Anne-Louise Nieto and Hanna Chiou, HABBI HABBI

Zibby Owens: Welcome to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I am so excited. We're going to be talking about Habbi Habbi today, the most amazing wand plus book bilingual combination of board books there are. Welcome. Why don't the two of you introduce yourselves so listeners can figure out who's who as we're talking?

Hanna Chiou: Sure. Anne-Louise, do you want to go first?

Anne-Louise Nieto: You go ahead. Go ahead.

Hanna: Cool. I'm Hanna. We always say Habbi Habbi's made with love by H&AL. I'm H. I am a mom of two. I grew up as your stereotypical ABC. My parents are from Taiwan, and so they speak Chinese. I really wanted my kids to be able to speak Chinese better than I can. That was one of the motivations behind us starting Habbi Habbi.

Anne-Louise: I'm Anne-Louise, the A of H&AL. Hanna and I always joke that we're twins from opposite coasts. We have all of these different funny things that are similar about us from the sports we played growing up to our parents' birthday too. Our brother-in-laws have the same name. We have all of these things in common. Anyway, while Hanna was growing up on the West Coast, I was growing up on the East Coast. I'm a transplant and now out here in San Francisco with my two kids and husband. We both have all these little kids running around. Similar to Hanna, we're teaching my kiddos Spanish. Although, unlike Hanna, I don't speak Spanish at home, so I'm learning with them. My husband speaks some Spanish. It's been a really fun journey as a parent, as a learner, as an entrepreneur.

Zibby: Tell me about starting this company. It's books, but it's also -- not that books aren't a business, but it's a whole dual language, language teaching, not ensemble -- what's the better word? System, essentially. I know both of you explained how it is in your homes and your inner motivations. How did you two pair up? What was it like getting this off the ground?

Hanna: Anne-Louise and I were -- obviously, we've been friends for a really long time, as you can tell, since we first met in 2005. That was fifteen years ago when we first graduated from college and we were in the same company. We've always been in touch. We were bridesmaids at each other's weddings. We were starting to talk about things in our new phase of life being moms. At one point, we were starting a pop-up shop. We were looking at all these different brands. During that whole brand search process, we were trying to choose intentional, thoughtful toys for our own homes and a really nice playroom. That was the same time where our kids were very young. We were going through our own journeys. For my daughter, I was wanting her to learn Chinese. There was this amazing technology that we had seen in Asia where you could tap different things in a book. It would read it to you. I said, this makes language learning accessible.

Even though I grew up with Chinese, I can't read it because it's character based. Whether it's being nonnative, whether you can't read it, basically, it makes language learning accessible. We thought it would be so much better if the books were intentional and had other languages besides just Chinese and things were more accurate. We got really excited about the technology. I just kept talking to Anne-Louise about it. At that time, we weren’t making product. We were just picking some toys. I said, this is amazing. From there, we said, we should make it. We should make it multilingual. We should make it beautiful. We should make it diverse. We should make it inclusive. We should include all these topics that we would love to talk about. We should make language learning, which is so hard for people in Western countries, especially in the US, we should make it more accessible. That was the origination. I'll let Anne-Louise talk more about where it went from there.

Anne-Louise: You hit it. We had this experience as well from doing this pop-up store where we saw these brands from all over the world. Then we were able to see what parents and kids were interested in. We did see a really intense interest in language learning. We also, like Hanna said, had that need at home and wanted things that were really engaging. I see it now. My older one is four. My younger one is one. The four-year-old starts playing with the wand and the books and is just so deeply interested in it and wants to tap and wants to repeat. It's creating those kind of things that are engaging for them that don't have a screen so I don't feel guilty that he's playing with this over and over again. It's fun, but it's also gives them the language learning that we're after. We're trying to build that while they're still young and they're learning to pronounce things and their brains are so flexible.

Hanna: The other thing I'd add is that when we were exploring the technology -- everybody knows conceptually that kids, if they learn when they're young and they get exposed when they're young, it's so much easier. I see these videos Anne-Louise sends me of her son using our wand. The way he repeats back the tones, they're perfect.

Anne-Louise: In Chinese. He uses the Chinese too.

Hanna: He learns it for the Chinese. At some point along as we grow older and we become adults, it's very hard for us to sometimes hear those tones. For kids, it's so easy. One of the big things for us when we made it was we said, how can we get families to have exposure early when kids are not necessarily -- they haven't even started reading. In English language, we just get exposure from people talking around us. How can they get exposure through play? No one's actually intentionally reading. That's why we made every inch of the book tappable and those types of things. We really wanted it to be fun. If they were having fun and they were just tapping all around and they got exposure, then naturally, the learning would just happen.

Zibby: Wow. It's so neat. Also, how you did the books themselves is interesting even if you couldn't tap it. It's the next generation of, what does your mom do for work? It's like, my mom's an entrepreneur. My mom does this or that or she's at home. I'm like, good, you're not just a doctor or a lawyer. I feel like so many books have, here are the two careers for a job. This was so multifaceted. Now I'm, of course, forgetting the ten different careers you profiled. What were they? Entrepreneur and...

Anne-Louise: We had a product manager. We have a chief home officer. She stays at home, but we wanted to recognize that that job is really multifaceted and challenging. We have an entrepreneur. We have an art history professor. We have an investment banker. We have a surgeon. For sure, we wanted to bring up topics that are kind of provocative and interesting. We do find that as the kids are using it, then they ask questions. My son was reading the Global Celebrations book this morning. Again, he can't read yet, but he was tapping it. We picked celebrations from all over the world, not just your typical ones you always see. We picked Carnival in Brazil. We picked Holi. We picked Eid and Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year. He was on the Holi page. Holi, they grab powder and they throw it in the air. It's a celebration of colors and springtime and love. He just started asking all of these questions about it. That's the kind of thing that we want, is that the kids are curious. They're getting the language learning, but then they're also learning about different cultures, different people, what they celebrate around the world. They start asking questions. It tees up the conversation for us as parents, too, to have with them.

Zibby: It's so neat. What is the plan for the series going forward? I saw how they all had arrived. You have a whole bookshelf full already, so not like you have to keep producing. What's the vision? What's the five-year plan you must have? It sounds like you guys are into that type of thinking.

