Stephanie Thornton Plymale, AMERICAN DAUGHTER

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

Stephanie Thornton Plymale: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: I could not be more excited to talk about American Daughter: A Memoir. I'm showing the cover to anybody watching on YouTube. Stephanie, this book, I opened it early on Saturday morning. I was like, I'll just read few pages now. Then I'll go work out or do something or deal with whatever. I stayed in one spot for four hours and read the entire thing. I could not put the thing down. It's so good. It is so, so, so good. Congratulations.

Stephanie: Thank you. I'm so happy to hear that from you. I can't wait to hear what you think about it and what your thoughts are. I can't wait.

Zibby: First of all, why don't you tell listeners what this memoir is about? 

Stephanie: You know, you read the memoir, it's so hard to say in just a brush stroke. Basically, after about fifty years of complete silence and living in shame with my story, I decided to come clean and write my story of my past of living homeless, in foster care, a severely mentally ill mother with multiple personalities, drug addictions, and just this life of homelessness that I had all the way up until I got married. Simultaneously, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was estranged from her because of the stalking order of her trying to take my life and burn my house down and horrendous things. I decided at that time it was time for me to get answers. I went in to do a series of interviews with my mother because that's the only way she would talk to me, is do an interview with her. Then what came out, the shocking, horrific crime that happened against her and then the reconciliation and the process of healing our relationship and many, many other layers that come out in this memoir and in my book to the point of the end where my mother and I fully reconcile.

Zibby: It's so much more than that, as if that wasn't enough. That's what was so remarkable about this book. First, it's all of just your ability to overcome the traumas of your early childhood and your retelling of all of what happened to you and all those scenes where I'm literally sitting there with my hand over my mouth reading because it's like, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this happened. It's also, what I thought was really beautiful -- first of all -- I'm so excited to talk about this. I can't get words out. Part of your background -- I don't want to give it away because I had no idea it was coming, but your own story throughout history, where your family came from was also unbelievable, especially the way you unveiled it the way you did. The third part that I really loved is that it's really a love story between you and your husband. You had this whole moment of almost cheating. It's really a love story. I feel like it has every element, the mother, the adversity, the love story, and it's true, which is what the craziest part is.

Stephanie: It's a true story.

Zibby: Even your mother's ability to overcome adversity, oh, my gosh.

Stephanie: There's so many layers for me. I appreciate how you brought what I said in bringing in what you said because it is hard to really distill it the way -- it's almost impossible to distill it into this brush stroke. We can go into more, but you did a good job.

Zibby: Thank you. Why did you write this? Why did you decide to take your story and put it in memoir form and do such a good job? [laughs] 

Stephanie: I started writing the minute I started working with my mom. Even before then, I started to write my story before I knew the whole story. Once this started to come out, these revelations and my relationship with my mom and, really, my failing in my marriage that was able to be restored, just everything needed to be told. It also started to feel like a story that was for everybody, and it is. It's this American story. It's the story of the failings of America. I fell through every crack. I fell through the education crack; my mother, a mental health crack. Our family just fell through every crack possible. Then I'm also the American story of being able to succeed in the opportunities that I've been able to have. It's a story of our history, even. My family is the history of our country that came out of this. There's just so many reasons why this story needed to be told. People will say -- I was just telling my staff, we were talking about this -- that I'm brave. It's not about being brave. I feel free. I don't have to live in hiding. I don't have to live in shame. I'm an open book. There's something just so freeing about that.

Zibby: You are an open book that is now sitting here open on my desk. Literally, you are. I could imagine that would be freeing. I don't know how you were carrying around that heavy load for so long. I don't know how corrosive that must have been in so many ways, keeping all those secrets. What was that like?

Stephanie: It's exhausting. It was exhausting. Before I could even meet with somebody -- my husband had a big career as a CEO. I was always having to meet and entertain people. I'd have to make a plan of what questions and how would I answer them before every time I met a new person if they said, where are you from? Where'd you go to school? How many siblings do you have? I don't know. One was kidnapped. I don't know if I should add him. There was no way for me to tell my story and be normal. It was exhausting. That's why I say I'm just so free now. It's all out there. I had all this external success, but inside, I was just broken. I was empty. I was a shell of person before I started this. Now everything's integrated. I get to be a whole person. Even my name, Thornton, I took my name back. I didn't even have a name. I didn't have a grandparent. I didn't have a cousin. I had nobody. I had no history that I knew of. I took it all back. I'm just so whole now.

Zibby: Wow. It's amazing. It's just amazing.

Stephanie: I don't know what it's like to have had these things either. Even when I was living in the back of station wagon eating seaweed, I didn't know any better. I wasn't unhappy. I was with my siblings. We were all together. I truly love the beach still. We lived in the beach. I've had to come to terms really through the process of writing my book. I lived outside. I lived in a car. I went to the bathroom outside. We ate seaweed. This was my life that I had. I didn't know any different. Even today, it shocks me. We were living like animals outside. That is sometimes just staggering for me.

Zibby: You even bring in your own parenting in this book. Even the way you adopted your daughter, this international adoption saga that ended beautifully with your daughter, but even your point of view of being able to say, look, this was what my daughter was like when she was eleven. Listen to what was going on with my mother and what was going on with me. Yet you have three children that are being raised totally "normally" in a very comfortable environment. Yet look what happened. 

Stephanie: I tried to raise them idyllic. I tried to be the opposite. I tried to give my daughter everything that I didn't have, which isn't always great at all. That was that façade that I put on that you read about that I think we all do in a way. We can hide behind this. I could hide behind this interior design business or all of this, but it's still there.

Zibby: Do you still do interior design, or do you only run your schools?

Stephanie: I just do it for fun. If you follow me on Instagram -- I think you're following me.

Zibby: I am, yeah.

Stephanie: I am constantly redesigning stuff. I'm constantly styling. I do that for the school, but it's just my fun passion. I don't have time to work with clients anymore. I just run the schools. Then now I'm doing a lot of philanthropic work and stuff with the book and starting a podcast and starting on my next book. Design, you'll see on my Instagram, it's my love.

Zibby: Slow down. Go back for a second. Tell me about the next book and the podcast.

Stephanie: I'm starting a podcast called "Overcoming." I'm interviewing extraordinary people who have been through extraordinary circumstances who come out on the other side to share their story, their strategies to help inspire other people to share their stories and to gain more strategies on how to overcome. It's all about overcoming. Don't we all need that right now after the pandemic?

Zibby: Yes.

Stephanie: That's what I'm doing. My book working title is called Overcoming. I didn't share everything in American Daughter. [laughs] 

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. That, I find hard to believe.

Stephanie: Oh, no, I scaled it. People say, wow, you just really let it out. It's like, no, we actually had to edit a lot out for this book to make sure that this book was just perfectly aligned with the story. There's still more of overcoming.

Zibby: I can't wait.

Stephanie: If you think about being homeless all the way up until I got married, I was in and out of cars, foster homes. I fell through that whole system, aged out, got kicked out my senior year for not getting my tags done on my car. I had to live with no parenting, no guidance. Can you even imagine your senior year? I think about my kids and how vulnerable they are. To be in their car staying in somebody's sofa their senior, it's just astounding how much I fell through these cracks.

Zibby: What is like then if your child complains about something? Are you just like, don't even?

Stephanie: [laughs] I'm not. They don't like me to do that. They're not into that. I've never been like that. I never shared my story with my kids. They never knew until I wrote this book. They only had glimpses of seeing my mother. They knew there was a stalking order. I shielded them from everything. They found out about my story when I wrote this book.

Zibby: What was like for you?

Stephanie: I just wanted to protect them from everything.

Zibby: What was it like having them now learn it? What was that experience like? Did you hand them the copy of the manuscript?

Stephanie: Literally. 

Zibby: Literally, you were just like, here, this is what happened?

Stephanie: Yeah, literally. Here it is if you want to read it. Here's the story. They lived also with their mother not being truly a whole person either. I hate that about the story because they didn't get to find out about their history. If I was raising my kids now, I'd be sharing these wonderful successful things from my family. I'd be sharing the horrific parts of our American heritage that we all have in terms of the Washingtons, the horrible things they did, the good things that they did. They never got to grow up knowing their heritage, but my grandkids will. If I had the story, that would've made them more whole too instead of a mother who had no history, no background, and shared nothing.

Zibby: Don't beat yourself up, seriously. I'm sure you've done an extraordinary job. You can sense how much you love and dote on your kids in the book. I'm sure they're amazing people in their own rights. I'm sure you did a fantastic job. Whatever you needed at that point to get through, that's what you needed then. Now you're ready for this. 

Stephanie: Exactly. I don't have any regrets. I do feel like I really tried hard having no skills. If you think about it, I had no parents. I was really homeless, orphaned. Then I decided to have a family with no skills. I just had to muddle my way through. For me, being as loving and doting on them was a safe thing to do. 

Zibby: The process of writing this, were you sobbing over your keyboard? What was that like?

Stephanie: Oh, my gosh, it depends on the parts. It depends. When I found out about my mother and what happened to her, so during the interview when she told me what had happened and she said, "Go look it up in the papers, 1953, and you'll find out," I still didn't believe her. You have to understand my mom's been in and out of psych wards over a hundred times in my lifetime, or jail. Anything she says you would take with a grain of salt. To find out what happened and to have never asked the questions that I wished that I had earlier -- but it was about the right timing. To find out what happened to her felt like somebody kicked me in the stomach a hundred times. The physical pain of what she went through being abducted and getting raped, it was horrific, but it also then created a lot of compassion that I had for her. Even if you read the first chapter, my mother describes trying to end her pregnancy with me. Just like we're sitting here talking, my mother told me with no emotion -- and I wrote it that way. If you read chapter one, this is right out of her mouth exactly how it went down in the interview. She had no feeling or compassion. Stuff like that is really hard to learn and to process. That was hard. What I'd like to say is that once I realized what happened to my mother, her personalities, her mental health, her addiction, it all made sense. It all made sense at that point. My compassion for her grew. Also, I was to a point in my life where I mattered. I never mattered. I never mattered to my mother. I never mattered in the system. I never mattered. I matter now. I mattered and I was still going to get the answers. She was still going to keep going through with the interviews. These interviews went on for two years. She wanted them to stop. I set the next one up week after week until I was done. That was two years later. The interviews went from being interviewing her to us having a relationship and forming a bond and love that we never had. That was very meaningful.

Zibby: The way that you wrote it and the way you discovered and shared your discoveries, we all -- well, I can't talk for anybody else. Now I need to find people who have read this book so I can talk to them about it too.

Stephanie: In your group, your book club.

Zibby: In my book club, I'll do it, yes. We'll do it in my book club. We all felt that too. We all went through that period of, oh, my gosh, that's what happened. Then you have to go back in your mind and say, does that change the way I view this person now that I have this information? Can I reshuffle and readjust like a filter or something when you have new data? It's just crazy. 

Stephanie: I've only met one person who said, "I cannot forgive your mom. I do not care what happened to her." I had only one person.

Zibby: What happened to that person? That person probably has a lot of stuff they're carrying around too. Most of the time, people's reactions to things are based on their own stuff.

Stephanie: Most people -- which was important to me that my mother's story be told and that people would have compassion on others with mental health issues because I did. I did. I grew up in a way that I'm so thankful that I don't have mental health issues. Most of my siblings do. They didn't quite come out. So often, it's just not the fault of the person. It's what's happened to them. You see that in American Daughter. You see what happened to my mother. It makes perfect sense how this can happen to somebody.

Zibby: I know you were clearly protecting the privacy of some of your siblings. In my greed at your story, wanting more and more, I was like, I want a picture. I almost googled and was trying to -- I was like, I can't do this. This is creepy now if I'm trying to google your siblings and your mom. I was like, should I try to look up the articles? Maybe I'll look and investigate.

Stephanie: Well, they're out there.

Zibby: I know. I'm sure.

Stephanie: People do. People do all the time. I notice if I google myself, I see what other people are googling. [laughs] 

Zibby: Exactly, what fills in after.

Stephanie: We all do that. In Overcoming, I'll probably share more about some of the stuff that people really are interested in similar to you where they just wanted to know more. It's not going to hurt anybody by sharing.

Zibby: Are your siblings that you're still in touch with and that are remaining, are they okay with where you've --

Stephanie: -- You know Dominic who was kidnapped. He lives in New York. He's living his life. He's had a rough life, prison stays. It's to be expected. He had a really rough life. Other siblings, one of my siblings has been diagnosed with five different mental illnesses. He makes my mom look like a walk in the park, to be honest. It's really, really scary. A lot of this trauma and honestly, illiteracy -- I didn't learn to read until I was eleven years old. We lived outside. We did not go to school. The first time I went to school was in my foster home where I was held captive, is what I like to say because I was literally tortured there, was my first time in school. You imagine how traumatic school was for me. My siblings, they were barely literate. Your early childhood is so traumatized like this.

Zibby: I love how you talked about the boyfriend who worked at RadioShack sitting there teaching you how to read. That was just beautiful, heartbreaking but beautiful, and even how you described Rick and your complicated feelings about him and everything. Can I just read a paragraph? Is that okay?

Stephanie: Sure.

Zibby: When you were talking about Rick and how he always used to tell you that you were beautiful inside and out and how he said that to you over and over again, and then you said, "On the morning of his funeral, a homeless woman came up to me in Starbucks drawing closer than a stranger would. With no alarm at all, I let her reach out and touch my face. 'You're beautiful,' she [indiscernible]. 'I can see you're beautiful inside and out.' It was Rick's mantra to me, and in that moment, I had no doubt that the message was from him. The gift of it knocked me out, rocked me from my roots of my hair to the soles of my feet. It was a moment as otherworldly as the one in that vintage bar at the piano when music flowed from beneath my hands with no explanation. That was my first memory with Rick, and this would be my last, both of them shimmering, glittering with mystery." Beautiful.

Stephanie: That made me cry thinking about that moment at his funeral. Readers haven't been able read to about Rick, but Rick was a conman. Rick stole a mail truck and took us to Mexico. It's just stuff movies are made out of. This is the craziest stuff. He was conman. He'd been in prison. He had even taken someone's life in prison. That didn't make the book. I loved him. He was like Santa Claus to me. He'd showed up here and there drugged out. I'd be like, oh, my god, he's back! Yay! I loved Rick. When you read about his turnaround and his recovery from drugs and alcohol, he became one of the most amazing human beings I'd ever met. I loved him. We had a great relationship. He even did things like -- I'm a designer. I own these schools now. He was the first person to take me to beautiful homes in Portland that he was working on as a contractor to show me what interior design really was. He would take me to these beautiful houses. I got to touch the fabrics. There were things about Rick that I think as a child I saw in him that nobody else saw. Even before he died, he asked me, "What did you see in me? Why do you love me? Are you crazy?" He would say, "Are you crazy? What in the world is wrong with you?" [laughs] 

Zibby: I love that relationship and all these signs that you point out over and over in the book. This whole book, there's some sort of spiritual thread to everything that is just so inspiring. I sound like a broken record.

Stephanie: I'm so glad you see that because in so many ways, sharing my story, it has a little bit of a magical way in people's lives. This book affects everybody in a different way. As crazy as this story is, as we've just laid out here, everybody sees themself in American Daughter. It's truly an American story. I didn't set out to do that. It's just it is that.

Zibby: Is this going to be a movie?

Stephanie: I'm sure it is. They're talking about a miniseries, which I think would be far better than one movie. We all want a miniseries, right? [laughs] We like to binge those.

Zibby: I love how now the miniseries is rebranded as a limited series as if it's a completely different animal whereas it's exactly the same, but whatever. I'm just going to let it go. It's great. A limited series is like a ten-hour movie. It's perfect. It's fantastic.

Stephanie: That's what we all really want. There's so much layering to the story, like you said, from my story to my mother's story to our history to all the people in this book. I think it'll be a really good series. We'll see. I know they're talking about it, working on it. I'm excited to hear about it.

Zibby: Me too. Do you have advice to aspiring authors?

Stephanie: Yeah. Have you written a book? I didn't read that about you.

Zibby: I have. I've written unpublished books. I have an anthology coming out very soon.

Stephanie: You do?

Zibby: Yeah, Moms Don't Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology. It comes out in two weeks.

Stephanie: Really? That's so exciting. Congratulations.

Zibby: Thank you.

Stephanie: That's so exciting. My journey of publishing was really wild, as wild as this book is. I published with Greenleaf which is hybrid publishing. I published American Daughter because I like to learn the hard way on everything. [laughs] I published it. It went straight to number-one best seller in memoir. I was on the Today Show. It just exploded. Then HarperCollins bought the book two weeks later, took it off the market. Then I've had a fabulous experience with HarperCollins. That's the next phase of American Daughter. I've had a chance to do both. I really love both experiences. If you have a chance to work with a publisher, I think it's fabulous. If you also get a chance to self-publish, I think it's a wonderful education for people. I just don't think that people should tell you not to do something like this. If you want to write a book, write a book. Do it. It's the best. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I'm free from it. As hard as it was, it was so fulfilling. I just think writing a book is so fulfilling. It's such a major accomplishment. I recommend if that's something you want to do to go for it. Don't let anybody tell you that book's been done before or any of the negativity. I heard it all. I got the looks. Who cares? What's another story? Even if I just did it for myself, it's fabulous. The book's going to touch people's lives. You need to go for it. You definitely want to know your audience. You want to be clear about what the purpose of your book is for. There's a lot of things. I want to teach a little class on publishing because I've been successful as a self-publisher and I've been successful working with a wonderful publisher like HarperCollins.

Zibby: Great. We'll be signing up for that.

Stephanie: That's next year. [laughter]

Zibby: Stephanie, thank you. This book really touched me profoundly. As you've said, it's touched so many other people and will continue to do so. I am just so in awe of you and feel like I have this place in my heart for you now that I know so much about you and have gone through this book journey here. It's really amazing. I'm thrilled to have you in book club at some point soon. I just congratulate you from the bottom of my heart.

Stephanie: I love being on your show. I love following you. I love your positive energy. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thanks for following me. [laughs] 

Stephanie: Oh, I'm all in. 

Zibby: Have a great day.

Stephanie: Thank you. I'll talk to you soon. I can't wait to be in your book club.

Zibby: Me too. Thank you. Buh-bye.

Stephanie: Bye.

Elizabeth Passarella, GOOD APPLE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss Good Apple: Tales of a Southern Evangelical in New York.

Elizabeth Passarella: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Zibby: By the way, I love this cover too. I'm holding it up on our video which listeners can't see. It's particularly inviting. Elizabeth, tell me how you decided to write this book. Why did you decide to write this book? Tell listeners, also, basically what it's about.

Elizabeth: Good Apple is a collection of essays. It's stories about my life. To be completely honest with you, I didn't really set out to write this exact book. I've had a career in magazines. I've written for women's magazines and been an editor of magazines for about twenty years. I've always loved nonfiction. It's what I love to read. It's what I love to write. I always assumed that maybe I would write a book about my life experiences, but I never really anticipated bringing my faith into it. I just assumed I would write a funny, interesting, relatable book about life. I was thinking about all the magazine articles that I have edited or written over the years. There's so many that talked about how to make your marriage stronger or how to be a better parent or how to deal with a difficult friendship. There were many times where I'd get to the end of that article and I would think, this is great and I love all these tips, but what if you follow all this advice and it still doesn't work out? What if you follow all these tips and your marriage is still really hard or that friendship still falls apart? I'm a Christian, and so for me, that's what my foundation is built on. That's the viewpoint that I look through when I deal with difficult situations.

I was talking to a colleague and a former editor who now happens to be my book agent. We were talking about ideas for books. She said, "It would be great to write about your life in New York or raising kids in Manhattan or small-space living, all these things you're passionate about, but it's got to appeal to all those evangelical Christians in the middle of the country." I thought, oh, I can do that. That's who I am. She was a little bit surprised. She said, "You're not what I think of when I think of a Christian. When I think about that, you're not what I think of. You're this New Yorker. You hold a lot of the same views and political views and world views that I do." That was another big part of it. I just felt like this kind of book, in terms of how non-Christians look at Christians, doesn't really exist. I wanted to write something where I gave a different viewpoint of what people think of as a Christian.

I think it works the other way. All the people that I grew up with in the South -- that's where I grew up -- and people who are really strong Christians, I think they look at New Yorkers and they look at the way I live my life and think, I can't possibly have anything in common with her. She's raising three kids in this two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan in this crazy city. I wanted them to look at these stories and see themselves too and realize that we have a lot in common. It is stories about my life. I talk about growing up in the South. I talk about growing up in a pretty conservative, republican family and kind of switching my political views as I got older and moved to New York and lived here for a while. I tell stories about heavy stuff. I talk about miscarriages. I talk about death of a loved one. There's a lot of lighthearted, funny stories too. There's stories about a rat getting trapped in my apartment building, which was not a great day. There's some light stuff and some heavy stuff. I feel like most of all, I just want it to be entertaining. It's mostly embarrassing stories about me. I look the worst of everyone in my family. As personal as the stories are, I definitely come out looking the worst.

Zibby: [laughs] One of my favorite stories was when you got trapped in the elevator. I think it was your building super or somebody had to take the baby out of the crib and sit and play on the floor while you got extracted. That's such a New York story. That was just so perfect.

Elizabeth: Everyone hears that and they think, you left your baby in your apartment while you went downstairs to the basement? I said, yeah. If you lived in a huge house in the suburbs somewhere and you went out to your mailbox to get the mail while your baby was napping, that's how far away from him I was. That's New York living. I left him in the apartment. Then I got stuck in the elevator for almost an hour. Yes, the staff of my building -- we've lived here for twelve years, so they know us very well. This very nice man who works in our building went upstairs and got my baby out of the crib and played with him when he woke up from his nap.

Zibby: You were so funny. You were like, they call me Passa, and I'm not sure if they think that's my last name or not, but it's too late now because they’ve been doing this for a decade. [laughs]

Elizabeth: Yes. You always have those people who have your name slightly off, but you've known them too long. You've passed the point of no return where you can tell them they’ve got it wrong. There's one guy in my building that I think it's just his nickname for us.

Zibby: There was this whole religious dimension to the book, but that was only a slice of the book. You could've almost done it without it. I feel like it didn't permeate every single chapter and every single experience. It just set a framework for it. I don't feel like it in any way left anybody out. First of all, you define evangelical and what it really means, but also the fact that you grew up with a Jewish father. Then you have a whole chapter on Jews I've Known and Loved or some funny title you had. I should look up the title.

Elizabeth: To All the Jews I've Loved.

Zibby: Yes, yes, yes, To All the Jews I've Loved. So funny. And just your experience in New York and different religions. There's some where you put in your points of view and how it is to be a democrat among a lot of people who aren't in your background. Then it's also so many other things. I found that part super interesting and not talked about as much. I also thought it could've been amazing even if it wasn't for that. In other words, that made it more interesting, but that was only one piece of it. I don't want people to think, even though it's part of the title, that that's what this was all about because I don't think it was all about religion at all.

Elizabeth: I struggled at first whether I should put that word in the title. You're right. I don't want to turn anybody off. If you are someone who has a different faith background or no faith background at all, I really wrote the book originally -- primarily, when I thought about my readership, I thought about the people that I do life with in New York, people who I know through my kids' school, people I work with, people that live in my building, my neighbors. I really thought about a non-Christian audience. That's who I wrote it for. I think there are plenty of Christian women who will pick up this book and enjoy it because I don't think there's a lot of Christian books out there that have an irreverent sense of humor. I hope that this book does. Yes, I think you're right. I absolutely wrote it primarily for the audience that I do life with all the time and anyone else who doesn't come from this background.

Zibby: I found that part fascinating. I'm glad you put it in the title because I like to hear other people's experiences and points of view. I don't want to only read about my own. That would get boring after a while. You want to learn about new things and new backgrounds and what makes you tick and all the rest. I thought it was a really interesting piece about a culture and a particular sect, I guess, that I didn't know that much about ahead of time. That was great.

Elizabeth: You said I sort of addressed this in the introduction of the book. The word evangelical has become so charged. I certainly do not walk around the streets of New York using that word to describe myself very often. It's become such a politically charged word. That was something else I wanted to -- not like I'm trying to take the word back. I don't really care. It's just a word. I also feel like people do have a misconception. For me, it's a theological framework as opposed to a political one. I think that it's been sort of co-opted by politics, unfortunately, which is why most evangelical Christians, even if they are, really don't use that word anymore, nor do I. From a theological standpoint, I think it still does define me.

Zibby: I love how much you put in about your marriage because I've been feeling very snoopy lately. I don't know if that’s even the right word. [laughs] I love peeking into the cracks in the curtains and seeing what's going on in other people's marriages, people who are my age, because for a while, I feel like nobody was really talking about it. Only your closest friends, I feel like, share. That's why so many people get divorced and you're shocked by it. I know I got divorced and I never talked about my marriage while I was in it. I rarely do now anyway. I just always appreciate when people are willing to share. The fact that you shared how you yell at your husband or that you get annoyed that he plays golf all day and do this passive-aggressive thing where you pretend like you have to work [indiscernible] get better at going to the spa. There are just so many things you put in that were so relatable and awesome and just amazing. We were talking before about how we had both married tennis pros. I'm remarried. Has your tennis gotten better? He has ever taught you?

Elizabeth: No, my tennis is not great. We do not play together. When we were dating, we played occasionally. It turned into a huge fight. Yes, I clearly fight a lot with my husband. It did not go well when we were dating and we would try to play tennis together. He is a very laid-back guy. His reaction to every shot I missed or anything that I wasn't doing well was, "You just need to play more." I'm like, "No, I want you to tell me exactly what to do. I want you to tell me exactly how to hold the racket or exactly which way to move to make that shot go in." He'd say, "You just need to play more." It did not go well. I just didn't really play that much. You know because you live in New York too, it can be hard to find a tennis court in New York City.

Zibby: Very hard.

Elizabeth: Manhattan does not lend itself well to playing a lot of tennis. I don't. I don't play a lot of tennis. I don't love to exercise anyway. He does play with my kids, which is nice. He plays with the kids. He plays on his own. It's sort of like golf. He says all the time, "I wish you would take up golf. I wish you'd play golf." I said, "You say that, but I think, actually, you just want me to play the one day out of the year that you can't find anyone else to play with. I don't think you actually want me to play golf with you on a regular basis. You would really like to play with people who know what they're doing." It's the same with tennis. He wants to get a workout. He wants to play with guys that he went to college with and they played together. I don't play a lot of tennis. I'm not terrible, but I'm not good.

Zibby: If you guys were to play golf together, I don't think that would help with the fighting.

Elizabeth: No. No, it would not. I agree with you. I think I make people uncomfortable sometimes because I tell all the dirty secrets about my marriage or how much I don't like my children sometimes, but you know, we all feel it. We all feel it. Even if nobody's talking about it, they're definitely doing it. They're definitely having those arguments behind closed doors. I tend to have a temper. I'm much more of a verbal confrontational person. I probably fight more than the average person does. That's, in some sense, where the faith element comes in too because I feel like I'm very secure in who I am and what grounds me, and so I feel like I don't have to put forth any sort of image of being the perfect wife or the perfect mom because I am definitely not. I am very below average on both of those things. I feel really confident being honest because I know where my real identity comes from in a sense, if that makes sense. It's easy for me to be, I guess, shameless.

Zibby: It's refreshing. As a reader in particular, it's, A, very relatable, and B, very entertaining. It's funny. All the stuff you're saying is very entertaining and funny. That's great. What else can you want in a book?

Elizabeth: Thank you. Yes, that's the goal.

Zibby: Even when you talk about your basically growing up in the city, growing up into adulthood I should say, and even your days of -- as I read this when you were at Tortilla Flats and Automatic Slims and all this stuff, I was like, I was there. I bet you we were in the same place at the same time. We're about the same age.

Elizabeth: I know. We are.

Zibby: Everything you kept going through, I was like, me too! It was crazy because when I picked up this book, I never expected to have so much in common with the author of this book not knowing who you were or anything about you. I was just like, oh, this will be one of those experiences that I don't really relate to, but it'll be so interesting. In fact, you were probably on my block. [laughter] It was crazy. Also, funny how you included all of the stuff almost explaining yourself to people who don't live in New York as if you've never lived -- I've lived in New York my whole life, so I get it. Tell me about including all of that.

Elizabeth: Listen, I have tons of friends who still live in Memphis, Tennessee, where I grew up. I have tons of friends who live all over the South and other cities. They look at my life and they think -- most of them have known me a long time at this point. We live in an apartment that's two bedrooms. We have three kids. One of my children sleeps in a closet. It seems very normal to us. I do think that people are very intrigued. I have this whole chapter that's sort of a Q&A that talks about all the quirky things about living in an apartment and living in a building in Manhattan. I think that's fascinating to people, especially now. When I wrote this book, of course, it was finished a year ago right before the pandemic hit. I finished in January of 2020. Now I think even more so, people are curious about New York. What's going on? What's life like there?

