Rachel Ricketts, DO BETTER

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

Rachel Ricketts: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. By the way, I know listeners can't see this, but you have the coolest glasses pretty much ever that I've ever seen.

Rachel: Thank you. [laughs]

Zibby: Listeners, head over to YouTube so you can check out Rachel's awesome glasses after this. Your book, Do Better, can you please tell listeners what it's about? Then we're going to discuss some of the ins and outs.

Rachel: It's about spiritual activism and ways in which we can all work towards dismantling white supremacy from the inside out.

Zibby: There we go. Rachel, in your introduction you basically say, white women, this book is for you. I want to change your mind. I don't want you to think of me as angry, but I feel so passionately about this that I am writing a whole book about it. Here you go. Did I summarize, mostly?

Rachel: A little bit.

Zibby: A little bit. [laughs]

Rachel: The discernment is really important. It's written to white women but not for them. It's for black, indigenous, and people of color, specifically, black indigenous women and femmes, but addressed to white women because white women, in my personal and professional experience, have caused the most harm and have the most work to do. I have no problem with people finding me angry. I am angry, justifiably so. We need to tap into our anger and be able to withstand the full spectrum of our human emotions. That resonance, that acknowledgment is really, really crucial for black, indigenous, and people of color who are constantly marginalized others and ostracized. Our anger is used against us. That's really important for white folks, specifically for white women, very specifically for white cis women, who need to learn how to tap into their anger so they stop taking it out on black, indigenous, and people of color.

Zibby: In your own experience, and I know you included a lot in the book, why do you feel that white women in particular are sort of the worst perpetrators of this?

Rachel: Many reasons. The most succinct and potent one is they have a lack of an ability to really acknowledge and be with their identity as oppressed oppressors. I believe all of us are oppressed oppressors in one way, shape, or form, but some are on a spectrum. White women are obviously very much oppressed by patriarchy. If they occupy other marginalized identities, then heteropatriarchy, ablism, etc. They also oppress black, indigenous, and people of color by virtue of being white and perpetuating white supremacy. That inability to acknowledge and be with that identity results in a lot of harm. There's also a really deep need to be good and right or at least perceived as good and right. All of that is very much tied up in patriarchy which, to me, is all under the guise of white supremacy. It's all tied up in oppression. This need to be good and right, which, again, I believe most of us have, but it shows up in a very specific way for white women, specifically cis white women, but this deep need to be good and right automatically prevents you from being able to authentically engage in racial justice because you can't be good and right and be in this work. You're going to get it wrong. You're probably going to feel bad because you're going to have to acknowledge the harm that you've caused to yourself and to others.

Zibby: We are looking at each other. I am obviously a white woman. You are obviously not a white woman. We are having this dialogue together. You have a whole book. For me and other white women who happen to be listening who haven't read your whole book yet, and hopefully they will, what's something that you want all of us to know instantly aside from what you were just describing? If there's something that somebody's only listening to two minutes of this podcast but they need to know and you need to tell them, what would it be?

Rachel: That racial justice is your work. It's not something that's happening out there. You and I are talking the day after white terrorists stormed the Capitol of the United States of America while police watched idly by and/or opened gates or took selfies with them. There's a lot of that othering that continues, like, oh, those people. It's not a those and them. All white people, every single white person on the planet, perpetuates and benefits from white supremacy. That will never change unless you're willing to acknowledge that, address that, and do the inner work that's going to be required for that to actually change, period.

Zibby: Everybody is the same? How can there be any massive generalization about an entire group of people? What if I have done the work? Maybe you wouldn't know just by looking at me.

Rachel: The work never ends. Even that statement I think is indicative of the fact that there's more work to be done. There's a constant need to be able to acknowledge the power and privilege that you have by virtue of the position that you hold racially, gender identity-wise, ability-wise, or otherwise. That really requires being able to understand your position and the ways in which you cause other people harm.

Zibby: In your book and in your bio and everywhere else, you share a lot of personal experiences that have led you here to this book, to some of your beliefs, but also just who you are in the world and what's shaped you in the past. One of the shaping moments in your life was the loss of your mother. I was hoping you could talk a little about that and how her decade-long battle with MS and how you coped with the loss has affected your day-to-day even now. I'm so sorry, by the way, for your loss.