Anne-Louise: I'm like, how do we get to tomorrow? [laughter]

Hanna: There's so many directions where we could go. Like Anne-Louise said, we sort of take it a day at a time with a rough idea of where we would love to get to. We'll see how we get there. The original vision was a global library. If you can imagine, you step into a room that looks like a combination of a playroom meets kids' room meets just a space that you and your kids want to be in. It's just filled, kind of like the room you're in right now, it's filled with books. Maybe there's some accessory like globes and some really nice comfortable -- whatever it is. You just go in and, literally, this one wand, you can tap anything. It's just so easy. You've used it before. We intentionally streamlined the design so that you don't have to toggle between languages. You don't have to set certain settings. You don't have to tell the wand which book it's on. Literally, all you do is turn it on, and you touch anywhere. There's no wrong place to touch. If you can imagine, a kid enters this room, looks up, pulls up any book, turns it on, and just taps anything. We would love to have a global library that's so accessible and makes language learning and the idea of global citizenship come home to families. That would be amazing.

Zibby: You could do a little video of that. Have you done that yet and I just don't know? You need to put a kid -- you need to recreate that in real life now.

Hanna: Yes, yes, we need to do that.

Zibby: You could just have lots of your book. It sounds like a good ad. What's your distribution right now? Where can you buy these? Are they in actual stores? Just online? How do people buy them?

Anne-Louise: Right now, we're online. We sell through our website predominantly, habbihabbi.com. We've also partnered with a couple of ecommerce retailers like The Tot, at Anthropologie, and Motherly as well. We're really choiceful, though, about who we work with. Of course, most of our engagement comes through our site. We have set it up to engage with our community. What we love is hearing from our customers, sharing that back with them. It's not just the transaction. We want to surprise and delight with every interaction we have a with a customer. We do all our fulfillment ourselves. We have a small team. We do our own warehouse. It's all very personal. We pack all the boxes. We always include a personalized note. The way our operations are set up are reflective of the importance of our community to us and the importance of reaching out and interacting with that group and building that community.

Zibby: I feel like you should partner with a place like Literati. They do these book subscriptions. I was recently buying a gift for somebody, a friend who's close to me who just had a baby. I gave them a book subscription from there. This would've been another great gift. Just in case people aren't remembering to go directly to your site, the more you can have an advertiser or something, places where people are already going to look for gifts for babies.

Anne-Louise: I should check them out. I think I get Instagram ads from them. [laughs]

Zibby: They're great. They do a really nice job. There are lots of book subscriptions, some for grown-ups, some for kids. I know this is kind of a toy, kind of educational. It's a hybrid. It's not just a book, but still. It's really neat. How long can a kid play with these books, do you think? What's the target age? I know you had said your kids are one to four. What's the perfect age for people to buy this book?

Hanna: It's so interesting because we have heard such different things from different customers. I think fundamentally, it's because it's a second language. Whether you're a more bilingual household or whether you're introducing it more as a minority language, second language, it changes per family. For the ones where they're like, I want my kids to be bilingual and I want to start early, we find that zero to three is when they start. Sometimes people buy it even before their kids are born. They put it on baby registry lists, things like that. They think about it as either, I'll read it with my child or they’ll play with it, but regardless, I just want more exposure and I want exposure early. They think about it the same as English exposure. Then some would say, while my kids can't tap it, I'm still focusing on English first. They think of the three to six as a very compelling period. I think no matter what, for most families, three to six is very compelling. Then we find that there are probably a smaller number but still a good chunk of people who buy it from six to nine. At that point, kids know how to use it. They're not just playing. They're tapping to read. It's a supplement as more for education. They take a class, and they think that this is a great thing to have at home to supplement what they're learning at school.

Anne-Louise: We often see, too, that because families have multiple kids that are across those ages, we'll see that they might buy a set. Their two-year-old uses it in a certain way. Their five-year-old uses it a certain way. It applies across. Our books, we have simpler books like word books that you just tap the animal name or it's numbers or colors, something very simple, all the way up through more complex sentence and story books that obviously have longer sentences and are, again, more complex for maybe some slightly more advanced kids, not necessarily age based, but more level of advanced.

Zibby: Another thing you could do -- not that you were asking my opinion. There's this company called Thatcher Wine. They do book sets where they design a logo on top of your book. Then they have their own catalogue. It would be neat to have that be one of their offerings too because you already have the spines looking so cool. They do more like spine art in a way, or sets. I'm trying to think if I have the catalogue here to show you. This is completely off topic of your book. See how they have -- I'm showing you. It's a podcast, but they're books that they string together. Then they make them look like something [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Anne-Louise: I've seen those before, actually.

Zibby: Like Little House on the Prairie, they’ll have over eight books or something. You can customize however. The way I keep coming back to this is I love how your books look visually all lined up. To have something on the shelf in a publication that people are already getting, I feel like that would be your audience too. I'm sorry, Juniper Books. His name is Thatcher Wine. Anyway, just another thought. [laughs] I'll stop.

Anne-Louise: I love it.

Zibby: How are you finding running a business and dealing with your families? How are you balancing, especially in pandemic time when we're not necessarily out in offices? I hate to use the word balance. How are you dealing with it, essentially?

Anne-Louise: When I think about my goals for next year, one of my goals for next year is stable childcare. One of the real tough things about this year has been, there's a shutdown and you don't have childcare. If it's a two-parent household and you're both trying to work from home, how do you -- there's been a ton of disruption this year, of course. Part of it is just having really great partners. We're very lucky that our husbands are great dads. They pull their weight. They're awesome. We also have to do a lot of moving and shaking around. I'll tell you all a really funny story. So we have a warehouse. We have a cardboard dumpster. On Wednesday nights, we have to leave the cardboard dumpster out. The cardboard dumpster gets full. I forgot last night. My son was home for Veteran's Day yesterday. He'd been doing the entire afternoon while I was down there. I was like, I'm just going to put the kids in the car and they're going to come with me to the warehouse. They're going to hang out for a second. I'll put the dumpster out. We'll go back home. You just have to be a little bit more flexible. It's not the same as a nine-to-five job where you go to the office and you have somebody take care of your kids. Then you come home. Then you're done. We're always adjusting and making it work. It's not always easy, but sometimes you just put the kids in the car and go put the dumpster out. [laughs]

Zibby: My mom was always throwing us in the car to do anything. Oh, we're going to the window store. I have all these memories growing up of sitting in random stores while she did other stuff. Then I feel like we got to a point where we were all so intentional with our kids' time, maximizing everything. They should go here. They should go there. In a way, it's almost like a throwback. Put your kids in fifty-seven classes and they're going to go with you to the dry cleaner, okay.

