion people have watched. Tell me about this memoir first. That was a long intro. [laughs]

Jarrett: I appreciate all of the effusiveness. Hey, Kiddo is a story about my life growing up. My mother was addicted to heroin. I was raised by her parents who were alcoholics minus the label. I didn't know who my father was. But I had art. I always use art as a way to rise above my situation. In 2001 when my very first picture book was published, I thought, here's the happy ending for this kid who always loved to draw. His mother loved to draw, but she had addictions. She was incarcerated. Then every time I sat down to write what would become Hey, Kiddo, I would stop because I'd find myself censoring it. What is this person going to think about how they're depicted? I realized that if I wasn't ready to be all in and really tell my story, I just wasn't ready to write the book. I went on to write more picture books and then the Lunch Lady books. As I was working on Lunch Lady -- the Lunch Lady was published initially between the years 2009 and 2012, which means in the early/mid-2000s, I was actively making the books. My mind would wander. I would start drawing my grandparents or who I was as a teenager. The idea of writing about my life was always there percolating.

You mentioned that TED talk. Actually, it was October of 2012 when I gave that talk. I was a last-minute replacement. I was home. It was a Friday afternoon, which is miraculous that I was home because I tour all the time giving lectures at schools and libraries. The fact that I happened to be home that Friday afternoon -- my phone rang. Even the fact that I didn't have the number programed into my phone and I still answered it, I'm really putting myself out there. Who is this? I don't know who this is, but it's a local area code. It was a producer at the TEDx talks happening at Hampshire College which is the next town over for me. They said, "We had a last-minute cancellation. Would you be willing to sub in?" I always thought, wouldn't it be cool to give a TED talk? I thought she meant it was next week or the next day. Then she said, "No, it's tonight. It starts in four hours." The thing is, my wife Gina and I, we had planned to go out to dinner. The whole family is constantly sacrificing their schedules for the demands of my work. I said, "You know what? Let me call you back." I said, "Gina, let's talk about this. Should I do it?" Then she got mad. "Why the hell didn't you say yes right away?" like I was dumb. "Say yes to the talk." I committed with four hours to go and immediately began pacing the floor of my kitchen out of, what am I going to talk about? Gina's like, "You're thinking too into it. The story's right there in front of you. You should write about your childhood." I started spitballing. "I'll get up there and I'll say, I love to draw and my mother loved to draw, but she was addicted to drugs." Gina stopped me. She said, "No, your mother was addicted to heroin. You should say that."

I had a slideshow that I had just put together for educators for a sixty-minute talk. Of course, now the TED talk can't be longer than eighteen minutes. Editing it down, jumping in the shower, getting dressed, and then of course our babysitter cancelled on us. Imagine if I had said no and then the babysitter cancelled. [laughs] There would've been no date night and no TED talk. Gina couldn't come with me, which was probably for the better because it was almost easier to be so vulnerable without making eye contact with her and seeing how that story pains her. I arrived at the venue. They said, "There's your seat." I took my seat. The lights went down. The first speaker went up. I didn't even go through that talk ever. I went up there and I talked about my mother's heroin addiction. The talk went viral. The response of kids at schools made me realize, okay, I have a story that I've been trying to write. I used to think I want to write this book. Now I realize I need to. That's something I've truly come to realize. Especially memoir, we don't write memoir because we want to, but we feel compelled to because our experiences can help other people through whatever they're dealing with or understanding other people's path in this life.

Zibby: Wow. After the TED talk when you had essentially outed everything in your history, did it even create a ripple? Did you worry at all about then releasing the book, or was it over?

Jarrett: What the TED talk taught me was how to deal with strangers talking to you about your private life.

Zibby: How do you do that?

Jarrett: It was good training. For me, it was good training. If I had just had the memoir, I think I really would've been overwhelmed by the response. Slowly over the years, I would connect with people. I learned how to also accept people's pain and still remain in one piece for myself. Then anytime something would come up, being an interview or something, there would be another wave of people reaching out to me. I learned how to find the right balance of making myself available to readers but then also exercising self-care. By the time I book-toured for Hey, Kiddo two years ago, I really was prepared for what was to come. There were grandparents handing me photos of their grandkids that they were raising at home. Hey, Kiddo's young adult. It's for ages twelve and up. As you've read the book, I didn't censor anything. My grandmother cursed like a sailor, used to be a trucker. At one of my book events, there was a ten-year-old there. I was known especially as the Lunch Lady guy or Jedi Academy, these young, fun stuff. Now I was really conscious of the fact that there might be someone who thinks this is going to be Lunch Lady, but I'm going to be talking about my mom's addiction to heroin. I didn't want anyone to feel unwelcome. What I would do is I'd have a slideshow of praise quotes. I explained what the book was before the event started. Then that family came up after the book signing. That ten-year-old was there because her thirteen-year-old elder brother had overdosed and died. Those are stories that I'll carry with me for all my days. Those are the stories that validate, for me, why I wrote this, so those young readers and older readers could feel less alone.

Zibby: Do you feel now, a little more pessimistic about how widespread this is as an issue for families in America today?

Jarrett: I don't know if I feel more pessimistic about it. I think people who are dealing with opioid addictions, not fully but more so than when I was young, are really looked at someone who's battling an illness versus having a moral failing. If I was growing up today, I would’ve had more resources to understand that my mother was ill and that she just wasn't a "bad person" as it was always painted for me.

Zibby: Then I read when you wrote at the end that while you were editing the book your mother passed away. That's so awful. Tell me a little bit about the timing of that and how you handled that.

Jarrett: We had been estranged for a couple of years at that point. When my second kid was born, she started getting arrested again. For a number of years, the only way I knew what she was up to -- I had to say, "I have a young family. I have a three-year-old. I have a newborn baby. You're getting arrested again. I can't have this in my life right now," the most difficult thing I could ever do. As much as I loved and wanted to take care of my mom, I knew that my most important role was that of a parent myself. These young children needed me. I couldn't get pulled into a lot of that stuff. We exchanged a few text messages. I saw her a year prior to her death at a different family funeral. We made peace with one another. When I got the news that she had died of a heroin overdose, I wasn't surprised. I was gutted and sad but then also relieved to know that she wasn't suffering anymore. I kind of liken it to when someone's had, maybe, terminal cancer for a really long time. She started using when she was twelve, thirteen years old. She lived well into her late fifties. She had a really long life for someone who lived such a lifestyle.

When I was cleaning her house after she died, I was really confronted the ugliness of her plight. That brought a deeper understanding of what she went through more than anything. When you're a kid and you have a parent who has an addiction, for me, I would always think, and I hear this from other people too, that you chose drugs over me. In seeing what she dealt with right to the end, I realized she only chose drugs once, and that was well before I was ever born. She wanted nothing more but to be a parent and be there and to be a grandmother. Even on my first kid's first birthday, she got in touch with me not to wish my kid a happy birthday, but to ask for money. It was things like that where, I mentioned this at the TED talk, it is like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. You keep trying because you hope maybe you make contact.

Zibby: You seem to be in such a psychologically healthy place talking about this.

Jarrett: Should I get Gina down here? She could tell you the whole other side of the coin. [laughs]

Zibby: That makes me almost feel better. You mentioned how you wish you had had therapy as a child, but you're lucky enough to have had it as an adult. That was just something your grandparents didn't really believe in and all the rest. You seem like you have made peace with this in such a profound way. Now all you do is basically give back to other people with your books and illustrations and even during the pandemic, all your drawing shows. Is that all because of this therapist?

Jarrett: No, no, no. It was because of my grandfather. My grandfather was a very altruistic man. He never forgot where he came from. He always would say to me, "Remember your station in life. Remember your last name." He grew up with nothing. A place that gave him a lot of opportunities was the Boys & Girls Club of Worcester. He, his entire life, would support them and donate to them. My grandparents raised me. They didn't believe in therapy, but you know what? They always gave me empty sketchbooks and art supplies. They, in their own way, provided me a space to work through a lot of that stuff. I will say, when I finished Hey, Kiddo, that was not closing a chapter, but it was very healing because it was a hard book to write. I liken it to in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when Professor Umbridge is making Harry write lines with the blood quill and every time he writes "I shall not tell lies" it's getting singed into the back of his hand. That's kind of what it felt like at times.

Then when I finished it, I was like, wow, I lived through that and I'm stronger for it. Then it published, which was this other wave of anxiety and nerves. Weeks before the book published, I thought, I can't ask them not to publish it. I signed a contract. They’ve spent all this time and money to put the book out there. Then again, it's getting those responses from the readers that I say, okay, that's why that pain was worth it. Going through the challenges of writing the book was worth it for that. I was sixteen when I started working at a camp for children with cancer. It was that experience too that taught me there are so many different kinds of pain. I have my pain. These families have their pain. Being of service to somebody, that lifts your spirits more than anything. One of the camps that I worked at was the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp which was founded by Paul Newman. His oft-used quote was that the mathematics of the whole thing didn't really make sense because no matter how much you put in, you get so much more out of that sort of work.

Zibby: Wow, that's beautiful and so inspiring.

Jarrett: And totally paraphrased and butchered. He said it much more eloquently than I just put it. [laughs]

Zibby: No, not that quote. I mean, that's lovely. I just meant the whole story, the way you're able to channel your life into such a giving outcome, essentially. Tell me a little more about the drawing show that you launched recently.

Jarrett: January 1st, 2020, as we all looked to the great new year ahead of us and we think, what do we want to accomplish or what do we want to work on? my new year's resolution was, I would like to do more webcasting. I would like to do more live videos. I'd like to create more videos for my YouTube. Step one is, how am I going to achieve this goal? I have three kids. I thought the only way that I could really make this work would be to carve out a space that would be just for recording. I'm in a room in my basement. It's a small little room. I have my flat files over here. It was just a storage room. I said if I just take this little corner and I have an extra drafting table -- I would go on Facebook Live once a week for the adults. I would go on YouTube Live once a month for schools. Then when everything started shutting down in the middle of March, my mind was rapid-fire like everyone's. What are we going to do? Then also, how can we help? What can I do in this moment?

I have friends who are nurses and doctors and friends who deliver bread to all of the supermarkets in Central Massachusetts. They were all essentially putting their lives at risk not knowing what was going to come of this work they were doing which was to benefit people. I was actually in Pittsburgh right before the shutdown. I was traveling the first couple weeks of March, definitely being anxious. Definitely, I was masking up and sanitizing and thinking, I don't know if I should be here. Then the NBA shut down and Broadway shut down as I was flying home from Pittsburgh. I was staying across the street from where Mr. Rogers filmed his show. Even just driving by there, imagine, he went to work every day, and he walked through that door. That is really neat. That physical space is where Mr. Rogers would go to work every day. I had that in the back of my mind. Then I was at the airport nervously scrolling on my phone before the flight took off. A friend of mine, she pulled her kids before our town officially called it. She had a big whiteboard with the schedule that they were going to keep. It said, "Two o'clock: Art." I said, "I could teach your kids art. You know what? That's what I'll do." The neurons just fired away on that plane home from Pittsburgh.

I said it'll be called Draw Every Day because we're going to draw every day. Everything's getting shut down for two weeks. We'll just do this thing for two weeks. It'll be done. Life will be back to normal. Done. Where I am travelling to next? [laughs] Obviously, you know how that story ends. Over the weekend, we formulated, what would it be? There’d be different segments. I made little animations. I have an overhead camera, so you could see me draw. People were really counting on me. I would receive these messages of gratitude. Then, again, I felt a little bit of a responsibility, so I did it every single day for the next couple weeks and another couple weeks after that. Then I went down to two or three episodes per week. Then Labor Day hit. Summer came. I said, let me just put it on pause, take some time to take stock and reflect and recharge, and also realizing how as soon as the adrenaline leaves your body, you're like a marionette without strings. That's really what happened to me. I took the summer to relax. By relax, I mean stay in my yard with my kids and not go anywhere. [laughs]

Zibby: That's so relaxing.

Jarrett: So relaxing, and not have any childcare help or anything and not be able to see anyone I love. Other than that, it was a great summer.

Zibby: Dream come true.

Jarrett: [laughs] Then I picked it up again in middle of August. Also realizing that with Hey, Kiddo, I have this whole other readership that's older, so I started another web show called Origins Stories where I'm interviewing my graphic novelist friends about how they came to be. That is a show for teens and adults. Sometimes younger kids could -- there's an episode with Raina Telgemeier. That would be appropriate for everyone. I don't want to hold back. I'll be interviewing some other authors who have more older-skewing work. Draw Every Day is about two times a week. Origin Stories is once a week. I record it right over here. I'll turn this around. This is a tiny little room. There are my flat files. That is where I record Origin Stories.

Zibby: Wow. Basically, it is smaller than I even thought, but it looks amazing. It's amazing. It's fantastic.

Jarrett: If I stood up, I'd touch the ceiling, but then you would see my sweatpants. [laughter]

Zibby: That's okay. Nobody's standing up on this call.

Jarrett: That's just the illusion of TV magic. I shared some behind-the-scenes photos a couple months in. People thought I was in this attic with huge windows and skylights. It's a couple of ring lights and a microphone. I was able to do that so quickly because I had the ring light here because I had all of this stuff set up. I think we'll all be traumatized by that pivoting for so long now. I don't think I've even processed it all yet. I'm sure none of us really have, that spring. You know why? Because we're so busy mourning every new thing that we don't have. Now we're in the midst of mourning Halloween and making plans for how we can safely celebrate Christmas with my in-laws and all that.

Zibby: Even the marathon is coming up here. I'm like, even the marathon's not happening? That's outside. I know what you mean, every milestone. I'm in my head like, oh, my gosh, if we hit March 12th again, I don't know what I'm going to do. Are we still going to be in this state with no vaccine and no anything?

Jarrett: Every now and then Gina and I say, we miss the days of just Tiger King and new TikTok. That got us through. If there's a Netflix executive listening, if you could please make a Tiger King: Season 2 for us by March 12th, that’ll be the only thing I'll [indiscernible/laughter].

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. Now what is coming next on the book front for you?