Rachel: Thank you. It's very much informed the work that I do, not only her loss, but all of the experiences that we had leading up to her loss. There was a large spectrum of losses that occurred along the way. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I am an only child. She was a single mother. We are both black women. On top of all of the experiences that we endured that would be hard for anyone across the board dealing with challenges with the healthcare system, with social systems -- we're based in Canada, so also acknowledging the privilege that we hold as a result of having access to healthcare and social welfare systems that we wouldn't have had if we were in the United States and still identifying and acknowledging the additional challenges that we faced, straight-up discrimination, oppression, and harm that we endured as a result of having to do that as black women.

In supporting her and just being someone who lives as a queer, multiracial, black woman-identified person, that deep need for equity, for justice has always been very top of mind for me, which is why I went to law school and then very quickly realized that law has nothing to do with justice, which was an upsetting realization. Then when my mother actually passed, when I supported her in ending her own life -- she and I both felt she had no options left to live in a way that would be fulsomely free from pain. When she was physically gone, I was left with not only the massive grief and loss of her physical absence, but all of the losses that we had endured along the way as a result of the oppression and discrimination that we faced. It was after she died that I really recentered and regrouped and was left with such deep grief. I just think we're very ill-equipped as a culture to deal with grief across the board. I think we really began to realize that more in 2020, the many ways that grief manifests and the ways in which we're ill-equipped as a society and as individuals to cope with that. I dove deep into grief work. Then very, very promptly, that led me back to racial justice work because the most grief I've ever endured in my life is as a result of being a black woman.

Zibby: With the small losses and the affronts that occurred along the way with your mother's illness, would you mind sharing one or two things that keep you up at night or that you have the most feeling about still?

Rachel: The one piece that really hurts the most -- it's hard to pick one. There are so many. We didn't even have support when we needed it in terms of allowing her to transition with dignity. That was a fight. I always say that was the most important and relevant use of my law degree to date, was literally having to fight the medical system to allow her to die with dignity, to allow her to have free rein over her own body. That fight took up all of my time and energy instead of being able to just be with my mother in hospice and support her emotionally, spiritually, physically as she transitioned from this realm to the next. I was there every day, day in, day out, trying my best to do that, but instead, the priority was doing my best to support her in having her needs met and her wishes met and ensuring that she was free from pain in executing that desire. We had to bring in a medical ethicist and the whole thing. When we finally "won" her right to be fully supported and kept pain-free -- she had to starve herself to death. That was the only legal option for her. When we finally won that battle to allow her to be fully supported by the medical system in her decision to do that, it wasn't a win. Then I was left with, right, now I've won this battle where my mom gets to die. The fact that she even got to that place is a result of the oppressions and discrimination that we faced. She may never have needed to get to that place if we didn't live in such an ableist, capitalist, white supremacist society at all. To really be with that is horrifying, truly, and part of why I do the work that I do because I don't want anyone else to have to endure what I did and what we did.

Zibby: I know that part of your mission, you do so much to be giving back to other people now. You have all sorts of certificates and degrees and everything. Part of that is in helping people with grief, not only in all the seminars that you lead on coming to terms with white supremacy and doing the work that is required, but even just the grief work. I shouldn't say even just. Grief work is so important. Like everyone else, I've had my own share of grief. Who hasn’t these days? When you say that people are ill-equipped, which I completely agree with, tell me a little more about that and how you think we can, as a culture or society or just as individuals, become better equipped to deal with something that will affect everybody at some point or another?

Rachel: This is the crux of my book because I believe that the work has to happen on the internal, cellular, individual level before we can actually make societal collective shifts that will reflect the changes that need to occur. This isn't work that happens from the neck up. We live in a society where that's a lot of the work that we're doing. That's the work that seems to be prioritized. Grief, to me, isn't really an emotion. It's an experience. Until we have a more fulsome understanding of our own emotional landscape, which requires us to do inner work, then we don't have the tolerance or even, really, ability to recognize, oh, this is grief. I would say most people on the planet in this moment are grieving. There's so much happening, whether in the United States or not. A global health pandemic, everything is different: the amount of uncertainty; if you have children, the amount of uncertainty for your children and that you're probably witnessing in your children. There is a lot that we are handling, or not, that we're trying to handle. All of that is grief. When we live in systems of oppression, which we all live in, then that word, even, often is seen to be hyperbole. Oh, it's not grief. That's really dramatic.