Anne-Louise: Exactly. They're not going to go to music class or going to whatever. They’ll be with you.

Zibby: I don't know about you. My kids are super happy to not be running around. They could stay home forever.

Anne-Louise: I'd say the one upshot -- Hanna and I also talk about this all the time. I feel like we do use the outdoor benefits of living in San Francisco a lot more. There are so many parks. There's outdoor activities. Then they’ve shut down all these streets in the city. We used to, maybe on the weekend we'd do a little more. We're in the house. We're doing stuff. We are out. We are outdoors. You are doing stuff. That's been a nice small benefit.

Zibby: How about you, Hanna?

Hanna: I feel every parent who's working at home has their own challenges. I am in much admiration of Anne-Louise. She is the best juggler of all things. The example she talked about last night about -- at one point, she was in LA. I was fulfilling out of my garage. There's just so many stories we could go into about this year. It was crazy. I reiterate what she had said about it's not like there's home life and there's startup life and work life. It just all melds together. When you can do certain things, then you try to make the most out of the time that you have to do that thing. For example, today, Anne-Louise dropped her kids off. She came down. This is one of the first times that we're together besides at the warehouse because we're doing a video shoot. Then she's going to change and go back to the warehouse. At one point, because I live further away, I was going to the warehouse and bringing stuff back to my garage so I wouldn't have to run to the warehouse every day to fulfill. We made a very intentional choice to do this, to take it on ourselves versus raise a bunch of money to hire tons and tons of people. As a result, it is hard to say that there is -- there is balance in a very strange way. It's more just, you make it work. You make it work. You do what you need to do. The good thing about being our own bosses is that we dictate the timeline for ourselves, and the goals. Of course, we have certain expectations for ourselves.

Sometimes we think back and we said, wow, we launched this fifteen months ago. Fifteen months ago, Anne-Louise had her second baby. We had one sample product, one hardcover book. We had a bunch of paper proofs. That's about it. We had no website, anything else. Now today, we have a warehouse. We have a meaningful product library of forty titles. We hired our first person. When we see progress, and we obviously find fulfillment in the types of products we're building, it helps the hard times where you're like, wow, I'm up at all hours talking to -- I haven't pulled an all-nighter in a long time. I pretty much pulled an all-nighter that one night when -- usually, in any normal year, we would go fly to our supplier, check out all the product before it gets approved and shipped. This year, we can't do that. We just can't get on a plane. Countries won't let us in. I was on the phone and on video at all hours of the day trying to make sure that everything was ready. Ports are -- there are so many things this year. Ports are a mess.

Anne-Louise: Ports are congested.

Hanna: Our container costs went up three times because of a combination of the trade war and fewer ships and demand and stuff like that. If we wanted to lay out COVID challenges, there are so many.

Anne-Louise: Oh, my gosh, so many.

Zibby: Wow. Do you have any parting advice to aspiring authors and entrepreneurs?

Anne-Louise: I would say you got to just do it. A lot of people have ideas or things that they want to do. They want to try it. Just go ahead and try. Know that it's not easy. You'll probably do some things wrong. You'll make mistakes. We have this philosophy about just putting one foot in front of the other. We were talking before about what's going to happen tomorrow. Just keep going. Of course, we do take time to step back and think about our longer-term goals. It's just having that stick-to-itiveness. If you're trying to write a book, start writing a page. Then write another page. If you're trying to start a company, just start figuring it out. The other thing I would say is that everyone already has a lot of resources around them. We have built this amazing network of friends and acquaintances and rediscovered friendships from ages and ages ago. People want to help you. Ask them. When we started, Hanna, we must have had dozens of conversations with anyone who would talk to us. If you pair that with the stick-to-itiveness and you keep going and you keep asking, and you keep going and you keep asking, you'll get there.

Hanna: I can't agree with that more. Everybody thinks entrepreneurship is super glamorous and it's all about the ideas. You have a brilliant idea. It's super fun. While it is super fun because Anne-Louise and I work together -- that was one of our primary goals. This needs to be fun. There are more times that people don't see that are unglamorous. For example, Anne-Louise describing going and pushing out the dumpster because they need to pick up the cardboard. If they don't pick up the cardboard, we won't have space to put the empty cardboard boxes. I think people either don't start or they don't continue because there are hard times. We were consultants by training because that's what we started in after school. We loved the job and learned so much from it. There was a lot of strategy in it because we were strategy consultants.

I think entrepreneurship has given us such a deep appreciation for how much execution matters and how execution is just -- when you build an actual business, the ideas are easy. That takes us two percent of the time. The ninety-eight percent of the time is, we know we have to unload the container. That's not hard to figure out. When a container comes, you have to unload it. Troubleshooting and problem-solving and saying, how do you realistically do it -- like finding a supplier. There are a million suppliers out there, but you have to find the right one. The detail and thought and actually visiting them and asking the right questions and seeing their line, those are the things that actually make a difference, not writing on a checklist, find a quality supplier. As Anne-Louise said -- people say, what's your background? Is it writing children's books? Is it teaching language? Well, we're moms. We hope that we can figure things out from our prior learning and jobs. We've asked people. We just basically said, if we need to find a supplier, who can we ask? We start with Google. We start with our friends. Then we just go from there and say, we can solve any challenge. That's how we approached it.

Zibby: That's a great attitude. I think that's the key to the whole thing, is believing that you can do it.

Anne-Louise: And having each other. We're very lucky that we have each other. It buoys you up. It keeps you going. I'm like, I can't figure this out, but I'm sure Hanna can figure it out. If we talk about it together, we can figure -- it just makes it better.