I really think of the book as kind of a love letter to New York. Like you said, I moved here right after college. I've lived here for twenty years. I really feel like this is my home now. I feel so much like a New Yorker. I love the city so much. I think it's such a wonderful place to raise kids. It's such a beautiful community. That's just come out more even since the pandemic started because a lot of people left. You're much more confined to your neighborhood, and so you get to know your neighbors more. You're happier to see them when you go outside. It has made the city feel like a really resilient small town to me in some ways. I just love New York so much. I wanted this book to be sort of a love letter to the city too. Everyone loves New York. Even if they don't live here, they're curious about what life is like here. I hope that I give people a little bit of a glimpse, and it's a good one.

Zibby: Totally. It's nice to see a mom in New York telling how it is. Everyone's like, how can you do that with kids? I'm like, well, you do it. You just do it. I don't know. You just do.

Elizabeth: Like you, my husband grew up here. I do give people the caveat that, for him, this is his hometown. When we first started having kids and there was something that would seem sort of strange to me, it wasn't strange to him because this was how he grew up. When we started letting our daughter walk home from school just this year by herself, I thought, is this a good idea? Should we do this? He's like, "Oh, my gosh. When I was in third grade, I was walking to Johnny so-and-so's house down Park Avenue," or whatever it was. She's not in third grade, by the way. She's in fifth grade. He was doing all these things growing up. It just gives me a nice perspective. He grew up here. He's a very normal person. It made everything feel a little more palatable.

Zibby: I grew up in New York, and I believe I'm a normal person -- my husband might disagree with that -- and so are all the people I grew up with. I think there's a lot of misconceptions about what it means.

Elizabeth: My husband likes to say more people are born and raised in New York than any other city in the country. Isn't that amazing? When people say, "Oh, my gosh, you're raising kids there?" he's like, "Yes. Lots of kids grow up in New York." It's true.

Zibby: I bet I knew him. Anyway, we'll come back to that. It's also a very small town. Kids who grew up in New York, though, at least in -- well, I don't know.

Elizabeth: He was on the East Side too. I don't know if you were on the East Side.

Zibby: Yes, I was on the Upper East Side. It's just a very small world between siblings and people you know. In that way, I do also feel like it's a small town. Tell me about your decision to include the whole piece about your miscarriages, which also feels very timely with the op-ed the other day. How can I blank on her name?

Elizabeth: Meghan Markle.

Zibby: Thank you, which I thought was really great, by the way.

Elizabeth: It was.

Zibby: Tell me about that decision.

Elizabeth: That was another one where I have no problem talking about it. I had two kids who are ten and eight now. When they were probably six and four, we had thought about having another kid. I was thirty-nine. I had two miscarriages before I finally got pregnant with our two-and-a-half-year-old now. I didn't have him until I was forty-one. Obviously, the statistics would bear out that it's very possible that I would miscarry. The first miscarriage I had, as I started talking to friends -- anyone will tell you this. Once you start talking to people, you realize so many people you know went through the exact same thing. It is so common. I think that maybe the reason people don't talk about it is it's just such a personal bodily issue. It takes place usually in private or in the hospital. There's a lot of hormonal issues that you go through. Again, I will almost talk about anything. I'm the person at the dinner party that you either really love or really don't like that I'm talking about a lot of personal things.

I just wanted other people to read it and realize that, yes, of course, it's common. We know that statistically. You probably know a lot of people who have been through this. It's different for every woman. There were certain commonalities when I started talking to other friends who had miscarriages, this hormonal cliff that you fall off a couple of weeks after this happened, just the simple things of you're not pregnant anymore, but if you take a pregnancy test, it will still show that you're pregnant. That is so emotionally wrenching. I think that that's something people don't talk about. All of us have sat and peed on a thousand different sticks to try to figure out if we are pregnant. Then you've lost a baby, and you pee on these sticks and it still says you're pregnant. Even just that small detail is something that was so impossibly hard for me to get through. I want people to know, hey, this happens. This is one of these really annoying things that you're going to come up against. This happens. It's normal. It will pass.

Zibby: Why keep peeing on the sticks?

Elizabeth: I don't know. You're waiting for your hormone levels to drop to the point that you don't appear pregnant so that you can try again. That's the big thing. The minute you miscarry, you think, when can I try again? It's just a lot of waiting. It’s a lot of time.

Zibby: Got it. Understood. When did you find the time and how did you find the space and all of that to write this book with three kids?

Elizabeth: That's a good question. I will say, I said this earlier, but the book was finished before the pandemic. If the book had not been finished before the pandemic, I'm not sure we would be talking right now. That has made work so much more difficult. I work from home. I've been a freelance writer for a long time. I work from home. When we did have this third kid and he's home with a sitter or someone, I couldn't work at home anymore. I pay a lot of money to babysitters. The summer of 2019, I paid a lot of money to summer camps and day camps to keep my kids occupied. I actually go to a library. It's probably near you. It's the New York Society Library.

Zibby: I know you were going to say that.

Elizabeth: It's a private library. A lot of writers go there. It is not expensive. It's a bargain in Manhattan for a yearly membership. They have really sort of sad, depressing desks in the stacks. They have really nice private rooms, but I never use those. I just go to the stacks. I sit at a little desk. I'm completely isolated. You can't even talk on the phone. You can't bring food. That's where I wrote this book. I wrote it in the stacks of the New York Society Library on 79th and Madison.

Zibby: I feel like with enough time, I will interview everybody who's ever tried to write a book in the New York Society Library.

Elizabeth: Yes. I already know a couple of them. I see them sometimes.

Zibby: So funny.

Elizabeth: It's a beautiful old library. It's a beautiful building. It's quiet. There's just nobody bothering you. That's what I did. I paid as many babysitters as I could afford.

Zibby: That's awesome. I love that. What are you hoping to do next? Do you have more essay books, or are you good with getting all of this out?

Elizabeth: Yes, I am under contract to write another one, so I've got to come up with some more stories. I've got to have some more things to happen. We'll see. It's interesting as this book makes its way out in the world, what resonates with people and which chapters people really love and which ones seem to attract the most attention. Listen, I'm a one-trick pony. I do not have a lot of talents. This is about it. I'm not a fiction writer. There's going to be no romance novel for me. This is what I enjoy and what I like writing. Hopefully, yes, I will write another book of essays. I would love to do that down the road.

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

Elizabeth: Oh, gosh. I came up through the magazine world to the journalism world. I came to book publishing that way. I would say, from my perspective, you probably will write a lot of things that you don't like to write about before you get to write about something you do like to write about. I think about all the years as a young editorial assistant or assistant editor, how I wrote so many captions for fashion spreads that I did not care about at all, but it taught me so many lessons. It taught me about word choice and how to say something in the most economical way possible. I spent a lot of time looking over proofs and seeing what editors changed and why it sounded better that way. I studied those. It made me a better writer. Don't shy away from those kinds of assignments even if it's not what you want to do. Just be humble and use everything as learning experience. I would also say, this is something that my friend Catherine Newman who I used to work with at Real Simple -- I think she's been on your podcast. She's a wonderful human and writer. She said be nice, turn things in on time, be easy to work with, do your job well, and be nice to everybody. I cannot tell you how many people I worked with as assistants who are now the editors-in-chief of magazines or who are content directors at really big platforms. You just never know where someone's going to end up. Be a hard worker. Be nice. Be pleasant to work with. Do a great job because the people that you're working with now, even though it might be at a really small publication or someone who's even younger than you, you never know, they could go on to have a really big job that could be really helpful to you down the road.

Zibby: I love that. That's great advice. Awesome. Thank you, Elizabeth. That was fantastic. One day, we can meet in Central Park.

Elizabeth: Yes. We can go on a walk around the reservoir. Thank you for everything that you do for authors. It's just so uplifting and wonderful, especially for people like me who are first timers. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: I'm really excited for your book to come out. I'll be cheering for you.

Elizabeth: Thank you.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Elizabeth: Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Ashly Perez, READ THIS FOR INSPIRATION

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Ashly. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about Read This for Inspiration. Today, we'll talk about this for inspiration. [laughter]

Ashly Perez: It's so weird. I haven't seen very many people holding the book. You just popping into frame was like, oh, my goodness, there it is.

Zibby: There it is. It's so beautiful. I know this is a podcast and also on YouTube. For the people listening, I am a sucker, as you can see from my bookshelves behind me, of the different rainbow colors. It says Read This for Inspiration in all different colors on the spine with yellow in the back. All the illustrations are just so happy and awesome. In addition to the actual content of the book, the container is so happy and something that we all really could use right now. Bravo on that.

Ashly: Sorry, guys, if you hear background noise. I'm outside, and there an airport near me. That's what you're hearing.

Zibby: You know what? There's always something. Usually, it's sirens in my background. Trade-offs. Ashly, tell me about your journey from Buzzfeed to publication, how this book came to be, and how you exploded onto the scene yourself.

Ashly: My background is Buzzfeed. I worked there for five and half years before Buzzfeed was really what it was. I was a video producer making all types of different content. Now I'm a TV writer and then have now written this nonfiction book that in some ways is a culmination of most of my life experiences. I went to college to study international studies. I love languages. At one point, I lived in South Korea as an English teacher and thought I was going to be a diplomat. This book is very much a dumping of my brain. I have ADHD. It's a function of how my brain works that these are in short little chapters about lots and lots of different subjects. It was actually really relieving to write the book and to see it because even now to this day, I can open it, and it still looks like the inside of my brain.

Zibby: I love how you set out all these rules at the beginning. You were like, you can read it like this, or you can just open it anytime you want, or you can do it like that, and it doesn't matter. It was the most forgiving entrance. It's like you're holding someone's hand and being like, let me teach you how to use this book and how it can be a little different.

Ashly: Really, the rule is just, however you want to use the book, you can use it.

Zibby: Let's go back to your ADHD, which you talked about. You said in the book, "I'm not good at resting. In fact, I have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, emphasis on the hyperactivity. Stillness does not exist in my bones, literally. And because of this, I am also not very patient." Then you talk about how you rush through everything and all the rest. Tell me about, when did you know you had ADHD? How did that affect even your education and growing up and things like that?

Ashly: Most women don't get diagnosed with ADHD until they're older. I was the same. I was in my late twenties. When I found out and finally got the diagnosis, almost everything clicked backwards in my life. I was like, oh, my god. One of the things that made me realize that I had it is that constant interrupting is a sign of ADHD. My whole life, I just thought that my brain felt fast and I was rude or something. Then I realized, oh, this is just one of the symptoms of ADHD. When I went back and started actually talking to my therapist and to a psychiatrist, I had almost all of the markers for both deficit and hyperactivity. Because of the way women are socialized, we often can socially get around what most little boys can't, which is just hyperactivity and an inability to concentrate in schoolwork. For me, ADHD, it was very much a cycle of feeling relieved and then feeling upset and then feeling confused about what that meant, and ashamed. Now I really feel like I've embraced what that does to my brain. This book wouldn't exist if my brain didn't have ADHD. ADHD has an ability to grasp different concepts from all over the place and put them together in kind of a weird and interesting mash-up. That's what I tried to do with this book, is just let my brain be free and bring together concepts that might not normally make sense.

Zibby: It's so funny. I've talked to other big-deal editors of memoir or narrative fiction or whatever. They're always saying things like, try to play with time. Try to bring in this and mix it up. Don't make it too straightforward. Make it more interesting. That's exactly what you're saying is how your brain is, de facto state of operation, right?

Ashly: Yes. It's nonlinear and just hops around. That's so interesting that editors are looking for that.

Zibby: Because the rest of us, even if you don't have ADHD -- I feel like I have situational ADHD. I am constantly interrupted, and so I can't actually think in a normal way anymore. No, I know it's much more -- I know a lot about it. I don't actually have it. I do feel like sleep deprivation and other things can really affect your ability to focus, not in terms of an underlying condition, but a situational condition.

Ashly: I also think that, in some ways, the way that we use social media now has affected all of our attention spans whether or not you have a diagnosis of ADHD. We all have so much less attention because of the way we're constantly consuming content in little bites.

Zibby: Yes. I think that has its translation into fiction where it's, keep people on their toes. Don't just sit and tell them a story and expect them to -- and not all. Maybe it was just a handful of -- I don't want to totally say -- now people are going to be like, wait, I have to change my novel and mix it up a little bit. No, no, no, but just in some instances, it can help keep the pacing or whatever. Anyway, all to say you do that naturally. I love how you interweave, as you said, all your personal stories. Tell me a little bit about your abuelo and his love of books and your special relationship with him and then how you ended up dedicating the book to him and his great saying that you put -- of course, I'm not going to find it at the right time. Was this one it? "There's always more to learn."

Ashly: Yes.

Zibby: You have it here, which I'm showing on YouTube, but nobody can see. I won't even try to massacre the Spanish. Tell me more about him.

Ashly: The book is dedicated to my abuelo. He is the entire reason that I love books. He died in 2019. He was known as kind of a walking encyclopedia, anything that he read. He read in all sorts of languages. He read in French. He read in English. He read in Spanish. Anything that he read was committed to memory even all the way up until he died when he was eighty-nine. He always used to write me letters in Spanish. I would write back to him. The entry that you're talking about is from a letter that he wrote to me. At the end of it, it's, "Nunca creas saberlo todo. Siempre necesitamos aprender más. Never think that you know everything. There's always more to learn." I really think that that's how he lived his life, always in the pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of new facts. He enjoyed discovering new things that would change his perspective. I always very much appreciated that about him.

My sense of curiosity and appreciation specifically for words -- you'll notice that a lot of the book has to do with etymology and the origin of language and what words really mean. I think that came solely from grandfather because he was so precise with all of the words that he chose. He often corrected my Spanish and often made sure that I was using the correct words, the correct interpretations. I would go over to his house in order to learn Spanish. He would pull out old letters that my dad had written him. We would correct my dad's letters in Spanish, which is very fun. We would correct my dad's letters in Spanish with a Spanish-English dictionary next to us to be learning, and always learning. I wanted to dedicate the book to him because it's very much an expression of love of learning and of always being curious and always discovering new things and not being precious about where you discover new things because you can find things everywhere. You can find inspiration everywhere.

Zibby: That is such a genius idea, by the way. I have this giant bag of camp letters from summer camp which is stuffed underneath a bunch of clothes in the corner of my closet. How great, as my kids get better at grammar and learning to spell -- hopefully, they’ll get better -- to take those letters out, even in English, and have them correct them. Then they can learn more about me. We can have a bonding moment. That's brilliant.

Ashly: It was such a fun way for me to learn about my dad with my grandfather there and learn about their relationship and then also learn Spanish. It was just so fun and so personal. I'm sure your kids would love that. I think anytime, as children, we get a glimpse into who our parents really are and who they were when they were our age, it's mind-blowing and it humanizes them.

Zibby: Totally, and the people, even, who wrote me letters because I saved a lot of those. Now with the emails, I'm always like, I'm sure I'll be able to find this later. I'm just going to stuff it in this folder on the side here. I'm never going to see that email again, but my own letters, I have. I know where they are.

Ashly: I think a lot of writers are very attached to words, obviously. The only thing that I will ever keep -- I always think, if there was a fire, what would I grab? I keep everything anyone has ever written to me. If I was at a bar with a friend and we wrote something on a coaster, I have that coaster. I have Post-its that my roommate used to write me in college. I have anything that has words on it. When my grandfather died, or right before he died, he showed me in his office, his whole desk was filed with every single letter anyone has ever written him. The ones marked from his family were marked tesoros, which means treasures. I was like, oh, at the end, all we have are these treasures from each other and what we said to each other and how we made each other feel.

Zibby: It's so true. I'll tell you, the first thing that I always do -- I've lost a lot of people, as I know so many people have. I don't do this consciously, but I have found that one of the first things I do is an inventory of, what letters? Where is their handwriting? What can I hold in my hand? What pictures do I have? What videos do I have? I assemble it all together. Those become talismans, the note from my friend in college that I still have, the birthday card from my grandmother, all of it. It ends up having so much more importance.

Ashly: I've memorized every voicemail my grandpa ever sent me. It's so funny because voicemails are always so casual. It just feels like, how did I not know this was so important? Now my mailbox is always full because I refuse to delete any voicemails from anyone. [laughs]

Zibby: The only voicemail I refuse to delete is from Andre Agassi who was the second guest on this podcast. I just thought it was the coolest thing that he ever called me. I keep deleting all the annoying school emails or my parents or whatever, but Andre Agassi, all caps, is in my voicemail inbox. [laughter] Tell me now about your TV writing and what you're doing aside from writing great inspirational books like this one.

Ashly: My TV writing, I work on a show called Good Trouble which is on Freeform. It's a spin-off of a show called The Fosters. It's been such a fun exercise. I started in digital writing and writing short-form content for the internet and then moved into TV writing, which is group writing, essentially. I didn't know even as a writer what, really, the function of a writers' room is. It's just a bunch of writers sitting with each other discussing their lives and stories and seeing how it translates to other characters. Really, all writing is the same, I think. It's humans sharing stories with each other and then figuring out the best form for it to take. Ironically, being in a writers' room, you do very little solo writing. When you get an episode, you go off and write. Sometimes you'll write scenes for different episodes. It was more of a function of just being in community with each other.

Zibby: I feel like I usually preferred solo projects to group projects in school. Yet I kept getting thrown together, particularly in business school because they were like, you have to learn how to work as group. Then the more I talk to people who work in writers' rooms, it's the same thing. I'm like, I guess I should've [indiscernible] I have that opportunity. A girlfriend of mine is going to be in a writers' room in January. She's like, "Do you want to come in on our Zoom?" I was like, "Yes, I can't wait. I want to see what that's like."

Ashly: It's definitely a very cool experience. It's fun to be able to write in lots of different forms. The book was very much written exactly where I'm sitting every day at the same time. I would write during the dawn and during dusk, I found were the best parts for me, so in the very early morning or at night in the magic hour, essentially, of the day and the dawn. The hardest part about writing this book was that I had to be inspired in order to write it. I was constantly practicing, how do I find inspiration and in what ways? Part of it is the discipline of looking for inspiration. Then oftentimes, it would be at the time where I was completely exhausted, couldn't think of anything, and would go on a walk that something would surprise me and give me a true burst of inspiration that was unlike just pining and looking for it.

Zibby: It's hard to say, okay, now I'm going to be inspired. Although, I guess now that we have your book, now I have a time and a place that I anytime I want, I can just go in. Another thing I noticed is how often you referenced Oprah. I feel like she must be some sort of cult hero of yours because you talk about not only how she used to hand out free donuts on the street to get people into her taping studio, but also how few iconic moments are relative to how much time the show took in general, how many hours. Tell me about you and Oprah.

Ashly: Me and Oprah, I wish that that was a real thing of, here's my friendship with Oprah. Like most of America, Oprah has just been an icon in my house and a purveyor of wisdom and somebody I've looked to for perspective. My and me editor had a lot of back-and-forth about how much Oprah could be in the book. [laughs] I won a lot of Oprah. I was just flipping through the book the other day. I'm like, oh, the first couple of entries are very Oprah-heavy, or people that Oprah has talked to and the wisdom that she learned there. I really respond to Oprah's What I Know for Sure and Little Truths. She has a book called The Book of Happiness. Oprah is also someone who has been scouring the world in her lifetime for new perspectives and new learnings. Oprah's person is Maya Angelou. If you know anything about Oprah, all she ever talks about is Maya Angelou and what Maya Angelou taught her. For me, Oprah and Brené Brown are the two people that I constantly and incessantly talk about who I feel like are women who have taught me a lot. One of my favorite things that you're referencing is, there's an entry about Oprah how she had, I believe it's 4,561 or 4,651 episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Zibby: 4,561.

Ashly: 561. I was trying to memorize it because this has actually come up a few times. She has 4,561 episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Maybe ten of those episodes, but truly, three of those moments are iconic in American history and feel like part of our pop culture zeitgeist. I think about the fact that she had a quote that said, "Do the work as an offering. Then whatever happens, happens." I think often as artists or creatives or people who are looking just for inspiration, we put a lot into whatever the next thing is and feel like it has to be perfect and it has to be the thing. In actuality with life, even what you were talking about with camp, think about how many hours you've spent at camp, how many days, how many nights. How many of those memories really stay exactly with you? How many of those are pertinent to you? It kind of taught me that you can't hold everything so preciously. You just do the work because you want to do it, because you love it. You live your life because you have to live your life. We're not really sure what's going to resonate. It's not our job to figure that out. It's just our job to put out there what is important to us.

Zibby: I love that. That sounded like great advice. I always like to ask what advice you have for aspiring authors. That is fabulous. Would you have anything else aside from, basically, keep putting things out there and letting the right people find it when they need it?

Ashly: That pretty much sums up my advice. You don't need permission to be a writer and that the validation of -- oftentimes for me, I was always looking for, what is going to make me a real writer? What job am I going to get? Who's going to see it? Do I have to have a published book in order to feel real and authentic? It's actually so much more about, I feel like a real writer when I'm writing stuff that I like and no one can see it. Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who's this amazing writer -- she did Fleabag and Killing Eve. She's a television writer. She always says that she writes for her one best friend. She just wants to make her one best friend laugh, and that's it. She ended up making everybody laugh and is this incredible writer. I think the pressure of thinking of an audience and people who are going to deem your work important can actually be the killer of creativity. Either write for your best friend or write for yourself. Take that pressure off. Then whatever happens, happens. If it goes out into the world and people like it, great. If it doesn't, I often think that the time of anonymity is the best time to be a writer because you can fail in the dark by yourself with no one watching. Enjoy the time before the time where people are looking.

Zibby: Love it, failures in the dark. [laughter]

Ashly: Yes, the next book after Read This for Inspiration, failures in the dark.

Zibby: Read this for inspiration in your closest with the lights off. Ashly, thank you. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for this beautiful book which just makes me smile whenever I see it and which I'm going to leave out on my coffee table even though it's tiny and adorable because it's really happy.

Ashly: That's exactly what it's for. That's what it's for. I made it specifically, when I was designing it -- I carry my books with me all around in backpacks and stuff. I wanted it to be hard enough that it didn't get bent and that you could fit it into your purse, into your locker, or right next to you by a coffee table. Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. It was great talking with you.

Zibby: Great talking to you too.

Ashly: Bye.

Zibby: Bye, Ashly.

Priya Parker, THE ART OF GATHERING

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

Priya Parker: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: The Art of Gathering, you might think this is a bad time for this book to come out, but it's actually the most important time ever for this book to come out when every gathering is imbued with extra meaning and navigating how to gather becomes the most important thing when you can't actually see anyone. What do you think about the timing of this release?

Priya: It's ironic. It's a fascinating moment to have The Art of Gathering, particularly -- the paperback came out in the midst of the pandemic and at a moment where the word gathering was in every headline perhaps in a way that it's never been before. The CDC bans gatherings. Washington State bans gatherings of ten or more people. Andrew Cuomo bans gatherings. In a sense, the word gathering -- I chose it very intentionally -- before COVID hit, was a source of meaning and inspiration and beauty. Within three weeks, the context of the entire word flipped. It was a source of danger and a source of death. Part of what has been beautiful and powerful and complicated and painful in this moment is that we still are grappling with and struggling with how to be together when we can't in the same old way. How do we create meaning together despite significant obstacles? I'm a conflict resolution facilitator. My core day job craft is not an events planner or a florist or a lighting expert or somebody whose profession is reliant on the things, the accoutrements of a gathering. A facilitator is trained on, how do you create meaningful connection despite significant obstacles? A huge part of The Art of Gathering, well before COVID when I was writing it over the last many years, is about, how do we actually stop our obsession on form and on things and on the fish knives and the flowers and the AV equipment? How do we actually think about creating meaning not through things, but through people? Right now, we can't make meaning through things. It's become actually this turned-up volume on, how do we actually create psychological togetherness and not over-rely on the physical togetherness?

Zibby: How do you do it? [laughs] Like you, like everybody, I'm completely reliant on Zooms and FaceTimes and trying to make time for that in life, but it's not the same. There's something very much missing.

Priya: Absolutely. I hope and pray as much as everyone else that this period passes as fast as possible. I think the way you do it is actually, in some ways, the same way you do it whether you're physical or virtual, which is, you start with the need in front of you. You start with the purpose. The same way if you're thinking about a birthday party, I would say you don't start with the cake and the candles, in a Zoom meeting or in a Zoom staff meeting or in a Zoom birthday party, you don't start with Zoom. Zoom is a tool. It's not the host. I'll give a specific example. I have a friend who was turning fifty. He thought about not, what kind of party do I want? but, what is my need right now? He was feeling tender about turning fifty. He'd never really cared about birthdays. He wasn't one to worry about getting older, but he felt a niggle. I don't even know if that's the right word. He felt this thing about turning fifty.

He got clear on it and he said, "In my life, I have always been attracted to and I've always sought out adventure and risk." He was a foreign correspondent. He realized that in his life there were many people who, once they turned fifty, they began to contract. They took less risks. They started taking less of the scary jobs. He was really worried that would happen to him. He decided for his fiftieth he would invite the people in his life that most continued to take risks. He brought them together. It was around a table, but you could do this on Zoom. In the first five minutes, he raised his glass and he told the story. He said, "What I most want is to continue to take risks and to expand. I don't want to be somebody who contracts slowly and incrementally over the next twenty years. I want to keep expanding. You are people who have always kept expanding despite obstacles. I want to thank you for that. I want you to blow that energy to me when I begin to contract. Remind me of tonight."

Zibby: I love that. Even in your book when you talked about the dinner party, it's something as simple as having a few couples for dinner. I'm having this couple, so I guess I should have this couple. What do you want to get out of a dinner party? Why are you going to do this? What do you want to talk about? Maybe you should talk about something really interesting. Maybe invite this other couple you hadn’t even thought about and give it a whole new purpose. Everything just shifts. I think one of the biggest things is we so often have meetings or events or whatever, and because we have them, they just are what they are. Your book and your whole message, really, is, no, no, no, we all have to stop. Yes, gathering's a part of life, but it doesn't have to be so route, almost.

Priya: Monotonous. Totally. I think at first, people are like, oh, god, that's just so exhausting. I'm like, no, you know what's exhausting? Going through life on autopilot and focusing on all the logistics and having everything to be perfect because you're trying to replicate somebody else's form. That's exhausting. You know what's life-giving? Having a real need and looking at yourself and saying, what is it that I need right now? Who might be able to help me with this? What is it that this community needs right now? How might we actually design for that? I'll give an example. One of the characters in the book, Ida Benedetto, I called her up recently. She's the one -- I don't know if you remember. She creates these extreme experiences to help people navigate risk with care. She does these fake conventions at the Waldorf Astoria where people show up in black tie and have to do things like -- there's a wedding on the third floor. Crash it, and give a toast to the bride. Things that just make your palms sweat. I called her up. I said, "How are you thinking about the holidays?" When I just need a different way of thinking, I call her.

She said, "You know, if I could give any advice, I would say don't think about a holiday party. How can you shift from a party to an adventure? The difference between a party and an adventure is two things: motion and mission." I was like, "Okay. What does that mean?" She said, "I threw my thirtieth birthday party years ago. Many friends often say to me it's one of the best nights of their life. I'm like, why? It was so simple." She had a friend who was a photographer who was taking pictures of beautiful keyholes on doors in the city. She brought together twelve friends. They all had to bring their camera. She explained their mission. The mission was to find the most beautiful keyholes in the city in two hours. Then they just went. She said, "What if during the holidays, rather than trying to all clamor into Zoom --" There's way to make Zoom, also, meaningful. "What if instead, with your team or with your family, you created an adventure?" You can be outside. It's cold, but when you're in motion, it's not so cold. When you have a mission, it allows for you to move. How do we actually think about being together in ways that are new experiences and don't have to look like what we think a party looks like?

Zibby: It's like my kids going on field trips. You have to get out of the classroom every so often. You have to go into the world. You kind of roll your eyes. You're like, really? I have to schlep to the Queens Museum? or something like that. Then you end up realizing that that's when you have the most memorable thing from the whole class. You just have to push yourself to get out there because learning often doesn't happen the way you expect. Neither does any of the rest.

Priya: And the dynamics within the classroom, all of us, for good reasons, play specific roles to have some amount of order, whether it's assigned seats or whether Sally always sits by Sanjay, and Sanjay always sits by Leia. Then on that sleepover, everyone could pull their sleeping bags in the museum on different parts of the floor. All of a sudden, these new friendships were born. When we shift our spaces, psychologically or virtually, we're also shifting our norms of who is labeled as what. They're always the introvert. They don't usually sing. Each of us have many parts. I define a gathering as anytime three or more people come together for a purpose with a beginning, middle, or end. We're gathering all the time, but we're often gathering in ways that we're on autopilot. It's not serving anybody.