When we can't even really be with what it is we're experiencing, how can we ever start tending to the healing that needs to happen? We can't even have an understanding like, I'm angry and that's okay that I'm angry. I don't need to be shamed or gaslit for my anger. I'm grieving. No one needs to die for me to be in grief. There didn't need to be a global pandemic for you to be in grief. In fact, things don't even have to be negative for you to be grieving. When you get married, when you become a parent, when you start a business or get a promotion, these are major changes that occur in your life. When major changes occur, grief can also come along for the ride because it's a huge shift. We don't allow space for that reality, to acknowledge that. The work is really an inner one. It's an internal landscape. It's shadow work. It's ego work. It's the hardest work you'll ever do because this is really challenging to really sit with the ways in which we have caused ourselves harm, the ways in which we've caused other people harm. Resting and being with ourselves is incredibly challenging in a culture that is constantly telling us that we need to produce, that we need to do, do, do, and that our worth is completely enshrined in our output, not in just being who we are.

Zibby: It's so true. In terms of doing better, what do you think you're doing better today than you were doing, say, last year at this time?

Rachel: I'm really trying to learn to rest, especially as a black woman who is constantly expected to show up for everyone, to do the work for everybody personally and professionally. Resting is a real act of resistance and real revolutionary act and one that's honestly quite painful because it brings up so much trauma. It brings up so much about the ways in which I've been conditioned and have conditioned myself to do and to prioritize everyone else and everything else in front of and instead of myself, which isn't sustainable. That has been a real challenge. I'm doing my best to do better at that. I'm constantly always doing my best to do better at owning and acknowledging my privilege and the ways that I cause other people harm as a result of the privileges that I possess, for example, being light skinned, living in Canada in this moment, being highly educated, English speaking, cis in a hetero-passing relationship. All of these privileges cause people harm, especially when I'm not acknowledging them and addressing them. That's the work. The book's called Do Better. I'm absolutely included in the need to do better all the time.

Zibby: Do you feel in a way consumed by this mission of yours? Not to say it's only your mission, but do you feel like it is what you eat, drink, live, breathe? Is this something that you wake up in the morning thinking about and go to bed at night thinking about and work on all day? Everybody has their things that they feel incredibly passionate about. Is this something that colors every moment of your day and this is the lens through which you see, how can I improve this? How can I help these people? Do you know what I mean?

Rachel: Yeah, it's more a mission. It's my life's purpose. It's why I'm here. It's not work. It is work because this is hard shit to do, especially when you're doing it from the inside out, but it's also my lived experience. I am a queer, multiracial, black woman. I am up against systems of discrimination day in and day out. I am constantly met with harm. For me, it's imperative that I'm doing the best that I can do to create more liberation for everyone and right now, specifically for black indigenous women and femmes.

Zibby: What's the last thing that has happened either as a result of your involvement and passion, or not, that has made you feel just super happy and grateful for someone?

Rachel: I would say I wouldn't have survived 2020 without the support of other black women. I mean that in every sense of the word. It was a really challenging year and continues to be a really challenging time. I'm so grateful for the black women and femmes that I have my life who really show up and nurture and support me so that I can continue to hold space and support this work.

Zibby: Do you have any close relationships with any white women?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I talk about it at length in the book. It's very important that we are able to have relationships with everybody else. That's the purpose of this. When we are doing the work from the inside out, then we understand the ways in which we have caused harm and the ways in which we can help mitigate that harm and have deeper connections with ourselves and with others, especially people that have been made most marginalized and people that we have oppressed. For me, I have a lot of close white women. Those are all women who are constantly doing their work, checking themselves in their power and privilege, and able to acknowledge the ways in which they have caused harm, continue to cause harm, make repair, and mitigate that harm moving forward and spend their power and privilege, as much as they possibly can, to help create collective liberation for everyone.

Zibby: Tell me a little about the writing of this book. How long did this book take? Where and when were you when you wrote it? Did you have to outline it at first? Just tell me a little more about the process of writing.

Rachel: I always say this book has been written from when I was in my mother's womb, so a lifetime. The actual process of sitting down to write, pen to paper, was about six months, which was a lot in the midst of a pandemic as well. It was really challenging. It was really challenging to write because I pulled out the most traumatic experiences of my life to put onto the paper as a means to illuminate the ways in which we cause each other harm and how we can do better. Obviously, not an easy thing to do for me personally. Also, a lot of familial trauma and stories came to surface in the midst of me writing this. Really, really challenging. Then at the same time, I felt so connected to my ancestors. I'm not saying anything new. No black activist or any anti-oppressive activist really is saying anything new. A lot of this has been said time and time again. Specifically, black folks, we've been saying the same thing for hundreds and hundreds of years. My ancestors had a lot to say. I'm honored that I was a vessel that got to be the conduit for this to come out. I wrote chunks of this actually all over the world. Chunks of it were written in Sweden where I was living for a chunk of time. Parts of it were written in France and Morocco and Indonesia back when we could travel. The bulk of it was actually written in Toronto, Canada, which is not where I'm from, but it is actually where my mother's side of my family moved to from Jamaica in the fifties. I really reconnected with a lot of that energy. I really felt that side, my matrilineal side of my family, as I wrote. It was my first time ever living in Toronto. Being there to write this book wasn't a coincidence. I think it was important to tap into that energy as I wrote.