Hanna: Every big challenge or even any chore -- it's funny. We'll go visit warehouses or we'll go pack boxes. We used to call it packing parties even though it'd be like, oh, my god, it's post-black Friday and we need to pack all these boxes. Having each other makes any high seem higher and any low not that low because there's emotional support. I feel like that's so helpful. Otherwise, it can be lonely or frustrating or something like that.

Zibby: I get it. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much for telling everybody more about Habbi Habbi and for chatting with me about your trials and tribulations of being bridesmaids-turned co-business owners and moms and all the rest. Thank you. I can't wait to see what happens with your business. It's so cool.

Hanna: Thank you.

Anne-Louise: Thank you. Thank you for chatting with us and sharing your beautiful library.

Zibby: Thanks a lot. Take care. Buh-bye.

Anne-Louise: Thanks. Bye.

Hanna: Bye.

Suzanne Nossel, DARE TO SPEAK

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

Suzanne Nossel: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Zibby: Let's discuss your book, Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. Amazing that you wrote this. There is so much information in here. It must have taken you a really long time to write and research and get it all perfect with all the bullet points. I feel like it's almost like a -- a textbook sounds pejorative in some way, but it's the resource on free speech. That's what it is. Every lawyer should have it. Everybody should have it on their shelf in terms of any questions related to this whole topic. That wasn't really a question, just a rave.

Suzanne: Thank you so much. Moms don't have time to write books is more like it. [laughs] It was a bit of a high-wire act.

Zibby: Tell me about it. You're also a CEO of PEN America. When did you decide to write this book? How did you decide what form it should take? Then how did you get it done?

Suzanne: The ideas, I would say, were germinating for some time. In the daily work of PEN America, we confront so many free speech controversies. We began work on free speech on college campuses several years ago. Whether it was professors being disciplined for something that they said in class or controversies over messages chalked on walkways on campuses, demands for trigger warnings, arguments that the campus should become a safe space, all of that really came to the foreground. What I saw was a real generational and cultural divide in how people thought about these issues. A lot of older people are really pretty horrified that young people seem so unfamiliar with and even alienated from the concept of free speech and are ready to ask to be protected from uncomfortable ideas by their institutions even if that meant letting the institution, the university administration, have more power over them. Young people ready to do that, and older people saying, have you lost your mind? This is freedom of speech. You ought to be more resilient. If you hear ideas you don't like, you just push back. The answer to offensive speech is more speech.

I felt like the two sides were really sort of talking past each other. That was something that has guided our work on campus free speech where we really make the argument time and again through trainings and workshops and engagements on individual campuses that the drive for a more equal, inclusive, and just society, which is what a lot of young people are striving for and working towards, is compatible with robust protections for free speech. In fact, free speech can be an enabler of those social justice causes. That basic idea which undergirds the book was something that I came to feel very passionate about and feel like it needed to make its way out more widely into the world. I really conceived the book in the beginning part of 2019. It was an editor, honestly -- I had a morass of ideas. She, when I met with her, said, "Why don't you make it into a set of principles?" The moment she said that, suddenly something clicked. I felt like, okay, I could imagine doing that. I could see how that seems like a manageable task, whereas wrestling to the ground all these complex issues without a clear structure felt a bit overwhelming. That's how I started.

Zibby: Wow. Then what happened? How long did it take to write it? How did you structure it and fit it into the rest of your life?

Suzanne: It was hard. One really important thing was I hired two really smart research assistants. It was a process to find them. I had to test out a lot of people. I knew, sort of, what I wanted the twenty chapters to be. I had ideas for each one, but I needed them to pull examples of different kinds of phenomena and to look through the secondary literature. I put them to work. They helped by creating memos. Then I took five weeks off last summer. My job is really busy and demanding. There's a lot of evening work and weekend work. I knew I needed a concentrated block of time. My kids were at camp, which also really helped. I was pretty free and clear. I worked in the Performing Arts Library on the Upper West Side. I would just force myself to be there when it opened. I basically had to rough out a chapter each day. It was really pretty grueling. By the end of that five weeks I kind of had a skeleton of the whole thing. Then it was months of revisions and back and forth and engaging with different experts who I wanted to review different parts of the manuscript. The psychological hurdle of climbing the mountain was really last summer.

Zibby: Tell me also a little more about your amazing background. You worked within the White House for the UN. You have done everything, Harvard -- two Harvards, right? You went to undergrad and the law school. This is an amazing career trajectory that you've had. Now it's ended -- not ended. Now we're at the steppingstone of your career where there's a book and you're leading this great company helping enhance speech and thought throughout the world, really. Tell me a little about, when you were a kid, did you think this is what you wanted to do? When did you know this is sort of the path you wanted to be on? How did you start out? How did you end up here?

Suzanne: I was always sort of interested in human rights issues, international affairs. As a young child, I was involved in the movement to free Soviet Jews who were stuck under that authoritarian government, couldn't practice their religion, weren’t allowed to emigrate. There was big movement here in the US to support them. My family, at one point, traveled over to meet with some of those, they were called refuseniks. I think that made a big impression on me. My parents were also from South Africa. They grew up in apartheid South Africa. I had a lot of relatives in South Africa who we would visit growing up. My parents were not terribly political. For me, it was jarring growing up in the liberal suburbs of New York and then going to visit what was still apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and seeing segregated buses and beaches and water fountains and trying to make sense of that. Actually, after college, it was in the beginning of the opening up in South Africa, and I spent two years working in Johannesburg. Most of the time, it was as part of an effort to combat political violence in the townships during the transition. It was working with all the different political parties, the police, the churches, the businesses, civics unions. That was amazing and really inspired the rest of my career in human rights and international affairs. Being part of that momentous transition and how it teetered on the precipice of erupting into explosive violence but managed to push it through relatively peaceful and just being very close to the action with that, which was the luck of being in the right place at the right time, I would say kindled a fire that sort of kept me going my whole career.

Zibby: Wow. That's a very unique way. I remember in fifth grade we all had these political prisoner bracelets. Do you know what I mean? They were copper. Everybody had a name. My guy's name was David something or other. I wore it around my wrist for like a year because it was such a big thing. It was just the issue of the time. It was captivating everybody's consciousness then, for people who might not have lived through that.

