Award-winning writer, professor, and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki joins Zibby to discuss her latest novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness. The two talk about capturing the imagination of children's books for adults, how social norms in every culture determine where the line is drawn between creativity and mental illness, and why Ruth sees books as living things.
Zibby is joined by Kelly Oriard and Callie Christensen, the two creators of Slumberkins, as well as one of her sons and all of his Slumberkins. Kelly and Callie talk with Zibby about how they apply their backgrounds in education and family therapy to create products that help teach important lessons in a fun and friendly way. They also share how they came up with the idea for Camp Slumberkins a year ago and when they knew self-publishing was the right path for them. Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books has teamed up with Camp Slumberkins! Use code CAMPZIBBY for 15% off until July 31st!!
"It doesn't take a psychiatrist to see what Shakespeare has done there: he's allowed his son to live." Novelist Maggie O'Farrell has been fascinated by Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, since she was in high school and decided it was time for the rest of the world to learn of his story. Maggie tells Zibby about the years of research that went into weaving a fictionalized account of how the Shakespeares handled the grief of losing a child, and encourages listeners to reread Hamlet with fresh eyes.
James Beard Award-winning chef Kwame Onwuachi opens up to Zibby about the events that shaped his life and went into his memoir, Notes from a Young Black Chef. He shares how he manages to maintain his positive mindset every day, why his approach to food, fashion, and nail polish is all the same, and the responsibility he feels to share his unique story with the world.
Zibby is joined by Carol Orange to talk about her debut novel, A Discerning Eye, and the rich art history at its core. The pair discuss Carol's career shift from the art world to the literary, their shared appreciation for the study of art history, and the Gardner Museum robbery that inspired this book.
Zibby interviewed literary legend Joyce Carol Oates as part of Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center's 'Women on the Move' series. Their recorded conversation, released here as a podcast, touches on Oates's two newest releases, American Melancholy and The (Other) You, as well as how she has approached writing during the pandemic.
IT’S PUB DAY FOR ZIBBY’S ANTHOLOGY! In honor of the big day, we’re releasing a special episode in which Zibby is interviewed…by her four kids! This is one episode you won't want to miss (and don’t forget to pick up your copy of Moms Don’t Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology, out TODAY!). All proceeds go to the Susan Felice Owens Program for COVID-19 Vaccine Research. Join for her launch party and fundraiser tonight at 7 pm EST. More info here!
In quarantine, all my old body insecurities came roaring back.
By Zibby Owens
The only reason I bought a scale recently was for my younger childrens’ telemedicine check-ups with their pediatrician. Before I could prop the kids up on my desk and have them “open wide” into my desktop’s camera, I would need to record their height and weight to have on hand for the appointments. It seemed simple enough. I ordered the same type of old-fashioned, floor-model scale that looked exactly like the one I had in high school and that followed me for 20 years afterwards.
The scale and I have had a fraught relationship since I was nine years old. That was when, according to my mother, I told her I was upset about how much larger my thighs were than all the other girls’ at school with their string bean legs. Sitting at the breakfast table in her bathrobe, smoking a Vantage Ultra and eating half a grapefruit before heading off to Gilda’s exercise class, this 5’ 2”, petite, toned woman sprung into action. She knew just how to fix this problem.
She bestowed upon me her treasured, dog-eared copy of the book Calories and Carbohydrates and taught me how to scan the tiny number lines for each food. I diligently measured half a cup of orange juice over the kitchen sink in my uniform jumper each morning before writing down the calories and then heading off to fourth grade. I remember rushing into my little brother’s room one night when my mom was tucking him in and proudly announcing that I had two pieces of great news: I had swallowed my first pill (something for my allergies) and I had successfully stayed under 1,200 calories for the day.
The real test, of course, was seeing if the scale had gone down. I would stand in my mother’s bathroom once a week, which smelled like Pond’s cold cream and Nivea lotion, and step on her doctor’s scale. I’d nudge the black markers right or left until the pendulum balanced and stopped wavering up and down. I always wanted to push it farther and father left. Nevermind that I was still growing. I wanted to fit in with my waif-like friends. I wanted my body to look like theirs; perhaps then I would be completely accepted.