Jarrett: I have a book called Sunshine which is a follow-up to Hey, Kiddo. It's actually not so much a follow-up as much as it's a companion. It totally stands on its own. It's about my time working at that camp with children with cancer. It actually fits into this book. It was originally a chapter from Hey, Kiddo. I'll show you the page. What was once a whole chapter became just this page here in Hey, Kiddo. I needed to explain how that experience informed my motivation to meet my father. You could read Hey, Kiddo up to here, stop, read all 240-something pages of Sunshine, and then come back and read the rest here. That was one of the greatest gifts my editor gave me. When I was writing this, he said, "Don't write this book like it's your only chance to write about your life." It's true because our lives don't unfold in a nice, neat, three-act structure. There are so many different tracks and so many things going. Even as I continue to think about life experiences that I want to write about, there were a lot of parts and things about my grandparents that just didn't fit into the narrative. I have these two wonderful tracks where I could write these heavier books for older readers. Then I could write younger goofy stuff for younger readers as well. I have another series in the works for that Lunch Lady/Jedi Academy age as well.

Zibby: Very busy. That's awesome. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors, or illustrators I should really say, creators?

Jarrett: One of the greatest gifts my grandfather gave me, too, was my work ethic. He grew up during the Great Depression. That's something he always instilled in all of his kids, including me, that hard work is so important. It really doesn't matter what art college you go to, if you even go to college for art. It's just about your craft. You have to work on your craft. It's a constant journey in growth. I could look at any of these books and point out everything that I would want to change about every single one of them, but I can't. They're printed. It's done. I can only take that knowledge into my next projects.

Zibby: That's awesome. I had such a great time talking to you today, especially our little pre-chat commiserating on our dogs' habits and whatever else. You're really inspiring. It's amazing. I love all the good you're doing in the world and the entertainment mixed with emotion. It's really fantastic. I'm glad our paths have crossed in this world.

Jarrett: I am too, Zibby. Thank you. I appreciate you. Thank you for all you're doing as well to throw a spotlight on books that you love. Thank you.

Zibby: No problem. Have a good day.

Jarrett: Have a good day. I'll see you soon, Zibby. Thank you. Be well.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Jean Kwok, SEARCHING FOR SYLVIE LEE

Jean Kwok: Hi. I'm so honored to meet you. Hello.

Zibby Owens: Hi. It's so nice to see you.

Jean: It's great to see you too. I am such a fan of yours and of your show. When they said you were interested in talking to me, I was just thrilled.

Zibby: Aw. I'm a fan of yours too, so this works out perfectly.

Jean: You're so kind. How are you?

Zibby: I'm okay. Thanks. I'm okay. How about you?

Jean: It's a crazy time, right?

Zibby: It is a crazy time.

Jean: Especially today. I just have to survive this.

Zibby: I know. Being mid-election results is a tricky time to have anybody focus on anything else.

Jean: It's a great break. It's great to do something else for a little bit because I'm just obsessively watching CNN. What's going to happen to us?

Zibby: I know. I know. Finally last night, I was like, I'm just going to go to sleep. I can't do this anymore.

Jean: I have to put it away. I have to not keeping looking at it every two seconds because it feels like the fate of the world is in the balance.

Zibby: It certainly does.

Jean: It's really, really hard, but thank goodness we have books. We have other ways of reaching people.

Zibby: I completely agree. Let's talk about your book because that's why we're here, give you some more room to promote your amazing work of fiction. Would you mind telling listeners what Searching for Sylvie Lee is about? Then I want to hear what inspired you to write it.

Jean: Searching for Sylvie Lee is the story of two sisters and a mother. What happens is that the dazzling, beautiful, successful, older sister, Sylvie, goes to the Netherlands to visit her dying grandmother, and she just disappears. Her younger sister, Amy, who's always been in her shadow -- Amy's the stuttering, shy one. Amy has to pull herself together and try to find her beloved older sister. It's this story about these deeply rooted secrets that tie these three women, Sylvie, Amy, and her mother, together.

Zibby: Amazing. How did you come up with the idea for this book?

Jean: The inspiration for this book was actually deeply personal. My brother, Kwan, who was the dazzling, brilliant one in our family, disappeared about ten years ago. He was the one that we had always looked up to. He was the one that we always went to when there was a problem. I was the black sheep of the family, so nobody ever listened to me. I grew up in a very conservative Chinese family. I am the youngest of seven children.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, seven children.

Jean: Exactly, and I'm a girl. The two markers of hierarchy were age and gender, so I was at the bottom of the bottom my entire life. My brother and I, we really loved each other. He always was so great. There was never any jealousy between us, maybe because there was a ten-year age gap as well. When he disappeared that night, I really thought, oh, my god, there's nobody to turn to. The person who has to figure out what happened and take charge is me. That is the beating heart of this book, that feeling of loving someone so much and having relied on them your whole life and then needing to grow as a person in order to try to help them.

Zibby: What happened with your brother?

Jean: What happened was that -- it happened right before Thanksgiving, so right around this time of the year. At first, he hadn’t called home when he was supposed to call. That's the kind of thing where you think, for a responsible person, that's strange, but it can happen. You can get really busy. You could forget. Nobody had been able to reach him. People were kind of alarmed, but not really panicked. When he didn't come home for Thanksgiving, that was a true sign that something was wrong.

Zibby: How old was he at the time? How old were you? When was this in life?

Jean: I was in my thirties. He was in his forties. I was already living in the Netherlands. I was getting these panicked phone calls from my family in New York. As you may know, I was born in Hong Kong. I grew up in New York City. We grew up extremely poor. We're a working-class immigrant family. I lived in an apartment in Brooklyn that was unheated for most of my childhood. I worked in a clothing factory with my brother and with my family from the age of five through, really, most of my childhood. That was our background. Kwan had always been the person that I looked up to and who kind of showed me a way out of that circle of life at the factory where you'd go in as a child and you leave as an old woman dragging plastic bags home to your apartment because you really never leave the factory.

Zibby: Sorry to keep interrupting. Wait, so did you go to school, or were you working? Did you go to school, or not?

Jean: I did. We all went to school. What would happen is that my father would pick me up -- I would wake up. I would go to school. My father came and picked me up after school. I would go to the factory in Chinatown and work until nine or ten at night. All of my homework, all tests, everything, had to be on the subway or during breaks at the factory. My brother, Kwan, and my other brothers who were ten years older, they were in the high school phase at that point. They did the same thing. They had, of course, much more pressure. They had SATs. They had papers, projects, tests, all of which could only be squeezed into those train rides or breaks at the factory. What was even worse was that, for them -- I would go home around nine or ten at night with my parents, which is late for a little kid. For my brothers, they actually went on to a second job waiting tables at a restaurant until the middle of the night. In fact, that was how I actually began to write. I didn't decide to be a writer, but the moment I began writing was when -- I remember one night. I was sleeping on my mattress on the floor because we didn't have beds. Oh, my god, you do not want to be sleeping on a mattress when your apartment is overrun with vermin the way ours was because you would just hear the mice racing past you in the night. I'm a very terrified-of-vermin person to this day. When I go in the garden, I put on a radioactive suit. I was the same when I was a kid. I was just terrified of things crawling on me. I would be constantly making noise and banging around me to try to keep things away.

In any case, I was already asleep. One night, Kwan came home. It was the middle of the night. He laid a package on my pillow next to me. That was so unusual because we were paid one penny per piece of clothing that we did at the factory. After a long process of processing the clothing, we were paid one penny per piece. Of course, piece work is also illegal, but that's a whole other story. There are a lot of things in my childhood that were illegal. We were paid by the piece instead of by the hour. You can imagine. We had debt. We had rent. We could barely afford food. It's a hundred pieces of clothing before you have a dollar. I really didn't have toys or anything like that. It was amazing to get this gift. He had somehow managed to save enough to get me a gift. What amazes me to this day is that he had not given me a toy or a piece of candy, but he gave me something that would change my life. He got me a blank diary. He said, "Whatever you write in this will belong to you." That was just a powerful idea for a kid who had changed countries, changed culture, changed languages. I didn't speak a word of English when I came to the US. I suffered for it greatly in school. It was just amazing to have a place where I could put down my thoughts and my dreams.

My parents had gone from being parents to being people who were even more scared and confused than I was. Kwan was a really important person in my life. He was the first person to leave the family. He went to MIT. He showed me that there was a way out. He would help me by giving me things like a typewriter to work with. Eventually, I followed him. I went to Harvard as well. I kind of began the rest of my life in his footsteps. The fact was still that he was the older brother. He was the one who was listened to at home. When things went wrong, he was the one who stepped in and fixed them. When he did not come home for Thanksgiving, I remember I just thought, oh, my god. I realized that this was something that was going wrong on a level greater than any I had ever experienced before. This was not failing a test or the normal things that go on or some guy breaking up with you. This was really serious. We didn't know what had happened to him. He wasn't in a relationship at that time. It wasn't like we had a girlfriend or a wife who would know what he was doing day by day.

Finally, we found out from a friend that he had flown to Texas to buy an airplane. We'd grown up. He became quite successful. He was a scientist. He loved everything that went really fast, so he was a pilot as a hobby. He'd gone to buy an airplane. That was all we knew. Of course, I start trying to call small airports in Texas. Do you know how many airports there are in Texas? There are really a lot of airports. He picked the wrong state to disappear in. That is not a good place to disappear. It was just impossible to figure out where he was and what had happened. Finally, I hacked into his email. Once I did that, I was able to retrace his steps. Of course, all these things are going through your head. What happened to him? Was he kidnapped? Did the sale go through? Did they trick him? So many things could've happened between that airplane purchase and his disappearance. We found out that what had happened was that he had bought the plane. Everything had gone well. He had taken off, but he had not landed. That was the next stage of the mystery, was to try to figure out what happened to the plane. Something that I never realized before was that if you have an accident in a car, you are found because you are by a highway or you crash into someone's house.

If you crash in an airplane, actually, a lot of people who crash in those small planes, especially if something happens in a wooded area, they're never found. An airplane may seem large to us, but it's actually nothing compared with the forces of nature. They can just disappear into the woods. You never know what happened to that person. There was a period of a couple of weeks when we were trying to track down what had happened to him, amazing volunteers, search and rescue. You're thinking every day, oh, my god, he might be dying of thirst with a broken leg next to that plane. That's the worst thing. You don't know if any delay is making the difference between life and death. What happened eventually was that they did find his body. He had been flying it home to West Virginia. Somehow, in the mountains, a sudden storm had come on. He had to lower the plane to escape the lightning and thunder of the storm. In doing so, he nicked a tree and crashed into the side of a mountain. When that happened, he had died instantly. It was, of course, the worst thing that had ever happened to me, to hear this news. In a way, it was also a relief to know. Just the act of knowing is a gift in a time like that. It's a tremendous loss, but I was really grateful to all of the volunteers and the air force and everyone who had looked for him and actually found out what happened.

When I set out to write Searching for Sylvie Lee, which is my third novel, I wanted to talk about this story, but I couldn't do it. It was so painful. There was so much that was tied between me and story that I just couldn't move forward. Then I realized I need to not make it a man who disappeared. It has to be a woman. The moment I made the story about two sisters, it changed everything. Sylvie and Amy took on their own life. Of course, the emotional engine is still there because that's at the heart of why I wrote this book, and also, many issues about language and culture. How well do we really know the people that we love most? What secrets are we hiding from the people we love the most? What secrets are they hiding from us? Once I made that change, then the story just flowed and came out as if it were complete.

Zibby: Wow. What a story. First of all, I am so sorry for your loss. Second, I'm incredibly impressed by your detective skills and ability to have figured out what happened at the time. I'm just so sorry that that all fell into your lap and that you had to live through that. Also, going back to your childhood, the fortitude and immense mental willpower and just strength to get through that type of childhood and still end up at Harvard -- I went to this cushy private school, and kids couldn't even get into Harvard, falling over each other to try to get in. I am just so impressed. I didn't know that entire backstory. The novel, which I did read, I didn't even realize -- now it, of course, all has so much more meaning to me. Thank you for sharing that story. Then I also saw that your mother has passed away. Not to open up every old wound you have, but I wanted to hear what happened with her. I know it was about ten years ago. You've written a lot about that. I wanted to hear about that and how maybe that affected this other trauma. When, in sequence, did everything happen? This is a lot of questions. How were you able to move on and go back to writing, go back to focus after everything that had happened?

Jean: Zibby, this is what I love about you and why I'm such a huge fan of your work. You go right to the heart of why people do the things they do. I think that I kind of write from trauma to trauma. If I try to write about something too directly, then I can get blocked. Writing, for me, is a way of transforming the things that happen to us. I think that's what books are about. Books are about connection and communication. Yes, maybe you went to a cushy private school, but you had your own problems. Life is hard for us all. Life is hard in so many ways. The great thing about books is that you can live somebody else's life, but you can also connect to them and realize how much they are like you and how many struggles they’ve gone through that are actually, at heart, similar to the struggle that you went through yourself. My mother is indeed a very big influence in my books. Tragically, my mother died after my brother. This is how life is so unexpected. It's one of the things I say to people. Love the people you have around you. Try to appreciate having them around you because you can never know what's going to happen. I never ever anticipated that I would lose my young, healthy, vibrant brother before I lost my mother.

My mother was, of course, a tremendous loss and influence in my life. When I was little and we were working in the factory and I was going to sleep on that mattress on the floor, I would look up and every night of my childhood, my mother was sitting up late falling asleep over these bags of clothing that she had brought home from the factory. Because the apartment was unheated in New York City, which is, of course, incredibly cold in the winter -- in the back of the apartment, in fact, people had thrown bricks through the windows. The landlord hadn’t bothered to fix it like the landlord had not bothered to fix many things. In the front, they did fix the windows because, obviously, they didn't want a complaint. In the back where nobody could see, they didn't. Our windows there were only covered with black plastic bags and duct tape. The wind would gust against them all winter. We did the only thing we could, which was that we turned on the oven. We left it on day and night throughout the winter so that it was this little source of heat in the kitchen despite the lack of glass in the windows. My mother would just sit by that oven and fall asleep next to the oven every day working hard.