Zibby: I think about this all the time, so I was particularly receptive to your message and your mission because I'm always analyzing time and how we're spending time. Is this worth it? Even my own time, is this group Zoom worth it? What is my purpose? Should I be doing my emails at the same time during this one or that one? How do you maximize everything? Why are we even doing it? What is the point? Why are we doing it? Before, I used to do it with meetings. What are we all just sitting around -- why do I go to board meetings? What are we doing here? [laughs]

Priya: When it becomes performative, like, I'd like to be on that board or I like that company's mission or whatever reason we each join boards or you join a board, then at some level, no one really wants to be this performative sitting duck. I'll give an example. A woman came up to me, pre-COVID, at a book event. She said, "I'm an executive director. I read The Art of Gathering. It helped me figure out why my board meetings suck. I realized that they are rubber stamps. We all as a staff work to make sure we make our most beautiful presentations. We go like a dog and pony show. We show all the wonderful things that are happening. Everyone politely claps and leaves." She said, "But these people on my board are brilliant. I want to use them. I flipped my board purpose from being a dog and pony show to be bringing them our scariest problems."

Zibby: I love that.

Priya: Everything changed. It was specific and disputable. Some of her staff were like, "I don't know if this is such a good idea. You really want to tell them what the problems are?" All of a sudden, you could see the blood come back into the board member's face. They were actually needed. We should be gathering because we need each other, not out of obligation, and shifting it -- every community has needs that benefit by people coming together. We're just not often gathering around what those needs are. We shouldn’t judge what those needs are. The needs can be hilarious. They can be release. They can be, I need to have a night where I can talk with other mothers and we don't talk about our kids. I need to remember that I can be many things.

Zibby: Yes. I feel like I need to try to put in motion -- I'm on the board of a major medical institution. I don't know how receptive they'd be if I'm like, okay -- but then you think, gosh, look at the people sitting around this table. If we were all just talking to each other, how interesting would that be versus listening? I also feel like that's some ways that we've all saved time. I do feel like one perk of this pandemic -- not that there are any and not that I wouldn't trade it, obviously. For times when you just need to listen and process, why go anywhere? Why run around town and go from here to there to there just to sit and listen if you can do it from your computer? If you want to be with people and bring yourself and your feelings -- I'm sorry, I'm preaching to the choir here. [laughs] I totally agree.

Priya: Absolutely. I often say to my clients, people I work with, in all types of institutions, there's a sense, we should have a retreat. We should have a three-day gathering. I always say, why are you doing this? Why do you want to have a conference? What is your purpose? Then I say, if you want to invite all of these people, I want you to figure out what the agenda is so that they would cancel other stuff to attend this. That's the bar.

Zibby: Usually, there has to be something they're getting out of it. You have to look at it like marketing. I have this anthology coming out. We're trying to plan a tour. I'm like, I've been on so many calls about books. There has to be something that you're offering. Otherwise, why would anybody just sit and listen? What can I give? I don't know if I even have an answer to that. What can I give that people might leave and be like, I'm so glad because now in my life I can do X, Y, or Z better, or something where it's not just...

Priya: Yes, and not just receiving. One practical way to think about -- I think about time as real estate. If you're sixty minutes on a Zoom call, fifty-nine minutes of those shouldn't be a presentation unless it's literally the most fascinating presentation in the world that people are tearing walls down to get this data. That's not most people. Maybe it's the presidential daily briefing. [laughs] If it's not that, how do you begin to shrink the presentation time to thirty minutes, meaning over an hour, or ten minutes and create time for people to interact meaningfully? On Zoom, that might be breakout groups. It might mean putting people in groups of three. It's not rocket science. It's having the courage to not fill time. You know what else? The presentation also is de-risked. I know schools that are navigating enormous conflict, whether on COVID or teachers. It's such a fraught time. When administrators finally come and do a Zoom call and you log in and it's a fifty-nine-and-a-half-minute presentation, they're not doing anything. They're perpetuating a problem because they're not actually shifting the relationship and listening to what people have to say. How do you actually not just give people something, but how do you create a contract where the gathering has changed because of who the participants are and how they actually engage there? You can't create something new if it's just a stagnant webinar.

Zibby: Totally. You should just send the presentation ahead of time. Let me skim through it. I will digest the whole thing. I will come back to you in the meeting, and then I will have my questions already thought through. So will everyone else. That's the beauty of the brainstorm. You really do get lots more ideas when you all come together, but if you're going to waste time just listening...

Priya: There's a facilitator named Misha Glouberman. He wrote a book called The Chairs are Where the People Go with Sheila Heti a few years ago. I think it was in April, he wrote this nerdy little Medium piece that I loved. It's nerdy because it shows you how to host a cocktail party on Zoom, but through all of the technicalities. I have a newsletter community that every two or three weeks we send out a story of what somebody's -- how they're creating togetherness virtually. Every now and then, we do an experience. We brought Misha in. He showed us on Zoom how you can create basically an unconference with a hundred other people. When he wrote this piece in April, it was kind of complicated. Now the latest version of Zoom has a feature where you can make everybody the host. Everybody, a hundred people, can be a cohost. This is an example of, if you have a hundred people or thirty people or twenty people, people are interesting. They know what their problems are. They know what their needs are.

He created a Google Doc where he said, "Do you have a conversation you would like to host in this group? Do you have a burning question you're trying to figure out?" Some people were like, how do you fight online? How do you have conflict safely virtually with your team? Other people were like, how do you create intimacy? All these different questions. Then everybody becomes a cohost on Zoom. You see all the rooms. You see who's hosting the conversation. You see what the topic is on Google Docs. You can literally portal yourself. Like Exit West, you can go through the portal and find yourself in another room. It’s a way of actually decentralizing power. It's putting the agenda into everybody's hands and letting people choose where they want to go. It's not rocket science. It's actually helping people determine what the needs are and choose where they want to go. People are now doing this virtually.

Zibby: Wow. That's really neat. All right, so there's hope. There's hope for the Zoom world. Thank you for that. How did you know you wanted to be a conflict resolution expert? How did that happen?

Priya: I assume, like your podcast, you are trying to sort out your own life through this podcast. [laughter]

Zibby: What makes you say that?

Priya: Something tells me.

Zibby: I can't believe you would jump to that conclusion. I'm offended. [laughs]

Priya: Same, girl. I'm biracial. I'm bicultural. I grew up in a family that two parents were married and then divorced. My mother is Indian. My father is white American. Each remarried people who were, in a lot of ways, polar opposite of the family that they had created together. They had joint custody. I was part of both homes. Every two weeks, I'd go back and forth between these two homes. It was like split screen or split reality. One home was this Indian, British, Buddhist-mediating, incense-filled, dream-interpreting, [indiscernible] for me home. Then I would travel 1.4 miles to my father and stepmother's home. It was, and still is, a white American, evangelical Christian, conservative, republican, meat-eating, softball-playing, dogs -- just culturally a different place. That was also my home. Every two weeks, I'd go back and forth between these two split screens. In many ways, the things that each of those family cultures began to think of as the other was actually my other two weeks. I've always been interested in when and why and how we come together and how we create our realities and how we create group identity.

How can you create a group and an experience and a community where people feel something in common, feel connected to each other, but don't have to all be the same, where you're stamping out people's differences in order to belong? In part because there's communities that I feel like I could belong and be complicated in and there's communities where I don't feel like I can belong and be complicated in, I'm really interested in the communities where you can belong and still have many paradoxes within you. I also don't think every community is for everybody. A big idea in The Art of Gathering is exclusion. You shouldn't invite everybody to everything. One, it makes everything the same. Also, it doesn't make sense for the purpose. I'm a huge advocate in excluding people with care and not because of the personality or because of the politics, but because of the purpose. I often talk about this gathering that a journalist hosted called the worn-out mom's hootenanny. She was trying to create this dinner party. She felt obligated to do it. It was actually an assignment she had. Then she shifted and she said, you know what, a need I have is I'm worn out. I'm a mom. What if I host a dinner party for my other worn-out moms? She called it a worn-out mom's hootenanny. If they talked about their kids, they had to take a shot. The six women who were invited and went were so excited to be seen as worn-out, to be seen as a real need. Some of the partners were like, why can't dads come? Part of it is because that's not the need tonight. It begins to shift. If you want a worn-out dad's hootenanny, you better be a little bit more worn out. It just starts to create specificity that actually has an opportunity to shift norms.

Zibby: Very true. I know. When I was reading about your childhood and the whiplash you must have had going back and forth -- I'm a child of divorce too. My parents lived very close together. They're not as different as yours. Still, any child of divorce who has to navigate constantly having themselves in these two different environments and having to adapt and also having to deal with parents in that situation, I feel like the conflict resolution schools or whatever, however you get trained, should pair up with the divorce lawyers. You could just have a feeder organization.

Priya: Completely. It's like a boot camp.

Zibby: Yeah, boot camp. There you go. [laughs] For you personally, now you have this book. You're talking all the time on all these shows and podcasts. You just talked to Brené Brown, oh, my gosh. I started listening, but now I have to finish after this. I was like, oh, my gosh, you guys are amazing. What is it you still want to do? What are you super fired up to do next? What now?

Priya: I look at the people who I think have had some amount of success, whatever you want to define that as, who are in their sixties and seventies and eighties and who are still happy and vibrant and seem grounded and not like jerks, what I see them doing and having in common, whether they're a comedian or whether they're a therapist, is that they all are still connected to their source work. It's the therapist who still sees clients three days a week. Jerry Seinfeld still writes jokes every day. He still goes to Podunk -- pre-COVID and hopefully post-COVID -- stand up halls to try out new material even though he's the most famous comedian in the world because he's pursuing mastery. He's close to his source work. For me, for the rest of my life, I think, I'm a facilitator. My craft and my source, it's to be close to the work. In a sense, I see writing as this outcome of the questions I'm pursuing through groups. Then I think the second thing that has really helped me is -- years ago, David Brooks made a speech that resonated with me. He said something like, no question worthy of pursuit is answerable in a lifetime. How do we come together in ways that are meaningful and have a common, agreed purpose and not have to all be exactly the same? That's a thousand-year question.

Zibby: That's true. All right, so you got your work cut out for you.

Priya: I think for each of us, rather than thinking about the form -- again, it's how do you stay close to your source work, whatever that is? How do you continue to pursue mastery, whatever that may be in? Brené Brown, she has one of the best and most whatever, number-one podcast. She's relatively new at it. She tweeted the other day, "Enjoyed so much listening to Dax Shepard and Tim Ferris geek out on how to podcast." She's a student. She's not sitting on her laurels. When she interviewed me, I was so moved. I was intimidated by the interview. Going in, oh, gosh, what am I going to say? She, more than anybody else -- the entire interview is text based. She had her book, The Art of Gathering. It was dogeared and Post-its all around and like a student with a capital S. She was studying. It just reminded me, we all may have a mastery in one specific thing, but to continue to pursue a question is life-giving, not just to everyone else, but for yourself.

Zibby: By the way, that does not make subsequent interviewers feel any good about what they are doing. I was reading this before I talked to you. I was like, oh, gosh, I've already failed this interview. I already can't measure up. [laughs]

Priya: Not at all. I think part of the reason why even interviews for me are fun is because each one is an opportunity to have your brain collide with somebody else's brain. Part of what's beautiful about your podcast is that it's your specific questions. It's your curiosity. It's not just for your audience, but for each author that comes on that's unique and makes it "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books"-ian or Zibby-ian. It's a very specific DNA.

Zibby: This is just literally my opportunity to ask people what I want to know. I'm delighted anybody else wants to listen, but this is completely self-serving. Yes. [laughs]

Priya: Which is why it's relevant. You have a real need. You found a way to spend time despite obstacles, I imagine being a mom and the things that may come along with that. There's a lot of other people who have the same problem, and so they get to ride alongside you.

Zibby: Sure. Why not? [laughs] Do you have any parting advice to aspiring authors?

Priya: To authors, one is, think about a question that you don't know the answer to when you're a writing book. You may have an instinct around -- you may think you have something to say, but you're really desperately curious to find out the answer to. That's one. Number two, don't write a book. Write twelve chapters. When I was thinking about a book, I was like, oh, my god, this is so overwhelming. My husband told me this. He's like, "Write down the twelve things you know are true that are counterintuitive that you believe might be -- and then go test them." My original yellow [indiscernible] sheet of twelve ideas, I think six of them became chapter titles. Six of them didn't. New things came in. Write chapters. Don't write a book. Make sure the chapters have an arc, but think about chapters. Then I think the third is, different authors and writers have different parts of the process that they love and that they hate. I love the research. I love the conversations. I love the meaning-making. I hate the writing. I find it very difficult. I'm a much better speaker than I am writer. I would often take voice memos of myself talking out loud and then transcribe myself onto the page. Find ways to lean into what you love and then to hack through what you don't.

Zibby: Excellent. It sounds like your husband could maybe be a writing coach on the side, if you guys need a little side-hustle situation.

Priya: Exactly. He's very good.

Zibby: I would say let's meet up sometime, but of course, I can't. If we ever have a common goal that we need to sort out, we should maybe intentionally try to do that face to face at some point in the next ten years or something. [laughter]

Priya: I look forward to that. I get so many of my examples, as you can hear from this conversation, from other people doing real stuff in the world. Send me your examples. On Instagram, we're often having lively conversations about what people's holiday plans are, what Thanksgiving plans, what a virtual party looks like. You can follow me, @PriyaParker. Sign up for our newsletter. The Art of Gathering is a call to look at your own life and ask what the need is and then gather around it. It's a courageous thing to do, but it's also a contagious thing to do. A big part of The Art of Gathering is it's a norm-spreading, permission-giving book.

Zibby: Love it. Well done. [laughter]

Priya: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and for a project that you're pursuing that other people get to benefit from.

Zibby: No problem. Thanks for sharing.

Priya: Thanks so much, Zibby. Be well.

Zibby: Have a great day. Buh-bye.

Priya: Bye.

Paige Peterson, GROWING UP BELVEDERE-TIBURON

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

Paige Peterson: Thank you. How are you?

Zibby: This is so nice for me because you were my first boss ever. How old I was? Eleven or something. I babysat your kids. How old was I?

Paige: I think you were ten. Alexandra was just born.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. How old is she now?

Paige: She's almost thirty-four.

Zibby: Yeah, I was ten. Oh, my gosh, that's crazy. It was so great. I got to spend all those summers and watch Alexandra grow up and then go to school with her.

Paige: We picked Trinity because you went there.

Zibby: I hope she liked it.

Paige: We followed you through your education.

Zibby: This is such a coming-full-circle moment. I'm so excited I can have you on the podcast. Your book is so beautiful and so beautifully written. I have to say -- let me back up. Why don't you start by telling listeners what your book is about and what inspired you to write it? Then I will continue my raves about it.

Paige: [laughs] Thank you. I actually was at dinner in New York with a friend of mine, David Patrick Columbia who has a blog called New York Social Diary. We were sitting together. I was just telling him what my childhood was like. He said, "Oh, my god, you must write about this. This is incredible." The way I wrote this book was to get very, very quiet and to kind of channel that inner child of mine and remember what it was like to be a little girl. I started writing vignettes. I just started writing paragraphs, nothing connected. In the end, nothing sort of connects in the book either because it's childhood memories. They're just capsules of moments. I was extraordinarily blessed. I'm sixty-five years old. In 1955, I was born in Northern California. Belvedere and Tiburon was still a railroad town. It was a rural, wild place. It was great.

Zibby: Your book is such a great combination of your own memories about growing up there and the place itself, but also your childhood and then so many amazing photographs that you have dug up from the past hundred-plus years, which is amazing.

Paige: We took those photographs from the Miwok Indians up. There's an amazing history here, one that America should not be proud of. What the Spaniards and the Mexicans and then the white men did to the American Indians is appalling. This whole peninsula that I live in where I'm talking to you from was just beautiful, peaceful land with Indians. Of course, in a very short amount of time, we decimated them. The missionaries put them in Western clothing and turned them into slaves. It's really an appalling history here. Then we moved forward. I did write about a hundred years of history in Northern California. It's amazing. This railroad town was an amazing place.

Zibby: Your childhood, literally, I was reading it and I was like, this is the backdrop for any movie about America. I felt like I was reading a set for a novel or something. I couldn't believe that's the way you grew up with riding your bikes all day and no playdates and just so many things that you think of as so traditional America, small town, whatever. Yet there was San Francisco right over the bridge too. Crazy.

Paige: It was crazy. You know Zibby, I raised my kids on Central Park West just the way you were raised and you're now raising your children. My childhood was so vastly different. Of course, our parents just sort of said, make your own lunch and leave the house. It didn't matter if it was raining. It didn't matter. We would go to the library. We were told to go. We wouldn't come back until the four-thirty whistle blew. Nobody paid any attention to us. We used to take swings and swing off over the cliff. Nobody cared. More importantly, kids didn't get hurt. I think sometimes the hovering things, kids aren't as mindful as they should be because everybody's always hovering around them. I feel so very blessed to have been raised here.

Zibby: Tell me about this. You put water in the freezer, and that was your water for the day. You would take it out and wait for it to melt.

Paige: Yeah, in a glass jar. We all did it. Collectively, all the kids always had a glass jar in the basket of their bikes. We all used to drink out of garden hoses, which of course now we know is completely toxic and horrible to do. I would never let my child, but we did it. We did it. We weren’t dependent on anyone. By the way, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich was all one needed for nine hours. There were no such things as snacks. It was so simple.

Zibby: There was part of me reading your book sighing with longing as I think about the effort it takes just for me to get my kids to school, and the fifty-seven snacks and water bottles. That's just to literally cross the park. That's a ten-minute --

Paige: -- I did it. I was you.

Zibby: Yeah, I know.

Paige: Just preparing to get out of my apartment, I used to think, oh, my god, I cannot even believe this. My mother never did this. It was a much simpler time. It was really beautiful. One of the things, Zibby, I live on the water. The Tiburon Peninsula has water on three sides of it. There were no life jackets. Kids swam in the bay. Kid swam in the lagoon. We were competent on boats and kayaking. There was no safety of any kind. There were no helmets when you rode your bike. There was nothing. It's amazing. By the way, I don't know any kid that got hurt. There were things that happened later on as teenagers, but it wasn't about playing and being free.

Zibby: You had this great passage. It just stayed with me, one of your many descriptive scenes that takes the reader back. You wrote, "For years, the snack bar at the club only offered bags of potato chips. After some remodeling, the menu upgraded to include grilled cheese, hot dogs, and hamburgers with chips and pickles, mayonnaise and yellow mustard on the side, paper cups for ice water. The thin plywood changing rooms stayed the same for years, lockers and hooks for hanging wet towels, the smell of never-ending dampness. Don't we all have such memory rooms composed of tastes, smells, and textures? They stay with us always." Aw, that is so nice. Then later on, and maybe this goes to what you were saying about the teenage years, you write, "Like any town, we had our share of tragedy. What happened inside the homes of our friends was none of anyone's business. People didn't talk about their problems outside of home. Ours was a culture of silence and secrets. In the 1960s and '70s, at least eight of my friends died before the age of twenty, some from drugs, some by suicide. All these decades later when I see the parents of those children, their eyes still carry sadness. As my grandmother would wisely nod to us, there but for the grace of God go I." Beautiful. You're a beautiful writer. That is haunting, the culture of silence and secrets in this idyllic waterside town. What's really going on inside the homes? This is a novel. It's like a thriller. I don't know what it is.

Paige: [laughs] It's interesting. I haven't heard somebody read that before. I was raised as an Episcopalian, but I went to a Catholic girls' school. It's interesting, this gang of girls. One of them ended up being schizophrenic and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Another one died of an overdose of LSD. It was in the sixties and seventies. Drugs were just being introduced to California, free love, and everything else. I think I was saved because I had a very strict mother. I was scared of her, and so I didn't do any of that stuff. I didn't follow. I wasn't allowed to. One of the things I write about, I wasn't allowed to go to Main Street. There were definite boundaries for me. I feel so very lucky and, as my grandmother did used to say, there but for the grace of God go I. It was so sad. Belvedere and Tiburon are two towns. It's divided by a road. It's not unlike East Hampton, one side of the tracks to the other. There was a lot of alcoholism here because of cocktail parties. This is a yachting community. This involves a lot of drinking. I still don't know what went on behind closed doors, but a lot of it wasn't very nice.

Zibby: Interesting.

Paige: And sad. Kids didn't go to psychiatrists. There wasn't much divorce. I was the product of a divorce. My parents were divorced when I was eighteen months old, very, very early on in my life. Most of the people I knew in this community were married and settled. Nobody took vacations because nobody had any money. We just played outside. We were together. Those years were complicated. I bet all over the world people could talk about the sixties and seventies being a hard time for kids in some respects.

Zibby: It seems like the trade-offs -- your childhood sounded just so perfect. Obviously, nothing is perfect. Maybe the secrets in your house do not want to come out either. Maybe you're keeping those locked inside.

Paige: I certainly didn't write about what happened inside the house. That's another book.

Zibby: I want to read that book.

Paige: [laughs] Outside the house, I think I was absolutely -- I look back on my childhood with such delight. I was so lucky. I just was so fortunate. Also, I was open to it and took advantage of it and didn't fight any of it. We were big tennis players. My mother was a professional tennis player. She is ninety-four and in the other room. We were on the courts all the time playing. There was amazing structure in that, being an athlete. Then the freedom that we had was just amazing. I don't see kids here having that freedom at all.

Zibby: Even there? Now I'm feeling all guilty that I have kids in New York City. What is it like for the kids growing up there now?

Paige: I have to tell you, Zibby, I loved raising my kids in New York City. They just had a completely different, wonderful experience. There are nannies holding their hands. There are hovering mothers. You don't see kids off on their own at all. It's just different everywhere. This idyllic time that we had I think was a capsule in time. It doesn't exist anymore. It'll never go back. First of all, the population exploded. We still had lots of empty lots on the island where we did box sliding and made forts and kept all our sleeping bags up there and put them under branches. That can't happen now. We're overpopulated. There's still a sweetness to this small town, but it's different. It's definitely different.

Zibby: Do you think that yields different kids and different grown-ups? What do you think the impact of that is on a societal level when you have a whole generation of people who grew up with all this independence? Now obviously we have these kids who we have to buckle up six ways and sideways just to get around the block in the car seats and everything. What do you think? What type of society does that lead to?

Paige: It's a really good question, Zibby. I'm glad I'm not raising kids. I'm sorry. I just think it's so hard. It's so hard now. I don't know. What do you think?

Zibby: I just think that it dovetails with the increased anxiety everybody has. Kids feel that we're so weary of everything that goes on around them. I think that it creates a population of kids who are not as inherently brave and bold to go forth. They're always looking behind them. Maybe that has some benefits as well. We like to believe in the sense of control and everything. I don't know. I look at you. I remember when I used to babysit. You were always painting these amazing things. You were just so cool. Not that you aren't anymore, but I just thought you were the most amazing woman, and so creative. Now you've written your book about Blackie. You've already written a children's book and now this beautiful book. You beat to your drummer much more so than most people that I grew up with knowing.

Paige: Thank you. You know something, Zibby? I didn't have any information when I was a kid. There was no information.

Zibby: Did you go to school?

Paige: [laughs] Yeah, I most definitely went to school.

Zibby: Okay, good. All right.

Paige: We're stating the obvious. There were no computers. There were no phones. I mean that kind of information. Our lives were so simple and small. Parents didn't talk to kids. In those days, it was completely -- I remember being told once -- I was horrified by it. Not by my mother, but I was told, "Children are to be seen and not heard." We didn't have the kind of information that our kids have now. I think that creates more anxiety for children. I wasn't anxious at all when I was a kid.

Zibby: Are you close to your mother now? What's your relationship like?

Paige: I have a wonderful relationship with her. She's at the end of her life, ninety-four. She's still full of pep. She was a two-term mayor here in Belvedere, so she's very political. My mother was a working person. She didn't have that much time to fool around with us. She played sports with us. She was a wonderful mother. When I look at how interactive the parents are with the kids, I just think, oh, my gosh, give them some space. I don't think children need to have as much information as they're getting. One of things I did is that I just had endless hours of daydreaming. I liked to paint when I was a little girl. I didn't have a scheduled time. Even after school, there was freedom to do nothing. Out of that nothingness came, for me, creativity. I started painting when I was very young. I didn't think anything was impossible. Then when I started reading, I thought, I want to be Gertrude Stein. I don't want Alice B. Toklas, but I want Gertrude Stein's life. I want to be surrounded with writers and painters and creative people. I was very attracted to that kind of world. That's where my creative brain was. I was always painting and writing, not necessarily reading. I was an action person. I was raised in Belvedere-Tiburon with Anne Lamott who was a childhood friend. Annie always had a book in her hand. I never did. I was finding things and making things. I was much more into being more creative.

Zibby: I saw her quote at the end. I read your book online in the PDF that you sent me, so I'm hoping that the final copy has this on the cover or something.

Paige: Yes, it does.

Zibby: All right, great. It says, "I love this new book by Paige Peterson and the Belvedere-Tiburon Landmark Society. Always amazing and meticulous in its discovery and preservation of historical photographs, the Landmark Society has found the perfect narrator for this new collection. Paige is both precise and charming in capturing the wild and natural beauty of our shared childhoods and habitats in Belvedere and Tiburon in the fifties and sixties. She extols the days of getting on our bikes after breakfast and not coming home until dinner, covered in blackberry juice and dirt, scratches and bliss. This combined effort brought me nostalgia and cheer. Anne Lamott."

Paige: Aw, Annie. I was very touched by that. We had the same childhood. She was a great tennis player. We all played tennis all the time together. She was so much smarter than I was. She always had a book in her hand. When you started this blog, I used to think about Annie. Also, Zibby, you were always reading. I remember you as a teenager always reading. As a little girl, you always brought a book with you. This is innately within you. I was not a reader. I was a painter. The other thing I used to do is that I used to make forts. Then I would make houses and play houses. I was much more out there creating things than I was reading. I am trying to catch up with that now. I read more now. Annie was great. You were reading all the time. I was trying to think about something. On your twelfth birthday, I gave you a book by -- he was a Lebanese poet.

Zibby: Kahlil Gibran?

Paige: Yes.

Zibby: Yes, I loved that book, The Prophet. I ended up quoting from it in my bat mitzvah speech the next year. In fact, if you gave me enough time, I would get up and start looking for it because I know that I still have it. I'm going to go search. If it's not in this room, it might still be at my mom's. I will find it. I loved that. I loved it.

Paige: In thinking about you and loving you, I remember thinking, what can I do for Zibby? I thought, oh, god, she loves to read. This is sort of out of the wheelhouse. It was just something different that I had been impacted with. It's wonderful.

Zibby: There you go. It's the power of a book. That book has stayed with me ever since. That's the best gift you could've given me. Plus, you gave me a painting of yours. I had it hanging in my room for years. Those are the gifts that have true meaning. Imagine if you had given me an LOL doll or whatever kids are getting now. [laughs] Thank you. This conversation has made me feel better too because I've been doing a lot more work lately. I'm on my computer more. I'm around the kids. I usually have my laptop upstairs. The kids just play. They play. They draw. They just do whatever. I'm not on the floor with them anymore. That's in part because they're older. I'm talking about my little guys, not my teenagers. I put them to bed last night. I was thinking to myself, oh, god, I worked so much today. I was next to them all day. They would jump on my lap. I'd kiss them. They'd run. Then they'd go do their own thing again. I was like, I didn't really spend that much time on the floor with them, except for the three hours in the morning when they got up at the crack of dawn. We were baking together and whatever. Once the workday started, I was focused. I felt so guilty when I went to kiss them at night. I was like, ugh, I was such a bad mom today.

Paige: You were a great mom today. To just be present and let them be, I think that's the best. That's what my mother was like too because she worked. She had a retail store. She also was in politics. She was available, but she wasn't on us. I think that's a gift. What you did today was great. It lets them figure it out themselves. I see these parents and I want to say, leave that kid alone. Let them figure it out.

Zibby: My mom would always say to me, "Zibby, benign neglect." I was on top of my twins when they were little, literally just like a hawk watching them as they scampered every single second. She's like, "It's okay." Then I watch home movies where my mother is lying on a lounge chair by the pool smoking with her long, red fingernails smoking Vantage Lights with a little plastic eye protector so she didn't get a tan around her eyes. You see my brother and me almost falling in the pool. Then fortunately a babysitter might sweep in and save us or something. Now she's like, "I don't understand what you're doing, the way you parent." [laughs]

Paige: That's really funny. That's really good.

Zibby: Different times. Different times.

Paige: Different times. I'm glad you're giving your kids space to just be themselves. One of the things that I did with my kids, I painted with my kids a lot. I was always doing their homework. They were Trinity kids. God only knows, we were always doing homework. We worked side by side, not necessarily integrated, but side by side. Good for you. I applaud you.

Zibby: Thank you. Paige, this has been so nice, just so meaningful, and so warm and loving. I'm just so happy we got to do this. I'm so proud of for your latest book. It's great. Enjoying this Blackie on my shelf. Congratulations on the book.