Suzanne: It was a great movement. Those bracelets, I remember as well. They really did find ways to engage kids and people from all walks of life and make -- I don't know if you ever did the marches that they would do down Fifth Avenue to [indiscernible] Plaza at the UN. Those were really inspiring. It was the same feeling you have if you go out on the streets to protest today as part of the Women's March or the Black Lives Matter protests, that energy. You're all together. You're chanting. It's a huge release. Getting a little flavor of that for a kid, for some people, and I think I'm one of them, ends up being something very powerful that you are drawn to try to come back to at different points in your life.

Zibby: As you navigated through your career decisions, was there any one point that you feel like looking back led you to where you are? Is there any job you took or anything where there were two forks in the road and you went this way and that's how you ended up here and how you ended up at a nonprofit at this stage?

Suzanne: I had a corporate career. I was at McKinsey and then Bertelsmann Media and The Wall Street Journal and learned a lot. I really enjoyed it. I still have friends and colleagues from each of those stages who I've remained close with. Then there was a certain point where, in my head, I was doing that to gain skills that I thought I ultimately wanted to use in another arena, in something that was more human rights or public service oriented. There was kind of a turning point where I left The Wall Street Journal and went to Human Rights Watch to become the COO which was really using my management skills. It was kind of a breaking point to decide, if I'm saying this is why I've taken the time to be in the private sector and it's for another purpose, I need to make good on that. If I stay here too long, that might really fall away. I might end up with a very different career than what I thought I was embarking on.

Zibby: How did your having kids fit into any of this?

Suzanne: I have two kids who are teenagers. It's been amazing but also challenging. When I had my son, I was actually fired when I was on maternity leave. It was a complete shock and really unsettling. I was very career oriented. Then suddenly, there I was back at home. I thought my maternity leave was going to end after three months. It went on for a while. I had to find a new job. I experienced firsthand these very real conflicts. My boss was sort of forthright. He was like, "You weren’t here, and so we reconfigured this and that." I said, "Would this have happened if I hadn’t gone on maternity leave?" He's like, "Oh, no, definitely not. You were doing a great job." That was quite eye-opening. Then I would say the other piece that was a little unusual was during the first term of the Obama administration. My kids were very young. My son was in kindergarten. My daughter had just started nursery school. I was offered a position. I wanted to join the administration. I was hoping to be placed at the UN in New York.

Instead, I was offered a position in Washington, and so I commuted for a year when the kids were very little. That was very tough. I was constantly coming and going. It was a lot for my husband to deal with. We were very lucky that we had a great nanny. We also had a neighbor downstairs who conveniently was willing to be a helper in the early mornings to get the kids off to school at seven AM. That was kind of miraculous. Then I did work a day or two from New York at the end of the week. It was a real high-wire act that I wouldn't necessarily recommend anyone do. It was something that was very important to me. Then after that year, my husband got a fellowship in Washington, so the family moved to Washington. We spent a wonderful year there. It's tough because the years when you're career-building coincide very often with the years when your kids are young. There can be some real challenges and dilemmas. I think a lot of women would not have ever contemplated commuting with kids so young. We made it work, but it wasn't easy.

Zibby: Wow. Your ending up at PEN, did any of it have to do with your love of books? Do you love books? If so, what do you love to read?

Suzanne: I do. I'm a huge reader. I actually read mostly nonfiction. I like historical biography. I like to read about US foreign policy. I love diplomatic memoirs. My husband is a historian. He reviews a lot of books. We have a constant flow of new books into the house. In that sense, it was very natural for me. I knew a lot of writers. I felt like I had some connection to their concerns and the debates that take place within the literary and intellectual community. What I hadn’t really done is worked with writers. In my job, especially with our board, I work very closely with writers. It's been a great pleasure because they're just such interesting people. I've been really fortunate with all of our board leadership that they’ve been wonderful to work with and so insightful and fun. Every lunch and meeting and encounter is a little bit richer and more unpredictable than what you might have with somebody who is a human rights expert or a policy expert.

Zibby: What are you going to read tonight? Do you read before bed? When do you read?

Suzanne: We're talking the day before the election, so it may be a little hard to peel myself away from the -- I'm actually trying to get through Nick Lemann's article in the New Yorker about what's next for the republican party because I'm very curious about that. That's what's on my nightstand right now.

Zibby: Nice. Yes, this will come out later, but as we're recording, it's the day before the election. I almost can't even believe that we're finally here. I felt like it would almost never come. It was like, we're only eighty-three days away or something. I'm like, what? Now here we are.

Suzanne: By the time this comes out, we will know a lot more about the future of this country.

Zibby: Perhaps, or perhaps not. Who knows? These things sometimes drag on. We'll see what happens. We'll see. So what's coming next for you? What are you looking forward to in this crazy time of life that we're all living through without planning being immediately accessible to us all?

Suzanne: For us, organizationally, it will be a significant pivot no matter how the election comes out. Having worked on free expression for many years and then over the last four years, an intensification of our work here in the US because of these divisions over campus free speech, attacks on press freedom, this challenge to the truth -- we've been doing a lot of work over the last few months on the rise in disinformation and how to inoculate people through disinformation-defense training and really spreading the word about what to anticipate with this election so that people are less vulnerable to conspiracy theories. That's been a huge focus. All of that work will continue in different ways. It's figuring out what the new paradigm is going to be like. I feel very certain that the challenges that have led up to the last four years and that we've lived through over the last four years do not evaporate no matter what happens tomorrow. I think some of the ways in which we need to engage must evolve.

We've done a lot of work at PEN America across the country really mobilizing over the last four years recognizing it's just not enough to do this work in New York or Washington or Los Angeles. We have chapters in Detroit; Dallas; Austin; Birmingham; Greensboro, North Carolina. Talking with those people about how we mend this fractured society, how we can use the power of the written word, of great literature, the stature of writers to commence a process of coming together, I'm hoping a lot of people feel that's necessary. That's going to be a big focus for us over the next few months. Then there's just also the human level of getting through the pandemic. I live in New York City. We lived through this in a very tough way in the spring. I know you've been very hard hit personally. I think we're tired of it, but we're also extremely leery and really thinking through how we sustain ourselves, and the human connections in particular. I've realized I'm an extrovert and I really miss seeing people. This has been hard for me. I need to probably come up with a plan for how to get through the winter. The summer was a lot better with ways of being together out of doors.