In my books, of course I talk about language gaps and about the differences between the first generation and the second generation, but I have a lot of sympathy for the first generation. I am a first-generation immigrant myself, and I know what my mother went through. I know what it's like to be the person on the subway who is dressed weird, who maybe smells weird, who's carrying a lot of plastic bags, and oh, my god, does not even speak English. To us English-speaking folks, it feels almost like an insult that somebody didn't bother to learn English because English is the universal language. We have the luxury of traveling everywhere over the world and everyone bends over backwards to speak English to us. We never have to think, how good's my Russian? What if I had to speak Russian to everybody in the world? How well would I be able to do that? It's very easy to make a judgement about somebody based upon how they speak and what level their English is at. I saw people making that judgement upon my mother my entire life. She never learned to speak English. The only words she ever learned of English was, when boys would call the house, she would pick up the phone and she would say, "She not home." Then she would hang up the phone. That was the only bit of English she ever learned.

I saw what she looked like from the outside. I knew what she was like in Chinese from the inside. When I wrote Searching for Sylvie Lee, for example, the narrative is told by these three women, Sylvie, Amy, and Ma. They're all thinking in their own languages. Sylvie was raised in the Netherlands with her grandmother. Sylvie is thinking in Dutch, which I also speak because I married a Dutch guy and I'm now living in the Netherlands. Amy is thinking in English. Ma is thinking in Chinese. You have moments like when Amy goes to see Ma and we see Ma for the first time. We see how Ma, from the outside, is this quiet, beloved-but-simple woman who's kind of getting berated by the customer in the dry cleaners. Then we open into Ma's chapter, and we realize this is a completely different person in her own language. She's deep. She's poetic. She has a wealth of feeling that she cannot communicate in English and that she also, tragically, cannot even really communicate to her own daughter. That's what happens in an immigrant family. We come to the US. Oftentimes, the younger generation does not know the original language as well as the parents. The parents don't pick up the new language as well as the kids. Then you have this huge language and communication gap between the people who actually love each other the most.

Zibby: Then what ended up happening with your mom?

Jean: My mom died of cancer. We knew that she had been sick for a while. She was doing really pretty well until the very end, so she didn't suffer very long, for which I'm glad. We knew she was getting old and getting frail. When she passed away, it was a different kind of grief. It's always a huge shock. It's always really terrible. I still have dreams where everybody's alive. Then you wake up and you're just confused by what's reality and what's not reality. It was different. My brother, who disappeared so suddenly out of nowhere, that was just such a shock. You're knocked for a loop because you did not see it coming.

Zibby: Wow. I, again, am just so sorry for all the stuff that you have been through. I'm curious about your family. I know I'm barely talking about the book now, but you have such a captivating story yourself. Was your mother still working in the factory? What happened to your older siblings? Were they able to achieve a point of comfort in their financial situations that your parents could stop working? What ended up happening?

Jean: We all, luckily, wound up doing well and getting out of the factory. Because I have these older siblings, they worked really hard. They were actually able to take my parents and us out of the factory. My mom had a lot of happy years along with my father. My father was pretty sick when I was a kid. He died when I was pretty young. My father wasn't as much of the day-to-day life of the family as my mother was. My mom had a lot of happy years. I remember, my brother, Kwan, and I understood she was getting old even before she began to get sick in any way. We would make sure to take her on trips to Las Vegas. Can I just tell you, don't go to Las Vegas with your mother. [laughs] I love my mom. It was great to be there with her. She was like, "Those girls are not wearing anything. Don't look." We would go through the casinos blind. She's like, "They're gambling, oh, my god. Come on." She really liked the food. She liked all the buffets. She liked the big hotel and stuff like that. We had a good time. We took her on a lot of trips. We had a lot of really good times with her. I guess it's one of the ironies of life that when my brother died first, I had all these photos of the three of us that I had taken, really, to remember my mother. Then instead, it was my brother who had gone.

I will say that that was the time in my life when my debut novel, Girl in Translation, was published. It was surprisingly very successful from the moment it was published. I was really happy that they were able to see that. They just saw the beginning of that. At first, my family was kind of surprised that I do write about my past. Searching for Sylvie Lee is, of course, in many ways, about the disappearance of my brother, but also the price of the American dream. Who pays and how do you pay for achieving that type of success? What happens if you're not capable of achieving the American dream, of achieving that success? That's what Sylvie Lee is about. My first book, Girl in Translation, is really about those years when we were really poor and living in that apartment and working in the factory. I remember they were a little bit surprised that I had written about it because people who come from a background like mine don't usually grow up to become writers. I had that instinct as well for a long time that if you're able to escape that life, you want to put it behind you. You want to forget about it. You feel ashamed of it. It feels like nobody else ever had anything comparable to what you went through. You just want to move on.

I had written the book as fiction thinking that nobody would ever read it and that nobody would ever ask me, is this based on your real life? Then of course, my books became very successful. Everybody was asking me, are your books based on your real life? My family, they were a bit in a shock when that came out. Then I think it really turned to pride because so many people were so kind and had the generous reaction you just had which was, how amazing that you survived that and managed to come through whole and in one piece. I think that that shame has turned into pride. I give a lot of credit for who I became and coming through as, I hope, as a kind person as opposed to a bitter, hard person -- that can also occur when you reach success. I really give credit to my mother because my mother really brought us up to say, the most important thing is who you are and the people you love. The things you have -- yes, it's nice to have enough. It is essential to have enough. Once you have enough to eat and to live, after that, it's really all about who you love and who you are.

Zibby: Wow. That's so nice. It's so important. It's so important to get that message out and find what unites all of us. In a time of such divisiveness, stories like yours are so important to hear. Messages like your mother's, they just go to the root of what is common and shared among everybody no matter what the background or circumstance is like. Jean, I am just in awe and so impressed. Now I have to go back and read your first two books which I haven't read yet. You're giving me more work here. [laughs]

Jean: I think you are so right. We are in a time of such divisiveness. This is a moment when books can do so much for us. It's something that I think about when I'm writing. I don't want to preach to anybody. I want the book to be a really fun read just by itself. It's a page-turner and a mystery and suspenseful. You can turn the pages just enjoying the story. I also think that the reason I do these things with language and with culture and race and immigration in the books as underlying themes is that I hope that somebody who's reading the book just for enjoyment and pleasure might pick up something else about, what is it like to not speak the language? What is it like to be judged? The great thing about novels is that it's the one medium where you are really placed inside someone's mind regardless of gender, color, race, socioeconomic status. It does not matter who you are. You really walk a mile in someone else's shoes. That's an opportunity for the author to show the reader, this is what it's like. This is what happens.

Especially since Searching for Sylvie Lee was a Read with Jenna Today Show pick, I reached a wider audience than I had before. I reached some people who had really not read books like mine. It was really great. They say, wow, I had no idea that somebody who might be of another race but who might speak English perfectly could still encounter racism the way that your characters did. I had no idea how frustrating it must be to be Ma and to be kind of trapped within this bubble of not being able to express yourself truly the way you want to, to the world and to your own children, to listen to your children be on the phone and not know what they're talking about. That's just so difficult. Yet so many people go through that. I do see a book as a means of connection, absolutely.

Zibby: It's great. A lot of books serve as a tool to share your voice, to find your own voice. I feel like your book actually helped you find your mother's voice, the voice that maybe you never got to experience and that you didn't want to be lost. That’s just beautiful. That's amazing. I say this, by the way, to my kids a lot. How would you like to be dropped in Tibet? You try to talk. I took French in college or whatever, but I'm not particularly good at languages. To drop me in another culture, no matter what people said about the importance of that language, it's not going to make me be able to learn it or master it any faster. Everyone has skills. Some people are foreign language people. Some people are not. To have that one skill out of so many be the thing that determines your intelligence is something that not enough people think about on a day-to-day basis. You're absolutely right to highlight it and all of that. Now I have to find out, what's going on now? Are you writing another book? What's happening with you in the future? Sorry, I've been captivated. I'm running long on this interview, and I didn't ask you anything I wanted to ask you.

Jean: I'm loving our conversation as well. I am actually finishing my next book. I'm really excited about this book. It is a mystery, thriller, an immigrant story kind of like Sylvie Lee. What happens is that when the book opens, we are reading a letter from a Chinese woman to someone she loves. We don't know who she's writing to. She is begging this person for forgiveness for her role in a murder. We know that somebody was killed. We know that she was involved in it. It was a person who was very important to the person she's writing to who she loves more than anything in the world, but we don't know who any of these players are. She says, I hope that when you hear my full story, you will forgive me and that maybe you will come to me and we could be reunited. Then we rewind fifteen years, and she starts to tell the story of what actually really happened all those years ago. It's only at the end of the book that we find out who she's writing to, who got killed, and why she really did everything she did.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, now I can't wait to read that.

Jean: We'll send you a copy as soon as [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Zibby: Please do. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Jean: Yeah, I have a lot of advice. To go back to my own problems with writing Searching for Sylvie Lee, I think that, as a writer, you kind of have to walk this line. On the one hand, you need to write from your burning passion. You need to write from your trauma. You need to write the things that make you uncomfortable, that hurt you. What I do think is wonderful about that is that -- sometimes stuff happens to us and it just seems like, why is this happening? There's nothing good in this. There's nothing redeeming. This is so unfair. This should not be happening to me or to this other amazing, kind, wonderful person. I find writing to be a kind of magical thing. I guess it's giving your attention. When you pay attention to something like that, when you describe it, when you tell it to someone else, it transforms something that is senseless into something that is a means of connection that we can learn something from, into a thing of beauty. I would say that as a writer, yes, you need to write to that place. You need to write that truth. On the other hand, sometimes it can be too right on the nose. It can be too hard to go forward in that way. What you have to do is just change the thing that's silencing you. It could be a change like I did from changing from a man to a woman and letting the book take on its own life. It could be that you have a character in your book that is a censoring character that might be connected to somebody in your own past that didn't want you to speak. I would say, just kill that person off. There's nothing wrong it. Just kill them off. It's fine. I mean, not in real life.

Zibby: [laughs] I know. I know.

Jean: In your book, just get rid of them. Sometimes if you do that, that can be pretty magical. Suddenly, you're able to tell things that you were afraid to speak about before or change them enough that you can deal with having them in your book. That is what I would say. Maybe one last thing to say to aspiring writers. Sometimes it's very hard to know what advice to take and what advice not to take. I would say, yes, absolutely, be as open as you can. On the other hand, you wrote what you wrote for a reason. I always think that it's better to have a living, vital, imperfect creature than a perfect corpse lying on a slab that is maybe in total proportion but is no longer alive. Whatever that vital spark is that is making you write what you write, you have to nurture that and keep that alive.

Zibby: Wow. This is amazing. I feel so fortunate that we got a chance to talk. I just wish we could talk longer. Now I want to stay in touch and meet you and all of the rest. I'm so glad our paths have crossed in life. I'll email you after. [laughs] Thank you, Jean. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for showing everybody what's really important about life in so many ways and also for the entertainment that your books provide. It’s a one-stop shop with you.

Jean: Zibby, thank you so much. I do want to say before we get off that you do so much to promote reading and authors. You have incredible, impeccable taste. I have been a really big fan of yours for such a long time. I'm so happy we got to meet and that we had this chance to talk.

Zibby: Me too. Thanks, Jean.

Jean: Take care. Bye.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Kazu Kibuishi, AMULET SERIES

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

Kazu Kibuishi: Thanks for having me on.

Zibby: My pleasure. I have to tell that your Amulet series is my older son's favorite series of all time. He was so excited that I had the opportunity to interview you. Here I am. That's what we're doing here. [laughs] His first question to you is, where did you come up with the idea for the Amulet series?

Kazu: You should just bring him on.

Zibby: I asked him, but I think he's just being shy or something. He's thirteen.

Kazu: The question was, what was the inspiration?

Zibby: What was the inspiration? Then tell listeners a little more about what the Amulet graphic novel series is about and how there's one through eight and all the rest.

Kazu: I've been drawing comics since I was five. I always tell people when they ask me, when did I start? I usually ask them, when did you quit? [laughs] I think we all drew cartoons when we started. I'm just the last kid out of the pool, so to speak. I've been doing it just out of sheer interest. When I started, I was inspired by Garfield at the Scholastic book fairs. I wanted to get the newest edition of Garfield and be the first one there because all the other kids wanted it too. I read Mad magazine, things like that. I did a lot of cartooning really early on. It wasn't until I read Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki where I realized, oh, I could do these cartoons, and I can write stories with them that had a literary quality to it. It had the scale and scope of something of Lord of the Rings. Up to that point, I didn't realize that I could do that with my cartoons. When I read that, I said, I'm going to try to do this instead of just the funny stuff. I used to draw hilarious cartoons and got myself into so much trouble in school. I was in detention for drawing all sorts of silly cartoons.

Zibby: Would anyone else find them funny except you, or did everybody find them funny?

Kazu: All the kids did.

Zibby: Okay, good. Just checking. [laughs]

Kazu: So did some of the teachers. They would scold me because they knew that you're supposed to scold the kids for doing things like that. I was always kind of a cartoon troublemaker. I always thought of cartooning as that, as something kind of irreverent, something a little off the rails. Then I read Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It had a huge impact on me. I knew at that moment, the moment I finished reading that book, that I would have to do this sometime in my life. It would be a mountain that I'd have to climb. It had nothing to do with career motivations. I was not motivated by career ambitions to do this. In fact, if I was motivated by that when I started, I think most people would've considered me quite foolish.

Zibby: What did you want to do? What were you motivated to do?

Kazu: I just wanted to make my parents happy. [laughs] My mom told me I was going to be a doctor pretty early, so I just assumed that I was going to follow some kind of path like that. I thought maybe I could take this art stuff and turn it into something respectable. I thought maybe it could be filmmaking, and so I went to college for film studies and learned how to be a filmmaker with live-action filmmaking, be on the set, work with actors, write screenplays, all that stuff. That was kind of the path that I was going to be on. When I got out of school, it was really difficult to find work as a live-action filmmaker, as you can imagine.