Zibby: Have you ever thought about a career in politics?

Rachel: When I was in law school, I was like, I'm going to be a politician. This shit needs to change. That's how I'm going to do it. Then I promptly was like, that whole system is not one that I could endure at all. I would rather be on the outside trying to create a more equitable system overarchingly than engage in that one.

Zibby: It's such a shame because I feel like all the brightest people don't want to go into government. The people who should be doing what they can to change the world from the inside are so up against an intractable system that it seems pointless to even try, which is the saddest part of the whole thing.

Rachel: It doesn't feel pointless to try to me. I just think there's many different ways to try. I think we're slowly beginning to see the ways in which we can shift the system and very much seeing the ways in which that system absolutely must change. My deep hope is that the system looks completely different soon.

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

Rachel: To the best of your ability, be clear on who you are and what your voice is before you ever try to fall down the path of actually publishing because you're going to be met with a lot of resistance in a lot of ways, especially if you occupy a marginalized identity. If I had tried to write this book ten years ago, I don't know what kind of book it would've been. I am very different. Also, I wasn't as embodied in who I am and what I need to say and how it needs to be said. I've had to fight a lot along the way. I think that's a really common experience for authors, so you need to be very, very sure of who you are and what you need to say.

Zibby: If you could have a sneak peek -- I don't know why I'm asking you all these what-if questions. Thank you for indulging my little interview experience here. If you were going to pick up a book in the library and it turns out it was the book that you wrote ten years from now, what would be in that book? What would be happening?

Rachel: Um...

Zibby: I've stumped you. [laughs]

Rachel: You've stumped me because even now, I'm like, I wonder what my next books are going to be like. Things change so quickly. It was really hard to write this book because I was like, this book could be outdated by the time it -- I am shifting and changing. The collective is shifting and changing very, very quickly, not quick enough unfortunately. Again, when we are dialed into actually doing this work from the inside out, the transformations are huge and they are quick. I'm really curious about what I'll be writing about and talking about and sharing about ten years from now. I think it will look very different because the world will also look so completely different. It's not something I can fathom. I say that in a really positive way because my hope, and I talk about this in this book, my hope is that we all can envision a world that looks completely different from the world that currently exists. That's really, really hard to do. That really does require us doing our own internal work and really trying to step outside of the systems as they currently exist as best as we can because we're all inside of them, myself included. What does it look like to really be rested, be well, be nourished, be taken off, be taking care of each other, be in equitable communion with other people, especially people who have less power and privilege than us? When we can start to really do that on a larger collective space, then I think what we can imagine and envision for the world is boundless and so phenomenal, but I can't begin to fathom what that actually looks like right now.

Zibby: I just want to say one thing to your fear that this book could be outdated at a certain point. Some of the things you share are so timeless that it could never be outdated. The personal emotion and feelings of loss and just the raw feelings are something that connects people and so universal and so timeless, this sense of grief and loss and all of it. This is not a book that will be soon not a timely matter. The stuff you shared is timeless. That's all I'm trying to say.

Rachel: Thank you. That was really important for me, not on the timeless piece, but on -- I didn't want to write a how-to. Some people laugh when I say that now because they're like, Rachel, this could very well be perceived as a how-to. I wanted to share my perspective and experience, one, to white folks because I think it's an honor and a privilege to be able to really read that and have a deeper understanding of the impact of oppression and white supremacy, and two, for black, indigenous, and people of color, specifically black indigenous women and femmes, queer and trans black and indigenous women and femmes, to see themselves and have an understanding of, oh, I'm not alone. There's nothing wrong with me. I'm not broken. Those are the kinds of thoughts we're conditioned to have, and certainly the way in which I was conditioned to think. That lack of connection, that lack of belonging, that constantly being othered and ostracized and made to feel like something was inherently wrong with me, that is why I wrote this book because I don't want anyone else to have to feel that way, truly anyone else, but obviously especially people who have been made most marginalized.

Zibby: I'm sorry that that was your experience. I'm sorry for everything you went through with your mother. I'm sorry for the ways in which you have felt that the world has failed you. My heart kind of breaks for you on that behalf. I'm sorry that that's happened.

Rachel: Thank you. I'm not alone.

Zibby: I'm not trying to say you are alone.