Zibby: I'm a little nervous about the winter coming. These first cold days that we've had are really worrying me. No kid playdates. How do you take a walk? and all these things that are the keys to my sanity. I guess we'll just have to see, particularly here. Who knows? Lots of question marks. I have to say, I was so lucky to have been invited to the PEN gala last year back when galas were a thing. I felt like a kid in a candy store because everywhere you turned you were bumping into amazing authors. I didn't even recognize, I'm sure, three quarters of them, which is the crazy thing about authors. You can sit and read for days or weeks, somebody's work, and then pass them crossing the street and not even realize. It was so amazing to just be in that environment. To have so many authors support an organization is really unique and amazing. Then you were so nice to let me cohost the Brit Bennett PEN America Virtual Authors' Night. I'm excited to do more of those. PEN's just been this nice bright light in all the darkness that we have these days.

Suzanne: It's nice to hear you say that. We obviously can't do the huge gala with all the finery of the Natural History Museum this year. It's sad because it's a great party. It's a lot of people's favorite party of the year. We really miss it. We're doing a virtual version that will be at the beginning of December. We've got Patti Smith. Actually, Bono is coming. Not entirely public, but I'll let your audience in on the secret in the hope that that news will be out by the time this podcast is released. We just announced last week we're giving an award to Darnella Frazier who is the seventeen-year-old girl who picked up her cell phone camera and recorded the murder of George Floyd and then posted it on her Facebook. The rest really is history. She performed that catalytic act. We have an award that every year goes to recognize somebody's courage in the exercise of free expression. She just felt to us like a perfect recipient. We're also giving that award -- we have two recipients this year. The other is Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch who was the US Ambassador to Ukraine who faced this withering scorn from the White House when she spoke up about interference with US policy on Ukraine.

Two very powerful women, totally different. We're extremely excited to recognize them. Darnella in particular has not really spoken publicly about this. It's going to be, nonetheless, a special event. I also invite your listeners to check out -- you did that wonderful event with Brit Bennett. We have many other Authors' Evenings that are these intimate, small-scale, really interactive give and takes. It's not like your typical webinar when, as an audience member, you're just in receive mode. Maybe you're lucky enough to put a question in the chat. You can actually, with our events, have a bit of a dialogue with a famous author, whoever it may be. We had Bob Woodward. We've got Susan Glasser and Peter Baker. We're going to do one with Isabel Wilkerson. I encourage people to check out our website and join us for these events. They're really a ball for book lovers at this time when so many of the book parties and readings and things that we normally enjoy are off-limits.

Zibby: If you need a moderator for Isabel Wilkerson, if that's available, let me know. [laughs] I'm kidding. Anyway, congratulations on your book, Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. This is really fantastic. I am wearing red to match your cover today.

Suzanne: Thank you so much. I appreciate the color coordination. It's great to see you.

Zibby: Great to see you too.

Suzanne: Happy election day. Happy winter arriving. I feel for you. I share the same feelings about the walks and the ways that we've stayed sane, but we'll find some new ones. It's going to work out. We'll be okay.

Zibby: Lots of hot chocolate.

Suzanne: Yes. We're attracted to the same creature comforts, it sounds like.

Zibby: Exactly, yes. Bye, Suzanne. Thanks so much.

Suzanne: Thanks a lot. Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Claire Nicogossian, MAMA, YOU ARE ENOUGH

Zibby Owens: Hi. Happy Monday. Actually, I don't like when people say happy Monday. I don't know why I said that. Anyway, welcome back. I hope you guys had a great weekend. This is the second week of my July Book Blast. Get excited. The first day is Advice Monday. It's assorted advice all day for this Monday. I hope you enjoy it. Stay tuned. All week we're going to have kid's books and beach reads, self-help and more. We're kicking it off with Advice Monday. Stay tuned.

Dr. Claire Nicogossian is the author of Mama, You Are Enough: How to Create Calm, Joy, and Confidence Within the Chaos of Motherhood. As soon as I heard the title, I knew I had to pick up this book as soon as possible. Originally from Washington, DC, Dr. Claire Nicogossian completed her undergrad degree in psychology and early education, and her master’s degree in counseling from Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. She then became a psychologist and got her doctorate in clinical psychology at the American School of Professional Psychology, also in Virginia. She completed an internship at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, and then had fraternal twin girls and moved to Rhode Island. Now she's there, returned to clinical work, and completing her post-doctoral fellowship at RICBT in North Kingstown. She has worked in a variety of clinical settings including the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, County Mental Health Center, and the Catholic University Counseling Center. She also works in private practice. Dr. Claire is passionate about well-being and self-care for individuals with a focus on parental well-being and writes about these topics at MomsWellBeing.com, Mothering.com, The Today Show Community Parenting Team, and at her self-help column, Ask Dr. Claire. You can also listen to her podcast, "In-Session with Dr. Claire."

Hi, Claire. I'm sorry I'm late. How are you?

Claire Nicogossian: I'm good. No apologies needed. Two minutes still feels like on time.

Zibby: I was actually taking the quiz on your website.

Claire: That's awesome.

Zibby: I was like, how much longer could this be? [laughs]

Claire: It is long. You know what? I appreciate that because I created that a couple years ago. Now I realize, who has time for all those questions?

Zibby: No, no, no. It was good. I had time. I just didn't have time right now. I should've done it an hour ago before I was in the middle of doing a podcast. I was like, oh, how fun is this? I'll never pass up a quiz.

Claire: I love it. It's fun. I love to do that because it's almost a baseline of what I would do when I'm working with clients. I feel like that information's so important and powerful for people if they can start with their physical health and they can go to a primary care physician or they can go to their counselor and have a nice foundation to start from.

Zibby: That awesome. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Can you tell me more about your book? which of course I left over behind me. I have it. [laughs] Tell listeners about your book and what it's about and what inspired you to write it.