Zibby: They don't post that on Craigslist or Monster or whatever else the sites are these days.

Kazu: They wanted a director. That was the issue. There was a bit of a logjam in there. I ended up just getting work as graphic designer. It led me down this path where I was kind of on the cusp of becoming an architect because I ended up working in the field of architecture as a graphic designer. Did very well. Then 9/11 happened. It was a wake-up call for me. I thought if I was going to have to just go out right now, if the chips are down and everything's over right now, if I look back at my life, did I do the right thing? I said, no, I don't think so. I think that I have something more to offer. It's through cartoons. As little value that some other people might find there to be in cartoons, I found there to be a lot. I knew that I could be somebody who could make that case. I thought if I didn't do that, I'd be failing the world. [laughs] Even since then, it's been really easy as far as career trajectory. Even when I failed at cartoons, I've just stayed with it and said, you know what -- all these opportunities came my way, movies, TV shows, all these different things. People have been really kind to me all along the road. I've had to turn down many great opportunities to stay focused on the one thing. That's to draw cartoons and comics. I think the world is starting to catch up to that now. They're starting to understand the value of them in our society.

Zibby: It's so true. On 9/11, did you have a personal connection to it or firsthand experience? Did you just hear about it? Where were you and everything?

Kazu: I was in downtown Los Angeles working in the -- it was, at the time, the Citigroup building, I believe. I was the top floor. I was a graphic designer for Altoon & Porter Architects. Woke up the morning of, and I got a phone call from my coworker and good friend, Ryan. He called me. He said, basically, "They're evacuating the building right now. Don't come into work." I was like, "What's going on?" He said, "Just look at news." I saw what was going on. There was even reports of a plane coming to LA. That's the one, I believe, that landed somewhere in Middle America. That was only in my early twenties. I just thought, you're supposed to get a job. Everything's going to line up. Everything's going to be easy to understand. You can chart a course for your success. That's the career. That's your life. It's safe. It's all okay. Then that happens and you realize, oh, man, we live in a volatile world. Things can just change at the drop of a hat. I decided if that's going to be the case, I better put my best foot forward. When I was doing graphic design, it was convenient for me because I could make good money, but it wasn't what I could produce. Graphic design was only one element of the things I've trained to do. I trained myself to design well, but also to illustrate well, to write well as well, and speak as well like this.

Zibby: Yes, you're speaking very well. [laughs]

Kazu: I thought I was really wasting something. I felt like I would be really letting down a lot of people if I didn't get back on my horse. Here I am.

Zibby: I had that same experience with 9/11, actually. I lost my best friend and roommate who was working in one of the towers that day. I was twenty-five at the time. As you were speaking, I was thinking about the impact of the people like us in our twenties and how our careers -- I wonder if it's a whole generation where we searched for more meaning from the beginning. Whereas other people, maybe they were too entrenched in their careers in their thirties and forties, even. Maybe the people in their teens hadn’t even had to pivot because they hadn’t had a vision yet. I feel like all of us had a chance to say, wait a minute, no, no, no. I'm going to bring my whole self to what I'm doing. Now's the time. Anyway, it's nice when I hear --

Kazu: -- That was it.

Zibby: That was it. I was like, if I'm going to die at my desk, I better be doing something that means something. That was my theory. Look at your books now, your best-selling series, this hugely successful artist. You just had to listen to yourself. It just is sad, almost, that it takes these massive world-scale events to shake us into doing what our calling really might be.

Kazu: I feel like success is really a reflection of a responsibility. I feel like it just means that a lot of other people have recognized that you are taking on a responsibility that you may be able to fulfill, and the success comes your way. Then it becomes a new responsibility to have to deal with it. That's something that I think a lot of young artists don't hear enough about, the idea that once things do go well for you, are you doing the right thing then? Are you prepared for that moment? That's a big one. It's a big transition from going from, no one knows who I am, to, now everybody's listening to what I have to say.

Zibby: How did you handle that?

Kazu: I came into it in such a different way because of 9/11. It was so visceral, the impact of the event. My wife was in Manhattan. She was right there. She was having to deal with all the stuff that was happening on the ground, trying to match it with how the media and everybody was talking about it and stuff and how different all the different viewpoints were and realizing that things can really spin out into chaos if we're not careful about how we go about our lives. Cartoons in general, they're really best at clarifying at information to simplify things to the point where it could be universal. A cartoon can be read by people who speak any language. It doesn't matter what language you speak. You can pick up an Amulet book and understand it to at least some level. Then you may even use it as a guide to allow you to understand the words that are inscribed in there. You're going to learn English. I think there's a lot of kids who learn English through Amulet.

Zibby: It's almost like hieroglyphics in the olden days, in the old cave drawings way back when, when that was how people communicated. They didn't even have language. This is the most elemental means of communication there is that withstands time and borders and anything else you want to throw at it.

Kazu: Even the written language, they're in pictures too that we memorize. I think we often forget that. It's so interesting too because we often look down on the cartoons despite the fact that they are the most ancient form of communication we have. Maybe there's value to that. I think often it allows cartoons to have more power because of how disarming it may seem that we continue to say, cartoons are kid stuff. It's garbage. It's just something silly. I think that allows people to come to it with unconditional love. It's an interesting thing. It's one of the reasons why I've stuck with it.

Zibby: To your point earlier where you were talking about managing the success of being successful in whatever endeavor you’ve achieved, how did you adjust to being just you, graphic-designer you, to you with lines-out-the-door-at-the-bookstore you?

Kazu: I was really fortunate because I got to go slow. This success didn't happen overnight. Some people might perceive that it was an overnight thing, but it was a long night. [laughter] I was fortunate to be working with David Saylor who created the Graphix book imprint at Scholastic. He designed the Harry Potter logo and worked with JK Rowling on those books and saw the success of that and all the other successes that Scholastic has seen over the years. When I was at the start, he was really helpful in coaching me through it. He pretty much just told me, "It's going to happen for you. Here are the steps. Here's what you want to consider." When I was painting the fifteenth anniversary edition paperbacks for Harry Potter at Scholastic, they even coached me through how I should speak to media and all those types of things. I thought, this is really neat. I was already pretty well-versed in all that, but it was really nice to get their feedback and really professional, ground-level information and very detailed stuff. They told me, "Don't say this. Say this. Say that." I was like, oh, okay.

Zibby: That’s helpful.

Kazu: That is helpful.

Zibby: That's a course that everyone should take in general. Every child should have to take that course before they graduate, maybe even before they graduate lower school. That would be nice to save the middle schoolers some issues. Then I read in your bio that you had some form of meningitis and you were in a coma. What was that all about? What happened?

Kazu: I nearly died. [laughs] That really helped redefine this part of my life. I got meningitis. I'm not exactly sure how that happened. I'm guessing it might have been something to do with -- I had a broken hand. I think it may have been some kind of expired drugs or something like that, the injection from the steroids that they put in for the pain. My guess, but we don't know that. We'll never know now. I came out of it having lost a lot of my memory functions. Now my short-term memory is pretty bad. Prior to that, my memory was so sharp that it actually scared people. Amy, my wife, often tells me that I came out of the whole experience a nicer person, less intimidating.

Zibby: Wow. How old were you when this happened?

Kazu: What was it? It was 2012.

Zibby: Eight years ago, so in your thirties or something? Twenties? Thirties? I don't know how old you are.

Kazu: I was thirty-four. When I woke up, I couldn't draw. I couldn't walk. I had to figure out how to do all that stuff again. No one knew it was going on because I was even between books. I was so fast at making Amulet at the time that it pushed us back about a year. People complained. I had to learn how to write with a brain that just didn't work as well as it used to. Now I have to take more notes. I'm the guy after the event now. I have to take tons of notes. I have to know that I'm going to forget everything all the time. After taking care of my grandparents and hanging out with older people, I see that in how they are. That's what happens when you're older. My brain ended up having to accelerate because of this situation. Now I just have to deal with, kind of, an old person's brain. It's the biggest struggle now making these books. One of the reasons why it takes a lot longer is that, one, I need more sleep. If I don't have the sleep, I can't repair my brain. Number two, I can't retain information the way I used to. I'm like a fisherman. I've always been a really good fisherman of ideas and things like that, but now I've got a net with a huge hole in it. How do I do that? How do I still keep the books at the level that they always were at and not feel like I've lost a step? It's really just meant that I have to be more disciplined in my effort.

Zibby: Wow. Did you consider just not going back to it? Did you ever think, that's it for me?

Kazu: Like I said, I'm the last kid out of the pool. I don't quit.

Zibby: That's great. Wow, that's amazing. What a story.

Kazu: The work itself helped me, though. It's cognitive therapy, especially working on the Harry Potter covers because I couldn't write my book at the time. Scholastic asked me to do those on the side for a little bit. I took a little time off just to paint. That really helped to get myself back on my feet. I didn't have to worry about the difficult task of writing a book. All I had to do was focus on drawing.

Zibby: All you had to do is paint the cover of the most popular series on the planet. Just a little rehab exercise for you.

Kazu: To be honest, it was enjoyable. It felt like a break. I was so glad to be able to take that. Writing these stories is so much work. It's such a challenge. Drawing it is the fun part.

Zibby: Interesting. When is number nine coming out? Can you say yet? Not yet?

Kazu: I'm going to be done relatively soon. We're on the long final stretch. This will be the final stretch of this entire series. I'm taking my time to do this right. I don't want to rush it out. I know Scholastic wanted it -- everybody wanted it earlier, but I really held off. I just felt like it needed time. It just needed to marinate. I needed to get in all the ideas that I was trying to get in in all these years. This is one last shot on this series. I want to reread the series just to get to the final book. I find that too many series these days, because there's so much money and so much pressure involved, a lot of the writers, they kind of lose a lot of energy down the stretch. You'll often things peter out a little bit. It doesn't complete itself in the ways that I think a lot of fans want to see it done. I feel that I have an opportunity to avoid that. I feel like I can do this right. It'll come at a cost to me because I've got to pay for my time and just spend more time. I'm not an employee. That's something that people have to remember. I'm not on somebody else's clock. I'm on my clock. I'm taking that extra time and putting that extra energy and resources and everything to make sure they get my best shot. It has to be the best book in the series by a long shot, in my opinion, or else it's just going to be disappointing. It'll disappoint me. I'll be disappointed myself if it's not the best sci-fi/fantasy graphic novel ever made. [laughs]

Zibby: Wow, that is some drive. You should bottle that up and sell a little bit with every book. Your mom must be proud. How does she feel now that you did not become a doctor and instead, this is what you've created, this alternative universe and healed people in a different way? How does she feel?

Kazu: She would've been proud of me no matter what I did. She loves me. Whatever I want to do, however I want to do it, she's there for me. I do this for her too. She would've been devasted if I didn't do art, probably, because she knew how much I put into it. In fact, I guess I could tell a little story about when I was younger. When I was in high school, I actually had to lie to my mom. I told her that I quit art at the time. It was a weird thing because I think she was devasted that I would say something like that. It was actually to protect it, to protect the art. In high school, I was a bit of an artist superstar as a kid. I was kind of a prodigy at this. I was being offered a lot of work early on. I saw that I could now be moved into all these different directions. My destiny was way out of my hands if that happened, if I took on opportunities that were coming my way, so I said no to everything. I told my mom too. She was pushing me into classes and different things and saying, "Here, talk to this person. Talk to this person," and trying to be a good parent and seeing if she could help me up some kind of ladder. Every time those opportunities showed up, I decided, I've got to say no to all of them. My spidey sense told me that I had to become like a turtle in a shell and just say, I'm going to protect the art and the writing and the sanctity of the process of doing this. It needs to be within the control of the artist. That's why I quit art.

I quit art to go to film school to go put my mind on something else. I went to film school not to make films, but actually to study them. I went to UC Santa Barbara. I have a film studies degree. It's research. It's history. It's analysis of movies. It's being a film critic, not a filmmaker. I think it was one of the best decisions I'd ever made because it gave me time to absorb information and know how to do that, something that I think artists don't do often enough. They don't know how to curate the information they put in their own brain and put into their work. They don't research very much. They often just practice, practice, practice. There's so much emphasis on practice, so much emphasis on drawing really, really well. Really, you don't need to draw really well. You need to draw clearly. You can clearly communicate your idea. That's a good drawing, in my opinion. It's subjective, but my opinion is that if the ideas gets across, that's a great drawing. That's it. It doesn't really take tremendous skill to do that. That was something that I had to take control over early. I don't know how I got derailed into this thing, but I just thought it was something that some kids out there might need to hear, or maybe a mom, maybe a dad needs to hear that about their own kids. You want to give them agency, is I guess what I'm saying.

Zibby: I think that's great advice. Do you have any other parting advice to aspiring authors out there?

Kazu: I killed so much time with that, oh, my goodness. Just try to involve yourself in everything. See as much as you can. I think there's too much pressure to succeed early. I don't think you need to. I think that maybe you do if you're a professional athlete because there's only so much time your body can do the things an athlete needs to do. If you're doing this, your whole life is your career. You can be seventy years old and starting at making art or writing. When you have something to say and you put it out there, if it's worth its salt, it's going to be there for probably beyond your life. You might want to spend a lot of time thinking about what it is you have to say before you do. Instead of practicing, practicing, practicing, and putting it all out there for everyone to see, you can do it in your private life. Make a web comic for yourself and for your friends. Don't worry about people making it popular or getting a lot of money. Just worry about making sure that you are saying the thing you're looking to say and that you are just slowly getting better at your craft. That's about it. Your success isn't really in your hands. It's often in the hands of the world at large. If you find success, then I hope you're ready for it. That's another thing. That's a whole nother discussion.

Zibby: Thank you, Kazu. This has been so interesting. I really enjoyed our conversation. I will now send this off to my son so he can listen to the whole thing.

Kazu: He should be a part of the interview. Kids, they're some of my best feedback and editing advice that I get for my books. I love hearing what they have to say. I always listen.