Paige: Thank you so much, honey. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Of course. My pleasure. Enjoy now that I know where you are. I'm jealous. Bye, Paige.

Paige: Love you, honey.

Zibby: Love you.

Natalie Portman, NATALIE PORTMAN'S FABLES

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

Natalie Portman: Thank you so much for having me.

Zibby: I read Fables to my kids. They were obsessed. They loved it. I don't say that all the time. I have lots of children's books. Sometimes your kids just relate to ones or they don't. My daughter was like, "You're talking to the woman who wrote the new Three Little Pigs?" They thought that was the coolest.

Natalie: I appreciate that so much. Thank you.

Zibby: What inspired you to write Fables, to reimagine some of these classic fairy tales from our youth and do them over? What was that about?

Natalie: I was reading books to my kids. I have a boy and a girl. I realized that, first of all, for my girl, the kinds of presents she would get, the kind of books that were given to her were often feminist baby books. I was like, why didn't my son get any of these? I was like, the boys need it as much as the girls. I felt like, I want something that everyone will read. The classic books that I had been reading both of them, of course, I started noticing that all of the characters, or predominantly, were male. I thought, oh, my goodness, the books that both of them are reading are telling them to prioritize male character stories over other stories. I thought, what if I took some of these classics and just made it more reflective of the world where there's lots of genders in the animal kingdom and let the stories that are still morally resonant, the morals that really resonate today like The Tortoise and The Hare and The Three Little Pigs and The Country Mouse and The City Mouse, those could still hold up and even have new meaning in today's world?

Zibby: Now the bad guys are actually bad women. Is that really a good message? I don't know. The wolf is a woman. Are we happy to be including her in our clan here? What do you think?

Natalie: [laughs] I think that the more women are seen as human and capable of anything, capable of being good or bad, capable of being smart or not smart, or strong or lazy, the more possibility women have to just be human and be seen as human first and judged by their character, their virtue, their accomplishments, not by their gender, that's where we reach equality. It's like the RBG quote. Putting women on a pedestal is just another kind of cage. Paraphrasing, of course. That's not the exact quote. When people say women are much better than men, that's another harmful stereotype even masquerading as a compliment.

Zibby: Very true. I feel like throughout your Instagram, you've done such a good job of trying to highlight all different types of women in all different areas and talking about the things that are really important, everything from Serena Williams and why are there not as many women tennis matches per day than men's tennis matches? to different political candidates, to homeschooling, everything. You're just digging deeper and deeper into every industry. It's not about authors. It's about, really, critical thinkers. Tell me about how you started doing this whole interview series as well.

Natalie: Really, I've just been led by curiosity and the things in interested in. I thought, if I have this way of talking to people directly, then I might as well talk about what I'm curious about, learn things, and share what I'm learning or the people I'm lucky to meet, whether it's about food, which is super interesting to me, and obviously, the environmental impact of food is really interesting, but making it delicious and fun at the same time, or whether it's writers. I love reading. It's such a great opportunity to get to discuss books with writers after you read them. It's the coolest opportunity. Or activists from whom -- I feel like the big change for me on going on social media was it opened up my understanding of the world in such a new way. I was exposed to so many incredible people doing so much really world-changing, world-bettering work. That's been really wonderful too as an opportunity. It's been really interesting.

Zibby: Social media obviously gets a bad rap, but I feel like I've met people from all over the world. I can talk to an author in Nigeria about how they're handling COVID. I can talk to someone in LA. There are no barriers anymore. You can connect with people anywhere. I think it's one of the biggest perks.

Natalie: It's all how it's used, it seems. Also, of course, it can be very addictive. It can be very, living in a virtual state as opposed to the real-life state. If you're able to use it in moderation, it certainly is an incredible portal into so many different places we wouldn't normally have access to.

Zibby: Back to your cooking, by the way, now I'm feeling totally shamed. Not only do you have your whole professional life and all these great activist, thought-leadership type interviews, you're cooking all these amazing foods too. My husband cooks, and that's fine. Matzah lasagna, that looks amazing.

Natalie: Oh, my gosh, you're so sweet, but please, not at all. My husband is really the cook in the house. He really cooks well. I'm very amateur, but I really like it. For me, why I like sharing it is because I'm not very skilled. I know if I can do it, anyone can do it. I'm usually doing it in fifteen minutes holding a child in my hands. I'm like, this recipe, you can do. If I can do it, you can do it. It's not complicated. I feel like those are the kind of mom things we need to share with each other because that's how we get by. It's those tips that we spread from mom to mom.

Zibby: It's true. The whole whisper culture of, this is how we do it, yes, I'm upheld by comments like those and little tips. The messages in Fables, though, go beyond typical kids' books, I would say. You have so many things. I don't know if you intentionally put in all your values and just shoved them in a little children's book, if you started with the values and you were like, how can I fit these? There were so many things like, "See, you don't need all that stuff. True friends are more than enough." You have all these things. "Sometimes, more isn't better. A bragger cannot persevere. A life lived attentively is the completest. To have strong foundations, you cannot be lazy. Waking up early is an energy booster. You want to have friends who will stand by your side." I could be reading a quote book at the checkout line with little flowers or something. Instead, they're interspersed in the book. It's very clever how you did it.

Natalie: Thank you. That's really nice. I think when you have a clear audience -- here, it was for my children. I was like, what do I want to give them in tangible form of what I think is important? It's not all in there. Certainly, there's a lot that I care about that I wanted to give to them. Secondly, I find that reading books to kids, it's kind of the only time I read books over and over and over again. My kids both have had favorites over the years. They make me read a book a hundred times in a row. It really gets into you. As a parent, you kind of want that to be meaningful. There are certain things I feel like I even wrote for myself, like in The Tortoise and The Hare. "Honey, move slowly, and it is the sweetest. A life lived attentively is the completest." The attention, it's so noisy. It's so busy. You're running around all the time. You know that when you really pay attention, when you really focus, when you really spend time, when you take things slowly is a true expression of love and meaning. That's where your most fulfillment -- it felt like both for them and also for myself, I was like, what do I need to remember? Also, what do I want to imbue in my children?

Zibby: I know in the back of the book you included a portrait that your mom had done of you and your brother as kids. I think it's so sweet. You have this whole big shout-out to her.

Natalie: That's my kids.

Zibby: Oh, that's your kids. Oh, my gosh.

Natalie: Those are my two kids, yeah. It's my son and my daughter that she drew.

Zibby: Aw, so sweet. Tell me about, what did she do right? What do you think she did in her parenting to you that gave you the values that you're now passing onto your kids? Or maybe not. Maybe it's a reaction against.

Natalie: She's just the most attentive and the most focused with kids. She was like that with me. I'm an only child. Then she's like that with my children now. You couldn't even imagine. I feel like I'm constantly running through lists of stuff that I have to do and trying to fold laundry and cook dinner and get the kids homework done at the same time. I mean, not get their homework done.

Zibby: I can imagine.

Natalie: Supervise them doing it. I mean, him. I only have one kid doing homework right now. My little one is in preschool. I feel so scattered as a mother. I feel like that's the central characteristic. My mother, I always felt that she was just so focused and present and attentive. I try and conjure her energy, which I don't have. I'm more all over place.

Zibby: I'm the same way. Sometimes even when I'm with my mom, she'll be on her phone or something. I feel so hurt. It's so silly. I'm forty-four years old. I'm like, but we only had an hour together. Why are you on your phone? What are you doing? What is so important? I think it's the same thing. Let someone occupy a hundred percent of what you're doing. That's what great conversation is about. You just pay attention. There's nothing like it. When you don't feel like you're necessarily getting that -- I try to remind myself of that when I'm with my kids. How do I feel when my mom seems distracted?

Natalie: Absolutely. My husband always says it to me. These smart phones were supposed to make our lives so we could have more free time because you could kind of be portable and whatever. Then instead, it just makes us work all the time. It makes us half working all the time, half on our phones all the time, half not present all the time. It's one of the biggest challenges of modern parenthood among the other seven thousand things.

Zibby: Let's pick. I know. Every so often, I'm like, maybe I'll just try to email on a computer today. Let's see how that works. [laughs]

Natalie: It's actually really good. I've done that a few times where I've taken breaks and just taken email off of my phone. It actually makes a huge difference.

Zibby: You can be so much more productive on a computer with an hour than all day long, these little dribble drabbles of emails that never stop. Not that I will change my behavior, but you know. Tell me about this new LA women's soccer team. What is that about? That's so awesome.

Natalie: We're so excited. Angel City Football Club is our official name. We're launching in 2022. That's when we'll start playing games. It's just really thrilling to bring women's soccer to LA. There's two men's soccer teams. We have such incredible players in this country. We have the best players in the world in the most popular sport in the world. It's super exciting to get to celebrate them and amplify their virtuosity because they're extraordinary. It's really fun. It's an incredible group of people doing it. It's Alexis Ohanian and Serena Williams and a bunch of actress friends I adore, Jess Chastain, America Ferrera, Eva Longoria, Uzo Aduba, and just countless others and sports legends like Billie Jean King and Lindsey Vonn and fourteen former women's national team players like Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy and Abby Wambach. It's an insane, insane group of people. It's so exciting.

Zibby: You all get a box and you can hang out every game? Is that how it's going to be? [laughs]

Natalie: That's the goal. Get through this pandemic. Then we can all hang, hopefully.

Zibby: Actually, I was chitchatting with my husband as I was coming down here. I was mentioning your soccer team. My daughter who we were putting to bed was like, "Wait, women have soccer teams?" I was like, "Yeah, women can have soccer teams." She's like, "Can women have football teams?" I was like, "No, not football." She's like, "Okay. Basketball?" We watch so much sports here. I don't. My husband does. Somehow, that was really inspiring. She's a great little athlete. You're setting [indiscernible/crosstalk] role modeling.

Natalie: I know. It's amazing for our girls to have professional careers to aspire to if they are extraordinary athletes, to have athletes to look up to and admire, and also for boys. It's the same things we're talking about with the book. It really had similar impetus. I was inspired to have the soccer team when I saw my son watching the Women's World Cup. He was looking at Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe in the same way that he looks at Messi or Ronaldo. I was like, that's change. That really feels like a completely new world. How many male athletes did we look up to as little girls?

Zibby: I had a secret girl crush on Chrissy Evert, I have to say, the tennis player. Everybody else is a blur of men. She was my childhood hero.

Natalie: We also had female athletes that you looked up to. I think women are often asked to empathize with or see themselves in men. I don't mind that. I think it just also should be that young boys see idols in women too, that they don't just have to look at greatness in male form.

Zibby: A hundred percent. Totally agree. Speaking of idols, tell me a little bit about Natalie's Book Club and the books that you've been picking and how that’s been going and all the rest.

Natalie: It's been so fun to get to share and hear people's opinions about books. It's brought me to so many interesting corners. I'm kind of an eclectic reader. I don't have a genre that people can rely upon. I hope that is okay for people following. Sometimes it's fiction. Sometimes it's nonfiction. Sometimes it's poetry. It's been really interesting to get to talk to all these different writers and understand more about their processes and, of course, read some great books along the way.

Zibby: Are you reading anything great now? Anything amazing by your bedside?

Natalie: I finally read Untamed. I know I'm so late to the game. So many people had told me how wonderful it was. They were all right. It's so rare when something lives up to the hype. It really did. Of the book club books that really have stuck with me in such a deep way, I would say the Lost Children Archive. That Valeria Luiselli book is amazing. That's really, really affected me deeply. Girl, Woman, Other was incredible, the new Elena Ferrante. I'm picking all fiction books. Then surprises too like the Robin Wall Kimmerer book, Gathering Moss. I was rapt. It was so incredible. Patrisse Cullors' memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, is really, really moving and world changing. It completely changes the way you see the world through one person's story. It's really a wonderful book. So many. Every one has been an incredible adventure.

Zibby: I have a whole new stack of books now. I have to make a new little shelf here for you.

Natalie: What about you? What are you reading?

Zibby: I recently read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett which, like Untamed, everybody had already read. I was so late to it. I almost didn't want to read it because I'm like, it can't possibly be this good. Then it was. I was like, how great is that? Lots of different books. I'm reading a new book coming out called The Push by Ashley Audrain about a mother who's been a victim of abuse through the generations, her mother, grandmother, and how she mothers. It's a thriller. It's really good. That's what I'm reading right now, and Fables. [laughs]

Natalie: Yes. I'm constantly reading a whole variety of children's books.

Zibby: We just finished Lady Pancake & Sir French Toast. That's really what I'm reading. I was reading that. That's a really good one.

Natalie: I don't know that one.

Zibby: It's good. Do you have any advice, I would say both to aspiring authors, and especially children's authors, but also just people who want to emulate your activism and how to make a difference in terms of advocating for women especially in getting equal footing?

Natalie: For kids' books, you just have to imagine and maybe practice with kids, what keeps their attention. I know I need to mention farts and burps and boogers. That's what keeps my children's attention. Not that you have to do that, but I think that the silliness always helps with the kids' books and practicing on them. I definitely read them the book so many times to find the parts I needed to change, what they understood, etc. In terms of activism, I feel like what I've learned the most is to listen to the people who've been doing the work and follow them and not trying to invent anything yourself. There are a lot of people who are doing it really well. Not to put anyone down. Obviously, if you want to devote your life to it, go do it. The thing is, when you're new to it, the best thing to do is find the people who've been doing it for decades, who've been organizing, who've been leading. Then listen to what they say and go with that. I mean, when you believe in what they're doing and their actions. I learned the most by listening. I guess that's always true.

Zibby: Can I ask one last perhaps inappropriate question? How do you stay looking so young? You do not age.

Natalie: Are you kidding me? That's so nice.

Zibby: I'm just looking at your skin. This so creepy of me. I'm like, what is she doing that I am not doing?

Natalie: All I do is go, look at all these -- I have lines everywhere. Every day, new ones. I'm trying to just embrace it and feel like I earned it. My best friend and I, we were talking last night. We're both turning forty this year. She was like, "Ugh, forty." I was like, "No. Forty, that's an achievement. You know how many people don't get to reach this? How lucky are we? How cool is this? Look what we did to get here. This is amazing." I don't want to look inexperienced. I'm not inexperienced. I am full of experience. I am full of joy and wisdom and curiosity. If that's what my lines represent, then great. Let that be a signal. Looking young is overrated. [laughs]

Zibby: Thank you. That was just what I needed to hear tonight. Thank you for that. Looking young is overrated. Wasted on the young. Forget it.

Natalie: Let them enjoy it. That's the best part about being young. You don't know anything at that point. Being young was so painful for me. I feel like it's such a painful, not knowing, searching, figuring it out, feeling uncomfortable in my skin time. Give them the clear skin. They can have it. It's the bonus prize for having to deal with all the --

Zibby: -- No clue what's coming next and nothing being settled at all. Every day is a question mark. Now we have everything settled. Here come the lines. So, fine, or for me anyway. Awesome. Natalie, thank you so much. Thanks for all your time. I really appreciate it. That was really fun.

Natalie: Thank you. You too. Be well.

Zibby: Thank you. Stay safe. Buh-bye.

Natalie: Bye.

Liz Petrone, THE PRICE OF ADMISSION

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Liz. Thanks so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to talk about your amazing memoir, The Price of Admission: Embracing a Life of Grief and Joy.

Liz Petrone: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: It's such a pleasure. Your book was moving and well-written and soulful. I just was like, I love this woman. [laughs] You know when you read something and you're rooting for the person so much and you care right away? I had that feeling reading your book.

Liz: Thank you.

Zibby: Would you mind telling listeners what your memoir is about? What made you even write a memoir to begin with?

Liz: This book was seven years in the making. The book that got published was probably the fifth iteration of this book. It was a process. In the book, I talk about the loss of my mother. We lost her after a struggle with addiction and mental illness. She was bipolar. Eventually, she committed suicide. That was about seven years ago now. If you follow that timeline, as soon as she died, I sat down and said, we need to be talking about this stuff. I've said in a lot interviews since the book came out that I feel like my mom died of a disease of silence. We live in this society where we don't talk about these things. We don't do a very good job of dealing with addiction and loss and grief and mental illness as a society. We didn't do a good job as a family. When she died, the very first thing I did was sit down and start writing because I really believe that we need to be talking about this stuff. That includes my own story, which of course is woven in through the book. We talk about my mother, but I also talk about my own struggle with an eating disorder and my own suicide attempt when I was younger and my own struggles with depression and anxiety. I think these are universal themes that we need to be doing better telling the truth about.

Zibby: That's amazing. So many of the scenes here were crystal clear as if you were living them then, like the scene in the elevator and the scene with your daughter in your tummy. They were just so clear. Are you the type of person who was journaling or recording these along the way, or do you just have an amazing memory?

Liz: I think maybe it's somewhere in between those two things. I don't know if you watched The Office. When Pam and Jim are getting married, they do this little mental camera where there's these moments. You just kind of know that these moments are something bigger than they feel like when you're living them. I think especially if you're a writer, but probably if you're any sort of creator or artist at all, you look at your life as you're living it through that lens a little bit. There are these moments that seem sort of ordinary. Then you go, oh, this is going to mean something later on.

Zibby: I know those moments. I do. I know those moments. There were so many passages that I wanted to at least flag because I thought they were so beautiful. I loved this part. You said, and this is probably how you titled your book, "I've come to realize that the true lie the darkness tells is one of omission. The darkness doesn't tell you how pain is simply the price of admission. And it's a steal, really, a bargain. One I will pay a hundred times over for the simple pleasure of a beautiful sunrise or a mug of tea heavy in my hands or another mile run or a hug from a long-time friend or the smile --" I'm going to cry -- "of a child across a crowded room. For the comfort of my soon-to-be husband's arm strong across my waist while he watched me sleep. For the moments when the darkness whispers its lies in the night and I am able, still, to answer it with the only two words that matter: I'm here." Oh, my gosh. Does that make you want to cry too hearing it again? It makes me want to cry.

Liz: Hearing you read it gives me goosebumps. I think you should just read the book to me all day long.

Zibby: [laughs] I have more passages I want to read. I don't usually just sit down and read somebody's book to themselves.

Liz: That particular story, which is really the story of my own suicide attempt, for me, was the hardest story to tell. There's this idea in writing that every story that you tell will be the same story in some fashion until you tell the story you're supposed to tell. That was that for me, which is why it was important to me that the book be named The Price of Admission and that that kind of be the lynchpin. Even though I set out to write a story in my mother's honor, that story, for me, was the one that I was very, very scared to release into the world. It's also the one that was the most freeing to tell the truth about.

Zibby: In the book, you were saying how you were afraid to even tell your husband. You have the moment where you finally confess to him. He was your boyfriend then, right? I think you weren’t even married. Now you've gone from that place of, should I tell the person in the world closest to me? to, actually, now I'm going to tell anybody who can read.

Liz: I'm going to tell you in the grocery store while we wait in line. [laughter]

Zibby: Wait, tell me more about how it feels freeing.

Liz: I think we carry this stuff with us. We think that we're the only person that could possibly ever feel this way. That can be anything. For me, it was that story. It could be anything for anybody, any story of struggle or hardship or any story where you feel like you are not necessarily the hero or painted in the best light. Those are the things that, when you put them out there, I feel like they make the most immediate universal connection with people because everybody has that. It doesn't have to be the same version of that, but everybody carries that kind of stuff with them. What I really have found is the hardest stuff to put out there is the stuff that makes the most immediate and true connection with people, which is really a gift when you think about it.

Zibby: It's true. We hide so much. Like you, I'm heart on my sleeve in my writing, but not as much in my talking with people. People have said, you're brave to write about this. I'm like, it doesn't feel like bravery to me. It just feels like finally I can get it out of my own head and just get it out.

Liz: I feel like it cuts through a lot of that minutia. I have relationships with people that I've met as a result of writing or as a result of things they’ve put out on the internet. We get to skip through all these preliminary layers because it's already there. We've already laid the baseline of, okay, we're going to do this. We're going to be intimate. We're going to tell our stories. For me, someone who's introverted and not really good at that whole small talk/minutia stuff, that's also a self-serving gift. I hear you. I get that too, that whole, you're so brave to be putting this out. In many ways, I'm doing it for myself just as much as I'm doing it for the rest of the world.

Zibby: I know. It's true. I've been talking to you for maybe five minutes, and we've already talked about your suicide attempt and your mother, your eating disorder and all this stuff. If we met at a cocktail party, this would never even come up. Obviously, this is a different format and I'm interviewing you for a reason. I wanted to read just one more part. This is when your mom calls you after you were stuck in the elevator. "I didn't know it then, of course, but it was the last conversation we ever had. She died a few days later. In the first chaotic weeks of grief, I thought of that elevator and how quickly everything can change. You can be just standing still, all minding your own business, when the floor drops out from under you and you're thrown right off your feet. It's completely terrifying, and it's easy then to get stuck in unfamiliar territory where the only way out is going to be calling out Marco and trusting even while your heart tries to gallop right out of your chest that the Polo is coming. And it is. There are people who will quite literally lift you up, grab your hands and pull. It's happened before --" I'm going to cry again -- "and it will happen again. Of this I am sure, as long as I continue to have the faith to call out." It's so nice. Oh, my gosh, sorry, I'm so emotional.

Liz: I know that you are dealing with your own grief right now.

Zibby: It's just anyone who's gone through grief has found, or really anything hard, as you point out so eloquently having just literally dropped floors in an elevator and getting stuck, that your life just sort of followed the feeling. You captured it so beautifully, especially because you were thirty-six weeks pregnant in the elevator, oh, my gosh. Could you even get into another elevator after that?

Liz: I worked on the, I think it was the sixteenth floor at the time. I was hesitant to get into another elevator, but I think I was even more hesitant to walk down sixteen flights of stairs.

Zibby: What was that job? What were you doing in the office building?

Liz: I was a computer programmer. I still am a computer programmer. Although, I don't work in that building anymore. It's a very opposite of writing professional life that I have.

Zibby: Wow. Like coding and building [indiscernible] and all of that?

Liz: Yeah. I support financial systems, so I'm sort of an applications programmer. I think that the two sides, the computer programming world where there is a very clear and finite answer to a problem and I find that answer to a problem and I give it to people and it's very satisfying -- then there's the creative side of telling a story where you could tell a story eight hundred different ways. You have no idea what's the right way or the wrong way or how that story is going to be received when you give it to the world. They sound like very opposing ideas, but they do a really good job of balancing each other out.

Zibby: That's really interesting. How amazing you have both sides of your brain. I only have one. I only have one of those sides. [laughs] Amazing. Tell me a little bit more about the eating disorder piece of your story, if you don't mind. You told in the book about going to an inpatient facility with a much older woman named Tina and how that was sort of a warning flag for you. You would not let yourself become that person when you got older. Tell me about your, not getting over it, but how you found your way through that mess. What lingering effects do you still wrestle with today?

Liz: The active part of my eating disorder was, we're going on over twenty years ago now, when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I was anorexic primarily with a little bit of bulimia in there in the later stages. At the time, there really just wasn't the treatment options that there are now. Thank god that there are now. I think that's important. I've done some work with some agencies. I'm excited that that is happening, finally. At the time, we just all were shepherded into a treatment facility which was a generic place where they treated addiction, suicide attempts, eating disorders, anything where you weren’t safe being home by yourself. I had a roommate who was also an eating disorder patient. She had to be in her fifties, maybe, which to me at the time was ancient because I was a teenager. To see her struggling honestly in the same way that I was struggling, it was such, like you said, a wake-up call to me. I really had thought, okay, I'm dealing with all this crap because I'm young and I don't know what I'm doing, but by the time I'm in my fifties, I will have figured everything out. Everything will be fine. To realize that that wasn't just a given was kind of jarring and scary.

I credit that moment, really, more than any therapy session or treatment that happened as an impetus to really start pursuing getting better and getting healthy. Getting better and getting healthy was a long, convoluted process. It probably is for anybody, but especially then when we didn't really have a lot of options as far as treatment. I think anybody who's ever lived with an eating disorder would tell you, you don't ever really get away from that completely. I would never stand here and say I'm totally healed. It's still something that lingers in the background all the time. I've had to develop a much healthier relationship with my body, especially through four pregnancies and raising children and, not to generalize, but raising teenager daughters who are starting to deal with some of the same ideologies that haunted me then. It lives there. I see it when life gets stressful. I'm not sure I've had life get more stressful that it is right now. It's definitely there. That's another reason why I think it's important that we talk about this stuff. If I didn't talk about it, it would be unhealthy for me personally.

Zibby: Do you still get therapy? Do you have things in place to make sure you don't slip back?

Liz: I don't actively get eating disorder-centric treatment right now. I do keep in place for myself, a support network of things. I will fall back on that when I can see that stressors are popping up or triggers are popping up. A good example might be, when my third daughter was born, I had postpartum depression. I didn't have postpartum depression with the first or the second, so it was kind of a surprise when it happened. I didn't have any experience with it. I wasn't prepared. When I got pregnant for the fourth time and then my mom died during that pregnancy, very close to the end of that pregnancy when my son was going to be born, I said, okay, the risk is huge right now. I've had postpartum depression before. I'm dealing with grief at the same time. I'm going to mobilize this network. I'm going to reach out to my people. I'm going to reach out to my treatment providers. I'm going to knit this safety net underneath myself and have people check in and have myself check in. That's the beauty of having been through stuff before. I think the problem is that you don't know to do that if you haven't lived it before, which is, again, why we need to be talking about this stuff and why we need to be laying that groundwork for people.

Zibby: There's someone in my life who's struggling with an eating disorder now and doesn't want to get treatment. As somebody who loves her so much, what advice would you have? What can I do as a friend? I'm sure other people out there have people who maybe they suspect have eating disorders or things like that. Is there anything you can do, or does the person have to be ready? What do you think?

Liz: It's just like any other addiction, really. I think the person has to be ready to pursue treatment in order to get healthy. Having people in your life that are understanding and supportive and primarily understand that this is an illness and not a choice, which is not always how people view things like this, but if you can look at it like that, that kind of gives you permission and grace to always be there no matter what the situation is. That is so important. Especially when you're in the late stages of an eating disorder, which is both when you're getting really close to getting treatment but also when things are getting dangerous, I think they go hand in hand, the instinct is to push everybody away because people are starting to notice and be concerned and push you towards treatment. It's hard to love somebody in that situation. Anybody who can survive and stay there with grace and patience and understanding is giving that person, I think, a better chance than they would have if they were truly all alone.

Zibby: What would you say to the person? Let's say there's somebody listening who's really struggling themselves right now.

Liz: It gets better. There is hope on the other side of all of this. It is better on the other side of all of this. That leap is probably one of the scariest things I've ever taken in my life, that leap to abandon what becomes the comfort center of living in this illness and what becomes the identity of living in this illness. It sounds crazy because you're sick and you're in pain and you're not in a good place, but that becomes almost your comfort zone. To leap out of that is terrifying. To land someplace softer and safer and healthier is so worth it. It's so worth it.

Zibby: Thank you. I'm hoping that somebody who needed to hear that today heard that. Thank you.

Liz: I could just sit here and stare at your color-coded book arrangement. It's so satisfying to me.

Zibby: Thank you. I know. I love it. It goes all the way around.

Liz: Oh, my gosh.

Zibby: I have to redo it soon. Because I've gotten so lazy, now I'm throwing things everywhere. I'm overflowing with books.

Liz: How do you find time to read all these books? is what I want to know.

Zibby: Man, I don't know. I just do. I don't finish every single book. I sit down to read. I've figured out a way to -- I don't know if it's called speed reading. I don't know what it is I'm doing, but I can go through with just a second or two and get most of the important information off of every page. Every other weekend, I don't have my kids. I don't have them today. They're with my ex. I can read all day. I'm about to take a drive. I'm going to listen to a book the whole time. I don't know. I just find the time. With my kids, I always, at bedtime, have a book. It takes like four hours to put your kids to bed. They know that as soon as the first time that they go in the bed, I'm going to sit down and start reading, so I always get a good hour in.

Liz: I do that too. I've read before bed since I was five years old. I think that's where wanting to write a book comes from, honestly, is that voracious consumption of reading. It becomes the logical way that you think of to tell a story, almost.

Zibby: What types of books do you like to read?

Liz: Anything, really. I probably prefer women stories and women authors. Since the pandemic, I'm in this ridiculous cycle of only reading psychological thrillers because they're so absorbing that they can distract me from everything else that's going on. I do worry what that's doing to my mental health because I find myself going, who do I know that's a murderer?

Zibby: [laughs] That's the great thing about books, though. You can decide. It's so crazy. They all look the same. In one, you're going to be terrified. In one, you're going to be crying with emotion. In one, you're going to learn all these factual things. Yet they all just look like words. I know this is ridiculous that I'm saying this.

Liz: No, you're right. To me, it felt like a level playing field. You can be a nobody and write a book. You can be the world's most famous person and write a book. They're both books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. It's crazy.