For the next 30 years, I tried every diet and exercise fad imaginable while ricocheting up and down 5, 10, 15, or 20 pounds, all within a tight range like a ping-pong ball going back and forth over the net of a faded table. Atkins. Step aerobics. Carbohydrate Addicts. Tae bo. A clinic on 63rd Street that gave me “vitamins.” HIIT. It was never enough. If only I could lose a few pounds, I could remove the shackle of shame I felt was constantly wrapped around my neck like a Parisian woman’s scarf. I was embarrassed by the outward display of my inner mess. I wanted to at least look like I had it all together when inside I was worried, anxious, and trying to find my place in the world.
After business school in 2003, I became a Weight Watchers addict and adhered so strictly to the program that I lost 30 pounds and even became a Leader, running meetings all over New York City to spread the gospel. I counted points and wrote down every food I ate for almost ten years, through three pregnancies and four kids. I couldn’t get over the joy I felt that there actually was a solution! Something that worked. I couldn’t control the chaos of having twins. I couldn’t absorb the shock of going from being an overachiever to spending my days on the playroom floor, longing for the time when I could just get to sleep again. But losing weight gave me a quantifiable goal. Something for me. Something to aspire to when grades and salary and all other external measures of success suddenly evaporated.
Yet losing all that weight wasn’t good for me physically; my hair started falling out, I stopped getting my period, and I was always cold. One doctor I consulted even said, “Your body just isn’t made to be this skinny, and that’s okay.” In retrospect, trying to control my intake and keep my body looking its best was the way I tried to cope as my first marriage fell apart and I felt powerless to save it. The inner turmoil was on full display. I ate my feelings. I structured my diet because I could control that more than I could control my life. I ate in secret to cope with the things that went on in my home that I didn’t discuss.
At some point during the last five years, after my divorce and in my new relationship with Kyle, who became my husband, I made a delicate peace with my body and started focusing on work instead. I stopped weighing myself unless my zippers strained as I yanked them up and I knew I had to regroup. I accepted that to eat the way I wanted without expending an inordinate amount of energy “watching it,” I would be three or four sizes larger than my goal weight.
And then the pandemic hit. I felt enormously lucky to be healthy and financially secure when so many others were suffering from the start. My first thoughts were more about food scarcity and the nation’s food supply system than my jeans. I was so scared and nervous as we hunkered down that I couldn’t eat that much. I was in survival mode. I threw my energy into helping buoy the literary community when I wasn’t taking care of my four kids and cleaning the house. For exercise, my teen daughter asked me to do a YouTube “summer shred” workout program with her. I’ll do anything for her, even crunches and burpees, so we did it daily.
And then the scale arrived.
I took it out of the box and placed it on my cold bathroom floor. My little guy hopped right on.
“Mom, get on with me!” he said excitedly. “Come on!”
I hadn’t been on a scale in months, but I had a number in mind (the high end of my ping-pong range) that I fully expected to see.
I got on the scale with my son and quickly did the math. Wait, that couldn’t be right.
“Honey, let me try this alone for a second, okay?”
I gasped.
I stared down at a number that was ten pounds higher than I expected. A number I’d only seen while pregnant. And here I thought I’d lost weight!
All the old demons came racing out, taunting me. You’re fat! You’re lazy! You’re pathetic! You’re out of control! How could you! The number was far above my “before” weight when I started Weight Watchers almost 20 years ago.
I backed away from the scale and ushered my son out of the suddenly toxic bathroom.
That night, I began aggressively stuffing my face with food, perversely punishing myself with the same weapon that had gotten me into this mess. I started obsessing about my weight, the foods I was eating, what I “should” and “shouldn’t” consume, scarfing down cookie after cookie at night when everyone else in the house was finally sleeping.
Naturally, several days later, my clothes felt tight for the first time in months.
I was falling back into my self-punishing habits, like an armchair sliding back into the well-worn depressions in the carpet after being temporarily pushed aside. I almost couldn’t believe it: after all these years, the same feelings were still there, ever-present.
I can see now that I was reaching for my telltale crutch, the one I routinely steadied myself with in times of stress and uncertainty. And what is a pandemic if not a time of extreme stress and uncertainty? I was trying to find that elusive sense of control, that hook to tether myself to, and then punishing myself when I couldn’t pull it off.