Claire: Thank you so much for having me on. So generous what you're doing for authors, so thank you so much, and what you have done. I'm a mother of four daughters. I am also a clinical psychologist. When I became a mother with all this education, these advanced degrees, a master's and a doctorate, those first couple months, that first year of motherhood, I said, oh, my goodness, there's so many things I'm feeling. There's so many things I'm going through. I've done as much education you can in mental health. How come we're not talking about these things? I would go to moms' groups. At the time, I was in this twins group. I just wanted to talk about real emotions. I love my daughters, I love being a mom, but is anybody else bored? Is anybody else frustrated? Does anybody else feel so angry from your sleep deprivation or frustrated with your partner or husband because you can't get them on the same page? It was like this wall would go up. It was taboo to talk about. That became a lot of the inspiration for the book, is to talk about things that us moms are going through that I hear about in my profession. Moms would come in. I work with a lot of news mom, postpartum, second-time moms, or people who are going through parenting issues and just need some support.

Whenever they want to talk about motherhood or fatherhood, they always start with a little disclaimer. I love my children so much, but I need to tell you they're driving me crazy. I'm overwhelmed. I feel ineffective parenting them. How come it seemed so easy with child number one, but now child number two, I don't want to be around? I started hearing these narratives and experiences from moms and just giving them space to talk about it. When we do that, they can change. They can look at themselves and not go to this place of judgement. In a nutshell, that's what the book is about. It's about the emotions that all of us mothers experience. I call them the shadow emotions. I do so intentionally, inspired by Carl Yung who talks about going to those places within ourselves so we know where our pain is so we can have a greater understanding and awareness. That was the framework of what I wanted to do. I don't want to call emotions negative. When they're negative, we start judging ourselves. I shouldn't feel that. Well, we are feeling it. Either you're pushing it down, you're ignoring it, you're denying it, or it's coming out in another way. If I can give space to those emotions, anger, sadness, disgust, embarrassment, shame, fear, and worry, and let's call them shadow emotions, then we become curious about it.

Zibby: This is like in Inside Out, the movie. Have your kids seen that? We have the books. Each one of the books is shame, disgust, joy. Just throwing that out. [laughs]

Claire: It's true. I remember that movie coming out when this book was in process. I thought, we have to spell it out for ourselves too. It doesn't have to be so complicated.

Zibby: What tips can you give to moms who are feeling this way who can't maybe have a session with you? Although, I feel like I want to sign up for how you scaled your services. What are some encouraging things or tips that you can share?

Claire: The first thing that I think is important for moms is don't be afraid to allow yourself to feel. Feel without judging. Just be curious. I live in Rhode Island. The analogy I always use in therapy is when you're at the beach, you look at waves come in and out. You're not really judging them. You're just observing them. Oh, that's a heavy surf. That's a light wave. Wow, look, it's a rough surf today, or super calm. If we start looking at our inner world like that, then we get out of that shame and judgment. That's number one. Then number two, it's so important to physically take care of yourself. It was interesting. When I was writing the book, I went to a conference. I was talking to another parenting author. I said, "How did you make a break into having your book published?" The advice I was given was, "Wait until your kids are older to publish this book." I remember responding to myself -- I was tired. I was exhausted. I feel like I work all the time, but it brings me so much joy to write. You lose the essence if you're away from the moment of parenting to look back on it. I feel like that's the voice that I really bring, is that I'm in it right now. I'm doing the distant learning. I call it a COVID meltdown every afternoon. I had one right before I turned this on to meet with you.

Zibby: I'm sorry.

Claire: Oh, no, it's just life. Someone's always overwhelmed. The step is just to allow yourself to feel, to take care of your physical health, to get the sleep. As exhausted as you may be, try to know your amount of sleep you need. When you sleep and are rested, then you can access your coping skills. Your thoughts feel a little clearer. The third thing I think is so important, with everyone at home right now, and I'm sure listeners can relate and we're starting to reopen the world a little bit, but there's not a lot of alone time for parents. How do you get that self-care when you're with your kids now constantly in all these different roles? What I say to parents, and moms especially, is watch the voices in your head. How are you talking to yourself? Be kind just like you'd talk to a friend. Those are some of the quick tips that I always like to remind moms to do. Also, don't get into this mindset that you have to be productive all the time. I think that's the piece that can be really overwhelming. The way I've been framing this time in the world is that if you lost a loved one, you'd allow yourself to grieve. You would scale back and have to just see it day by day. I'm doing a lot of that in sessions with clients and reminding myself that we're all grieving in our own way in different intensities. Let go of that need to be productive. Maybe the most accomplished thing you can do is feed your family and get outside for a nice walk.

Zibby: It's actually easier for me to do six podcasts in a day than it is to go on a walk. [laughs] I know I should be going on walks. Everybody's going on walks. Why am I not going on walks?

Claire: It's hard. Yesterday, I was in between a bunch of sessions. Then I had to teach in the afternoon. It just felt so suffocating being in the house. I took my oldest girls, teenagers, they're fraternal twins, I said, "Let's just go for a quick walk." I came back, and I felt better. Sometimes I think it's fun to be in that mode of just recording or being productive, and then other times...

Zibby: How old are all your girls?

Claire: My oldest are fraternal twins. They're seventeen and a half. They're finishing their junior year. I have a soon-to-be seventh grader, she twelve, and then a soon-to-be fifth grader. She's ten.

Zibby: We have a similar spread. Actually, it's very similar because I have fraternal twins also who are about to be thirteen next week. Then I have an almost-seven-year-old and a five-and-a-half-year-old.

Claire: Very similar.

Zibby: I'll be where you are in a couple years.

Claire: It's amazing. It's a lot to juggle all those different developmental stages, but I think it's such a joy.

Zibby: When you were saying about the surf coming in and watching the weather, this is a big wave and now it's a storm, I'm like, yeah, but I feel like I'm watching -- and I'll include my husband. As adorable as he is, everybody has moods. I'll include my own moods. I have tons of moods. So that's all six of us with different tides. We're all crashing on the beach in different ways on different days. It's a lot harder to manage all of our emotions. If someone's having a bad day and they're having a big storm and you don't even know why and it makes no sense because the Hatchimal didn't open or whatever it is and the other person's upset because of something bigger like some friends such-and-such, then you have to manage all of it as the mom, or some dads too, I'm sure. How do you deal with all of it at once?