Zibby: Right, exactly, which is great in a way because we all are just people with thoughts and feelings in our heads. Getting them out on paper is just one way to share. Famous or not, who's to say your story's any more important than yours? Anyway, sort of loosey-goosey talk. One last thing I just wanted to touch on was the suicide element of your loss because that's a particular beast in and of itself. You talked about the priest at the time asking if it was okay to even share at the service that it was a suicide. While you were saying yes, everybody was saying no. I'm wondering in your own family or your own extended circle, when did that protection and hiding, almost, go away, if it did, or this is a big coming out of her death?

Liz: Her family is not okay with me talking about this. There's a big schism there and has been since shortly after the death, which is a huge source of sadness for me, but not enough that I felt like I had to stop. I feel like putting this story out there was honoring her, which I think is kind of a funny thing to say. I tell some stories about her that probably are not totally flattering. My mother, despite all of her faults, despite the fact that she would wake up in hospital after us calling 911 and her going in an ambulance intoxicated and saying, "Did the neighbors see?" I think she would've wanted the end of her life to help save somebody else's life. I truly, truly believe that. Without getting into all sorts of froufrou stuff, our relationship didn't end when she died. I have full confidence that she supports this book and this story and the work that I've done. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe that. To specifically address what you're asking, no, we do not do a good job talking about suicide. We don't do a good job talking about death in general. Suicide is a whole nother level. Then grieving a suicide is a whole nother level because it takes you a while to get to where you would start if you just -- I don't want to say just -- if you had lost somebody in a more natural fashion. Like I was saying earlier, I started writing this book seven years ago when my mom first died.

That first iteration of this book was angry and hurt and abandoned. I was the martyr. She was the villain. Thank god that thing has not seen the light of day. Also, thank god that thing came out of me because it had to. That kind of grief is not the kind of grief that people are going to necessarily feel comfortable talking to their friends about because who wants to say, my mom died a month ago and I'm still so mad? That's not a thing that people feel comfortable saying. I think it's just the natural progression of losing somebody in that fashion. Seven years have gone by. I'm not angry anymore, but that takes time. I think it takes honest conversations. I hope that the book can help people have those honest conversations and help people understand that all of those reactions, the anger, the abandonment, the sadness, the everything, is totally normal. When you lose somebody who's been struggling like that and you've had this tumultuous relationship, there's that -- I'm going to screw this up, and I don't want to say it wrong -- almost this sense of relief, like, at least that's over. That is a thing that people really can't talk about it because it sounds so off-putting and terrible, but it's just natural. It's just part of all of it. I think we need to talk about that stuff.

Zibby: That’s amazing. I hope you're thinking of starting, if you haven't already and I just don't know about it, some sort of bigger way of spreading, like a movement about what you're talking about because you made it. You need to be the leader of this movement.

Liz: I do. Now that the book is out there and that work is done, I really do want to start doing some community work in this realm. My story of having been a suicide survivor myself and then losing my mother to suicide I think gives me the ability to see it from both sides and to speak to both sides in sort of a unique way. I want to encourage more people to be having these conversations.

Zibby: I should introduce you -- I'm on the board of the Child Mind Institute. It's for children's mental health and also to help reduce to the stigma of mental illness. It's more for childhood issues, everything from anxiety to depression, everything. Maybe you could reach parents that way or you could reach the children who are struggling and tell your story to them.

Liz: That would be great.

Zibby: [Indiscernible/crosstalk] offline about it. I'm just trying to think of good channels for you to be able to use that are already existing as opposed to having to put your own community together to get the message out. Anyway, not that this is my job. Last question. What advice would you have to aspiring authors?

Liz: Write. Butt in chair. Write. It's funny. I did a podcast yesterday. The host asked me, "How was the experience of writing this book?" I'm like, "It was the worst thing in my life," which doesn't sound like much of advertisement for writing, but I think that's how you know it's what you're supposed to be doing, that it is just so unbelievably hard and exhausting and consuming and all-in. I remember going to bed at night and falling asleep. Then I would wake up an hour later just with chapters flying through my brain. I think we all need to be telling our stories. It's not about being trained as a writer or even being a good writer. It's about putting pen to paper and putting the story out there. I remember going to a book lecture when I was probably in my twenties. I had always wanted to write even though that wasn't my career. The author, I can't even remember who it was, stood up and said, "People are always coming up to me and saying, I have a story inside of me." She was saying that she found that offensive, like, nobody comes up to a surgeon and says, I have a surgery inside of me, but they come to writers and say they have a story inside of them. Now that happens to me. People come up to me and say, "What would your advice be to write? I want to tell this story," or they tell me their story. I think the fact that people are constantly coming up to me and saying they have a story inside of them is the best part of all of this. There's nothing more universal than the fact that we all want to be heard. We all want to relate. We all want to have that community. It's beautiful.

Zibby: Wow. This has been really inspiring. I hope that we stay in touch. I'm just so happy to have met you.

Liz: Thank you so much.

Zibby: Thank you for your beautiful book, Price of Admission. Everybody go pick this up. Thank you. Thank you for coming on the show.

Liz: Thank you.

Zibby: Bye, Liz.

Liz: Bye. Thank you.

Christa Parravani, LOVED AND WANTED

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

Christa Parravani: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: I always think it's so funny to interview someone who's written such an open memoir with so much information that I'm like, I already know all about you. Let's skip to the next part. What happened after the memoir? Let's catch up. It's like we already had a conversation. For listeners who don't know much about your book, Loved and Wanted, can you please tell them a little about what it's about?

Christa: Loved and Wanted is a memoir that is about my time living in West Virginia. I was a faculty member at West Virginia University. My family had moved there from Los Angeles. It's about the years that I lived in West Virginia and had a second daughter and then was unexpectedly pregnant with a third child a year after having my daughter. I was my family's sole provider. I couldn't afford a third baby. I looked into my options for reproductive healthcare and discovered that I didn't have any. [laughs] Or very few, and not the kinds of options that, as a mother to small children, that I could take. There were waiting periods that would've caused me to have to take two weeks off of work and find someone to stay with our kids. Oftentimes if you get an abortion, you have to have somebody come with you. We didn't have family nearby. The book is about that. It's about the journey that I had afterward, after I had my son who is very much loved and wanted, which is where the title of the book comes from. I believe that you can both want to have had the choice for reproductive healthcare and love and want your children. It's about the discovery about what the implications are for curtailing reproductive healthcare for women and children through my direct experience.

Zibby: I was so surprised to learn about how difficult it was for you in this day and age in a state that allows abortion to get it. You went through in the book so clearly, if I had done this, I would've had to give up this many days of work. This would've cost this. This bus ride would've cost this. Then I tried this other option. Then this doctor said no. I couldn't believe it. You were saying that this goes on all over the country. I'm from New York City. You just don't know what it's like. You had been coming from LA at the time, so it was a culture shock.

Christa: It was unbelievable to me as a person who grew up in New York and then lived in Los Angeles. Our family lived in New York City for many years. We lived in Los Angeles for many years. It was shocking to me that there are laws that prevent women from being able to seek reproductive healthcare in states like West Virginia and many other states. It's not just West Virginia. As a matter of fact, the majority of healthcare providers are in New York City and/or around New York and Los Angeles, California. The reason why we don't understand this to be a daily situation is because those providers are near those cities. There are many states that only have one facility for reproductive healthcare. The numbers are going down and down and down as times goes on. There are fewer and fewer places to be able to get reproductive healthcare. Again, like you, until I saw that directly, I was unaware, completely surprised. Also, in that surprise, I felt crazy. [laughs] I felt like, why do I feel like this is impossible? What is wrong with me? In fact, it was because it was impossible. Part of the reason I wrote the book is for that reason. The ways in which I was told indirectly that the choice was not mine to make because it was too hard to make caused me to doubt everything about myself including who I was as a mother to my two daughters.

Zibby: The fact that you had to go through that with no support and no help and struggling financially -- your mother was -- I'm glad she came through for you at one point in the book. I was like, well, thank god for this. Finally, there she shows up. Also, your tragic history with your sister which was the topic of your previous memoir, can you talk a little about that too? Really throw you in the fire this morning. Here, let's start right off with your most painful things in life for me who you just met.

Christa: Let me tell you. [laughs] When I was in my twenties, my identical twin sister, Cara, died of a heroin overdose. She had suffered from depression as a result of having been raped by a stranger in the woods when we were in our early to mid-twenties. She had a six-year struggle after that attack and eventually succumbed to depression and addiction. The book is about identity. It's called Her: A Memoir. It's about what it means to climb your way out of unimaginable grief. I wrote it because I feel like people want to know what it's like to have a twin. They want to know what it's like to have intimate love in that way. We don't talk about losing that very often. I felt a responsibility to do that. I felt a responsibility also to talk about what it means to be trying to care for somebody who's been sexually assaulted and not really know how to do that. I didn't realize the trajectory of my writing career had to do with activism. It does. [laughs] This book does that too. I'm now experiencing myself as somebody who is not only interested in writing, but interested in justice and justice for women and sharing our stories, in a way, to liberate us.

Zibby: That's a perfect tagline for a career. That's great. It's great to have such a clear goal. A marketing firm would say this is fantastic. You've outlined your mission. I'm so sorry. I don't even mean to make light of your horrific experience and your tragic loss of your sister. It's just awful, what happened. I need to go back now. After I finished this book, I was like, oh, my gosh, how did I miss her first book? Now I have to go back and read it. It sounds like you've been through the ringer in so many ways. It's like, at least, they should give you the choice of whether or not to have another baby.

Christa: I think we all deserve that choice. We deserve to be in situations where healthcare is strong enough for us to be able to make that choice, and once you have your baby, to be taken care of.

Zibby: Yes. That was the other thing in the book about all the pitfalls and misdiagnoses, essentially, with your son. Oh, my gosh, I wanted to scoop you up and take you to my doctor. [laughs]

Christa: I wanted to go to my doctor too.

Zibby: I know. I know you did. I know, oh, my gosh.

Christa: I don't mean to make light of any of these things. I do think, though, there's a way in which if you don't approach something with humor and levity, you're never going to be able to communicate the thing that you need to communicate. All these things did happen. Miraculously, I'm okay. I want to be able to teach women and people to be able to go through these experiences and still be okay and to be able to look at them and help other people. We deserve to have good healthcare. We deserve to have good reproductive healthcare. We deserve to have good pediatric care for our children. The thing that I discovered in this -- I'm looking at my book here, which is the galley copy.

Zibby: Yay!

Christa: Yay, there it is.

Zibby: Wait, let me see the cover again. I had to read it online. There wasn't a cover yet. Oh, I love it. It's awesome.

Christa: It's a picture of Morgantown, West Virginia, that was taken by a local photographer not very far from the house where I lived.

Zibby: PS, I would not say this was exactly an advertisement for Morgantown, West Virginia. I'm not sure they're going to have the biggest book party for you there.

Christa: I can't say that many people have acknowledged that it's happening. [laughs] I can't say that's the case. I have a lot of love for the place even though I had difficult times there, for sure, I did, unexpectedly. The thing that I discovered is that states that curtail access to women's healthcare -- curtailing access to abortion is not just curtailing access to abortion. In fact, it's curtailing access to pap smears and all sort of women's healthcare that is only available to certain people in places that perform abortions. It just so happens that the money that is funneled into women's healthcare, when you take it away, you don't get adequate care for children. That's something that occurs across the United States and which I didn't realize until after I had my son. He was born with some issues that were not easily taken care of in West Virginia but would have probably been noticed in a second in some place that had more resources, less overcrowding.

Zibby: Then you think of the spread of COVID across the country and then you realize, how can small towns everywhere focus when they don't have the advantages of all the science and all the expertise, necessarily, of bigger communities? That's what most people are turning to. It's just kind of frightening, to be honest.

Christa: It is frightening. In my case, I lived in a town where West Virginia University is which is where I teach. The medical center there is vast. It runs the state. It's a historically really interesting place. Mylan Pharmaceuticals is based there. This giant medical complex is based there. There's a history of healthcare there that's really interesting. However, because West Virginia does not have a lot of medical offices, it is serving the entire state, basically. There are people who need to commute two and a half hours to be able to see a doctor for any reason. That includes women who are pregnant and having babies.

Zibby: There was that one scene where the mom came in with her child and waited for two hours and had to drive two hours. Then she couldn't miss any more work and had to turn around and leave. It's just heartbreaking. Then of course, you realize how often this must be happening all over the place.

Christa: It's happening all over the place. It happened to me, a professor, somebody who has two master's degrees and writes books and is a white woman. The number of women that this happens to who are women of color and poor women is astronomical. I feel like we don't really have enough of a voice for that yet. I feel like as women, we haven't been able to articulate this yet because there's something about saying "I thought about having an abortion" that is still a really taboo subject. It's one that I came up against when I was writing the book. I asked myself consistently, can I do this? Why am I doing this? What does it mean for my son to do this? I have the answers, but as I was working my way through it, I did not have those answers. I just had the desire to be able to say something that didn't feel like it was being said often enough.

Zibby: What were some of those answers deep down?

Christa: I'll tell you. I have two daughters. I thought about what it was that I would say to them in two decades from now, a decade from now, about what it meant to live in this time and not advocate for their healthcare. I know that I look to my mother. I say, what did you do in your time and place? I remember being really disappointed by the fact that I didn't feel like she did a lot when she was growing up in the sixties. She didn't have the opportunity to do that. She worked at Sears, Roebuck. She was a waitress after that. She didn't have the resources that I have. I look to my daughters and I think, I will not forgive myself if I don't advocate for them. If I don't do it, who will? I think that my son will grow up in a household of girls, of a strong mother. He will understand that this necessity is one that doesn't have a lot to do with having him being loved or wanted at all. It happens to be something that makes a better world for him too, for his sisters, for his children. I think he'll understand. It was a risk that I had to take in order to take care of them all.

Zibby: You have to protect the ones you have. Anyway, I won't get into it, but I get it.

Christa: [laughs] Thank you.

Zibby: This is like Sophie's Choice or something, but yes, I understand. I'm glad you came to terms with it and crystalized your point in doing it all and all of that. Can I just ask, are you and your husband good these days?

Christa: We're trying. It was a horrific experience to go through in a marriage. It was. The time after my son was born was not easy either. I don't write about it. The last couple years have been hard for everyone. We're living in a chaotic country in which we're not sure what tomorrow will look like in a whiplash news cycle. We both happen to be writers, my husband and me. There's a way in which that career breeds uncertainty. He was really worried about my writing this book. I think he was worried about our son. I'm also worried about our son, but as a man, intimately concerned with his needs in that way, where I was concerned with our daughters' needs. It's been hard. We're trying to work it out. I don't know what'll happen, to be honest. It could go either way. Right now, we're still married.

Zibby: Okay, I'll just leave that alone.

Christa: [laughs] I want to say something about this. One of the things that I'm asked a lot about is what my husband thinks about this book. That's an interesting subject. I think that when you take a subject like this and you ask about someone's husband -- this is no offense to your question because I would ask it too in a second. I would say you're making something about what should be about a woman's choice and her role as a mother and turning it around and asking her what her husband thinks is making it less about her and more about him.

Zibby: I did not ask that question for the record.

Christa: No, no, no, I'm talking about it in terms of -- I was thinking about it. I'm a writer of nonfiction. My husband is a writer of nonfiction. We tell stories that would be harrowing for other people. He's written two memoirs. There's a take-no-prisoners approach in his writing that I don't necessarily have in mine. I thought, what is my gut reaction to not wanting to address him? I'm interested in talking about the marriage, but what is it about this particular situation that makes me feel nervous about that? When I look at him, I'm taking away something that was really about me. I don't want to do that because it clouds a situation which, to me, seems so clear in terms of what he would think and feel about, say for example, me having an abortion. He immediately, when he found out that I was pregnant, said, "It is your body and your choice."

Zibby: I didn't ask what he would think about it. I was more interested in, are you two okay? Just wondering what the conclusion was. I guess I would be wondering because you didn't paint such a great picture of your relationship. Revealing that has effects on both members of the party. That would be it. It actually had nothing to do with the abortion part. That's obviously one piece of your book, but certainly not the other piece. I also think it's about, how do you get through being a mother in a marriage when life is really, really, really hard? I think that's a big piece of your book regardless of the reproductive angle. It's the day-to-day life and the struggling and the financial stress that weighs on you and the blame and his career versus yours. I just felt like so much of this was so widely applicable. Also, abortion has so many political and religious and whatever. I was kind of not dealing with that because people have such different views on it. However, I was just trying to get to --

Christa: -- I totally understand what you're saying. The thing is that any marriage has its complications. I talk to my girlfriends and we're all talking about, oh, my god, what are our financial lives going to be like this year? How does that impact our marriage? Who's getting to work right now? Is my husband getting to work? Am I getting to work? Who's taking care of the children? No matter what the mess, the tangle of your life is, I think we all in some way are adjacent to that in that kind of stress. Keeping a marriage together is so hard. It's really hard. That doesn't mean that you don't love somebody. It doesn't mean you don't want to be with them. It just means that it's hard. It's not just hard for me. It's hard for all of us. Show me the perfect marriage. I want to see it. [laughs] As a writer of nonfiction, it's my job to tell the truth.

Zibby: Even still, many writers of nonfiction don't delve this deep into their own marriages. I feel like some authors do it when they're older reflecting back. Dani Shapiro wrote a beautiful memoir called Hourglass about her whole marriage.

Christa: I love that. So good. I love it.

Zibby: I feel like it's not as often that you hear from the inside. I feel like there's this, almost, iron wall sometimes around people's inner relationships that you didn't have, which was great which is in part what made your book so interesting and un-put-down-able. You're like, what's going to happen next? How did they navigate this? How would I navigate that? You put yourself in your shoes and go through it with you.

Christa: Thank you. I do feel like if I didn't write about the marriage, the book wouldn't ring true. I had to do it in order to tell the story. There was no way around me. Trust me, I thought about it. Do I need to do this? The answer was always yes and to do it respectfully and with love realizing that the outcome was going to be something that I felt would be helpful to people. There's always the do no harm. I just wanted to look at it from all angles. There was really no way to write this book without that. Everywhere I hit in the story, the marriage was there looking at me. [laughs]

Zibby: I got divorced after being married for ten years. I am now remarried. After this, if you ever want to ask me any questions, I'm around.

Christa: I'll Zoom you.

Zibby: Yeah, Zoom me. I'm around. Anyway, so tell me a little more about the actual writing of this story. When on earth did you find time, especially given how you painted your life, to write a book on top of everything else?

Christa: I had the great fortunate of working for an employer that gave me parental leave after I had my son. I was on a paid leave for a semester. There was really not a lot of time to work after having that baby, obviously. He was not well. I was literally hooked up to a milk machine, a pump, for the first four and a half months of his life because he was never able to nurse. Then having the two girls running around me while I did that, it was so hard. Just pure drive and grit made me write it. [laughs] I needed to get this book out of my soul. I would type it on the side while my son was napping and my daughters were wrestling around the living room, but I did. My husband was working full time at that point. He had gotten a job in television in Los Angeles, which is a more than twelve-hour-a-day job that also involves frequent travel. Those first six months of Keats', my son, that's his name, Keats, his life was not full of a lot of work. I did the best I could. Then he got a little older. I found a great childcare provider. Every free minute that I had I invested in writing this book. Then I used my summer vacation to write the book. Then I had to take leave off of my teaching for a semester to finish it, unpaid. There was no way to do it.

Zibby: Are you working for the same university?

Christa: Yes, I am. I teach remotely right now like so many people. Yeah, I do still teach for the university.

Zibby: But you left West Virginia?

Christa: I left West Virginia. Yeah, I did. I left West Virginia because I didn't feel like I could live there anymore. This book is also about homesickness and sadness. It's also about asking what it means to be from a place. I felt, even though it hurt me to live there in so many ways, that there was so much of me that loved it. My daughters loved it. It was a very hard decision but one that I felt like I had to make after looking at the facts and then knowing that if I felt like I had a heart attack in the middle of the night, when I had to call an ambulance, that it might not turn out okay.

Zibby: How is Keats? Is he okay now?

Christa: He's so wonderful. He's so great. He's healthy.

Zibby: How old is now? Three or something?

Christa: Two and a half.

Zibby: Two and a half, wow.

Christa: He's two and half. He's just starting to put together complex sentences. He's my big helper. He's the neatest of all the kids. If you look at him, he's playing in the play kitchen wiping down the counters. [laughs] He's just a sweet little love. He's healthy and doing so well.

Zibby: That's so great. Are you trying to write any more books on the side, or are you content with the chaos that your regular life...? [laughs]

Christa: I have another book that I'm working on right now. I had been working on before this book. It was a book that I had been working on. Then when I realized that I needed to write Love and Wanted and my publisher wanted to have it in time for the election, I had to put that other book aside. It's a deep love of mine. It's a nonfiction book about a woman who was a CIA operative during the Bin Laden years. She worked at the top of asset conversion while also being involved in a really awful marriage that involved domestic violence and not being able to tell anybody about that because it compromised national security.

Zibby: Whoa.

Christa: I met her through a friend. That story changed my life because I realized -- probably, obviously, it influenced this book too. I thought, what does it mean to be a woman working in the world at the top of your game and still have this closet full of secrets and shame? I'll finish that book. I'm about halfway through now. Obviously, I'm taking time with the kids and teaching. Remote school is hard.

Zibby: Yeah, I get it. Wow, that books sounds awesome. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Christa: Put your rear end in the chair. Don't worry about it not being good the first draft. It's so important to be able to get your story out and not to stop yourself by telling yourself lies like, this isn't good enough. Who will care about this? That's my biggest piece of advice. Also, if you can, to find a group of readers that you trust and engage yourself with them. Writing is a solitary experience, but it's also a community experience because you have a reader. It's not just about you. It's about what it means to have a conversation with somebody who picks up your book.

Zibby: I love that. I have to tell you in terms of the reader, I read this book -- I couldn't sleep. I sometimes get all this pain in my body. Anyway, whatever. It was the middle of the night. I read the whole thing walking in circles around my apartment standing up on my iPad. I read the first hundred and fifty pages just roaming around in circles and so in it in the dark with just the light of the iPad. I felt so connected to it. Then I finished the rest the next day.

Christa: That sounds like what it was like to live it. [laughs]

Zibby: It was a very intense moment, especially because I feel like I was in your life in the middle of my night in a dream state or something. It was awesome. I loved it.

Christa: Thank you. That was the aim. The aim was, how do I write a book where I feel like I can put my arm around you and just tell you this thing that happened to me and we can just be together in the dark with an iPad? [laughs]

Zibby: Yes, exactly. Mission accomplished. Check. Thanks so much for chatting with me today and for giving the conclusion to your story. I was like, what's happening now? Thanks for that too. I'm excited for your book to be out in the world.

Christa: Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me and for having this conversation. This is the first one that I've had about the book.

 Zibby: No way, oh, my gosh. It's been on my calendar. When I first heard about this book forever ago, I was like, yes, I can't wait. It's been one of my longest, and it did not disappoint me.

Christa: Thank you. Thank you so, so much.

Zibby: Good luck with everything. Buh-bye.

Christa: Bye.

Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney, LORETTA LITTLE LOOKS BACK

Zibby Owens: Welcome so much, Andrea and Brian. This is a such a huge thrill to be interviewing both of you and getting a visual element and literary. It's so exciting. Thanks for joining me on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Andrea Pinkney: Thank you.

Zibby: Let's talk about your most recent book first, Loretta Little Looks Back. I can't speak today. Can you please tell everybody what this particular book is about? It's so unique and interesting. Also, what inspired you to write it?

Andrea: It is a mouthful, isn't it? Loretta Little Looks Back, say that ten times fast. Maybe I will begin by telling you what it's about by introducing you to some of the characters. The title is Loretta Little Looks Back: Three Voices Go Tell It. As Loretta says, "Right here, I'm sharing the honest-to-goodness." As young brother Roly proclaims, "I'm gon' reach back, and tell how it all went. I'm gon' speak on it. My way." As young Aggie B who is twelve years old will tell you, "Folks claim I got more nerve than a bad tooth. But there is nothing bad about being bold." This is their three stories. It is the story of the Little family: Loretta, Roly, and Aggie B. It spans from 1927. We begin in a Mississippi sharecropping field. We go all the way up to the 1968 presidential election. It spans three generations. We really get a front-row seat to African Americans on the Civil Rights journey, but also claiming the right to vote. That's a little bit about the book.

Zibby: You describe this book as a go-tell-it, a monologue novel. The way you wrote it was, even though it reads as a novel, some is more like poetry. Some are more like scenes from a play. It's all very visual and auditory as well, almost as if it should be on stage as well as a book. Tell me about how you structured it because it was so interesting, this format. Tell me.

Andrea: Loretta Little Looks Back, I am calling it a monologue novel. It really is a mix of poetry, first-person narratives, gospel rhythms, a little bit of blues thrown in. In each of the sections, the characters come out on stage, as you will, and they talk to us. The idea is that we're really getting behind the eyes of Loretta. We're getting in the belly of Roly. We're getting right, right, heart and soul of Aggie B. Kids, young readers, can really feel what they're feeling. It's very experiential. The idea also is that the book could be shared with friends. It could be done as a readers' theater. You can read it quietly and contemplatively on your own. Really, we just want to hear those voices of the three characters. We really want to inhabit who they are so we can experience what they're going through.

Zibby: Did you consider just writing this as a play?

Andrea: I did. Speaking as one who likes that front row seat -- we live in New York City. I spend a lot of time in the theater. That was my first thought. We just strung it together as a narrative, and now it lives as a novel. Maybe it will live as a play or a film someday at some point.

Zibby: There you go, all very versatile. Of course, you have your husband, an acclaimed illustrator in his right. You guys are such a power duo. This is insane. He does all the illustrations. Now Brian, we're looking at your incredible studio here with all these drawings behind you. Tell me about what it was like working together. I know you have before. What was it like illustrating for this novel in particular?

Brian Pinkey: When I illustrate with Andrea, it's an amazing process. It's always different because her approach to writing changes with every novel or every book that she does. My first thing is that I just read the stories over and over again to the point where I know them so well. I start feeling it in my heart. Then I just start making artwork. The best way for me to explain that is to actually show it while I'm talking. This is the paint that I used. There's gouache here. I have acrylic. I have watercolor. I think with the paintbrush. It's almost like I'm thinking theatrically. In the case of doing the cover, I'm thinking about what colors would be in the South. I'm thinking blue. I think of the sky. I think of lots of sunlight. I'm making circles. I know in my mind this is going to be Aggie's face. Andrea talks about her looking back in the title. I thought, what would that be like to be looking back but also moving forward at the same time? I'm thinking abstractly. This is going to be her face. This is going to be land. This is going to be sunlight back here. It's very wet. The watercolors move very fast. I'm using a sumi brush, which is a Japanese watercolor brush.

Then I'll go back in just intuitively thinking about brown skin, her face. It's going to be somewhere here. The soil is also brown. They're sharecroppers. There's green for the vegetation that's growing. I'll get something very messy like this. Then I'll just sit with that for a while because you can see I paint really fast. I'm going to show you a piece that I had earlier that's very similar but already dry. It has to dry. This is kind of my underpainting. Again, I would do a lot of sketches like this until I find one that I like. Then I'll go back in with another brush called a Da Vinci Maestro, which is a very fine-pointed brush. I'll go in with black ink. I'm using black ink here and a brush. While I work, I am thinking about the blues and jazz. It's very improvisational. Again, my hand is dancing while I'm drawing. I'm thinking, this is going to be Loretta Little looking back. I'll look at hundreds of pictures of beautiful, young, African American girls to get an idea of what she should look like. In my mind, she kind of looks like my niece who is about twelve or thirteen now, very curious. I think, what would it have been like for her if that was her? Just with the paintbrush, drawing her hair. Now I use different pressure. What's great about this is because my studio is not in the home, Andrea actually does not know what I'm doing when I do it.

Andrea: I'm loving it. It's always a wonderful surprise.

Brian: This is how I work. I'll look at outfits like costumes of -- what did the clothing look like? I want to make sure everything is authentic to the time. I'll look at cotton fields. How does the cotton grow? All the while, I'm thinking, what is this saying about the main character? She's looking back over her shoulder here. I'll take breaks and go back into it with more color. I may do this image four or five times, six or seven times, to get the one that I think is exactly what I want. I can hold this up a little bit on the bigger screen so you can see how it's coming out. You know the cover of the book.

Andrea: I'm going to hold this up where you can see it. What I love about the cover is that Loretta Little is indeed looking back. What Brian has done so brilliantly is that she's gazing back at her history, her legacy, and also looking ahead into an unknown future. I really love the cover.

Zibby: I love the cover too. This is great.

Brian: That's basically the process. In terms of Andrea and I working together, we've come up with a couple guidelines so that we actually can stay happily married and work together. Andrea, you want to me start out?

Andrea: Kick it off, Brian. You got it.