Zibby: If he has any feedback, I'll shoot it over to you. Thank you so much.

Kazu: Thank you.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Nicole Krauss, TO BE A MAN

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

Nicole Krauss: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: I'm so excited to discuss To Be a Man, your collection of stories. I just took this off of my shelf behind me where I knew exactly where it was on eye level. I pass it every day, The History of Love, just FYI in case you were wondering. For readers who don't know anything yet about To Be a Man, can you tell us what this collection of stories is essentially about and what inspired you to write all of them or to make a whole new collection of stories?

Nicole: It's always hard to say what any book is about, per se, even a novel, but it's especially hard when it's a collection of short stories. If pressed, I would say that it's a collection of stories that's largely about relationships, about what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a man, about the tension between freedom and relationship, the requirements and limitation of relationship, and the difficulties of freedom. It's a lot about the paradoxes of people. There are a lot of men in these stories, a lot of women looking at men and experiencing men. The men, just like the women, are full of contradictions. They're not contradictions that I want to solve as an author, but I want to hold and to look at. Maybe that gives you a taste.

Zibby: I'm glad I pressed. Your pressed answer, that was a perfect, beautiful, articulate answer to that question, par for the course with your writing. Let me talk about just a few of the stories with you. The first story, for instance, "Switzerland," with Suraiya -- at first, I didn't even realize if it was a girl or a boy. As the story unfolds, you kind of realize what's going on and that there are three girls in this intermediate boarding house-ish type place. One girl gets ensnared in a perhaps not-so-great relationship with a, presumably, much older man. What happens to her along the way? We can only imagine as the story unfolds. In this story, I felt like the girls were so -- with so few words, you created these entire characters. You enabled me to feel fear and worry for a character that had just appeared in my imagination. I'm always intrigued by how an author can do that because a minute ago I hadn’t even met this character. Next thing you know, I'm like, oh, no, don't go to the hotel! What do you think it is? What do you think helps you create that intimacy and ability to get the reader right in to get to know a character like that?

Nicole: I think it begins with the writer's own relationship to the characters. I tend to choose characters that I feel an enormous amount of compassion for. I don't think that's unusual, but I don't think it's always the case. I think there are writers who do very well choosing characters that they hold in ironic distance from themselves. For me, I get so close to my characters that I am them. I'm inside of them or I'm pulling out pieces of myself in order to make them or pulling out pieces of intimate experience. In this case, the narrator is thirteen. Those older girls, Suraiya and Maria, are eighteen. I had the structure or the setting or maybe the circumstance of the story came from my own experience of being thirteen in a boarding house in Geneva at boarding school. It's a time, at a certain moment in life, I found myself going back to in my memory and thinking about that time. The story kind of came out of that. The other two girls that the narrator are describing, I just think she feels, and so I as narrator felt, such enormous affinity for them or connection to them. They were these older girls who cut this pathway into this more mature life that as a thirteen-year-old she knew was on the horizon but she hadn’t reached yet. They were teaching her something about it in their way. I think there's a kind of strange gratitude in that. Maybe that's part of what allows the reader, if the reader likes the story, to feel like a quick connection to them as well.

Zibby: Then in other stories about the character who goes to, I think it was Tel Aviv and inherits her father's apartment and starts following the strange man who comes in and starts cooking her dinner -- I'm blanking on the name of this story, but I can look it up really fast.

Nicole: That story's called "I Am Asleep, but My Heart is Awake," which is a [indiscernible] from Song of Songs.

Zibby: That story was fantastic, but almost harder to imagine, a little bit on the outer reaches of the suspension of disbelief. Would she really have followed him this far? How would she have gotten back? I feel like at times you play with our imagination a little and push the envelope.

Nicole: That one story in particular because that story is predicated on this idea that a man can arrive inexplicably into one's apartment and then have an ability to sleep, and sleep like the dead in some sense. There's the question, of course, of whether that story is real in the way that we think of realism or whether it's real on a more soul level. It's a story about the question of the existence of the soul and what happens to the soul after death. There, I hoped that the reader would suspend their disbelief a little bit in order to go to where the story emotionally wanted to go. A lot of the other stories are more realistic, but there are a couple that are like that. "The Husband" is also another one of those kind of stories that asks the reader to leap off into something perhaps more imaginary.

Zibby: The line that stuck with me the most, or the thought I should say, is that the apartment that this woman inherits of her father's, she realizes, oh, is this who he really was, and where we had been living all this time, because the mother had passed away, had that just sort of been a front? Yet that was her entire life. Here she was in this other place which seemed so fundamental to who he was as a person. Yet she was just meeting it after he passed away.

Nicole: This is something that a lot of us, even if we don't have a parent who comes from one country and raises us in another country and then we go back to that origin country and understand, this is the place that made my parents, and it gives all this new access to them, I think even when we don't have that experience, all of us at some point or other come to understand that our parents are adults with their own secret, private lives that, as children, we didn't know about or didn't want to know about or they didn't tell us about. I think that coming to terms with one's parents' other life not as a parent is really an interesting thing. It happens in stages. It happens first probably when we're teenagers. Then it happens throughout life. As we go through the things we watched them do, like have our children, we understand, oh, my god, this is what they must have been thinking or feeling. Then of course, I think as they get older or pass away and we go through their things, we find out all these other -- I know so many incredible stories of people finding out whole other lives of what their parents lived that they didn't know about. All of that was on my mind in that story, what happens after a parent dies, what is left, and what you can go on discovering about them.

Zibby: Has that happened to you?

Nicole: No. Thanks goodness, my parents are both alive. Thank you for asking. They are still well.

Zibby: Good. It seems like you have a close connection with Israel. It makes appearance in most of your work. What is that about?

Nicole: It's just a place that -- it's kind of another -- I wanted to say another version of home, but I always have trouble with the notion of home is place because my family comes from so many places. Growing up, we never were encouraged to commit to any one place as an idea of home. America was where we were being raised, but we were from Europe. Israel was the place where everyone in the family met, fell in love, got married, etc. It's just a place that I've been going to all my life. It's become another alternative as a place to draw on as a writer. I feel such a connection to it. I know it so well. As a writer, it provides me something different than, let's say, New York, which is my other local geography. New York has wonderful things and people and strange contradictions in its life. Israel has a totally different set of those. The whole system of values in the society is completely different. The levels of intensity are different. I find that those things, to go back and forth between the hot and cold of those environments, in some ways just gives me a lot. I wouldn't want to give up either one. Of course, I've set novels and stories in a lot of places, London. England was a big part of Great House. There are stories here set in Switzerland, as you mentioned, and Japan and South America. I'm certainly a person drawn to geography as a way to reach ideas or feeling in fictional narratives.

Zibby: Interesting. I didn't mean to suggest that you were a one-location pony, if you will. [laughs]

Nicole: No. You're right to point out that that's a place that is paramount in my work. Certainly in the last novel and in these stories, absolutely.

Zibby: Do you find, is it more place specific, or do you also feel like the religion is a key factor?

Nicole: I'm not a religious person. I think it has more to do with three thousand-plus years of history. America's such a new place. Israel, every stone in the ground sings with history. The complexity of that combined with a state that's very, very new and people trying to invent themselves, I think all that is very, very rich material. There's so many things that pull me there. It's one of those places where it's so intense as a writer. You can go and gather forty stories, but you're exhausted afterwards. New York, I find, is much better to actually work, to get work done. I almost never get work done in Tel Aviv. I do the abstract work of gathering lots of stories and experience. New York is a place where, of course, everyone is working all the time, and so you don't feel like you're missing the beach and the restaurants and the life and friendship that seems to be everywhere in Tel Aviv.

Zibby: I feel like the whole culture here, I'm also in New York, is if you're walking around the park all day, people are thinking, what is she doing? Whereas, you are working. You can be thinking and brainstorming and creating and doing all this essential work that you need to do before you sit down and put stuff on paper. It's sort of a culture of, why are you not running somewhere else faster at times?

Nicole: Work as a religion is a very American ideal. In New York, it's just only exaggerated. It is remarkable when you grow up with that and you go elsewhere, to the Mediterranean or to India or wherever, Morocco, and you just realize this is not the values of everyone else in the world. Everyone wants to live and to get by and survive, but work as a definition of self is a peculiarly American thing. I think it takes work to distance oneself from that idea.

Zibby: Yes. New York particularly has its clutches in a lot of different things we need to extricate from ourselves to have a healthy life. [laughs]

Nicole: Every place does these days.

Zibby: That's true, now in particular. Tell me more about how you got to this place in your career. When did you know you were a writer? How did you really get started? Then how did you not give up along the way?

Nicole: I really started where a lot of writers do, when I was a teenager, fourteen. It's a very specific moment. I was in ninth grade. I had this older friend who was a senior. He was writing poetry. It sort of became this way of inventing myself, which is what all teenagers are in the process of doing. They're trying on different selves very, very quickly. The discovery that language was a medium in which that could happen with enormous speed but also breadth, you could become so many things on the page, I think that was very attractive to me. I stayed writing poetry for a long time. I thought that that's what I wanted to do. It was really much later when I was already finished with college that I started to write fiction. I actually finished with graduate school too. I started my first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was the first time I really started to write fiction. I was twenty-five when I wrote that. I've been going since then. Since I was fifteen, I've been at it. In terms of not being discouraged, I've been discouraged a million times. At this point, it's so deeply part of how I process life and relate to the world and relate to other people, how I keep in balance with experience and feeling and communicate, all those things. It's so much who I am. I can no longer take it out of me or tell you why I do it or why I go on doing it. It's just like breathing for me.

Zibby: Another writer I interviewed at one point, or author I should say, compared it to dreaming. She's like, dreams happen. They always come. You always have them.

Nicole: Except that writing doesn't always come, which is really interesting.

Zibby: That's true.

Nicole: I think you always need it. I always need it. There's not always fluency, I find. That's a whole nother story.

Zibby: Do you write where you are now? Is this your workspace?

Nicole: I was in my workspace until we --

Zibby: -- Until I dragged you across the apartment? [laughs]

Nicole: I'll often sit here and work because this is actually a rocking chair. I don't know why I don't give it away. It's also where I nursed my kids. I can't quite give it up. It's extremely comfortable. I tend to sit in the same couple of chairs to work.

Zibby: I guess the days of the coffee shop writing --

Nicole: -- I never was a coffee shop writer. I just find it too distracting. I find other people too fascinating. I just want to look at people and understand what's going on. I can't focus on my work. I have to be alone.

Zibby: Do you find that in your own friendships, say, or relationships or if you go to have a dinner with a friend or something like that, that you apply that same sort of analysis, if you will, or observation where you're trying to figure things out in every situation you're in? Are you always sort of mining unconsciously for material in a way?

Nicole: [laughs] Unfortunately, yes, as all of my friends know. My first thought to your question was I think that there's a psychological machine in some of our brains that is constantly trying to understand people's motivations and to understand the subtext of what they're not saying but they're saying and to try to make sense behind the scenes of what's visible on the surface of the conversation or the person. Yes, I can't dismantle that. That's always at play, and for better or for worse. In terms of material, as I get older this is more and more problematic because more and more interesting things happen to all of us as we get older. All around us fascinating things happen, to everyone it seems like, as we all enter midlife. This question of material and using material has been an interesting one.

There is a story in the book, the title story, "To Be a Man," that involved a kind of agreement with certain people that I would use certain material with their blessing. There are writers who certainly don't ask for the blessings of the people whose material that they borrow or steal, but it does matter a lot to me that I don't betray confidence. On the other hand, again, I hope it comes down to a certain kind of compassion. When you feel compassion for the people you're writing about, even if you expose a vulnerability or fragility, a mistake, a whatever, at the end, you're holding them up in the human light. That's the goal. In the end, there's the love of attentiveness, what it is to attend to somebody and look at them and try to understand them. My hope is that that is always what comes through. So far, it has. I haven't offended anyone yet, lost any dear ones. Let's hope for the best.

Zibby: I read this article about you in Elle, not to snoop or anything, but just to find out more. Let me see if I can find the quote. Of course, now I'm not going to be able to find it. You were talking about divorce. I'm particularly interested, as I got divorced about five years ago or so. I'm always reading up on it and all this stuff. You had said something like that you knew something was amiss and yet you didn't know what to do with that information, similar to knowing that the afterlife might not exist but not knowing how to handle that in the day-to-day life either.

Nicole: That's a quote from Forest Dark.

Zibby: Oh, sorry. I'm so sorry.

Nicole: No problem. That mistake is often made, the sense that I am continuous with her. That's my own fault because I gave her my name. I remember writing that line.

Zibby: The question is really, how do you, especially in a life event like this where I at least felt the ground kind of shook under me and everything had to be reimagined, how do you then take that experience and put that into writing without betraying -- back to our other question of mining for material. How do you use that and help yourself through whatever experience you're going through in the best literary way?

Nicole: For that one, for my divorce, I didn't have a hard time with that because I didn't write about that. I feel like one of the journalistic or critical mistakes of writing about Forest Dark was the notion that it's a book about divorce, but it isn't. Divorce doesn't happen in the book. It's about a woman who understands that she's reached a moment in her life where she can no longer sustain the forms that she's committed to, one of which is her marriage. The divorce doesn't actually take place in the book. It's just her journey into herself, really. Because that book wasn't about divorce and it wasn't specifically about what it is to have a husband or any specific husband at all, I felt that I steered clear of there. I do think there are certain areas, the one that jumps most readily to mind is one's children, there are certain things that you just cannot -- there are lines you cannot cross. That, I feel very strongly about. I didn't have that issue in my work. The kind of things I'm thinking about are friends or lovers or parents or siblings, those kind of things where it's a slightly different situation.

Zibby: Are you already at work on your next big project, or are you taking a minute?

Nicole: Both. I'm always working. I'm always writing. I'm trying to find my way into a new novel, which is always a long process for me, but a pretty playful one at this point in my life. It wasn't always. I'm playing with a few ideas and working on things, but I don't yet feel that I've found the vein that I'm going to mine for the novel. Let's put it that way. I wrote a story during quarantine that's coming out with Harper's in their next issue. Then I thought maybe I'll put aside short stories for now and really try to get into a novel. We'll see.