Rachel: No, I know.

Zibby: I know you're not. The world has not been fair to many, many people in many different ways. I was just trying to express that I'm sorry that's happened to you, from me to you. That's all.

Rachel: Thank you.

Zibby: Thank you for coming on this podcast. Sorry for my bizarre line of questioning today.

Rachel: No, not at all.

Zibby: Thanks for encouraging me to do better.

Rachel: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby. It was a pleasure.

Zibby: You too. Buh-bye.

Rachel: Bye.

Jennifer Rosner, THE YELLOW BIRD SINGS

Judy Loebl: The focus of today's event is The Yellow Bird Sings. We have with us the author of the book, Jennifer Rosner, as well as Zibby Owens who will moderate the discussion. The Yellow Bird Sings is Jennifer Rosner's debut novel translated and published around the world. It's the story of a mother, a child, and an impossible choice. Set in Nazi-occupied Poland, Róza and her five-year-old daughter Shira, a musical prodigy, flee their town seeking shelter. The day comes when their haven is no longer safe and Róza must decide whether to keep Shira by her side or give her the chance to survive apart. Previous to The Yellow Bird Sings, Jennifer Rosner published a memoir, If a Tree Falls, about raising her deaf daughters in a hearing/speaking world and discovering genetic deafness in her family dating back to the 1800s. Her short writings have appeared in New York Times, The Massachusetts Review, The Forward, and elsewhere. Her children's book, The Mitten String, was named a Sydney Taylor Book Award Notable. In addition to writing, Jennifer teaches philosophy. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her family. Zibby Owens is a CEO, author, literary influencer, podcast host, media personality, and mother of four. She is the creator and host of the award-winning podcast "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Zibby, named NYC's most powerful book influencer by Vulture, conducts warm, inquisitive conversations with authors as wide ranging as Alicia Keys and Lena Dunham to Delia Owens and Jennifer Weiner. Please join me in welcoming Jennifer Rosner and Zibby Owens. Hi, there.

Jennifer Rosner: Hi. I'm so happy to be here.

Judy: Thank you for joining us.

Zibby Owens: Great. Hi, Jennifer. I'm excited to do this with you.

Jennifer: Me too. I just want to say how happy I am to be here and also to have Zibby as the interviewer of this conversation. You are such a great supporter of authors and readers and humans generally. I just really appreciate everything you do in the book world and well beyond that.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice. Thank you. I'm really excited to talk to you about this book, which was so great and has such staying power, I think one of the best debuts of the year, particularly with Jewish themes and all of that. Can I ask you some questions about it? We heard a little synopsis. Basically, what inspired you to write this book? What did you hope to achieve by writing it?

Jennifer: The journey to getting to this novel is a kind of an interesting one. As Judy mentioned earlier, I am a philosopher. I was a professor. I had two daughters. They were both born deaf. This turned my world upside down. I had been doing this dry academic writing. I didn't really love it very much. Then when the deafness in our family emerged, I just needed to start expressing our decisions, my feelings, what we were going through, a lot of fears. I found that kind of writing to be so nourishing. I had never done anything like that. I wasn't one of those people who had wanted to be a writer since she was a little girl. This personal process and self-expression was so meaningful and nourishing. These little snippets of this eventually became a memoir.

I was giving a book talk actually through the Jewish Book Council. I was describing our journey with our daughters and how we were encouraging their every vocalization. We made a decision to give them hearing technology and to take a listening and spoken language pathway. I was saying how much we were encouraging our children to talk. A woman in the audience described to me her childhood experience of having to be completely silent. She was in hiding in a shoemaker's attic with her mother during World War II. I couldn't stop thinking about that woman as a child having to be silenced, as a mother, having to keep her child silenced, what that must have been like. I ended up finding her and interviewing her and then interviewing many other hidden children. That was kind of the seed of the story. It got planted by this person's comments one day at a book event that had nothing to do with hidden children or the Holocaust or anything, but it resonated so much with me because we were so much in the world of silence and sound. Then learning of this woman who needed to be silenced, it just hooked onto me. I couldn't let it go.

Zibby: Wow. I think often about having to keep kids silenced during the Holocaust and characters like Shira and Anne Frank and others when I think about how hard it's been even just to deal with my kids during the pandemic. We have every electronic at our fingertips. Even with all of that, how hard it is just to keep them basically inside and not socializing. Then I think, gosh, with the fear lurking, similar fear today, but obviously on a much different scale, how did they do that? You even had Krystyna, the farmer's wife, come in and say, "I just can't imagine how I would keep my son this quiet either. Let me take her for a walk around the chickens," or whatever. What did you find from all your research? How did people do it? Did they just do it because that was it? Life or death, and so they did it?