Brian: Some of the rules we came up with that -- Andrea is an editor and an author. She has an amazing eye for details. I appreciate that, but I'm also very sensitive. It's very important for me that when Andrea sees something that doesn't look quite right to her, she words it correctly for me. For example, if she sees Loretta Little's foot, she can't say something like, "It looks like a football," because that kind of hurts my feelings.

Zibby: Has that actually happened?

Andrea: That has happened.

Zibby: It sounded like that might have been an actual [indiscernible/laughter].

Brian: Her thing is that if you see something that doesn't look quite right, she can't say, "Loretta Little's foot looks like a football." She has to say, "Loretta Little's foot looks unresolved."

Andrea: It's unresolved. It's a work-in-progress.

Brian: Then my self-esteem stays intact. Then I can come up with some lame excuse, or maybe a good one. Andrea always has guidelines for me, which is that she loves it when I read her manuscripts no matter what stage they're at. As the artist, I do have the peripheral vision of it. I can kind of see it. Her rule for me is that no matter what I think of her writing at the time I must start my comments outs with, "Honey, you're off to a great start."

Andrea: We're all off to a great start one way or the other. Brian mentioned his studio is not in our home. That's deliberate. Most authors and illustrators don't meet each other. They don't collaborate in the traditional sense. The person in the publishing company, the editor, keeps those individuals apart. It seems very strange, but that really is how it works. If I weren’t married to him, if the illustrator of many of my books wasn't sharing a box of cereal or a tube of toothpaste, then I wouldn't see what he's doing in the studio. We don't talk about it. We do get together once a week on a Saturday. It's usually from around noon to three o'clock in the afternoon, three hours. We come to the dining table. That's really when we talk about the work. We have a designated time period. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. I know that if there's something else I want to say or convey, I wait until the following Saturday. There's a nice boundary around that. We were talking about work all the time. That meeting space allows us to talk about it and to move on and have a happy family life and a great marriage.

Zibby: This should definitely be your next book, by the way, all these tips. This is great. "Honey, you're off to a good start" is a great way to really preface any conversation, almost any idea.

Andrea: It's always true.

Brian: Anyone in a relationship, your partner says they're going to clean the room, they don't or they do and you're not quite happy, you can say, "Honey, it looks a little unresolved."

Zibby: Unresolved, okay. Good starts and unresolved things, I'm making mental notes here. This is good to know, the secrets to the successful collaboration. I love it, especially in a creative field where it's not right or wrong. It's always in the eyes of the beholder, essentially, what the work is from a book to a drawing to everything. Excellent advice. Can I hear a little more about how both of you got into your fields to begin with? I want to also hear how you met. I heard that it was through work or something. Go back in time for me a little bit. Give me some background.

Brian: I'll start. My family are all in the arts. My father is Jerry Pinkney who's an award-winning children's books illustrator. Growing up, I always visited him in his studio and would see him make pictures. I followed in his footsteps in a way. Then I went to art school, university art school, visual arts, and came out and started illustrating and getting freelance jobs and doing books. It was hard work, but I love doing hard work. That's how I got started.

Andrea: I fell into children's book publishing, and really book publishing, a little bit by accident, which happens to a lot of people. I did go to journalism school. I wanted to be a journalist, which I was. I worked for a lot of the leading women's magazines. I was the contemporary living editor at Essence magazine. Part of that job at Essence was that every month I had to fill a section with information about African American children's books. This was in the mid-eighties. I would call up publishers. I'd say, "Send me your best books." There weren’t a lot to send. Now someone who works in publishing will do anything to get that coverage in the media. My editor-in-chief at the time, Susan Taylor, said, "Andrea, you've got to fill this section." I said, "Susan, I can't. There's just not enough books for every month." I met someone at the BookExpo America conference. I said, "Hey, we need the black Baby-Sitters Club. We need more board books for babies. We need biographies." We got to talking. One thing led to another. I got my first job in book publishing at Simon & Schuster where I was a children's book editor. Then I went on from there. Then I started writing books. Brian was illustrating textbooks at the time. I kept saying to him, "You should call your editor at this-and-that publishing company and tell them we need a black teen series, board books for babies, mysteries, fantasy, adventure, biographies." He said, "Well, why don't you write some of those books?" Here we are.

Zibby: Wow, that's amazing. With so many ideas of what you wanted to do, how did you even decide where to begin?

Andrea: As a magazine editor, I almost feel like you're installed with a radar. When you're working for a magazine, you have to have ideas constantly because you have to be filling that magazine every month, long lead, four months ahead. The radar is always up. I was saying to my then fiancé, maybe somebody should do a book about the dancer Alvin Ailey. Is there any children's book about Duke Ellington? Has anybody written just a little cute series for babies? Just riffing on the ideas. Brian was saying, "You do it. You do it. You do it." Again, here we are. Always got the idea mill going.

Zibby: Then from an editor perspective, tell me about ushering in other people's work on these same themes and topics. What's that book like on basically both sides of the fence, so to speak?

Andrea: I work as a publisher and editor in a publishing company. I work at Scholastic and I'm an author. I do have a lot of ideas. They're not always the books that I am inclined to or that I have the right voice to write them myself. Part of what I love to do is think, here's an idea, who would be amazing to deliver this? I'll often contact that person or their agent or ask somebody, first, "Is it a good idea? Who do you think would be a great person to write it?" It works both ways. Let me just say that when I've got my author hat on, my editor switch is turned off. I can't edit myself. When I have my editor/publisher hat on, the author has gone to sleep. I'm there in service to help other writers tell their stories.

Zibby: Wow, amazing. Can we go back now to Loretta Little Looks Back? Now I said it right. There we go. [laughs] In doing all the research for the book, you mention in the note at the end how you had talked to so many people and got real oral histories including many people from your own family. Can you talk to me a little about what that was like and how you conducted that research and investigation?

Andrea: My family and Brian's family as well, our families both come from the South, mine from Virginia, Brian's from North Carolina. I grew up hearing a lot of these stories on front porches, summer evenings, fireflies, sweet tea, hearing about the legacy of Civil Rights from members of my own family. Somehow, those stories stuck with me. The other thing is that I will say that both my parents were Civil Rights foot soldiers. My father marched with King. I was born a few blocks and a few days after the March on Washington happened in Washington, DC. I'm the kid who -- they say, what did you do this summer? We had the same summer vacation which is that my family got in that wood-panel station wagon and in July, we went to the NAACP Annual National Convention every year. We went to the National Urban League conference. Right before school was going to start in September, we went to something called the Congressional Congress. I would hear African American notables giving speeches. My family would have to talk about it. I'd be like, ugh. [laughter] I dreaded, "What did you do this summer?" Everyone said they went to the beach. They went to camp. How often can you say, "I went to the NAACP National Convention"? Looking back, it stuck. A lot of what you read in Loretta Little Looks Back are from those experiences. Hearing Fannie Luo Hamer, the Civil Rights voting activist, plays a role in Loretta Little Looks Back. Those are the kinds of speakers I heard as a kid myself, like Aggie B is hearing in the story.

Zibby: In terms of what was from your own life versus fiction, did someone in your family get cancer from harsh materials that were sprayed in the fields for mosquitoes? Did that happen? Did the MS happen? What was real and what did you make up?

Andrea: There is a part in the book where a parent dies of cancer as the result of pesticides that are used coming on new to the scene in sharecropping. I won't give it away. I will just say that did not happen. I have had a parent die of cancer, so I infused the emotions of that young girl into that experience.

Zibby: I'm sorry, I hope I didn't give anything away. I was just wondering. I like to know.

Andrea: Not at all, no.

Zibby: I'm really sorry to hear about your parent's experience. What about the disease of the nerves, as you talk about in the book?

Andrea: One of the characters has MS, multiple sclerosis. No, that is not my own experience. It's not the experience of anyone I know. Again, people that I do know, family members, have had similar afflictions, and so I infused it in the book. I was really fortunate to work with the Multiple Sclerosis Society to get all the depictions correct and infuse it with the history of that disease. Everything is really on point.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about your actual writing process. For instance, the chapter Billy-Club Bullies which was bam, bam, bam, tell me about sitting down. Where are you typing these words out? Give me a visual of how you're getting it done, how you structured it. Do you have Post-its everywhere? What's the process like? Then where are you when you're pounding these out?

Andrea: No, I'm not sitting in front of a keyboard, mostly. My husband will tell you. Here's an example. I get up at four in the morning. I'm up. This happened today. I go out. I'm walking. It's dark out. I've got a big hoodie with a big zippered pocket in the front and a pen. This morning for example, it was raining. I came in dripping with the big hoodie and stuff in the front pocket, it's like a kangaroo pocket, this little rickety pen and a notebook. That stuff hopefully will end up in a book. That's how Loretta Little Looks Back started and many of the books. I eventually get to the keyboard. My writing is really from four AM to about six or six thirty in the morning. It takes many forms. Yes, I have Post-it Notes, scraps. It eventually gets to the keyboard, but I don't get up, sit down, and start writing.

Zibby: Wow, what a process, four to six. Then you do your regular work the rest of the day?

Andrea: Yes. In a non-COVID moment, I change clothes and go to my office in Lower Manhattan.

Zibby: Then what time do you go to bed? How much sleep are you getting?

Brian: Not enough.

Andrea: I go to bed pretty late. Not enough, yeah.

Zibby: Pretty late, wow. I guess that's one of the perks of not needing as much sleep. There you go. Do you also get up at four AM, Brian?

Brian: No. I maybe roll over when I hear her get up. I get up around seven and usually leave the house around seven thirty, get to my studio these days around eight thirty, and have my own creative process. I'll get to the studio, look at everything I have to do for the day, and then meditate or do yoga. Then I have a whole kitchen here. I make my food and everything. Then I just start sketching and painting. I'm working and meditating and moving all the time. I usually don't even sit in a chair. I'm either walking, moving, working, or taking a nap. I love taking naps, which is part of my work because my ideas come to me when I'm meditating and napping. Then I put them on the paper.

Zibby: How convenient is that? I want to put napping into my workday. Let's see if my kids really go for that. No, I'm working. No, really. [laughter] What are you working on next? I know this book is coming out. Do you have more coming down the pike together, separate?

Brian: Yes, we're always working on several projects at the same time. Some are in the concept phase. Some are in the sketch phase. Some, I'm working on finishes. I have projects that I'm working on that I've written. I have projects I'm working on that Andrea's written. Some, we don't even know yet what they're going to be.

Andrea: The next one, I'll just tell you, is something for very young children. That's all I'll say.

Brian: We can't talk too much about the details of it, but it is in progress and process.

Zibby: When are you going to write your memoir? When is that going to happen?

Andrea: Brian, are you working on your memoir?

Brian: I'm always working on my memoir, a memoir of some sort. It just keeps shifting and changing. It's a lot of my growing up, just being creative and playing with art and images and imagination. Most of the books that I write are about imagination. Most of the books that I've written are somewhat autobiographical.

Zibby: Amazing. You two seem to have it all figured out. I'm incredibly impressed. The marriage and the workflow and the meetings on Saturdays and the creativity and the awareness of how you work best, I'm very impressed, I have to say. What advice would you both have to aspiring artists and aspiring authors?

Brian: My advice to aspiring artists is to make art. Art is to make art. Find a way that feels most true to you to make art. For me, it's with traditional materials, watercolors, gauche, ink. I let myself change. Sometimes I discover a medium I had never used before. Working with acrylic is pretty new. Some artists work on computers. They work on iPads. Whatever feels natural and to just make art. Continue to draw every day. Make art every day. That would be my first -- and look at people that you admire.

Andrea: I would say the same thing. Writers write daily. People say to me, oh, come on, do you write on your birthday? Yes. Do you write on Christmas? Yes. Do you write on New Year's? Yes. Do you write when your house is a mess? Especially, because I don't want to clean it. Writers write every single day of the week under all circumstances and conditions. Is everything I write publishable? Most of it isn't, but I'm in the act of pursuit of the craft. I also say read everything. Push past that comfort zone. I hear a lot of people say, I don't do fantasy. I'm not a mystery kind of person. Read those books. Read everything. Become a sponge. It would be like me saying, I think I'm going to become a ballerina and just do it every now and then. You have to work at that. I would say, writers, just always be in the act of pursuit of doing it.

Zibby: Love it. Thank you. Thanks so much to both of you for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and for sharing your beautiful work in every format and all your marriage tips. I'll probably have a better day because of it. [laughs]

Andrea: Thank you, Zibby.

Zibby: Thanks so much for your time. Buh-bye.

Andrea: Buh-bye.

Lou Diamond Phillips, THE TINDERBOX

Lou Diamond Phillips: For somebody who doesn't have time to read books, look at all of this.

Yvonne Phillips: Hey, that's the first time I have seen the hard copy.

Zibby Owens: Here it is. I just got it, actually. It just came yesterday. Beautiful.

Yvonne: Fantastic. I haven't seen it yet.

Lou: Cool!

Zibby: Want it closer?

Lou: That is nice.

Zibby: Do you want me to send it to you? I can FedEx it to you.

Lou: That's okay. I've got an employee discount. I'll be able to get it cheaper.

Zibby: Okay. I got it free, so I'll send it to you if you want. If you change your mind, put your address in the chat or something or have your publicist get in touch. [laughs] Welcome to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm delighted to have you here. Thanks for coming.

Lou: Thrilled to be here. Thank you.

Zibby: Your latest book is called The Tinderbox: Soldier of Indira. Indira, correct? Yes?

Lou: Indira like Gandhi, actually, like Indira Gandhi.

Zibby: Okay, perfect. That, I know. Can you please tell listeners what this book is about and the amazing story of how the whole thing transpired which you wrote in the author's note?

Lou: The original inspiration -- my inspiration, I'm going to start there. Then we'll back up to hers. My original inspiration were her drawings. When Yvonne and I first started dating and getting to know each other, you know how it goes, she started reading a lot of my work. She started sharing with me, a lot of her art, which is amazing. In that batch of original art was a series of drawings in manga style that was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's "The Tinderbox." So looking at the drawings, I go back, I read "The Tinderbox," which is a three-page, five-page fable/fairy tale. It's very short, not one of his more famous ones. It just sparked this whole idea in my head. Her drawings, to me, were very evocative of a post-apocalyptic Mad Max kind of wasteland feeling. It went from there. I told her it was a great idea for a movie. She said, run with it. I did and basically ambushed and hijacked her idea.

Zibby: Perfect. [laughs]

Lou: Yeah, and kept going back to the source material because, as I've said in other interviews, I've always been a fan of art that begets art, West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet, a book called Grendel by John Gardner that was the bad guy's point of view of Beowulf, which is really hard to understand. [laughs] I understood Beowulf a lot more after I read Grendel. Just thought, let's create this fantasy sci-fi world. It's not that sci-fi jumped out at me. It's that originally, we thought it would be a good movie. Game of Thrones hadn’t happened yet when we first started this process. I said, if we're going to make a movie and we're going to set it in this other worldly fantasy thing, let's take a nod from Star Wars and do a --

Yvonne: -- Avatar was out at the time.

Lou: Exactly, in a galaxy far, far away where we could create our own rules and have kings and queens and princesses and soldiers and what not. That was where it all started. The story's very simple. It's a soldier on a foreign planet who falls in love with a princess. It's very Romeo and Juliet in that respect.

Zibby: Amazing. Yvonne, how did you feel about what happened to the drawings after the beginning?

Yvonne: My original concept was not sci-fi or whatever in the world this is. I basically started drawing it back in the nineties because I was really into the magna comic book style. This is before the internet was available, so you couldn't google images or just go to the store. It wasn't readily available like it is now.

Zibby: I remember that time of life. I understand.

Yvonne: You'd go to the comic shop and you'd order something from a catalog and wait six to eight weeks for them to order it. I decided I was going to create my own content. I'm not a writer. I'm very familiar with fairy tales. I'm from Germany. I grew up there, a lot of Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen and all those stories that I grew up with. I took one of the lesser knowns. We know The Little Mermaid. I went, I'm going to go a little bit lesser known. I started animating a story that was already out there in the magna style. He says it's kind of post-apocalyptic. It was, but it was definitely not outer space. It was earth bound. It was still witches and princesses and maybe more Games of Thrones, fantasy, earth bound, not outer space.

Zibby: I'm sensing a little discord here. [laughs]

Yvonne: When he took the idea and said, "I'm going to write a screenplay," I basically washed my hands of it. I'm not going to animate or draw or illustrate a screenplay. That was pretty much, do whatever you want with it. Take the story. It's a cool story. Expand on it. Do what you got to do. I thought I was finished with it.

Zibby: And now here we are.

Lou: That's just it. It took on a life of its own. It really evolved. It kind of took over. People have to understand that this has been a ten-year process. The father of the hero is King [indiscernible] the 47th. The reason he's King [indiscernible] the 47th is because I was 47 when I wrote the screenplay. We write the screenplay. It's fantastic. I'm very happy with it. She's very happy with it. Then we realize this is going to be really, really expensive. Nobody is going to let me direct it and us produce it. We'd probably make a little money by selling it, but that wasn't really what we wanted to do. This started out as a project for the two of us. There was always the thought to novelize it as part of the whole world, if you will. Then Game of Thrones happens. My manager, JB Roberts, says, "Write the novel. At the very least, you've got that. Then if you sell the rights or whatever, you've created the world." I kept bouncing ideas off of Yvonne and checking in with her on plot and just an overall feel for it and went about the process of actually writing the novel and creating the world in more detail so that even if it gets bought out from under us, this is what it looks like. We've established that.

Zibby: I love how your manager is like, just go ahead and write the novel, as if that's not a big deal. There are thousands and millions of people, that's all they want to do in their whole lives, is sell the one novel.

Lou: It's interesting because it is, it's easier said than done. It took me ten years because the day job kept working out. I kept acting and getting a job. Eventually, got to the point where I could do a film or a TV show and write at the same time. It wasn't as if I could devote eight hours a day to writing like novelists who do this for a living are. I think the reason that JB recommended that is because I've written a bunch of screenplays. I've written screenplays that haven't been produced. I've written screenplays that have been produced. Whenever I've decided to write something, it gets done eventually. He knew that I would do it, that it wasn't a frivolous suggestion. It just took a while. What's interesting is that, speaking of the collaboration, I really painted her into a corner. [laughter] I stole the idea. She washed her hands of it. Then I wrote a novel. It's like, okay, illustrate this, and there's all this stuff in there that wasn't her idea. It wasn't what she imagined she would be doing.

Zibby: This is how we learn the meaning of compromise in a marriage.

Lou: And communication.

Yvonne: I think it turned out that we did compromise because I ended up going back to really old-school vintage sci-fi, more Flash Gordon, Barbarella as opposed to the high-tech sci-fi that we see in Blade Runner and that of today. I still took my fantasy world and did a big mishmash of everything else and tried a few new things that I wasn't as comfortable with and pushed the boundaries here and there for myself. I think we got a good mix. It's not necessarily sci-fi, what is expected, but it's not exactly earth bound like it is today either.

Lou: People always tell you after the fact -- I didn't set out to write a sci-fi novel, really. I didn't set out to write in any category whatsoever. I wrote the story as it came to us. Now people go, it's sci-fi.

Yvonne: It's YA.

Lou: It's YA. Is it really? Okay, great. Wonderful. My heroes are teenagers. They're nineteen and seventeen, I think, or nineteen and eighteen. I guess that makes it YA because it is very much a Romeo and Juliet story, but that wasn't the point. I didn't set out to fit into any particular genre. I think ultimately what happened with Yvonne's artwork is also a hybrid, which I think is wonderful because it certainly has that feel like the original Hans Christian Andersen drawings, but also a bit of Charles Vess and a bit of the [indiscernible] drawings from Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland. There are those touches of not only that really cool retro steampunk-y kind of sci-fi, but a graphic novel sensibility as well. She had to draw creatures that I made up. She goes, [indiscernible/laughter].

Zibby: I'm reading the original Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland to my daughter who's seven. I was reading it and I was like, I don't know if this came across my desk if I would even cover this. [laughs] It's weird. It's a funny story. Who thinks of these things? There's less rhyme or reason in that book than probably any other book in all the different ways that it goes off. Yet it's a classic. It's amazing. There's just no science to writing. Things just take off. They become successful. There's no formula, really.

Lou: The truth of the matter is that's one of the biggest criticisms. It's too formulaic.

Zibby: Right, yes. Exactly.

Lou: If you're going to be original and you're going to do something, then you kind of have to follow your heart. Obviously, there are certain ground rules and some fundamentals when it comes to writing. You apply those. You just can't compare writers. Franzen is very different than my friend Craig Johnson or my friend Chris Bohjalian. Both of those guys are different from one another. Their styles are different. Chris Bohjalian, his style will change depending on a subject matter, which I think is just amazing. His depth and breadth of research and the worlds that he creates is wonderful. By the way, both of those guys were instrumental in us getting to the finish line with this book. I was doing the series Longmire when I really started writing it in earnest as a novel and showed Craig and his wife, Judy, the first couple of chapters. I say, "Am I wasting my time? Is this really something that, this is not for you?" They really liked it and encouraged me. Then Bohjalian and the three of us are working on a project together. He took a look at the completed novel and literally pointed us toward an agent and gave us some advice and has been a steadfast mentor in this whole process as well. It's been a lovely journey. We've acquired some great friends along the way.

Zibby: That's amazing. I love Chris. It was so nice of him to put us in touch. I was like, "How did the two of you meet?" He's like, "We met through Twitter like everyone these days." I was like, what? I thought he was going to say, we go back decades or something like that.

Lou: It's one of those, it makes no sense. If you wrote it in a book, they go, no, no, no.

Yvonne: It's funny. I was reading The Flight Attendant, I think it was. We both do a lot of reading. We're big readers.

Lou: She'll read something and then recommend it to me. It goes onto my pile.

Zibby: That great.

Yvonne: When he started reading it, he's like, "Is this guy on Twitter? I should see if this guy's on Twitter."

Lou: Because once again, I'm reading The Flight Attendant, this would make a great movie. Little late to the party. It's already a miniseries now. I'm always looking for something to do or to direct or write. Sure enough, looked him up on Twitter, there he was. Not only was he a fan, but he's a friend of John Fusco who wrote both the Young Guns films. John and I have stayed in touch over the years. It was one of those two degrees of separation. We just happened to be going to New York within a couple of weeks of contacting him. He was here. We had lunch. One thing led to another. That's how we're working on a project. We're actually in the process of adapting one of his novels, once again, for a miniseries. He wanted to take a look at some of my writing. It was like, here, can we do this together? He's just wonderful.

Zibby: That's so great. Having a mentor is so important. It's so funny because you wouldn't think -- look how accomplished you are in your professional life. Yet you need a person or two just to be like, yeah, you're doing okay. [laughs]

Lou: It's when you're trying something new.

Zibby: It's true. It's a hundred percent true.

Lou: I don't think we can assume to be a champion at everything you try. My whole career has been defined by jack of all trades kind of thing. I write. I direct. I do theater, film, TV. I've said it many times, it's all different branches of the same artistic tree. I'm a storyteller. I'm a communicator. Whatever platform or format that takes, it’s just getting down the technicalities of it.

Zibby: Yeah, which medium to choose. It's like you have all these cards in your pocket. You can just deal them out wherever you want to spread your --

Lou: -- We'll see how successful this is. The reception has been incredible so far in some of the early reviews, which have been lovely.

Zibby: You're a beautiful writer. You're really good. You really are. You never know when you open a book, what you're going to get. You're a good writer, so that’s great, as you well know. [laughs]

Lou: A lot of people automatically saw that -- first of all, they thought it was a memoir, which ain't going to happen until in ninety. I promise you that. It's unexpected. I don't think people thought that I was going to write something not only fictional, but that was in this world. I always liken it to when I did The King and I on Broadway. So many people thought, the La Bamba guy thinks he can be on Broadway? I have a degree in theater. It's my background. Even though I'm not known as a writer, I've always written. I actually set out to be a narrative writer, a prose writer, in high school. Then the acting bug bit.

Zibby: This whole acting career has really just derailed what your main goals are. I can't believe how much it's gotten in the way. [laughs]

Lou: You know what's interesting? Yvonne has done so many things in her life. We met when she was a makeup artist.

Yvonne: I obviously didn't become a graphic artist or an illustrator. I went into hair and makeup and special effects makeup, all that.

Lou: Again, very artistic.

Zibby: Did you meet on a set? How did you meet?

Lou: She gave me a haircut, got all up in my grill. [laughter] Her art, it's a gift. It's a gift. She blows my mind to this day. I've always thought, you should be doing this. I've sold so many of her ideas. Believe me, our production company, which is Frabjous Day, from the "Jabberwocky" poem, so many of the projects that we have in various stages of development are her idea.

Zibby: Look at that.

Lou: I'm riding her coattails. I think at this point in life she's not yet having an opportunity to embrace some of the things that I think she is intended to do. She's just so gifted and so smart.

Zibby: How amazing to have a partnership where both of you can reach your full creative potential. That's amazing.

Yvonne: There's a lot of support.

Zibby: I feel like this never happens the first time. I'm on my second marriage. My husband, Kyle, and I have the same synergy where the more we talk, the more ideas go flying out in different forms. I feel like I never hear that about people with their first marriages. [laughs]

Lou: Her first.

Yvonne: You know what? It's my first.

Zibby: It's your first? Okay, sorry. Then I'm wrong.

Yvonne: It's blown out of the water. There you go.

Zibby: You changed the trend for me then. That's amazing. In the book, the character obviously is a soldier. I know you have a military background in your family. Did that play into the creation of this character at all?

Lou: Both of us have a military background. It's interesting. A couple things come to mind. First of all, Hans Christian Andersen's short story starts with the soldier coming back from an unnamed war, clip clop, clip clop. That is the imagery of the book, the first image. The fact that it's an unnamed war and the fact that he's a soldier automatically, in my mind, put him in a certain age range. A lot of great war stories are from people who have just experienced this or are still in the process of defining their own manhood, if you will. I did a movie called Courage Under Fire with Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan, directed by the amazing Ed Zwick. This was after he had done Glory. I asked him one day, I said, "Why do you keep doing war stories?" He goes, "First of all, the bang-bang's exciting." There's the big explosions and the effects and the hardware and whatever else. He's a very well-read man, a very smart man. When you think about it, you go back to even Aristotle who set a lot of things against war. Shakespeare set a lot of things against war.

Yvonne: Conflict.

Lou: Exactly, because you have this conflict, but you also have a setting in which you can discuss the more grand aspects of human character, of courage, of nobility, of integrity, of bravery, of all of these things in what is truly a life-and-death scenario. Hans's story is fairy tale. It weaves a certain tale. There's some magic involved and some just outlandish, fantastical adventures. As a novel, to me, or even as a film, it had to be grounded in a real sense of humanity. Why are we doing this? What are we talking about? From all of that came the idea of creating this planet that's spilt in two. We have two different races of people who are fighting one another. It's sweet because Craig Johnson said it's rather prescient, which I didn't think at the time. Here we are still again discussing race, discussing peace, discussing where we're at in this incredibly unsettled world. Though it's not meant to be a message piece, there is still very much a morality tale at its spine. The Once and Future King in the King Arthur is really an anti-war statement. Having read my entire life, I thought, I can't set off on this journey and just do it for the little story. There's got to be something a little bit more to it.

Zibby: Is it going to be a movie after all that now that you've backed into it? Do you have any idea?

Yvonne: Don't know yet.

Lou: We don't know yet. It's for sale if anybody's got half a million dollars laying around. What's interesting is that in the time it's taken to write the novel, that world has changed. What used to be a one-off now could easily be a miniseries, a limited series of sorts. I don't know how many books Game of Thrones, total, was based upon, but it has created a world. Interestingly enough, a lot of the people who reviewed it early on said that they so loved this world that they would revisit it. She came up with the idea for the sequel, so I'm working on that.

Zibby: Nice. Are you writing a sequel?

Lou: Oh, yeah. Already working on it and literally bouncing it off of her daily.

Zibby: Yvonne, you're the mastermind of the whole thing.

Lou: She is the mastermind. We had a certain idea and was tooling around with that for almost a year. Then one day she came up with a different idea that was out of left field. I literally went, that's it. That's it because it's unexpected. Once again, it's about something. It's about something that's relevant. Working on that now and very excited. This time, trying not to back her into a corner with the drawings as much. [laughs]

Yvonne: But we're already there. We're there already.

Zibby: I would recommend approaching this a little differently, perhaps.

Lou: We've been butting heads a couple of times.

Zibby: Last question. Do you have any advice, I was going to say to aspiring authors, but really anyone trying to achieve things in this creative way and to be storytellers?

Yvonne: For me, it starts with creating your own content. You want to do something, do it. Whether you're trying to sell, do it for yourself first. Somehow, put it out there in the universe. Something will happen even if it's many, many years later.

Lou: That's the point. That would go toward what I have to say. I said this to young actors, and that's never quit. You will never get an opportunity if you quit.

Yvonne: Just keep doing it.