Zibby: Is it just when the mood strikes?

Nicole: No, I'm a pretty disciplined worker. I work every day. When I'm in this stage, I'm reading a lot. Normally, I would say I'm living a lot in order to acquire, accumulate experience. Living a lot, I don't even know what that means in times of COVID. What does it mean to live a lot now? That's been interesting, particularly because my life has been, in these last however many, seven years, been deliberately designed to allow for maximal experience. How can one do that? Or can one not do that now and just have to burrow in? We'll see. I feel like a lot's happened to me. I think I still have a lot of material to draw on in the banks there.

Zibby: Time to open up the vault and go back. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Nicole: The only thing I ever think to say is just it really requires doing it constantly. A lot of times so many people imagine that they have a book in them. I think we all do. The book in all of us is the self. That's the book we're all writing. In order to actually translate that or some part of that into a real book, it really requires the doing, the daily doing of that. It seems like obvious advice, but I think very few people actually take it, honestly. I think a lot of people think about writing or imagine writing or want to write or see the value of writing, but don't go to the hard effort of putting language on a page day in and day out. That's the only way anything ever gets written.

Zibby: Last question. Just wondering, what are you reading now? What do you like to read?

Nicole: I'm reading this right now, which is beautiful. It's Landscapes by John Berger. I don't know if you’ve read John Berger. He's absolutely one of the most wonderful writers to read. I loved his book Portraits. A lot of his [indiscernible] is about portraiture. I just picked this one up. Of course, he's written novels as well and all kinds of essays. He's no longer with us. He died a couple of years ago. He really was one of our gems.

Zibby: Awesome. Thanks for chatting with me today. It's been such an honor to talk to you because I've been following you for so long. This has been so nice.

Nicole: I'm so glad. Thank you for making the time for me. I really appreciate it.

Zibby: Oh, gosh, it's my pleasure. Have a great day.

Nicole: You too.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Sophie Kinsella, LOVE YOUR LIFE

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

Sophie Kinsella: Thank you so much for having me. It's such a joy to see you. I love it when these things work out and we can see each other. It all fell into place. The universe works. It's great.

Zibby: Sometimes it does. Who knew? Where are you? Are you in the UK now?

Sophie: I am. I'm in my sitting room, which is the quiet room. You will notice there are no children in this room. It's seven PM here. I have to say, this podcast has been the best thing ever because I've had children for the last hour. You know what it's like. We've been doing homework and piano and eat and trumpet practice and, oh, I've got a cart. At seven, I was like, I have to go now and do my really important podcast. I'm really, really sorry about that. What a shame. See you later. Can we do this every night? This would be great.

Zibby: [laughs] I would love that excuse too.

Sophie: I've got to go and have a really essential chat right now. So sorry to miss out on the whole bedtime chaos.

Zibby: It's tear-inducing. It's true. Sometimes we just have to solider on through.

Sophie: We do. So I'm very happy here.

Zibby: Good. I'm so glad. I've left the Zoom school situation in the next room because we're still during the day, obviously. That's also really fun. [laughs]

Sophie: We are back at bricks and mortar school. We are not in that anymore. That is quite the challenge.

Zibby: It's just the afternoons. They go in the mornings. Then they come back, and then there's more in the afternoons. Of course, it's on the iPad, so they're like, let's just play with something fun on the iPad.

Sophie: [Indiscernible/crosstalk] super motivated like we all are in the afternoon. [Indiscernible/crosstalk] after lunch, aren't we? Work is exactly what we want to do right now.

Zibby: Totally. Of course. Yes. [laughter] That's nice. That's all great. Anyway, now that bedtime and Spanish are going on in separate rooms, we can have our adult conversation, which is great. I have been reading your books since, I feel like, you started writing them. I feel like I've grown older as you've grown older, and all these major life events your characters have gone through in the Shopaholic series and all the rest. It's just been great. Now to be talking to you about it is just the perfect ending to this journey through your books.

Sophie: I love meeting someone who has read my words and they enjoyed them. Perhaps they’ve made you smile or whatever. This is a real treat for me. As you imagine, authors, we're on our own most of the time. We send out our words, and we just hope. It's this act of faith. I hope somebody likes it. I hope somebody is whipping over the pages or they smile or they laugh. This is really quite a treat for me just to hear that.

Zibby: I feel like someone like you who's had so much success in the literary world and best seller after best seller wouldn't need that validation or wouldn't even appreciate it anymore.

Sophie: Oh, no, it's the opposite. However long you've been doing it, you start to think, do people still like what I do? How can I put that to the test? Especially this year when I haven't been out and about, it's just really important to connect in every sense, as humans, as family members, and as an author with your readers. We've all missed out on so much connection this year that I think we're all craving interaction of all different kinds. For me, it's lovely. Hi, reader. This is so nice. I feel a bit robbed of contact. I might get quite needy in a minute. [laughs]

Zibby: I'm wondering if I'll be able to actually close this laptop or if you're going to be in there every time I open it.

Sophie: I will. You know it.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, so funny. Let's talk a little bit about your latest book. Tell listeners what it's about, what inspired you to write it, this hilarious writing retreat that you have your main character go on, which is just so funny with your characteristic sense of humor. I think that's part of why I was so excited to talk to you because this is completely what I find funny, is what you find funny.

Sophie: You think, oh, no, is this just me? Really, looking at the differences between instinct and practicalities of love. My heroine is super romantic. We all go through a journey with a loved one. We meet them. We take in details about them. Maybe these days we've met them online. I think this is what makes it really interesting. You build up a picture. We kind of fantasize, don't we? We fill in the gaps. Maybe you text them or you go on that first date. You've got so many good impressions, but you don't quite know the rest of it. You fill in the gaps. Then gradually, you get to know the real deal. For most people, this is quite a slow process. You're taking in information. You're thinking, does this person match up to what I originally imagined? You have reality checks. I thought, what's the most extreme version of the reality check? I set up this heroine who is a deluded romantic. She just believes in instinct. Then it happens that she's at this writing retreat where nobody uses their name, nobody gives out any personal detail. I have to say, this was slightly inspired by -- I have a friend who went on a yoga retreat, and nobody said a word all week. You're just taking in impressions of people.

She falls in love with this guy. She doesn't know what his name is or his job or anything about him except how he looks, his demeanor, what he says about writing, but nothing else. They don't divulge any details. She falls in love and takes it to the max. They commit to each other. They pledge to each other. It's like your most extreme version of your holiday romance. Then boom, come home, reality. It's the most extreme of, wait, what? Wait, wait, this is not what I imagined. This is how you live? This is your job? She's imagined that he's an artisan carpenter based on very little evidence. She's just got it in her head that this is who he is. She's got the idea that he has a particular name. None of this is the case. Then she's faced with, okay, so this is the guy in my head. This is what I'm presented with in real life. He, by the way, is exactly the same. He had all kinds of ideas of what she might be like. He comes to the end. He gets to the airport. Reality is there. She gets met by her crazy dog and her crazy friends. He gets met by Mr. Corporate Driver. They look at each other in absolute shock, like, wait, who are you? I love you, but I have no idea who you are, and now I'm going to have to find out.

Part of the inspiration was that saying that you read, and it's around the place, love me, love my dog. There's a dog in this book. I thought, I'm going to extend this to, love me, love my life, because they get to know each other's lives from the dog to the friends to weird habits to things which seem small but actually become quite -- there's a moment where he runs her a bath. He says, "I'll run a lovely warm bath." He draws her a bath. This is going to be the healing moment. She gets in. She's like, "What is this? This is not a warm bath. This is tepid. I'm freezing." He's staring at her in utter incomprehension, like, this is a really warm bath. It just signifies how they're on completely different pages. They better get used to this. The book explores, what do you get used to? What can you put up with? At the beginning of the book, she is adamant she is not a deal breakers kind of a person. She doesn't believe in them. She thinks they're the work of the devil. She lectures her friends who are a bit more pragmatic and dating online and having to create profiles. She's like, "I can't engage with this. I could just love any man. I have no parameters. I'd never have a deal breaker." Then she's looking at this guy thinking, okay, I don't like this. I don't like that. I can't relate to this. Your family has these weird customs. The question throughout the book is, what can they get used to? What can they not get used to? What could change? How could they compromise? And hopefully finding the comedy in all of that because that's what I like to do. I like to slightly torture my characters in really terrible, embarrassing, cringy moments at all times. They certainly do go through a few of those.

Zibby: Wait, why do you like to do that to your characters? By the way, then your reader is similarly cringing and holding their breath and covering their face as well. What is that about? Why do you like to do that?

Sophie: I just find it so entertaining. I love to laugh. I love to push it, what I feel is just enough to make you laugh and go, no way, and also kind of be obsessed by turning the page to see, how are you going to get out of this? and hopefully not take it so extreme that it's painful. Although, I do think that sometimes I do torture my readers. [laughs] I just can't help seeing the potential for the extreme version. Everybody doesn't get on with some aspect of their partner's life. I thought, I'm going to just take this to the max. So her flat, he can't get on with her furniture, so many things about their life. At the same time, I do feel like comedy has to come out of reality. There is a real contemporary thread to all this. I read an awful lot online about online dating and, what are people's real deal breakers? How do they go about this? It does cause pain as well as comedy. It does cause some thoughtful processes going on and some development. The characters have to go somewhere in the light of all this. Hopefully, there's a mix. There's comedy, but there's real stuff. I hope there's love in this book too.

Zibby: It's great. I love how you set it up in the beginning when her roommates are online and she's like, "How can you do that? How can you search ten miles from where you live? What if he lives eleven miles away?" They're like, "No, no, no, it's fine. He'll lie about that part." She's horrified. It's true. I think it speaks to this whole crazy falling in love thing in general, which seems completely random. What if you just missed, by your parameters, the guy of your dreams? What if he just walked out of the restaurant before he walked in? What if you never met and if it's your fault? Nothing really makes sense, so you have to just roll with it.

Sophie: I completely agree. I think that we have an added pressure on us when we have to create a profile and define it in advance because sometimes you don't know what you're looking for. It's a bit like shopping. One of my characters does actually liken it to choosing a white shirt on a website that has so many white shirts. You're bewildered. Actually, I was slightly inspired. I created a fictious website with a million filters. I was slightly inspired by shopping websites where in order to make any sense of it all you just have to filter. This size, this kind of color, this sleeve length. Apply that to a life partner. Even with clothes, you think, wait, I don't really know. What if I saw a great shirt and it did have a longer sleeve but I loved it? [laughs] I'm stressed. What do I want? I can't go through a thousand shirts. You put that to a man, I don't know. Does the hair color -- I don't know. Once you start looking at it, it is quite funny, but it is also quite painful if this is what you're having to do. As you say, it's so arbitrary.

Zibby: Yes, so arbitrary. What it really comes down to is that it's completely out of your control. I think that's what all the filters are designed to fool you into believing, that you have some control over your search when really, it's completely random and out of your control. So I know how you came up with this, but you've been consistently innovating and coming up with new ideas and taking your character through all these times. Tell me about how you decide what books you're going to write, what you're doing with your characters. Does it always come from life? How has the progression of your characters evolved?

Sophie: That's interesting. I think that each book has a slightly different genesis. Sometimes I'll start with a character. With the Shopaholic series, it was very much, I can see this character. Now I want to put her in different situations. Sometimes stuff just happens in life. I'm aware of what we're all talking about. With social media, that became an interest to me because we're all talking about this. I tend to plug into the conversations that I'm hearing. I wrote a young adult book about anxiety and computer games. That was very much picking up on the conversation of the day. When I was writing I Owe You One, I knew I wanted to get two people together and that they would exchange favors with each other. I didn't know what would be the mechanism to bring these two people about. I'm sitting in a coffee shop. This really happened. By the way, people are always saying to me, I bet you pick up things from real life, don't you? I bet you just listen in on conversations and use them all. I'm always like, I really wish that people would just act out a whole novel at the next table in the café and I could write it all down. That would be handy, but it's never happened yet.

Anyway, the miracle happened. I'm sitting in this coffee shop. This guy -- I have to say, he was very handsome, an American, which added a bit of sparkle to the event. He looked at me. He just went, "I have to step outside. Could you mind my laptop for a minute?" I was like, this is it. This is how my characters meet. The coffee shop gods have given me my beginning. That was absolutely given to me as a gift. As I say, each book is different. In this book, there's a very naughty dog who is the bone of contention between our lovely couple. In a similar way, I was looking for a dog. I was thinking, I need a dog. I want a really good character of a dog. I have a dog. I met dogs, but they weren’t quite -- then I stayed with some friends, and I met this beagle. He was such a character that I was like, that's it. Okay, you're going in my book. You get inspiration all around.

Zibby: That's great. I love it. When did you know you wanted to write? Did you always know? Did you know from when you were a child? Did it come later?

Sophie: It wasn't my childhood ambition. I wasn't the child walking around saying, I'm going to write a novel one day. I loved to read. I read obsessively. I read books over and over and over again. Looking back, I think it gives you a real sense of story, how stories work, if you practically know a book by heart, whether it's a classic or whether it's just a run-of-the-mill book knocking around in your house. I loved stories and words, but I didn't even really plan to write until I was in my twenties working as a journalist. Even at that stage, I thought, this is what I'm going to do. It was really going on the tube to work and reading every day. In the days before we were all on our phones, we read books. I read books the whole time. I just had this chord of recognition. Wait, I know I'm writing financial articles and that's my job, but this is what I want to do. I want to make it up. I've never been any good at facts. I still am no good at facts. It's all invented. I just started in my spare time. I sat on the train waiting until I got an idea. The minute I started, I just felt like, yes, now I feel at home. I was lucky enough to get that one published. That's all I've done ever since. I'm fit for nothing else. Obviously, bathing my children I can do. [laughs]

Zibby: Yes, that's a skill we all somehow seem to magically acquire, not so much writing the Shopaholic series. Was that your first book, Shopaholic?