Claire: It's so true. That's the human part of it. We can have these ideals. Then what does that look like? as you just described. What we do in our family, and I think I've coached the girls pretty well, sometimes it's not effective, but I always say you have a right to every feeling, but you don't have a right to take it out on someone. That's a message I say. Oh, you seem pretty angry. You're not being kind with your words. Do you need a break? I'll model that. Girls, I am so tired. I am feeling really sad. I'm just a little quieter tonight. It's about labeling, identifying, and then making that conscious effort. How are we going to treat each other right now? And giving them permission to go take a break. I'm not being disrespectful. For example, one of the girls, you're yelling and you're not being nice to your sister. I'm wondering what we can do about that. What do you need? And giving her permission to go to her room and just take care of herself instead of, why are you feeling that way? Why are you being so mean to your sister? You're the older one. Okay, we need to pause and take a break. It's not kind right now. That's this message that I repeat. Some days it's more effective than others. Like I said, I had a meltdown right before we started, but that's life.

Zibby: I feel like with so much time with the kids now especially, as I know all of us are home with the kids, I keep trying different things emotionally and just seeing, okay, I'm going to try this. Today I'm in the mindset where I can try this tool that I've read about. Also, just not being able to hide my own emotions, as I'm sure with you, here we are. I can't say I'll be back in twenty minutes, not that I used to do that so often, but there's just no hiding it. If I'm crying, they're seeing me crying. I might as well say, you know, moms get sad too.

Claire: Exactly. I think that's a beautiful thing you do, is to normalize that feelings happen. When feelings are pushed away, repressed, ignored, judged, then you feel shame for feeling them. It's okay for parents, and especially moms right now -- moms are carrying the mental load of this pandemic. That's what we're seeing. Moms are so overwhelmed. That's not because they're ineffective. That's not because they're doing something wrong. It's because what we're living through. It's constant. It's okay to have those feelings. It's just, what are you going to do about that? The book, it was interesting, the way I organized it is looking over those five big emotions that we talked about earlier and then breaking them down kind of on a continuum. A mom can pick up the book and say, today I'm feeling irritable and I'm feeling frustrated. She can go to this section in the book and read about it. What does that look like in motherhood? What are some of those thoughts she may be saying to herself?

Then I give tools and instructions on -- number one, in this book you'll see that my writing is all about compassion, all about taking care of what's going on inside and healing, whatever that may be. The message is received going up from a partner, from society. She can see, okay, I can manage my thoughts. If I'm saying this, here's a healthy way to say that. Here's moving from the shadow into thriving. There's the cognitive piece. Then there's steps that she can do, whether it be reaching for support, journaling, talking to a counselor. I have a little meditation at the end called The Thriving Mama Reflection, just an encouraging way to be compassionate about yourself when you feel it. It's not a book that I intended for moms to read front to cover. It's almost like a resource. If I'm in a moment and I want to just get in the car and go but there's nowhere to go, can I just label the emotion I'm feeling and read about it? That was my goal.

Zibby: That's awesome. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors now that you have a book out in the world?

Claire: I appreciate that question so much. If you are an aspiring writer and writing, one, write as often as you can. Two, don't wait for someone to give you permission to write. Just write. Then take risks. Continue to have that grit. My book, it was interesting. What you'll see is this lovely cover and lovely message inside. What readers and listeners may not know is that it was rejected I think twenty-four times over the course of four years. I have a wonderful literary agent, Regina Brooks, at Serendipity Literary Agency. She believed in me. That really helped. I had her in my corner. The messages we always received was, the world's not ready for a book this honest. She held fast that hope for me, as did my husband and friends and children and parents. That gave me the courage because it felt worse to give up on writing than not to write. For me, I just kept on believing and regrouping. Those rejections were hard. There was one moment at the dinner table in 2018. We had come back from a trip to California visiting family. I'd gotten my last rejection. I sat at that table with my husband and the girls. I said, "I think it's time to give up writing." Then I sat with it. Then of course, how authors/writers write, then they get an idea. They're like, oh, my goodness, I want to ignore that idea and not write. I looked at my husband, I said, "You got to take the kids for four hours. I literally have to write something. I can't not write it." That was an excerpt that I submitted to Motherly that Diana Spalding said, "Claire, I love this so much. Can I put it in our Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama?" That felt like the universe was like, okay Claire, I know you wanted to give up, but you kept going. For me, it was just getting quiet and listening as a writer in spite of the rejections, if that makes sense.

Zibby: Of course it does. That's awesome. That's such an inspiring story. You hear it. It takes a lot to get it published. Hearing your story, rejection hurts. There's so many times when, for every book, think of all the authors who did give up and they're not out there, the books that weren’t.

Claire: The books that weren’t, that's the piece too, what I would say to any aspiring author is your voice is what makes you the writer. Don't try to be like anybody else's voice. Some of the feedback we received is, "Oh, my gosh. We'll buy Claire's book, but we think it's too heavy. We'd rather it be funnier." I remember having these conversations with my literary agent, Regina. She's like, "Claire, you got to be true to who you are. You can't be funnier. You can't be indignant. You are you, and this is your voice." That's the other piece. Be open to feedback, but don't give up who you are as a writer and your voice.

Zibby: That's great advice. Thank you so much. I'm glad we connected. I'm going to go back now and read all of the results of my quiz from your website, Dr. Claire Nicogossian. Thank you. Thank you for all your tips. Thanks for helping so many moms out there.

Claire: Thank you, Zibby. I appreciate talking to you today. This was a lot of fun.

Zibby: Thanks. I hope the COVID meltdown pre-our call has been resolved by the time you walk out of the room. [laughs]

Claire: Thank you. I'm optimistic. Have a great one.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Claire: Bye.

Zibby: I hope you enjoyed this episode of Advice Monday on the July Book Blast. I know that some of these were from the quarantine and some might seem old even though they’ve just come out. I had to get them out in one big sweep. I hope that you've gotten some useful life tips as you've listened today.

Celeste Ng, LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE

Little Fires Everywhere

By Celeste Ng

Buy on Amazon