Lou: You never know what heights you're going to rise to. When I set out, I just wanted to be a working actor. I was actually a very good student in high school and what not. When I decided to major in theater, a lot of my teachers and my counselor said, "Oh, no. What are you going to fall back on?" My standard answer was, "My ass." First of all, you have to love it. You have to have a dream. Then the thing that so many people -- I hate to say this. So many people who have this sort of overnight success American Idol mentality, it takes work. Writing especially, you got to do it. Our twelve-year-old right now wants to be an author. We love that. It's like, well, are you writing? Are you doing it? Some of it is just brass tax. It literally is elbow grease. You have to put in the work. Even if you have a dream as an actor or an artist or a dancer, you have to put in the work. It's a craft. It's an art. You may be talented. God bless you if you are. If you don't have discipline and you don't have commitment, then nothing's ever going to come from it. There are certain people who get a break because they are talented or they're beautiful or they're whatever. If they have no staying power, if they have no commitment to the art, they tend to go away because, especially in today's world, the cycle is so fast that you're only flavor of the month for a month. That's how it works.

Zibby: A month is a long time these days.

Lou: A month is a long time these days in a twenty-four-hour news cycle. Just look at what happened this last week. The thing about it is that I've done this for so long as an actor. I've never given up the writing. It's because I love them both. It literally is just physically, actively going after your dream.

Zibby: I love it. Thank you both for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and chatting. Tell me again if you want me to FedEx it. I'll run down to the store. [laughter]

Lou: You read it. You hold onto it. When we get to meet in person, we'll --

Yvonne: -- We have a few phone calls to make after this.

Zibby: All right, phew. Good. Have a great day.

Lou: You too.

Yvonne: Thank you.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Yvonne: Bye.

Anne Helen Petersen, CAN'T EVEN

Zibby Owens: Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Anne Helen Petersen: Of course. Oh, my gosh, look at your beautiful library.

Zibby: Thank you. Pride and joy. [laughs]

Anne: It's great that you can have it as your background on your Zoom call so that more people can see it.

Zibby: It's true. I know. The rest of this pandemic, I've been out on Long Island. I ordered a bookcase because I had nothing to showcase books at all. This is my whole built-in library. I was like, what a waste, all those months. Anyway, congratulations on Can't Even. So exciting. I saw you were all dolled up on Instagram, which is always nice to be able to -- [laughs].

Anne: It was honestly the first time that I've done the full deal since May when I had to do a video appearance for an Adobe conference or something. I didn't recognize myself. I was like, what is happening? I actually think I should do it for no reason a little bit more often because it reminds me of a different face that I have. [laughter]

Zibby: Tell listeners, please, what Can't Even is about and how it was based off of an article. What made you want to write it? I know it flowed out of you. I know you talked about it in the book. It just came out of your fingers. Tell us a little more about how it all got started.

Anne: I was really, really burnt out. This was the fall of 2018 leading up to and then after the midterm election. I think I had been burnt out for a really long time. It's just that I refused to recognize what I was feeling as being burnt out. I was like, this is just how I work. I had reached a point where I was getting mad at my editors and crying. One of my editors was like, "You're burnt out. You need to take some time." I was like, "No." [laughs] I had taken two days, Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Of course I didn't need any more time. The thing that I thought was wrong with me is that I couldn't figure out how to do my errands, just the pettily stuff at the bottom of your to-do list. I just couldn't do it. I was like, I'll research that. I'll figure out what's going on with that. As I researched it, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm totally burnt out. All roads led to burnout.

Zibby: By the way, the things that you mention in the book on your to-do list that you weren’t getting to, they don't even make it onto my list. The things you were beating yourself up about, I'm like, resoling my shoes? What? No. [laughs] It's not even in the realm of possibilities. The fact that you even had it on a list I think was a step up.

Anne: I love these boots. I want to wear these boots for the rest of my life. They need to get resoled. Otherwise, the cobbler gives you dirty looks when you bring them in. I don't want the scorn of the cobbler. All signs pointed to burnout. Still, the diagnosis of burnout as it was clinically described did not match what I was feeling exactly. Clinically, they usually describe it as collapse. I wasn't collapsing. I was still going. I wanted to try to figure out how to maybe expand that definition to describe a more societal instead of just clinical diagnosis. I try to look at my own life and where I had learned to work all the time and really internalized that ethos and then extrapolated a little bit more onto the rest of my generation. It was a personal essay that was long. I thought that it would function like a lot of personal essays, a couple ten thousand people would read it. That was not the case. Seven million people read it. When I thought of the idea that I expand it into a book, it was really straightforward to expand it both in terms of historical rooting to look what happened in the economy and in changes in childrearing patterns and all that sort of thing in the post-war period that affected our parents and burnt out boomer parents, and then also expand it way past myself and try to decenter that white, middle-class experience that I had.

Zibby: You talked in the book about a lot of your own, as you mentioned, personal stuff. It started as a personal essay. Then you sprinkled in just a lot of experiences of your own like your parents' divorce. Tell me about how that exemplified this burnout, how systemic things in the environment and culture led to burnout culture now.

Anne: I read this really interesting book by Katherine Newman. It was published in, I think, the early nineties. It was about all of these different ways that boomer families oftentimes tried to compensate for ways that they were falling out of the middle class. So many boomer families, they had grown up in homes that had become middle class for the first time in the post-war period. Then just as boomers were entering the workplace in the 1970s, that economic stability started to disintegrate through a series of rolling recessions. You had these families -- she follows this one family, I remember, that had been a Wall Street banker, got laid off, but still lived at that level even though he was laid off because they didn't know how to live any other way but middle class, and went into significant credit card debt. I think that story will be familiar to anyone who's had financial insecurity but cannot fathom not living the way that they're living. I don't mean lavishly, necessarily, but just having the accoutrements of middle-class lifestyles, so a house that you own instead of rent. If you're living in a city, this is different. A house, cars, new clothes and gadgets and stuff for your kids, computers. There are ways that you could be so much more thrifty and really decrease your cost-of-living footprint, but that is unfathomable once you've come to that middle class. It's a real psychological burden to shift classes, to go downward.

To connect this to my parents' divorce, she has this whole chapter that is about what happened to women who got divorced during this period. They have incredible downward mobility because a lot of these boomer women stopped their jobs. This was one of the first generations that went, en masse, into the job market, but then many of them had taken a step back from the job market in order to raise their children and allowed their husbands' careers to take precedence. When they got divorced, whether the kids are in elementary school or in junior high, the income -- the wife doesn't necessarily have a career and can't restart her career where she left it or didn't have one in the first place. The husband still has a career and can just continue going on. They're living in two different houses, but they have to pay rent for two different spaces. The income level of that secondary house -- usually, the kids would either be primarily custody with their mom or splitting custody. The experience of being a kid in one of those households, it just teaches you as a millennial, as a gen Xer, it teaches you a lot of lessons about, this is what happens if you don't have a plan for yourself at all times, if you don't know how to work at all times. At any moment, this marriage could go under and you could find yourself financially afloat. I certainly internalized that idea. I tried to expand on it in the book.

Zibby: I know at the end you say you don't want to give an overwhelming list of tips and that those are kind of useless also. You do such a good job of outlining the hurdles. I feel like you did it with some -- you were sort of pissed off writing this book.

Anne: Oh, yeah.

Zibby: You were, not venting because it was so well-articulated, but it was more just like you're angry at the situation. You feel that there is sort of no way out unless everybody changes everything. That's tough. What do you think can actually help, or are you doomed? [laughs]

Anne: No, I don't think we're doomed. I don't think that every last thing about our lives have to change. We don't have to leave our homes. I just think that there are palliative things that we can do in our own lives to decrease our own personal burnout. You can try to institute better borders between the workspace and the rest of your life. You can have better digital hygiene in terms of, I delete Twitter off my phone on the weekend or whatever. All of those things are Band-Aids, ultimately, if you're fighting against this larger system that is broken. It is always going to be the stronger force. The burnout inherent to that system is going to swallow you no matter what armor you put on to resist it. I think that there are those smaller things that we can each individually do. As a society, I hope that that anger and that frustration is contagious because I think that as millennials we have been taught to, despite our reputation, to kind of put our head down and be like, I guess I just need to work all the time. This is just my life. Instead, we can look at our lives and say, it doesn't have to be this way. How can we together say that loudly and then also decide that we want change, not just incremental change, but societal change?

Zibby: What's something in your dream scenario here, not to put you on the spot, that if society were to change -- I know you reference everything from pensions and social security and parental burnout. I know there's a lot of stuff. What's one thing, maybe, that could happen that could make things better?

Anne: Mandatory paternity leave. We don't even have mandatory maternity leave. The chapter on parenting burnout, I think anyone who reads the book will see just how angry all of these moms are. They're just so tired and so angry. There's a lot of resentment. A lot of it has to do with the fact that you're doing all of these things that society has told you to do to be a good mom. Then you also just feel like in your home, in your heterosexual home, that it is really difficult to find anything close to an equitable labor split even with the most progressive of husbands or the most feminist of husbands. One thing that has been shown in other countries and to some extent in the US to actually sustain equitable splits of labor in the long term is if a father stays home for an extended period of time by himself with kids. What that does is it teaches fathers everything that has to be done in order to take care of children and run a household. That is something on a societal level that we could do to pretty radically reorganize the way that labor is split in the home that could have ramifications across society. Then also, government subsidized and funded affordable childcare would be a huge thing. Every parent I know is stressed out about finding reliable care. This is even pre-COVID. Reliable, affordable care, it's really, really hard. Other countries have shown it's doable. It takes a huge burden off of parents.

Zibby: I'm still trying to digest the idea of mandatory paternity leave. This will sound very antifeminist of me. As a mom of four, I actually wanted to be with my kids. I don't know that I could've been like, all right, honey, I'm taking off two weeks postpartum. I don't know what I'm going to do, but you're --

Anne: -- Not two weeks postpartum. A lot of places that do this, it's maybe from year one to year two, or year one to eighteen months, or eighteen months to two. It doesn't have to be in those early times. It's more just, it teaches -- it's not like the mom, necessarily, would have to go back to work, or if they don't work in a traditional setting or something like that. They can do anything that they want as long as the male is primarily responsible for keeping the child alive.

Zibby: And not call it babysitting. [laughs]

Anne: Exactly. You're not babysitting your own kid.

Zibby: Even in your introduction, it was interesting because you were saying you don't even expect jobs to last. You don't even have the expectations that were for so many of us, assumptions. Now you don't even have them. I feel like I don't know how you would maintain any sort of positive outlook and inner equilibrium if you felt that there was no true hope. I know there are things societally we can do. Aside from you getting up and running for president, which maybe you've thought of --

Anne: -- No, no, no.

Zibby: [laughs] I feel like there's still potential for joy and happiness in the context of societal frustration. I feel like I'm trying to make you feel better because I felt like you were so upset in the book. Now I feel like I'm answering your upset-ness. [laughs]

Anne: I think the problem with burnout is it swallows joy. It swallows all of those moments that -- for me, I knew how to find serendipitous moments of happiness in the corners of my life and that sort of thing. I think that both my exhaustion and then the way that we come to rely on our phones and Instagram as crutches during those moments, it takes your best intentions and cannibalizes them. That is the frustration. I was very careful to always ask all the parents that I interviewed for the book, I was like, "Tell me all these things that you're frustrated about, but also tell me the thing that makes you so happy about parenting." A lot of them were like, "There are all these things that I love about being a parent and I love about my kids. Because of all of these other stresses, all of these other instabilities, it makes it so hard to focus on those things." What I think a burnout cure does is it offers relief from those sources of precarity that rob you of your ability to feel just genuine, simple joy.

Zibby: Speaking of genuine, simple joy, you must have had some of that when you saw that you had seven million views of your article.

Anne: [laughs] It was very gradual. It accumulated over the course of several months. It's a weird thing to go viral on that level. One thing about burnout and about, I think, what a lot of millennials -- our experience is that there's not a lot of space to feel even those ups and downs. The way I try to describe burnout is that everything, the highs and lows, vacations, non-vacations, everything flattens. There's a lot that bears similarity to some symptoms of depression. Also, if you're just trying to get through every day, it's hard to feel catharsis. I think back wistfully all the time about my time in college when you would study so hard for a final and then take the final, and then you'd be like, and I'm done, just that incredible release. You'd always get sick. I would always get sick.

Zibby: I would always get sick, yes.

Anne: Your body is letting down its defenses. Then I would go home. This is a very rarified, privileged experience to be able to go home. I didn't have to work over break. I would just sleep so much and recover. Then it would be long enough of a total break that I would come back to school and be just so excited to be back. You really have that moment of incredibly hard work, achievement and catharsis, recovery, and return. How many of us have anything approximating that in our lives?

Zibby: I will tell you, I got divorced six years ago now or something like that. I split custody. I have more of it. Every other long weekend, I don't have my kids. In my head, I know that I have a point now where I actually can relax and get sick and do all that stuff, which I didn't have for years and years. My oldest kids are thirteen. No, I guess I wasn't divorced six years ago. Anyway, it doesn't matter. The point is, that was introduced into my life after many, many years of stay-at-home parenting. I was like, oh, my gosh, I finally have this little break from the rainstorm for just a few days so I can catch my breath. I found that I came back as a far stronger mom. If we're going to put our little wish lists out there for how to help society, I don't think mandatory divorce is the answer, but --

Anne: -- That's the problem. If the only way for you to get those moments is a divorce, that shows that something is wrong.

Zibby: That's true. More evolved couples, perhaps, could've had some sort of -- I don't know. I think you're right. I'll just get away from my own situation. Having the breaks now has been absolutely lifesaving to me. I don't think I could even have this whole creative pursuit in my life and all this stuff without the sleep and the regeneration. Not to brag.

Anne: Totally. You're not alone. Also, other parents have told me that they want to be better, more patient parents. If you're so tired, you're just kind of at this baseline of annoyance. You don't like the sort of parent that you become. That's hard. I find that sometimes in my relationship where I'm like, I'm not being the partner that I want to be right now. How do I try to fix that? Usually, it's take a nap. [laughter]

Zibby: I remember in college when I would get so worn out and so tired from studying and all this stuff and I'd be like, should I take a nap or should I go to the gym? Should I take a nap or should I go to the gym? I was like, I don't know, I only have thirty-five minutes. Now I have thirty-four minutes. Now I only have thirty-two minutes. Let me try to take a nap. Oh, no, now I can't sleep. [laughs]

Anne: That's the thing. This is such a great example of the optimized way that we approach our time. When you're like, I have thirty minutes to nap, that's the only time I have a nap, and it becomes such an overdetermined, like, I have to nap right now, that I can't nap ever because you're like, I have to do this thing right now. It doesn't work.

Zibby: This is why I never nap. This is literally it. Unless I am so tired that I somehow just basically fall over or I'm reading to a kid or I'm reading to myself and next thing I know all the lights are on and I'm sound asleep. Yes, that's a problem.

Anne: When your body tells you. Your body forces you to say, it doesn't matter if you don't have time for this.

Zibby: Naptime, ready or not, here we come. Oh, my gosh, that's funny. You have Can't Even out there, which is so exciting. What are your ambitions now? Do you want to be political? Not necessarily the president. Do you want to try to affect societal change? Do you want to keep writing? Do you want to focus on this? What do you think?

Anne: I'm not a policymaker. I like reading other people's policy suggestions, but that's not my expertise. People have a lot of expertise in that area, and familiarity. My PhD is in media studies. I love reading history and synthesizing ideas and trying to figure out what's going on. Why are we acting in the way that we are acting? I guess you could call that examining ideologies of a given moment, that sort of thing. I think that my next project is going to do with work from home and the brave new world of hybrid working from home and how you can prevent it from sucking your life into it. It could be a real way to even become more burnt out or it can help us think about how to reorient our lives away from work, which might be revelatory. Still trying to think through some of the first steps on that.

Zibby: I love that. I actually have found with so much more stuff going on at home that all of the stress of logistics and running around has taken a big burden off. I have all this extra time and energy now that I'm not racing from place to place and figuring out how to get all my kids there. Now it's like, okay, you do your thing right there.

Anne: I used to travel so much for work and for speaking stuff and that sort of thing. I think for a lot of people who have been slowed down by the pandemic generally -- obviously, when we can start moving around a little bit, I'm going on a vacation, having our actual vacation as soon as possible. I can't see myself returning to that level of franticness. It's one of the small silver linings of all of this, is some perspective.

Zibby: It's true. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Anne: This is what people always say, but I really think sometimes you get really precious about writing and are like, I have to be in the right place. It has to be the right kind of writing. It needs to be good as it comes out. I am a big proponent of just barfing on the page and then coming back and editing. Write a lot.

Zibby: Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" and for our little therapy over anger and society and divorce and all the rest. Congratulations again on your book coming out.

Anne: Thank you so much. This was great.

Zibby: Bye.

Anne: Bye.

Julia Phillips, DISAPPEARING EARTH

Zibby Owens: Hello. Thank you for joining today for my conversation with Julia Phillips who's one of the five 2020 Young Lions Fiction Award finalists. I'm Zibby Owens. I'm the host of "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books," the podcast. Each year, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Awards champions emerging writers and recognizes innovation and excellence in contemporary fiction. This year, the award marks it's twentieth anniversary of celebrating the next generation of outstanding fiction writers. The 2020 Young Lions Fiction Award finalists include Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay; Julia Phillips, who's here, Disappearing Earth, congrats; Kiley Reid, Such a Fun Age; Xuan Juliana Wang, Home Remedies; and Bryan Washington, Lot. You can see interviews with all the finalists at nypl.org/ylfa. Today, I'm delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Julia Phillips who's nominated for her novel Disappearing Earth. Welcome, Julia.

Julia Phillips: Thank you. Thank you, Zibby. It's nice to be here with you even virtually. It's nice to be here on this Zoom call with you.

Zibby: It's nice to be on this Zoom call with you too. Just more one sentence of background about you for people who might not know. This is your bio, which obviously you know. Julia Phillips is the debut author of the nationally bestselling novel Disappearing Earth which is being published in twenty-three languages and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A Fulbright fellow, Julia has written for The New York Times, ​The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. She currently lives in Brooklyn. Okay, that's it. Now we can just chat. Welcome. Tell me about finding out that you were nominated for the Young Lions Fiction Award. What was that like?

Julia: It was so exciting. It was so wonderful. I'm a big fan of this award and this program and the New York Public Library in general. Because of quarantine, I'm afraid I had too much time on my hands to refresh the library's page and Twitter account and think, I wonder when they’ll be announcing that this year, just because. No particular investment or interest for myself, just because. I spent quite a few weeks sort of pestering the account before I got the wonderful, wonderful news that I was on the list. It was so exciting.

Zibby: Aw, that's awesome. The Young Lions Fiction Award is now celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Do you feel like it means even more in the context of being part of the anniversary year? What do you think?

Julia: I would buy that, absolutely. I got very excited about the nineteenth and the eighteenth and seventeenth too. It's hard for me to see that it would mean so much more right now, but actually, I like the way you put that. Maybe it does. It's much more meaningful now, the twentieth. How could you resist that? That number is irresistible.

Zibby: And it's 2020. There we go. It's great. [laughs] I want to talk a lot about your book, but I also just want to ask if you have an earliest memory of visiting a library.

Julia: Gosh. A lot of my early memories of visiting libraries blend together a little bit. A library was a big after-school staple for me of doing homework or being dropped off to do homework and not doing homework and just reading books in the aisles when I was a little kid. All of those sort of blend together in one happy homework-shirking memory that lasted many years. I recently found a newspaper clipping from when I was seven. My public library had a Write Your Own Novel program for kids. We got these blank books that we filled up with our own stories. I wrote a very, very plagiarized novel that I think was the plot of a Christopher Pike book -- I don't if you remember Christopher Pike, loved it, sort of scary teen novels -- about a dead body found in a snowman. I was very supported in that by the librarians and the staff. They were really loving and let me write all sorts of wild, plagiarized, half-baked horror stories. They were wonderful.

Zibby: I feel like I will never approach a snowman in the same way again.

Julia: You never know what's inside.

Zibby: You never know. Terrifying. [laughs] It sounds like they were really supportive of your development. That's amazing. Did they help you find books that maybe set you on this path as well, or was it more of fostering of your love of writing?

Julia: It was a fostering of all of our love of writing and a fostering of whatever creative direction we needed to go in. I think I spent a particular amount of time illustrating the cover and put most of my focus there and wrote about forty words in the rest of the book. I think I lost my steam for the story pretty quickly, probably because it had already been written by somebody else better.

Zibby: It hasn’t stopped a lot of other people. [laughter] Where did you grow up, by the way? Where are we picturing this library that you were in?

Julia: I grew up in Northern New Jersey, in suburban New Jersey about fifteen miles outside New York.

Zibby: Do you remember the first time you want to the New York Public Library? I know I'm putting you on the spot.

Julia: [Indiscernible] first time I went to the New York Public Library, but I have a lot of sharp memories actually in more recent years of going to the library as a sort of celebratory event. It always feels so special every single time. Now I've been in New York for about fifteen years. Still, every time I go it feels like the most special thing in the world. I think it's the lions outside. It makes it feel very, very special every single time. The architecture's so wonderful. Every room is a mystery.

Zibby: Now that you're about to have your first baby, you can discover the children's room which is also really special.

Julia: Oh, my gosh, okay, that is on the bucket list for post-quarantine baby life. Taking [indiscernible] to the children's room, for sure.

Zibby: Now that I know you've been writing since you could basically hold a pencil, tell me about how you got from your first plagiarized novel to your Book Award-nominated Disappearing Earth debut actual novel here in 2020? What happened in between with all your writing and the Fulbright and all the rest that got you here?

Julia: I always wanted to be a novelist. I was a big reader as a kid. I was really lucky to be supported by some of my early teachers. I remember my second-grade teacher especially being supportive. I was trying to write a novel in a notebook about a girl who was raised by wolves. I would take up all her time reading out loud from this second-grader's notebook. She would say, "Keep going. That's great." I really took that "Keep going. That's great," and chose to hold onto it very tightly and always dreamed of writing fiction. I ended up studying fiction in college and also studying Russian which was a big hobby of mine and a language that I love to study. I had been working on a different novel manuscript that I pictured would be my first book. I'm very lucky that it was not and that it went into the drawer it went into. As I was getting to the end of that process, which was quite a few years, I started thinking about what I imagined would be the second book. I thought maybe I can combine this interest in writing and this interest in Russia and set a novel there. With that big plan in mind, I spent a couple years applying for, as you said, a Fulbright, this grant in creative writing that would fund my living in Russia for a year and beginning to research a book of fiction. I got that after a couple years. I moved to Russia and started researching the project that became Disappearing Earth. That whole process started in 2009. The book came out in 2019. It was a really educational and challenging and wonderful decade of work on this book. I'm so glad and grateful to have had this project all this time. It's been a really beautiful thing in my life.

Zibby: Do you think it was those words of your teacher that made you not give up? That's a long time to persist and feel that the project was going to come to a good conclusion. I feel like giving up might have been a tempting option along the way. Instead, not only did you finish, but you crafted this award-winning beautiful novel. What made you not quit? How did you keep going?

Julia: It's interesting to think in the context of the Young Lions award because I've been learning a lot and reflecting a lot about publishing and about writing and about the creative process recently and about youth and the creative process, or speed perhaps. I've been thinking about how in the past when I wanted to publish a novel at twenty-two and didn't publish a novel at twenty-two, I thought, there must be something very, very magical about twenty-two-year-olds who are publishing a book. Maybe there is a magical thing or a magical thing about a thirty-year-old that published it. I've been thinking more and more about how integral support is in creating speed. Everyone's writing incredible books. Everyone can write incredible books. Everyone's doing the work. If you are supported by the people around you, it makes it a lot easier. That's as true as it is in second grade as it is now. When you have people around you who say, "I believe you can do this," it is motivating and really helpful. There are so many folks who do the work with an enormous lack of support. Yet when I look back on my writing ambitions, I really count my blessings in how I felt supported by that teacher or supported by my mom who didn't think it was whacky for me to be studying creative writing. That support was really huge for me.

Zibby: That's so important. It's tough to not be supported in basically anything. Having a cheering squad can't be underrated. That's for sure, especially in writing which is much more of a solitary profession. Knowing that once you look up from the keyboard there are people rooting for you to actually finish, that's a huge help.

Julia: It is. It's a selfish road for me toward arriving at the realization of how important it is to support other -- when you find people that you're excited about or find people that are dreaming of a thing that you're dreaming of or have their own dreams, how little it takes and how much it benefits to say, "Keep going. I want to support you in this. I want to do everything I can to support you in this." That is hugely meaningful to folks. It certainly was hugely meaningful for me.

Zibby: How do you think you so accurately nailed the voice of the sisters in the beginning of the book as they're wandering around the beach and the annoyance of the older sister? All of that was so pitch perfect as a mother of four children including two daughters. All of those dynamics, it just seemed so real. When I heard you were pregnant, I was like, she must have older kids too because she totally nailed this. Not to say you have to have your own children to write children well, but how did you do it so well? What do you think?

Julia: That's so kind. That means so much to me that you say that. That means a lot to me that you say that. There's so much doubt in the process. Certainly, their voices took a lot of revision and a lot of, talk about support again and community, a lot of feedback from more experienced authors and peer writers and friends who are parents and friends who said -- I remember very, very well a wonderful writer named Dionne Brand who I had the good luck -- she read that first chapter and said, "Why don't you go on YouTube and listen to some kids?" The characters are eight and eleven. She said, "Why don't you go on YouTube and listen to eight and eleven-year-olds talking and then revise?" I was like, thank you so much. [laughs] Absolutely trying to channel their voices or get their voices right was a -- whatever result there is, is a community effort, for sure, a community effort to ensure that I was listening closely to how kids talk and express themselves to each other and not just sitting in my own mind fantasizing about a precious eleven-year-old who is never resentful.

Zibby: I am now thinking that maybe there's a marketplace for kids who want to get job experience helping authors who want to perfect their voices. You could search by age and just have a phone conversation with a kid. Look at that.

Julia: It honestly was, upon reflection, pretty troubling how easy it was to go on YouTube and search "eleven-year-olds uncensored." [laughs]

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. When you were actually doing the writing, obviously you did a lot of research to make sure everything was just right, did you have the whole format outlined? Did you have the different people in the community? Did you outline? Did the characters just come to you? What was the driving force of starting this story versus how it ended up? That was a lot of questions.

Julia: I love all of those questions. I tried to make as many decisions as possible about the book and the structure of the book and the arch of the book prior to starting writing. I mentioned that I'd previously been working on a manuscript. That manuscript, I kind of started with a feeling and a tone and a setting and not a story at all, really. I thought, as I work on it, I'm going to come into the story. I'm going to learn what the story is. Seven years later, I realized, not the case actually, for me. That process, at least with that project, didn't give me clarity the more I worked on it. I kind of stayed in the same place where I had started of having a feeling and no concrete decisions around that. When I started this project, I wanted to approach it differently. I wanted to make some really strategic choices around its structure, who would be speaking and why, what information would be conveyed in each chapter, what the point was.

I wanted to have an elevator pitch, which I still practice now. I say the book is about two girls who go missing in the Russian Far East and how that affects the people around them, two girls who go missing in this remote Russian community and how that affect people around them. Over and over, I would say this to myself to try to focus on what the book is about. From the start, I thought, it's going to be over the course a year. Each chapter is a different month. Each focused character is a woman or girl in the community. I really wanted to approach it with as many decisions made as possible. As I got to the end of the writing process, I spent the last six months outlining even more heavily. I was a couple drafts in at that point, or a few drafts in, and yet went back and re-outlined all of the chapters and the whole project to try to get more clarity. I found that every conscious decision I could make really helped the work for me. I find now as I approach new projects, as much outlining as I can do in advance helps me a lot.

Zibby: Then once you sit down to tackle the writing, where is your happy place for writing? Where do you prefer to write when you can? What do you wear? Do you have any traditions or superstitions when you're writing? What does that process look like for you?

Julia: I don't have a desk. I write in bed or on the couch. I handwrite my first drafts. That helps me a lot. That's a superstition, for sure. I find writing on the computer to be a little bit more -- I pay more attention to what I'm doing in some way. It is more tempting to delete or to go back. I'm a big fan of drafting over and over and over again. To just get out that first draft really fast and messy is helpful for me to do by hand. These days, especially a few months into being inside my apartment walls all the time, I've been thinking about what a happy writing place looks like and what a productive writing place looks like. I think how much I've taken from changing my setting before and being on the subway or walking around or having things pop into your head. I've been missing that. I wonder if it is less a specific place and maybe more a state a mind or a feeling of movement of engagement with the world that helps me a lot. I don't know. Still figuring it out, I guess, is the answer.

Zibby: Have you been able to do any writing during the quarantine?