Sophie: I used to write before that under the name Madeleine Wickham.

Zibby: Oh, that's right. I knew that. I'm sorry.

Sophie: Then I switched style. The first one was Confessions of a Shopaholic. That's where I really found comedy and realized how much I like writing comedy. That felt like a new beginning. It was really exciting because it was a new voice. It felt like I was starting my career all over again, which is a great advantage that you have as a writer. You can rebrand, take a new name, start again. It's quite liberating.

Zibby: That is your actual name, though, right, Sophie Kinsella?

Sophie: It's not, no.

Zibby: It's not?

Sophie: No. I know. [laughs] I've been Sophie for so long.

Zibby: What's your real name? Your real name is Madeleine? No way. Sorry, I should've somehow realized that. I apologize.

Sophie: No, it shows how good my disguise is. I answer to Sophie now. I practically feel like Sophie because I live so much of my life as Sophie. All my children know I'm Sophie. It's actually quite nice because I'm anonymous day to day. I go and do my stuff, nobody even tweaks. Well, they sometimes tweak, but I feel quite under the radar, which is quite nice. It's good for being a writer because you can eavesdrop in coffee shops, as previously mentioned.

Zibby: Yes, and come up with all your ideas. Wow, I'm sorry. I think I did know that at some point. I forgot. I'm sorry.

Sophie: Don't be silly. Lost in the nick of time.

Zibby: Do you always have your next thing? Do you know what your next book is already?

Sophie: I always have a few things up my sleeve. I find with an idea for a book, you need to give it a bit of time. I'm working on something at the moment. I've had the shell outline for a while. I have all kinds of ideas. I don't think you know instantly if it's going to have legs or if it's really a book. Is there enough to it? I like to think ahead and have them in different stages of development. Right now, I'm at the nice stage where you're fleshing out an idea. I think this actually will work, so that's nice. The bad moment is when you think, that seemed like such a great idea in the cocktail bar. I was super excited. I wrote all these excited notes in lip liner because I didn't have a pen, and it makes no sense. It's gibberish. It's not a book. [laughs]

Zibby: Wait, how far down do you have to go? How many pages or how much time do you invest before you decide whether it's working or not?

Sophie: For me, I won't have written an awful lot. It's more in planning stages. I obsessively plan. It's when I'm sketching out all my plan and the details and all of that, that's when I know I've got a book. I won't start it unless I feel confident in that. I have friends who, they just start. They just start writing. I'm in such admiration of that. I would love to be that kind of free flow, see where you go, let it grow, but I'm not that. I want to know that I have an ending even if it's not "the" ending. I want to feel that there's a sort of solid plan for me to follow.

Zibby: Do you have it on index cards? Do you just write it out? How does it look?

Sophie: I have a big board with index cards. I always get kind of impatient with that because I can't put all the detail I would like on the index cards. At some stage along the line, I either abandon that and that starts to look a bit sad and unloved and I start to write things on computer. Then I write them on bits of paper. Then I have Post-its. I have a million different systems. My new thing is dictating into the phone, which is just great. A line of dialogue pops into your head and you just randomly say it into your phone looking slightly deranged as you do so. If you're walking through London ever and seeing someone in Trafalgar Square talking into her phone with a glazed expression, that's me. Then I forget what I've put where, so I have to do this go around -- I had one idea on my phone and I had some other scene that I wrote on my laptop -- and try and put it all together into a book. I sometimes forget bits. It's a bit like when you're doing a dinner party. You had this sauce. You had this side dish. Then you get to the end. You're collapsed. You open the oven, and there's that bread you had heating the whole time and you forgot to serve it. [laughs] It's a bit like that.

Zibby: Love it. Just even your mentioning dinner parties makes me sad. I am missing that time of life when we could entertain and see friends and all the rest.

Sophie: It's so weird, isn't it? I just can't believe we're still here.

Zibby: I know.

Sophie: I saw it as a summer thing. I felt psychologically that the new school year would begin and we'd all go, that was the summer, that was weird, and on we'd go. Now, don't know. Very strange.

Zibby: Has it affected your work or creativity or all that? It must, or maybe not.

Sophie: Yes. It was weird. During our extreme lockdown, I was actually really glad. By absolute luck, I finished writing Love Your Life pretty much two days before lockdown. Family was here. We had to do, as you say, the home school and all of it. During lockdown, I edited it. That's a really different process from writing. It's changing what you've already done. I'm so glad because I think that against this apocalyptic backdrop, I don't know how I would've written those final scenes, whereas to edit them was fine. There they were. I could change them. I could amend. Believe me, it was a wonderful escape for me to go back into that world. It felt quite indulgent, especially writing the Italy bits. It's like, I'm not here. I'm in COVID-free Italy right now. I'm on the beach. I'm in this amazing monastery. I'm in love, and the food. It felt like a really lovely place to escape to.

Since then, that kind of obsessive following of the news and every development, I have been unable to keep up with that. I don't have the stamina to be following every development. I just do what I'm told, try and follow the rules, which are quite confusing, I will say. They keep changing. Sit on the sofa is about it. I'm able now to go into another world. My brain isn't constantly drawn back into, wait, what? Pandemic? It was for a while. What I did, actually, during lockdown, is I wrote Shopaholic Lockdown Diaries, just a little fun thing for my readers. A lot of readers, I'm touch with them on social media. They would say, "What would Becky do?" We had tremendous problems in the UK with stockpiling and shopping. You couldn't get this and that. Shopping was topic A for a while. I just couldn't resist it. I thought, this might cheer everybody up. I wrote what Becky was up to. You know, it was a tonic for me. I hope it cheered up some people. It was very of its moment, but it was kind of therapy as well for me.

Zibby: I have to go back and read those. I somehow missed that as well.

Sophie: It was very tiny. It was just her diary of a few days. I put it up on the internet. It was a gift, really, to my readers. Here's something to entertain you today.

Zibby: Is it on your Instagram? No? I'll go back.

Sophie: That was really nice. I'm someone who, I just try and find something to laugh at even in the worst lockdown situation. It took a while. I couldn't do instantly. After a few weeks, I was like, come on, let's cheer the troops up here. Let's find something to laugh at.

Zibby: That's great. So needed, so necessary to find those outlets of not just the end-of-the-world mentality. That's great. Thank you for that. What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Sophie: I'm someone who has had to find their voice. I started with one kind of writing. I changed into another kind of writing. It's sort of similar but quite different. I would say be true to what you want to write. Don't try and second-guess. Write what is right for you at the moment, but be prepared to experiment because there might be different versions of you. You may not hit on the right voice straight away. Don't worry about that. Just keep trying. I've written comedy now because I really enjoy it. I think that you can tell writers who love what they do, whether it's crafting an excruciating thriller plot that's just so intricate or whether it's making people laugh or whether it's wonderful love scenes. Write something that is going to light your fire because, believe me, you're going to be with this book for a long time. It had better light your fire.

If you really don't know where to begin, something I sometimes say is imagine that you go into a bookshop and you see the perfect book. It's like a visualization. Imagine walking in. You're like, that's the book I need to buy. There are some books, you walk in and it's a no-brainer. I have to buy this. Of course, I am going to read this. Whatever that is, whatever speaks to you, that's the book you need to write. That's the book that you would pick up. If you would pick it up, then lots of other people would pick it up. It'll be different for everybody. It might be the plot. It might be the premise. It might be a character or a style. It could be anything, but make it something really strong that is going to be still exciting in six months' time when you're at chapter ten and you hate the whole book and you forgot why you started and you're thinking of giving up. You need to have that initial inspiration to come back to you to keep you going.

Zibby: Excellent advice. Love it. Shopaholic, is Becky going to make another appearance in a real book, do you think, or you think not? What's the plan?

Sophie: I can never say goodbye to Becky. The book I'm working on at the moment is not a Becky book, but she's always in my mind and in my heart. I don't think we've said goodbye. I never know when. I'm someone who, I have different ideas floating around, but then I always act on instinct much like Ava. It was like, I have to write this book right now. I can't always predict which one is going to grab me, but Becky's not going anywhere.

Zibby: Excellent, phew. [laughs] Thank you, now I don't know what to call you, Madeleine. I started calling you Sophie. Now I'll end this interview calling you Madeleine.

Sophie: I go weeks of my life at a time being Sophie. I feel like Sophie. It's my middle name. It is who I am, really.

Zibby: Whoever you are, thank you for coming on my podcast. I'm sorry to have to say goodbye and release you to your kids. Maybe you could pretend --

Sophie: -- I'm just going to carry on talking to the laptop. Right, that's a very long question. Yeah, I've got to [indiscernible/laughter] great length. This has been absolutely lovely to chat with you.

Zibby: You too. It's been great. Thank you for this comic interlude in my crazy day. Thanks. Bye.

Nancy Jooyoun Kim, THE LAST STORY OF MINA LEE

Zibby Owens: Hi.

Nancy Jooyoun Kim: Hi. How are you?

Zibby: Good. How are you?

Nancy: Nice to meet you.

Zibby: Nice to meet you too. How's everything with you?

Nancy: Good. How about you?

Zibby: Good. I know this is going to sound crazy. I was just at lunch with my dad. He wrote a book called What It Takes, which is a business-type book. It's being published in multiple languages. He said, "Who's your podcast with?" I said, "Nancy." I told him a little bit about your book and your background. He goes, "Oh, my book just came out in Korean." I was like, "I don't think she speaks Korean. She's from LA." He's like, "Maybe her parents." I'm like, "I know her dad passed away." He's like, "Maybe her mom." I was like, "Well, she came here when she was four, but maybe." Anyway, he just gave me this book. He signed it and he said for me to send it to your mom. [laughs]

Nancy: That's so funny. That's great.

Zibby: It's in Korean. He didn't even give me a copy.

Nancy: She'll be the only one between us who will be able to read that. I can't read that myself. Thank you so much. That's so sweet of him. Congratulations to him. That's huge.

Zibby: Thanks. If you're interested, just send me where I should mail it to her. She'll probably be like, what on earth? [laughs]

Nancy: You can send it to me. I'll explain it to her. She'll appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Zibby: No problem. Anyway, thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I am really excited to talk about your book and your life and all the rest. Thanks for coming on.

Nancy: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor.

Zibby: Nancy, can you tell people who haven't read your book yet, which is probably most people because it's just coming out, what your book is about and what inspired you to write it?

Nancy: The Last Story of Mina Lee takes place in Los Angeles's Koreatown. It's about a complex mother-daughter relationship between a Korean immigrant single mother named Mina and her American-born named Margot. The book begins with a death. Margot discovers her mother's body in their apartment. The plot unwinds in a dual narrative that alternates between the mother's point of view in the past and the daughter's point of view in the present. During this process, Margot not only learns more about her mother's life, but she learns about her own life and her own self as well.

Zibby: It sounds great. That's the perfect description, uncertainty, a mystery, mother/daughter. It's got all the elements. This is right up my alley.

Nancy: I just really wanted to write about the complex interdependence between mothers and daughters, the ways that they need love and sometimes even resent each other. This premise allowed me to explore all the different nuances of being in a mother-daughter relationship and also having the extra -- the tensions are heightened by the differences in language because Mina only speaks Korean and a little bit of Spanish while Margot speaks primarily English. As you can imagine, as a teenager as she gets older and she wants to describe her feelings and her motivations to her mother, she hits all these blocks. It became extremely frustrating for her.

Zibby: It's hard to imagine a relationship without fluid language between two parties. That's the cornerstone of how you relate to somebody that you love. To have that taken away, especially between a mother-daughter relationship, is for sure worth examining. What's happens then...?

Nancy: There are lines within the book where Margot says things like, "What would be the point of me learning Korean?" She only thinks that she needs it to speak to one person in her life. Yet it requires her mother's death for her to finally realize what that exactly means. Suddenly, her mother dies. Her mother is her only connection to family. She becomes kind of untethered in this world, which is quite devastating for her. We watch her pull through. I think the mystery itself of her mother's death gives her this distraction for her grief.

Zibby: You had a quote in the beginning when Margot is talking to her friend. You say, "Agreeing to the same white lie is what makes family family, he says." She was like, what about if people agree? What if family agrees to two truths? He's like, I don't know, maybe they're scientists. [laughs]

Nancy: That was a little nod toward sometimes the fragility of the stories that our families tell ourselves to survive and the ways in which parents and children, sometimes we keep things from each other no matter how much we love each other because we're attempting to either protect the other person or protect ourselves. That's a very human impulse, in my opinion. Obviously, Margot has a lot of reasons to be angry at her mother for keeping secrets from her. At the same time, as she gets to know more and more the depth of her mother's story and how complicated she was, she could see how her mother, in order to survive, literally had to submerge so much of her history and her past just to get through everyday life. I think it's hard to just be a working-class single mother and imagining how she can work so many hours a day and also attempting to process things with her daughter, explain things to her daughter in a different language, which is almost impossible in a way that's nuanced and complicated. Through this process, Margot kind of forgives her mother in an interesting way. This book is just the beginning of that relationship in a lot of ways.

Zibby: I was wondering with the book, how much this is tracking your own life. You wrote so beautifully about your father and his tragic death on his way home from a hiking accident and your mother and both of their stories and when they came to the United States. You wrote in Guernica and Los Angeles Review of Books. I felt like I really got to know your whole backstory. Maybe you could share a little more about what it was like, your knowing their stories and also even your father's reticence to share his past and the pain that he masked in the past and then how he leaving your family affected you.

Nancy: In a lot of immigration stories, there's so much trauma involved, usually. A lot of times, immigrants are either running from something or running toward something. Even though this novel is not autobiographical, I think that something that I could really relate to are the types of silences that exist within families and how loaded those silences can be and the ways in which daily life won't allow you to access the truths behind those silences until something as horrifying as what happens to Margot, which is finding her mother's body in her apartment, happens. Like Margot and Mina, within my own family, my father spoke English, but my mother, she didn't speak English. A lot of the tensions and the misunderstandings that happen between mother and daughter, that's something that I could definitely relate to. It's very difficult to describe unless you've experienced it. It seems like, how could you live with somebody under the same roof and not speak the same language? It just almost doesn't make sense. Growing up, parents and children, the language that they use is typically elementary. It's things like, did you do your homework? Did you go to school? What did you eat today?