Jennifer: For one thing, I think children grew up very, very quickly. They were responsible and careful and conscientious very, very early on when necessity required it. One of the things that was really interesting about my interviews is there were all these different scenarios of people who had been in hiding. There were those who were in cramped spaces and having to be silent. There was a person who was hiding in plain sight on a neighbor's farm. There was someone who was carried over a ghetto wall in a suitcase, all these situations. There was a man who was in a school attic with his mom and aunt and uncle. There were children at school and playing in the yard. He was inside this attic looking out through these slats and having to be quiet. What was unbelievable about his story was his mother found an atlas and she would quiz him and say, "If you had to get from Odessa to Warsaw, what path would you take? What route?" She taught him how to read while in this attic.

This man describes his time in hiding during the Holocaust as being cocooned in love, which is such a testament to that mom. It is so incredible what people did, and their ingenuity and their creativity. That was part of what inspired me to have the mother character, Róza, be telling stories. They're working on reading and music and other things because this is how they got through that time. My editor initially said, "I can't even keep my kids still dealing with the one snow day. How can they function in that barn for what's essentially almost a year and a half or something?" That's what she was encouraging me to set out to do, is to say, how can you hide? What happens? How do you use the bathroom? How do you brush your teeth? How do you function like this over this amount of time and get through? In listening to the stories of the hidden children, there was just so much resilience and intelligence that came into play. It's very, very inspiring and humbling.

Zibby: It also almost reminds me of that book Room. Although, they didn't have to be as quiet most of the time, but just what parents can do when it's just you and a child and limited materials. You just have to make do with your imaginations. It's quite remarkable. I also felt like, how were you able -- I felt fully like I was in this situation after I read this book, that I knew what it was like because you described it so well. Did you get all that from the people you interviewed? Did you ever try to bury yourself in hay? It felt very much like you had experienced it yourself.

Jennifer: There's two things. I didn't bury myself under hay. Although, we do have rabbits. We have a lot of hay around. I could've done that. I do know what hay really feels like and smells like and how it pokes at you. Every writer brings strengths, weaknesses to their work and has to compensate for things that are harder for them and has an easier time with certain things. I think that, honestly, being a mom of deaf children enabled me to really slow down when it comes to sensory experience which enables my ability as a writer to be descriptive of sensory occurrences. I think that is something. I spent a real lot of time, what would it sound like? What would it smell like? How did it feel? Really slow. That's what I think enabled the sense of really being there, because of the way I was able to harness -- we had done so much work with our children about not just hearing, but seeing and getting every sensory perception in order to gain as much information about the world as possible. I think that training actually has really helped me as a writer.

I also did a lot of travel for this novel. I had written a draft of it. I interviewed the hidden children, many, many. Then I set all their stories aside because I wasn't going to write any of their particular stories. I thought maybe they would write them or maybe their children or grandchildren will write those stories. I set them aside. I wrote a story out of my imagination. Then I felt I really should do some kind of crosscheck here because I'm here in Western Massachusetts imagining the convent and the barn and all these other things. I just want to make sure I'm okay. I found a guide who was just this amazing man. He read my manuscript in advance. Then he planned our trip. Actually, my eldest daughter came with me. We went to several places. We went to this area of farmland where you got to see how it would really be to try to hide someone in your barn. Initially, you think of a farm and you think they have a lot of land. It might be fine, pretty safe.

For community reasons, the houses were very close together. The barns were right there too. Then the land you had was in these narrow swaths going back, so you didn't actually have a lot of space from your neighbor. Your neighbor's kind of right on there. It was very hard to keep anything private. In fact, even when we were there looking around, people were wondering who we were and asking questions. You could see that people were very curious, and hiding someone in your barn would be really hard. He took us to several convents, but one where Jewish children had been hidden. This was really interesting too because I had sort of concocted a bit of a grand convent initially, stone. Then he said, "We're a pretty poor country. It's brick here." There were all these sensory details there, the smell of soup as you walk in and the way your feet move on the floor and what the partitions were like where people were hidden and all this kind of sensory information that was so incredible to have as a novelist. He also took us, much to my daughter's chagrin, to this area of primeval forest. Since my character was going to be hiding in the forest in winter, I insisted that we go in winter. We're tromping around. It's freezing cold. My daughter keeps saying, "Why didn't you set your book in Greece? What are you doing?" [laughs]