It was a sobering reminder that achieving balance is a lifelong journey with plenty of backslides along the way.
Soon after, the craziness, busyness, and fear of day-to-day Covid life overtook me again. (What about camp?! A new disease affecting children?!? Should we move?) But this time, I handled things a bit differently.
My food rumination waned: I started to plan. I got caught up in life again, in helping my kids and my community, in looking outward.
Delia: I've written poetry all my life. I'm not saying I'm good at it at all. Words just come to my mind a lot. I feel a lot when I write poetry. I feel that the words themselves can be so inspiring to readers. Most people who love good prose and literature, even if they don't have time or the inclination to read poetry, when they do read a verse, they feel a lot. That was the number one thing I wanted about this book. I wanted people to feel. Poetry makes you feel. You can get your thoughts into a few words. You can do it in a way that it’s like putting a drug straight into your bloodstream. You have to read a whole novel sometimes to feel certain things and get the point. A poem can say so much in a few words. That's a reason it’s so powerful.
Susan: The Library Book is a nonfiction book that has several narrative threads. On one level, it was a book in which I wanted to explore what the daily life of a library was all about. I was focusing on the Los Angeles Public Library, the main branch downtown. I had that in mind when I discovered, quite unexpectedly, that the LA Central Library was the site of the largest library fire in American history. This took place in 1986. It was an arson fire that destroyed 400,000 books. It damaged 700,000 books. It closed the library for seven years. What had begun as this more general curiosity about, what is the daily life of a library like? became a story about the near-death and rebirth of a library and an investigation into who did it and why. At the bottom of that as well, to add one more thread, was the thing that probably got me interested to begin with. I have an incredibly emotional response to libraries. I feel like it isn't entirely rational or logical. It’s some feeling that's much bigger and deeper and more touching than just saying it’s a building with books in it. There's something about libraries that feel really emotional. I don't think I'm alone in that feeling. The book also was an attempt to explore that. Why do we feel so attached and connected to libraries? Why does the idea of one burning down feel so deeply distressing?
Zibby: I lost my college roommate and best friend, Stacey Sanders, on 9/11. I didn’t just lose her. We all did. I’ve written often about Stace and how her loss affected my life and continues to do so now, 18 years later. I'm releasing a dedicated podcast episode today of me reading three essays I’ve written about Stacey, starting with one I wrote just two weeks after she died for my business school newspaper, one from Redbook, and one that Modern Loss published today.
Rex: When I first started writing it, I had been dabbling in writing short stories about my childhood. I'd write a chapter. Then I'd basically have a panic attack. I was like, I can't keep writing this. Everyone kept saying we need important stories and stories that can help kids live a better life or have a different experience or have hope. When someone said the word hope, I was like, god, I had so little hope as a kid. I wanted to write something that gave hope and showed kids you can live through bad things. You can still come out the other side and be better.
Emily: Cribsheet is about parenting. It’s about using evidence to make parenting choices. It’s about breastfeeding and vaccinations and sleep training and co-sleeping, and all the big things that come up in the first few years of life and also some of the smaller things that come up, and really about looking at what does the evidence say about these choices?
Delia: I've written poetry all my life. I'm not saying I'm good at it at all. Words just come to my mind a lot. I feel a lot when I write poetry. I feel that the words themselves can be so inspiring to readers. Most people who love good prose and literature, even if they don't have time or the inclination to read poetry, when they do read a verse, they feel a lot. That was the number one thing I wanted about this book. I wanted people to feel. Poetry makes you feel. You can get your thoughts into a few words. You can do it in a way that it’s like putting a drug straight into your bloodstream. You have to read a whole novel sometimes to feel certain things and get the point. A poem can say so much in a few words. That's a reason it’s so powerful.
Jen: The women of today, you, me, all the women we’re speaking to who are listening here today, these are go-getters. These are women who have achieved. They have gotten places. They have done the work. They have pushed themselves. These are the high-achieving women who need to realize that if you say, “I'm going to take the day off,” or if you say, “I'm going to loosen the reigns around my dieting,” you're not going to go sit on your couch, eat chips all day, and wait for lightening to strike before you move again. It’s not going to be.