There's this point where Margot just begins to grow separately from her mother as an adolescent. She sort of begins to abandon her past as she gets closer towards going to college and thinking about what she wants to do with her own life. These are all frustrations and things that I could definitely relate to. Mina never really needs to know English to get by. That's one of the beauties of ethnic enclaves, places like Koreatown, Chinatown, where people can come to this country and they can survive. They can work and find basic ways of getting by without learning the language. Pretty much, in Koreatown, you have an accountant. You have a bank. You have a post office. Mina works in a mostly Latinx area of LA. She really only needs a little bit of Spanish to communicate with her customers. As Mina's spending so much time at work and then Margot's focusing on figuring out how to get out of Koreatown, they really split apart. These are definitely frustrations that I think that I can relate to and a lot of other immigrants and the children of immigrants can relate to.

Zibby: A hundred percent. You also include in the book what it was like growing up looking different. I don't know if this was your experience growing up in LA or if this was just fictious for Margot's background, but how she longed to look like all these tall, blond-haired, beautiful, white students. PS, I would also love to look like a tall, blond student myself. [laughs] I think that's a common aspiration.

Nancy: What's interesting is I think the assumption is that if you grow up in diverse places you have exposures to so many different forms of beauty and concepts of beauty. Margot does grow up around a very diverse group of people. At the end of the day, she is very lonely growing up because she has no siblings. Her mother works all day long. She only really sees her mother at night when she's very tired or over the weekends when she's helping her mom at her mother's store in [indiscernible]. She spends probably so many hours of her life watching television. I think that so much of children's formation of how they view the world and how the world is idealized is through TV. I'm imagining Margot growing up in the eighties and nineties. I'm sure there were some forms of diversity on television at that point, but I don't feel like she had a ton of role models. I don't think she necessarily saw herself in a lot of the television or the movies that she was seeing.

There's this sense that there's a gap between her lived experience and what she's seeing in this public and social way, like, if I had those things, that is what success looks like. There's this huge gap, which is actually really sad when you think about it because in many ways Margot's mother, Mina, even if she doesn't fit the traditional standards of success in her country, in many ways she is a successful person. She's a woman who had so little and managed to create a life for herself. She managed to feed her children. She managed to send her children to school. I think being a single mother is a huge accomplishment in and of itself, especially in a country that's so foreign to her. There's this huge gap in understanding where Margot sees her mother as representing everything she doesn't want to be when she grows up. She wants to have a nice at least middle-class life. She wants to have certain nice things in her life. In reality, if she had known more about her mother's story, I think she would've appreciated her a lot more and seen, wow, this woman is actually very heroic.

Zibby: I think it takes a lot for kids to actually get out of their minds and consider their parents to be heroes, especially at a younger age, but even, I would argue, a lot of -- I think it's very hard to be objective sometimes as a child, even an adult child for some people. [laughs]

Nancy: Right, because our parents will always be the people who are reminding us of what we're not quite doing, even if you're in a very loving environment. Obviously, they're doing that for a specific reason. As children, we can sometimes see our parents as the boss, the person who doesn't see me for who I am. There's so many ways that parents and children -- I think that's what makes this book really interesting. It's interested in the nuances of those emotions, even if some of them are uncomfortable or maybe even, I don't want to say embarrassing, but I think they're hard to write about and talk about.

Zibby: Basically, Margot just wants a role on Beverly Hills, 90201. What is she going to do? Instead, she's going home to Koreatown and whatever. She's never going to be happy in that environment. That’s tough.

Nancy: Right, exactly. I'm sure she watched 90201.

Zibby: Of course. Who didn't? Come on. How did you become such a good writer? I really feel like you are a fabulous, fabulous writer. Your nonfiction stories about yourself really read almost like novels and made me so excited to read your actual novel. How did you do this? Tell me about your whole writing history.

Nancy: That's so sweet of you. I've been writing for a really long time. I started probably when I was a kid just playfully, imaginatively. I used to draw these little cartoons and write these little stories. The plants would be characters. The lawnmower was the bad guy. I remember writing these really elementary stories as a kid. Then in junior high and high school, I started writing really bad poetry, which I think a lot of kids at that age write. [Indiscernible] writing bad poetry or writing really melodramatic songs. I definitely had that streak in me. I've had streaks in my life where my work was just too demanding. Writing for me has really just been about practice and discipline and endurance in a lot of ways. I feel like I just put the time in and the hours. I know that's really hard to do for most people. The way that I was able to really complete this novel after so many years -- I graduated from an MFA program in 2006. That was fourteen years ago.

Since then, I've written two novels. This is the only one to be published. For me, what worked is to find the story that literally only I could tell. Once I had a sense of purpose to my writing, it made the discipline required a little bit more accessible, I would say. Writing as a discipline is really hard because I think there's no obvious rewards immediately. Nobody really knows what you're doing. Everybody's like, oh, you're writing a novel. That sounds fun. They don't really get what's going on behind the scenes. There's no real way to explain it very well, also, while you're working on it. It just sounds like some abstract story. You're still figuring it out, so you can't even really talk about it. What helped me was to find the story that I felt only I could tell and to have that sense of purpose behind what I was doing. Once I had that sense of purpose, I was able to muster the discipline that I think I needed to actually complete the book.

Zibby: What was that sense of purpose that you felt? What did you need to get out with this book? What was the driving force?

Nancy: I feel like this book, it's a story that I had never read before. I feel like it's something that captured things that I have always wanted to say to either my mother or maybe to other people and that I could not say in real life. That's the beauty of what fiction can do that I think is really amazing. I remember when I was an undergrad [indiscernible] had given a talk. This was many years ago, probably fifteen, sixteen years ago. Somebody in the audience asked her, they loved the dialogue in her novels, and were they based upon real conversations in her family? She said something like, no, they're conversations that I always wished had happened. The purpose of this novel is in a way to create a kind of impossible conversation that could've never happened while Mina was still living between a daughter and a mother. I feel like to have this sense of purpose of having this extraordinarily important conversation and talk between two people who really love each other but can't quite access each other really focused my attention in a way that narrowed it and made it a lot easier to accomplish as opposed to thinking, I'm going to write about immigration, just to really zero in on something that felt manageable to me. On the way, obviously I would explore all sorts of other things.

Zibby: Wow. Then when you were actually doing the writing in that space where nobody really understands what you're doing, where did you like to do that? Where did you work? When and where? What did you do the rest of the day when you weren’t writing and all of that?

Nancy: I actually began really focusing on this novel during a point of transition in my life. I was living in Seattle working a full-time job. My husband got a job down in California. It allowed me to start all over because now I had to find a new job. I began to put together freelance editing projects and more project-based work so I could work from home. For me, this novel really was written in the mornings before I had to do my regular day job. I tried to put together at least two to three hours per day working on my book. I tried to work on it about five days a week. That's very hard for a lot of people to do. It just is, whether it's because they have children or the demands of their job. I found that working on a book almost every day allowed me to access almost a fluidity or subconscious space where I was returning to something. There's something kind of meditative about it. I think it's probably similar to how professional athletes or certain artists have to wake up and it just requires this disciple where you get into it. It's a little bit easier every time. That was the process for me. I just woke up in the morning, try to get it out of the way first. If I waited until later, life would just take over.

Zibby: That's how I feel about exercise, which is why I basically never exercise. [laughs]

Nancy: It's actually very, very similar. Then for the rest of the day, you feel recharged and you feel like you've gotten something done. That was necessary for me.

Zibby: As opposed to maybe not getting out of your pajamas all day in pandemic mode. What has this time been like for you with your book? When we went into the pandemic mode in March or whatever, I'm sure your book release felt so far away. Now suddenly, here we still are and it's coming out. How has this whole thing been for you?

Nancy: Obviously, there's aspects of it that are so difficult. Nobody imagines this situation when they're thinking of, I've been writing for this long and I'm finally having my first book out. Now I can't even go out and celebrate. There's so much that I can't do that I would love to do. I can't go to my bookstore and see my book on the shelf. That's one of the [indiscernible]. At the same time, I try to just remain grateful every single day. I know that this has been such a huge honor to have a book out in the world. I feel like people who will connect with this book will connect with this book. They’ll find a way to it. The story matters to me. Obviously, I want people to read it. Just that this story exists and is out and there's this possibility of people finding it is really wonderful to me. Every day, I just try to remain grateful for that. I'm actually loving the virtual aspect of things, to be honest, because I feel like I'm able to do a little bit more than I normally would be able to. I'm able to connect with writers in different regions. There's no travel involved. It's kind of fun going to online readings because you don't have to put on shoes. You can turn off your camera. You don't have to put on anything, pretty much. You can still be a part of this community. I do think that there have been some pluses to it in a way.

Zibby: I love going to book readings. I have four kids. It's often hard to get to Brooklyn for seven on a Tuesday or something like that, so I felt like I was always missing out. Sometimes I would go to book readings and there would be like ten people there, which is crazy, even though the authors are super amazing and the book was fabulous. It's hard to get people all to congregate at these appointed times. Now I feel like we can all pop into bookstores across the world if we want. There is a sense of liberation in that.

Nancy: You can have dinner while you're at a reading, which I know sounds weird, but you can. There's fewer excuses, almost. I've been to some wonderful readings. I really miss the live events. There's always the hangout afterwards. There's always the energy of those events. At the same time, I think we're doing pretty well considering the circumstances.

Zibby: Maybe you shouldn't actually eat dinner while you're giving a reading. Maybe if you're in the audience it would be okay.

Nancy: If you're in the audience, I mean.

Zibby: Okay, good. I'm picturing you rolling up with --

Nancy: -- [Indiscernible] fold laundry.

Zibby: It's true. The function of no video always being an option is huge. Who knows what people are doing? I'm sure somebody's done a funny skit about what people are actually doing behind the black little boxes in the Zoom screens. They're funnier than I could potentially ever be. Who knows? Have you found it easy or hard to write during this time? Have you been working on a new project? What's coming next for you?

Nancy: I started working on a new novel which also takes place outside of Los Angeles's Koreatown. It's about the separations, the silences within a family after the mysterious death of the mother five years ago. I'm still writing. I'm probably not as productive as I was before the pandemic, obviously, because so much is going on in our world. It's been a comfort. I love it, just getting back into the pages. This is my favorite stage of the process. I love the early stages when you're just learning about your characters and you're like, oh, my gosh. You get this idea just out of nowhere, or you're in a scene and they say something and it makes you realize, maybe she's suggesting something about her past. There's this really interesting part of discovery that I love in this stage. It's great. I love this part. This is the best part, actually, the beginnings. Once you start revising, it gets so hard.

Zibby: Yeah, because you're out of that same mental headspace that you referred to before. Now you just have to dip into it in certain parts.

Nancy: That's when you start getting really sharp about things and you start realizing, oh, there's this plot line that totally just dropped off. Now I have to remove that and figure out why that was in there in the first place. Right now's a really good time in terms of where I am with my next book.

Zibby: In terms of this book selling and the publishing journey, if you will, what's the synopsis of how you sold your book and how that all happened?

Nancy: It really began with an agent finding me. She actually read that Guernica piece that you're referring to about my father. It's called "Heaven Lake."

Zibby: It was so good.

Nancy: Thank you so much. My agent who's incredible, Amy Elizabeth Bishop, just reached out to me. She said, "Do you have anything?" I was like, "I do, actually. I have this novel that I've been working on for about five years." It was a pretty straightforward experience. I didn't have the same experience with my first novel that I wrote. It went through over twenty rejections. This was a much more straightforward experience. I think it's because of what I was talking about earlier, just having that sense of purpose, that really clear sense of purpose. A lot of people wonder, where am I going to find a story that only I can tell? That sounds like some kind of magical thing that drops in your lap. I think it's more a matter of just finding and being true to what truly keeps you up at night, what truly you want to spend time with, what truly at the end of the day matters to you. For me, it was all about exploring this one complicated relationship between a mother and daughter. The purpose and the clarity was very obvious in the manuscript. That helped it sell, in my opinion.

Zibby: Love it. That's great. Do you have any other advice? I know that you've already given a lot of great advice to aspiring authors. Any other parting tips?

Nancy: Yeah, I do. I'm not particularly wise. I'm still new to all of this. I would say something that has helped me a lot is I've surrounded myself with extraordinarily supportive people. Through the years, I've had so many relationships that were less functional. This is one of those industries where you need to be surrounded by people who believe in you a hundred percent because there's so much rejection. It's such an uphill battle. I think that really surrounding yourself with people who support you and believe in you no matter what is so important. We can't choose everyone that's around us. My strategy has always been, I've been much more careful about sharing things with those people and really identifying who I can trust and who's going to support and love me through even the hardest parts of this journey. That has made a huge difference. I couldn't have survived all of this without my husband who is very supportive and friends who hadn’t even read my book but who just always gave me the sense that they believed in whatever I was working on and that it was important.

Zibby: That is just all-around great life advice. Surround yourself with the right people. It's true. That really is the secret to the whole thing, is just saying, is this person good for me or not? and figuring out a way to have the strength to say goodbye to the people who aren't.

Nancy: That is really, really hard. Yes, it's super hard. It's something that I'm still learning to do, but I feel like gradually moving in that direction. I am definitely seeing major improvements in me reaching the goals that I need to reach.

Zibby: It's obviously working because you have a book coming out. You're a beautiful writer. Your book is getting on the shelves whether you see it or not. It's like a tree falling in the forest. [laughs] If my book is on the bookstore shelves and nobody sees it, is it really there? But it is, so congratulations.

Nancy: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. It's been such an honor to talk with you.

Zibby: It's been so fun. Awesome. Thank you so much. Send me your address so I can send you this book.

Nancy: I will. I'm not sure if I have your email, but I guess I'll send it through Justine, my publicist. Thank you again. Bye.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.