To see the denseness of the forest, to see how someone could possibly dig a burrow in that situation and, again, all the ingenuity that came to -- those people survived in the woods, and in family camps and all these things that happened. There was travel. I also got to go to Tel Aviv. I met a violin maker who's this amazing man who reclaims violins that were salvaged from Holocaust times. He rebuilds them. They're played around the world in orchestras. Just so many things that really enriched my novel. In addition, I consulted with so many people. There was a forest tracker because I had to figure out how my character could move through the woods, and a mushroom forager and a nun and all these different people, but most importantly, a master-class violinist because of Shira being a violin prodigy. I needed to understand how that was going to work out, what she would play. When would a piece be played? There was a lot that went into this journey of understanding what it must be like to be hidden in this barn and then move to a convent or into the woods. Each step took a lot of research.

Zibby: Tell me about the decision to have the male owner of the barn, Henryk, come and visit her each night right next to her daughter and how that decision got made in the novel. How was that okay? There was some noise involved with that. How do you think they got away with that?

Jennifer: That's a very good question. Let me say that while I set most every personal story aside, when I made decisions like this, I wanted to make sure that they have happened. This is a scenario that I heard about in a less than entirely clear way. There was a woman, nearly eighty or whatever, who was talking to me about her experience being hidden. She was quite young in the barn with her mother. There was a farmer who she believed visited every night. She didn't totally know what was happening. Although, actually, I'm going to try to find it because I think it's really incredible and moving. She wrote a poem as an adult. You know poetry, how something in your experience will just show up for you. I have it on my phone. This is this woman who said to me that he came and they talked about the news. She thinks maybe he loved her mother. It's called Wild Strawberries. This is her poem. It's very short. "Sometimes under cover of darkness, Mr. R would visit. I would see my mother's silhouette, her long hair down her back, and in the dark, the outline of Mr. R's powerful shoulders as he sat opposite her on the straw-covered attic floor. He would talk in hushed tones. I sat beside my mother but apart from them feeling a vague excitement mingled with fear. He would bring sweet wild strawberries in the night." I was also very much aware of how much sex was traded in the Holocaust, traded for survival. The scenario felt realistic. I wanted this to be a blurry situation.

This family, the couple, the farmer and his wife, they're risking their lives. They're risking their families. I think the wife is, in many ways, righteous, but yet she gives eggs and bread to the child, not to the mom. She knows something's happening in the barn. There's a question of whether it's kind of a relief that it's happening and that there's some pressure off her. I wanted it to be a really blurry scenario. I wanted it to be, you wonder whether he fell in love with her, Róza, in the barn or whether it really was just payment of a sort. I thought it would create, obviously, tension, but also questions about how we respond in times with the challenges that we're faced with. We make a lot of moral judgments of people and how they respond in circumstances, but we're not necessarily faced with those same challenges. We want to believe we'd be one thing. Sometimes we might be a modeled thing. I think often, people were modeled in their reaction, both good and bad. I learned that one criteria for being accepted into Righteous Among the Nations, Yad Vashem, is that there was no sexual predation of any sort. I also learned that there were many people who were candidates and then rejected for this reason, that there had been, so just a lot of blurry stuff. The noise is a really good question, actually, about noise in the barn. Maybe the only thing to say is that she was trying to keep as still as possible and trying to hope that it wasn't going to kill them all. It's very complicated.

Zibby: Yes, it's very complicated. I feel like you left it a little ambiguous because there was one stretch where he didn't visit as often, and she was missing that. She was welcoming him back when eventually he did. There was sort of a question mark. It's almost like -- what is that called? The Stockholm syndrome? You fall in love with your abusers after a while.

Jennifer: That was also part of the blurriness I wanted there because her body responds even if the situation is quite horrible. I had gotten some reactions of people upset about this. I was like, but this is what happens because we are bodies also. It happens even when the situation is very hostile. Your body can respond. Then people feel guilty for having responded, but it's something that happens. I wanted the complexity to be there.

Zibby: Tell me about the decision to have music be such a part of it. I feel like this all gels with the sound and your daughters and your music. You take it away from there.