Julia: I've been doing some writing during the quarantine. I've been really motivated and inspired and blown away by some friends who have put together different accountability groups. Every day, morning writing session or a once a week free-writing session together or weekly check-ins. That's been really incredible. That being said, as you mentioned, I'm pregnant. As I get more and more pregnant, I do feel that the fetus is sucking all desire to move out of me. I've been very, very unaccountable these days.

Zibby: I think you have every excuse in the book.

Julia: I love what you're saying because that's what I tell myself in my head as I get very behind on the things I should be doing.

Zibby: Your body is actually doing a zillion different things right now that you just can't put your finger on to build another human being. I feel like if you want to take a week to just let your body do its thing, the work will follow. It's not like you're going to stop writing.

Julia: [Indiscernible] for the past week where I've done nothing.

Zibby: You've done a lot. It's just you haven't gotten it on the page.

Julia: I haven't gotten it on the page.

Zibby: That's okay. There's plenty of time, maybe less time once you have a child, but who knows? Maybe not.

Julia: Different kind of time.

Zibby: Different kind of time. What was it like when you sold your book? What was that moment like after all this time and effort and work? Then you sold it. What was that feeling like? What was that experience like?

Julia: It was the most miraculous experience of my whole life. That feeling really started when I got my agent. With the previous manuscript I'd worked on, I'd queried a hundred agents. I was very focused on the agent hurdle and spent a lot of time thinking about approaching agents as I was working on this book. A lot of the strategic decisions I was making from the start were around, it's important to me to have an elevator pitch because it's also important to put that in a query letter. I was thinking about how I can better position myself in the future for developing a relationship with an agent, I hoped, one day. The experience of my agent taking this book on, I will never forget where I was. I'll never forget how it felt. It was the moment when dream and reality met. I just felt like I passed out of my real life and went into the life I had fantasized about. I screamed, jumped up and down. I couldn't handle it. Everything after that felt miraculous in such the same way. It felt like my agent had opened the door and let me into the life that I had dreamed about. It all felt like a dream. It still feels a dream. After a few months on social media as I was promoting the book as it came out, I realized that I kept using that language over and over again. I kept saying, this is like a dream. This is like a dream. This is a dream come true. This is such a dream. It started to get a bit disturbing that I was sort of saying, help me, I'm totally disconnected from any sense of reality. [laughs] Certainly, a lot of dreams of my life have come true. That has been bewildering and magical and does feel impossible.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice. By the way, if I were your agent right now hearing this, I hope that whoever it is, he/she is listening to this. I would be swooning. That is so nice.

Julia: Suzanne Gluck, I love her tell and I tell her every second. [laughs]

Zibby: I'm sure she knows. It sounds like you're pretty expressive. Still, that's pretty awesome. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Julia: Yeah, I do. My first advice would be to be patient with how you've heard this before because it's not outrageously novel. My three go-to pieces of advice are three things that I tell myself over and over and over again and kept forgetting to act on sometimes. Upon reflection, I think if I just do those things more, things would be better. Write as much as possible. Read as much as possible. Build a community or embed yourself in a creative community. Writing as much as possible just to practice and lower your own inhibitions and un-paralyze yourself and see what works. Reading is the best possible education in writing for which there is no equivalent. Community, to me, it seems like -- my book is so much about community. I keep on talking about it. To be able to connect to other people and learn from them, learn from their work, cheer them on, be in communication with them about what they're working on, to be part of a creative team -- that can be in person. It can be online. It can be on Twitter. Just to connect with other people in this pursuit of something that, as you said Zibby, can be very isolating and is so personal and so strange, this channel that you're trying to tap into of creativity in yourself -- it's such a bizarre thing. To connect with other people through that is really the most beautiful and hopeful and inspiring activity you can do. It motivates your work and it makes it much better, in my opinion or in my experience for sure.

Zibby: That's the only person I was asking.

Julia: [laughs] The only one you're going to hear from right now.

Zibby: The only one. Who else? Not in my little square. I actually listened to your book instead of reading it. Usually, I read. I downloaded it and listen to it over a series of trying to actually get of my house and run and walk and all the rest. When you have your baby, god willing everything is great, and you go one day on a walk with the baby when everybody's out in the open, I want you to go back and listen to the first chapter. You are going to be filled with this sense of panic that I was filled with, and anxiety. [laughs] That's my little assignment for you post-childbirth.

Julia: In my writing group, that helped me so much with this book. I remember very well a woman in my writing group reading it. At the time, her two kids were just about the same ages as the two sisters who go missing. She came to the group and she slid the papers across the table. She was like, "I think your first chapter is pretty effective. I will not read any more of this book." [laughs] Best possible feedback, thank you.

Zibby: When you do that, you have to DM me or something. Thank you, Julia. Thanks for being a part of this conversation for the Young Lions, the New York Public Library, and all the rest. Congratulations on your nomination and all of your success. Well-deserved.

Julia: Thank you so much, Zibby. This was so wonderful to get to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much to the New York Public Library, one of the best places, if not the best place in the entire world, I think.

Zibby: Thanks.

Marisa Porges, WHAT GIRLS NEED

Zibby Owens: Dr. Marisa Porges is known for her work on gender and education, leadership, and national security and is the author of What Girls Need: How to Raise Bold, Courageous, and Resilient Women. She is currently the eighth head of school of The Baldwin School, a 130-year-old all-girls school outside of Philadelphia that's renowned for academic excellence and preparing girls to be leaders and changemakers. By the way, Dr. Porges actually went there. Prior to joining Baldwin, Dr. Porges was a leading counterterrorism and national security expert. Most recently, she served in the Obama White House as a senior policy advisor and White House Fellow at the National Economic Council. She also has served as a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Council on Foreign Relations. She also worked as a counterterrorism policy advisor in the US Department of Treasury and as a foreign affairs advisor in the US Department of Defense. In all these roles, she stood out as one of a few, if not the only, women present, at any given time. Dr. Porges started her career on active duty in the US Navy flying jets off carriers as a naval flight officer. She earned a BA in geophysics from Harvard, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in war studies from King’s College London. She's won a million awards. She currently lives in Philadelphia with her family.

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

Dr. Marisa Porges: Thank you for having me, Zibby. Great to be here.

Zibby: What Girls Need, this is the ultimate question. [laughs]

Marisa: I think it's on all our minds, right? All the time.

Zibby: All the time. What do I even need? I don't know.

Marisa: That's where it starts. It starts from thinking what I wish I had, what I wish my friends and I, when we think about the real world. We want to give it to the next generation, our girls, our daughters, our kids.

Zibby: Totally. Your career has been so interesting. I can't believe you were a naval pilot. You were, I don't even how to say it, naval air force pilot. You were in the White House. Now you're running a school. You're just the most badass person I feel like I've ever interviewed. [laughs] It's so cool.

Marisa: Thank you. I'll take badass. I hope we all realize how badass we are because we all have our badass moments. I did have a choose-my-own adventure of a career, so there's that too.

Zibby: It was so great in the book how you just sprinkled it all the way through. Now you're in the cockpit. You were banging on the fuel gauge. You relate this somehow to the board games that I should be buying for my daughter in my completely boring standard life. [laughs] Thank you for distilling your experience down to help other people there.

Marisa: Oh, my god, I think we all have these fun stories. We need to think about it in new ways. It was fun in the book to be able to share of some them with readers.

Zibby: Before I go into some of the tips and advice and everything, what do you think it was about your upbringing that got you to this place? What did your parents do right? What led you to accomplish all of this stuff, do you think? Do you think it started with your upbringing, or not?

Marisa: One hundred percent. I think this is part of the lesson that I realized recently, to be honest. I think it came to finally the aha moment when I was here running a school. I run an all-girls school now. It's actually the school that I grew up at. I went here. Part of it was coming back and then seeing through a new lens as to what young girls can be given and what we need to do from an early age to really help them realize their badass self. I do think it happens young. I think it was that moment where my dad helped me brush my knees off or whatever it was when I fell on the playing field and said, no, go back out. Do it again. Compete. Be healthy. Enjoy competing. The idea that I wanted to fly for the navy when I was a kid, I think it belies our age, it was Top Gun. For those who grew up watching Top Gun, that moment, I wanted to be Maverick. That was my thing. It was an era when the rules still hadn’t been changed and women couldn't even fly in combat. That wasn't mentioned. It was just, okay, go for it. Why not? It turned out I was too short for the cockpit, so I had to be Goose, not Maverick. There is that. We figure out a way. This is what I've been encouraged to do. It is part of who I am. I see it now in little ways for young girls, particularly elementary-school girls, those moments where we say, no, you can do this. We want them to puff up their chest and say, I got this. I say there's one picture that was on the wall of our school where a girl drew a picture of herself and said, no one will say no. You think, oh, my goodness, her poor parents when she's a teenager particularly. I wish I was thinking no one's going to say no when I was an adult all the time. I've had my moments where I didn't go for that job. I didn't go for that moment. I could just go on and on about how I think we need to start this early for our kids.

Zibby: It's so important. It's so smart to give the parents the tools now to make sure it all happens. Just one last question on your bio, how did you end up back at your school after the way your career was going? What made you come back to Baldwin?

Marisa: I know, that's the crazy one. I had the good fortune of when I was in the White House, I got a phone call one day, literally. I was working the West Wing. They rang up. I thought they were going to ask for advice or for money. There's that. But no, it was the head had just retired. They wanted to see if I was interested in leading the community that had given me so much. I threw my hat in the ring, again, because I'd been taught to be a healthy competitor. Had no actual thought that they would take me. Look, crazy thing is I'm now leading the school through a pandemic, so there's that. I think it's just a lesson to go for it. It's a lesson that we all need to remind ourselves and remind our friends. I say this to my girlfriends all the time. Just go for it. It doesn't matter how crazy it is. The things out of left field are sometimes those opportunities that take you in directions you would never imagine and are the most fun and impactful. It's totally that lesson of life for me.

Zibby: This is the corollary. This is the just say yes. [laughs]

Marisa: Yes, exactly. Just say yes.

Zibby: One of the principles that I really responded to in your book is talking about how to make sure our daughters have a voice. How do they build that voice and hone that voice? I feel like I could've used this when I was growing up. I was so shy. This was really hard for me. The situations when you're in the White House and Obama's sitting there and you regret not speaking up, I was in far less tense situations and felt like I couldn't talk in work meetings and all the rest. You had so much great advice for girls. How can we help them? Tell us a few basics of how to start. Then I love so many of your specific advice, like even ordering takeout. Let's start from the broad and go down to more of the specific.

Marisa: The broad is recognizing that these are skills that I still struggle with sometimes. I have to remind myself to speak up in a meeting because it maybe feels too natural to just wait for the perfect moment. There's never a perfect moment. Any women out there know that a man isn't going to wait for the perfect moment. They're just going to talk. We need to as well. We want our girls to remember that and practice it. It's about finding ways in little, everyday ways to encourage our girl's voice and reinforce that her voice matters in an age-appropriate way. It's not about speaking out inappropriately, but saying, no, we want to hear from you. You're at the dinner table, making sure your daughter's speaking out when your son maybe is dominating the conversation. Even if it's an adult conversation, what does she think? Asking her to be involved. This idea that when you're ordering food -- this is a lesson I took from one of our students. She remembers when she was a kid, that her father used to make her order pizza when they called, a reason not to use the app on your smartphone. Not her brother, but she would have to make the order because she didn't like doing it. It felt totally uncomfortable. Yet then she got older and she said, "It's not my favorite thing. I'm still an introvert, but I do it. I can do it. I know I can do it." These are the safe little ways that we just teach our girls to practice that muscle memory of speaking so when they have their aha moment for their career or just that time when they want to tell their boss, "Excuse me," what they need, they feel empowered to do so.

Zibby: It starts with Chinese food, apparently.

Marisa: Apparently, Chinese food or pizza or whatever, Thai. Take your pick.

Zibby: Take your pick. [laughs] Also, how you suggest inviting debate, that you should always debate every side and open it up for conversation and say, should TikTok be allowed? Let's talk about it.

Marisa: These are funny things. Again, it's not every day. I think sometimes we make it about, it has to be all this, and so parenting becomes overwhelming. Finding a natural moment where you don't cut the debate off, but where you encourage her to keep going. Frankly, it's a helpful way to fill time in the car when you're driving home from the game or something and it feels endless. It's also just a moment to help your daughter, again, realize that you care, that you want her to practice her voice, that it matters to you, the number-one role model in her life. She's going to say, I'm going to do it other places as well.

Zibby: Even when you were like, don't ask how was science today? that you should say, what did you say in science class? How did you handle that? What questions did you ask? These are such great specific tips that are not so hard to implement.

Marisa: Again, it's little tweaks. The little things make a really big difference. Hopefully, it helps make parenting easier. One thing that I came upon as well is this idea of helping your daughter practice her ask, this idea that you want her to ask. If you practice this in negotiating, the next time she asks for something, anything, even if you decided what your answer is going to be -- yes, I'm going to let you have an overnight sleepover; yes, we're going to go to the amusement park; yes, you're going to get the thing that you've been asking for for ages -- say, huh, go back and make a pitch. Give me three reasons why. Come back in thirty minutes. Come back in an hour. Make her practice the art of asking. Then again, regardless, you don't have to change your mind. The answer could still be no if that had been your parenting decision to start. Maybe you say, well, the answer's no this time. Here's what worked and here's what didn't when you pitched.

Give her the little bit of feedback. I really liked when you did this. You used your emotion well. God, that PowerPoint was great. I had one kid who actually -- a girl at my school showed me the pitch deck. She and her friend used to make PowerPoint decks. This is how clearly her parents helped her spend her time to give her something to do, make PowerPoint slideshows when they wanted a sleepover on a weeknight. She showed me pictures of the cupcakes they wanted to make and the movies they wanted to watch and the tent they wanted to build in the living room. I don't know if they got their Thursday-night sleepover, but they just loved the process. Candidly, it made them better at this idea of the ask. They had actually come to my office to ask me, the head of the school, for something that everyone else had said no to. I said no as well, but I reinforced that the asking was good. It's what we want to see from our kids and our girls especially.

Zibby: My daughter did something similar with three friends at her day camp because she was aging out and they wanted them to extend it. The girls all got together. They put together this whole presentation and pitched it to the head of the camp. They extended it for the summer.

Marisa: That's fantastic. What a fabulous lesson to her because in that instance it went well. She got this positive reinforcement. I hope that you remind her of that. When we get off our call today, say, hey, by the way, I was really proud of you for that. That was super cool. Do that more often.

Zibby: Totally. I should bring that back up.

Marisa: Sounds like she's great at it already.

Zibby: I remember as a kid my curfew was so much lower than everybody else's. I went around and I called every parent and asked what the curfew was. I made a whole spreadsheet. I didn't have Excel, of course, back then. It was like, kid's name, mom's name, phone number, curfew. I was like, look at this data. Mine is earlier. It's not safe. I will be having to get home by myself. And so she raised it. [laughs]

Marisa: Wow, look at that, analytics from an early age. That's on your life resume 101.

Zibby: It's true. I've kind of forgot about it until now.

Marisa: This is the art of persuasion. It is such an important skill and something that statistically women aren't as effective at. It's not the reason why there's still a pay gap, but it plays into the nature of how pay gaps continue as well as other things that I think we all continue to see out there. Whatever we can do for the next generation so they don't face these same challenges.

Zibby: You even pointed out how men have such a higher rate of interrupting women and how there was that one example in the boardroom where people got up and spoke. Maybe it was at Google. Was it at Google? You tell the story. [laughs]

Marisa: There's countless examples. It's funny. When I was looking for stories to include in the book, there's some places where you could see a hundred examples of men interrupting women in work, in public. The most crazy example was they’ve actually done a study at the supreme court. The female supreme court justices get interrupted more often than male supreme court justices. You think the pinnacle of our judiciary system, and the women are still getting interrupted more often. They’ve done studies, actually, in schools and in co-ed environments. I have the good fortune of leading a girls' school now. In co-ed environments, boys speak out and interrupt girls more often than the reverse. You take that same young girl and you put her in a single-sex environment, a single-sex play group, and she will speak out and speak up as often as the little boy did when they were in class together. We need to counter that. It's a social norm. We know our girls want to speak out and speak up. We just need to help them practice it.

Zibby: You also talk a lot about fostering the competitive spirit and how sports play a big role for girls especially because at least they get that experience on the field. You give all these examples of leaders like Meg Whitman and others who are all -- she was playing lacrosse and squash at Princeton, which I didn't even know. Tell me about how fostering that love of sports can really help our girls too.

Marisa: Being competitive is something that in particular right now I think a lot of parents shy away from. We think of competitiveness as a bad thing and it's a maladaptive behavior. Unfortunately for our girls, a lot of times they read that as, I can't compete even the things I want to be good at because I don't want to put my friends down. It's going to be embarrassing if I win, not if I lose, but if I win. It's not just on the sports field. It could be the spelling bee or the poetry contest or other places too. Any man or women, father or mother would say, you got to be competitive in the real world. It's the, go for that job. It's the, go for the apartment. It's the, go for whatever it is you want. Takes a little bit of competitive spirit. Every study shows that competitiveness makes you perform better personally. You run faster when you're running against somebody just by the nature of the adrenaline that gets going. We want to find moments to help reinforce this with our girls. Sports are an easy one because they're widely available for girls and for boys.

Yet by middle school, most girls opt out of competitive sports. There's peer pressure and social norms at play. A lot of times, they just give up on it. Whether or not they were going to be the Olympic athlete is just something that goes by the wayside. This is where I'd say, do we let our boys opt out as easily? I remember one mom on the sideline of a sporting event here at school. She says, "We tried four sports for my son until he stuck with swimming. We kept going because we knew it had to be part of his day. For our daughter, we let her opt out. Sure. She wants to do something else. She's more artsy than not." I would challenge that mom to say, well, it's not about whether she's going to play sports in college or go to the Olympics. It's about helping her practice being part of a team, being resilient, and being competitive. Or try the poetry contest at the library, the spelling bee at school, any moment where you have to throw your hat in the ring, be judged against your peers, practice winning and losing, and just realize that being your personal best is a good thing even if it's in a competition.

Zibby: It's so true. Thank you, by the way, in the book you gave all these boardgame examples for little kids. I was reading the book and I had Amazon open in another browser because I read your book online. It was like, Diplomacy, Catan Junior. What can I get to help my kids? Never too late.

Marisa: Right. There's little easy ways that we can just naturally -- it doesn't have to be this grandiose thing that makes parenting so much more difficult. It's just about thinking a little bit differently about what games, what books we have them read, what the daily interaction around the dinner table is like, and just small things we can do to reinforce these key skills for our kids, our girls.

Zibby: I really loved that you said use the things that come naturally to girls as their competitive advantage. Don't try to make girls have, necessarily, the same skills and then be better at them. Go with what they have that's great and really blast those things out.

Marisa: We get challenged when we think about how to prepare our girls. You're try to make them like boys. We're like, no, no, no, I'm trying to help them own their personal best self. It's about being your personal best, being competitive in whatever it is that she wants to do and she's eager to engage in. It's also about the fact that so many of the skills that come naturally is a generalization, but studies show to our girls are really the advantage that will set them apart when they're adults in work and at home, this idea that they naturally empathize more readily. Empathy is something that places higher for now. This is what employers want in their work environments, that we communicate, our girls communicate in really helpful, natural ways that build consensus, that solve problems. These are things that are their advantage. We just want to reinforce them so that they really own their best girl self just as young women as adults.

Zibby: There are obviously so many things. Right before I did this, I was talking to a friend of my husband's who just had a little girl. She's two years old. He was like, "I need some parenting advice podcasts." I was like, "Fantastic, I'll send you this one." He's like, "I live with three women and this little girl. What do girls need?" If there was a summary of the most important things for a new parent, dad or mom, to know what they should do a hundred percent, what would that takeaway piece be?

Marisa: It's about finding little moments to reinforce her voice and helping her speak out because I think that's where it starts. I think it's about finding role models. It doesn't have to be whoever the VP nomination's going to be, that level role model. It's the daily role models. It's her mother role modeling. It's the aunt. It's an athlete you see in social media that you're like, oh, just look. Use those as daily reminders of how we want our girls to own themselves. Always pause and remember to share lessons of our own challenges, failures, foibles, not in the least because studies show that those lessons get reinforced better, they get remembered more often by those listening. These are the times where our girls think, wow, this is what the real world's going to be. What am I going to be like when I'm older? They sop it up. Particularly our young women, they have ears for miles. They hear everything we're saying. Now when we're navigating virtual school for a lot of us, there's more and more of those moments where they're hearing and seeing us navigate really challenging times. It's a perfect opportunity to just be honest with them and say, hey, this is how I'm figure it out. It's not going so well because... Again, age-appreciate ways. It'll look different for an elementary school girl, someone in middle or upper school or high school. Just sharing with them how we're navigating these moments so that we help them do better than we do. That's the key. That's the ticket, I hope.

Zibby: How are you navigating this moment? It's so funny. I'm sitting here talking to you. Usually, on this computer I'm Zooming with all the different headmasters of my kids' three different schools. It's the lower school and the middle school and all these different schools because everybody's back-to-school planning. How can we handle this? How are you getting through this? Do you have to listen to your own internal voice for your school? Are you trying to aggregate consensus? What are the skills you're using? How are you making up your mind, essentially?

Marisa: It's a crazy thing. It's interesting. I was frantically setting up the system for the podcast today. You'll see I'm no longer in my office. We relocated around campus in order to social distance and spread out all our girls, and so I no longer have an office, interestingly. I'm here in the office next to our gymnasium making sure I can talk to you this morning. It's hard. It's hard for all of us. One thing I remind all of our parents, anyone listening, is go easy on your teachers and your kids' school leaders because we're all just trying to do our best and make this is safe as possible for our students, our families, and our teachers even as we realize that in-person learning is ideal. It's where those connections get made between the girls and their friends, the girls and their teachers, and where so much of the learning happens, even as we were fortunate to really have great success with our online virtual program in the spring. I'm sure like your kids, we all went virtual from mid-March. That was that. Like a lot of our peers, you're really leaning into the data trying to figure out, what are public health officials saying? What metrics can we use? What tools? Can we use masks, social distancing, hand washing to help protect our kids?

Then how do we deliver not just the core academic program, but those other things, those other moments that our kids really need, particularly our girls, to socially/emotionally thrive? We need them to get through this next year. It's not going to be forever. We need to remember that. We'll be able to help them catch up. We have the good fortunate here of being able to support a wide diversity of students and families with tools to help them get through the year academically. We also need to find moments that they can connect with each other, that they build those relationship skills that are so important, particularly in adolescence, so that they understand how to be compassionate and empathize and connect with others. For parents to remember that so that even as we're building the school program of what the day looks like, remote or in person, we're also finding these touchpoints to reinforce the social/emotional ways of being in relationship, skills that our girls in particular really need at this age to be able to navigate not just the year ahead, but the rest of their lives.

Zibby: It's so true, oh, my gosh. I feel like my daughter is mostly concerned about lunch. Lunch was her one time to let her hair down and hang out with her friends. Now that is being predetermined who she's going to have lunch with. Anyway, whatever. I have so much respect for school leaders through this whole process because this cannot be easy, especially dealing with the personality types of all the parents too who have such strong opinions. Hats off to you.

Marisa: Of course, because it's the most important thing we have. It's our kids. Candidly, our teachers feel the same way. It's the students. This is what we do. For that moment, if she's not going to be able to sit next to her friend in class because we're doing assigned seating maybe in order to make sure that we can navigate the whole reality, and yet, here's a perfect lesson in teaching her adaptability. Lean into the change. It's not forever. It's just a moment. She'll have to navigate it. Then also to build in rewards, build in other moments. She can't have lunch with her friends, maybe. Perhaps this is the time to say, on Saturday afternoons we're going to have socially distanced picnics with three of her friends at the park outside or over Skype or FaceTime or whatever the natural technological way is that isn't about school, but is about connecting and is not social media. I think sometimes, a lot of times, our kids rely on social media. That's not the natural way to connect and build relationships. There is something to be said for real-time interactions like we're having right now. It's going to be a strange reality for us all. The more and more we get kids used to that and helping them realize it's just not forever but it's for now and it's what we need to do to keep each other safe and healthy and the community side of that -- one thing we're doing at our school is we're having all our girls pick at least one person or maybe a few that they're doing this for. They're actually going to write down and sign a community compact that says, I am doing this, I'm taking precautions, I'm wearing masks for...their favorite teacher, their grandparent, their mother, their friend who is immunocompromised or otherwise has health concerns. At the end of the day, that's what we need to do to get through this all.

Zibby: That's good advice. That's really nice. I love that, and even what you were saying about sports. We're not even having sports. Anyway, not to keep talking about mine.

Marisa: We're not there yet, but it's a conversation. It's something that all the school heads are talking about on a regular basis, about what it looks like. We've delayed our sports season at the moment. We're figuring out, what does it look like to have safe sports? We're seeing what's happening in Major League Baseball and the NCAA. You think, what does that look like for volleyball for our girls? It's hard. At the end of the day, safety is paramount. They can train. They can go for runs and get outside. It's going to be a tough year in that way. We've actually built in recess for the day for middle school. It's an age where they left recess behind. Now suddenly they need to let the energy out and go socially distance, it's crazy to say, but be outside and run around.

Zibby: Just tell me for two seconds about writing this book. How long did it take to write? When did you decide you were going to write this book? Did you have the whole outline? How did you approach it? When did you do it? All of that good stuff.

Marisa: Zibby, that's going to be, maybe, more crazy. I don't know. This may reveal my crazy. I'm just going to warn you. Two years ago about, a little over two years ago, the idea all came together. I teach a leadership class for the seniors at the school. In all the conversations, I started telling stories, some of the stories that are in the book, about my time in Afghanistan, my time interviewing Al Qaeda in Yemen, my time flying for the military. It's oftentimes lessons of failure that I had in those moments that I was sharing with the girls as they were thinking about, what is life going to be like in the real world? and what skills they need. Then over dinner with a friend, a parent at the school, this idea came together. I had the good fortunate of having a publisher interested right away. I wrote the book. Candidly, there's the deadline that forced me -- I'm a deadline-driven person. For those listening, deadlines help. I had my first child not quite a year ago.

Zibby: Congratulations.

Marisa: There was an impetus of, let's get it done before the other baby, the book baby finished before the baby-baby arrives. I had the good fortunate of having a very supportive partner. Another lesson for all our girls is having a partner who builds in time and allows you to do that. He was the one who would take the baby and say, "Go write your book at the coffee shop for the morning so we can get it done." I had the good fortunate of a supportive community. It was something that I was inspired to do.

Zibby: Wow. I don't think that's too crazy.

Marisa: Okay, good. Then I won't share that there was some writing going on in labor delivery.

Zibby: No! Okay, that might waver into crazy territory.

Marisa: I know, but it was extended. I brought my laptop. I just wanted to get it done. That was the moment of pure crazy. Again, it was the deadline. It was the fear of what happens when the baby arrives. It's also a good lesson of it doesn't have to be perfect to be good enough. I think moms everywhere need to remember that sometimes, particularly now. A B+ will do often. Then I had good time to edit and things like that. Sometimes we just need to let it go and move on.

Zibby: That's good advice. Do you have any other parting advice, having written this book, to aspiring authors and also to parents with young girls? You basically already did that, so let's just say to aspiring authors.

Marisa: This is one that other people have taught me and I'm still working on. It's the sharing of your stories. Despite me just oversharing about labor and delivery, I'm a very personal person who keeps my stories close to my vest. Lessons of failure, it's taken a long time for me to share the things that I write about in the book of my transition out of the navy and how that, for me, was something that felt like a failure that I had to grow to accept over time. These other personal stories both are what audiences want to hear, it's what my students want to hear. I think it's what makes interactions like this, Zibby, like your stories about your own girls and how we're sharing that, it's what makes it most fun. For any writer out there, for me, that was what helped me turn the corner, was when I really got comfortable sharing my personal story and feeding that into the narrative.

[phone ringing]

Zibby: Awesome. Time is up. We got the phone ringing. You're onto your next. [laughs]

Marisa: I know, exactly. Interrupted by reality, which is the way it is these days.

Zibby: Good luck. I don't envy you having to lead your school through this in this time. They are so lucky to have you. If you ever want to come to New York... No, I'm kidding. I love my headmasters.

Marisa: Philly's waiting for you, Zibby.

Zibby: Okay, that's true.

Marisa: It's a crazy time. I look forward to hearing how your kids do. We all got to get through this together. There's that.

Zibby: Yes, all get through it together. Thank you for all the tips that I'm going to implement right away. Thank you.

Marisa: If you need more, there's actually on my website, whatgirlsneed.com, there's resources, reading lists for parents with girls in mind, so other things that we help each other with.

Zibby: Perfect, more for me to do. [laughs] No, I'm kidding.

Marisa: It's the distraction.

Zibby: Totally, I need it. Thank you.

Marisa: Great to talk, Zibby. Thank you so much.

Zibby: Great to talk to you. Buh-bye.