Jennifer: There are so many parts of this. The first thing is that my father, who I lost a year ago, he played violin every single day. He was a very dedicated violinist. He wasn't a prodigy or a virtuoso, but he played daily. It was really infused in my life because I heard it every day of my life. He also composed some music. It seemed to me that it was a way of him somehow connecting to his Jewish roots through the music he was writing as well. Then I studied opera. He and I made music together. I saw the connective power of music. I also have to say that it links to something else, a few things that are dealing with the deafness in my family. When we looked back at our family tree, I eventually discovered these great-great aunts who lived in a little shtetl in the 1800s who were deaf. The one substantial story I learned about them is that when they went to sleep, they would tie a string from their wrist to their babies at night so that in the darkness if the baby cried or fussed, they would feel the tug and they'd wake to care for them. This string in the darkness was such a model of connection and mothering. I had felt in many ways unheard by my mom except when I sang. Music was one of those times when she really attended. I wanted a string so badly between my daughters and me. I wasn't sure if it was in my repertoire. I chose violin not just for my father, but because it was a string instrument. I wanted Shira to have this connective string that moved through. Her mother plays cello. Her father played violin. Her grandfather was a violin maker. There was the string instruments and string moving through the story for very personal reasons all through.

Zibby: Tell me a little more, if you are willing, about why you didn't feel like you felt heard by your mother.

Jennifer: It's really complicated. My mom has a hearing loss that isn't, supposedly, linked to the genetic deafness by my husband and I having recessive genes. We're not totally sure about how it all links. She too grew up with some hearing loss which I think caused her to retreat in certain ways. I think it's an energy saver. It's conservation for deaf people sometimes. I think it's also that a variety of things that happened in her own childhood caused her to be more turned in and not turned out. I think she loves me dearly, but just wasn't able to be as attentive and focused. It was intermittent, which is very hard for children. You think you sometimes have it, and then it's gone. It's very hard to hold onto. It was something that was quite hard. Like I said, it was funny, when I sang, it was like everything stopped and she was right there. I sang a real lot. [laughs] I studied voice. It was a thing I really took on because that connection meant so much to me. When it came to creating these characters, the transportive power of music and connective power of music, it was right there as a subject matter.

Zibby: Then with the book being divided into three parts and having three basic identities for Shira as she goes through different stages of her hiding and her travels culminating in this fantastic ending, tell me about the division of her time in those ways and how you even renamed the character. In each section, you refer to her as the new name, not even her original name, which I thought was really interesting. Tell me about that.

Jennifer: Thanks. I thought it was really important for us to remember now that we're in this age where we can find anyone -- if you want to see your fourth-grade friend, you just go on Facebook and put their name. There she'll be. People lost the thread of not just their families, but themselves. I was really struck by this. I was struck by it emotionally. I went to the Holocaust Museum in DC and saw this, almost like a program where there were these pamphlets of people. They would have a face and it would say, "Do you remember me?" It was this literal question. If you could tell me that I'm Ana whatever from this village, then I would be able to go back and find my family and figure out where I come from and who I am. It was just incredible. It resonated with me also as a philosopher. What we are as we persist in time and when we shed particular things, are we still that same person? What does it mean to be a self over time, and especially in a situation where all these things have to change? Your name changes for your safety. Not everyone got to have their name buried in a jar that got unearthed later. A lot of the time, they just changed their name and they forgot the other one. They were five years old. They don't know their mother and father's actual name. They just knew them as Mama and Tata.

All of that way in which the threads can get frayed or broken completely I felt was really interesting and important because later, there was really no way back. You couldn't figure it out. People were just lost. It was incredible. That was an important point for me to see that this is what happens in war. It happens especially in a brutal way to children because the thread gets lost and then they can't quite be connected and find their way back. That's part of what I did with that, with the different names. I also wanted it to be linked to the fact of so much religious confusion. Your name gets changed to a Catholic name. You're put in a convent. Now you're praying to this god. You're listening to these psalms. I wanted even the music -- there was the chaotic Jewish music beforehand and then the orderly music of the convent. It was soothing to her. There were many hidden children I'd read about who ended up in other settings where they clung onto the orderliness or the Mary statue or something that felt like some kind of anchor or mother figure or something just to orient and reorient. Then later, it's so confusing to figure out who you are and who you were and how to be now. I wanted all that to be up in the air because I saw that very clearly, especially in some of the people I interviewed. They either never quite found the thread or they imposed a new thing. I'm going to be a Jew. I'm going to Israel. I'm going to whatever. That's what they did, but it was like an imposition in a way. They decided it by fiat rather than an organic development.

Zibby: Obviously, I had thought about it, but your book just put this in such stark black-and-white details of how hard it is to find somebody and how many people have just drifted and even the near-miss type situations that must have happened all the time. It just is heartbreaking. I think that's one of the things about this book. Every part of it, you know logically reading it, has actually happened in real life magnified millions of times. The depth of that suffering and those emotions just makes this book even more powerful riding on the coattails of that collective trauma. One of the questions actually from the chat -- you started talking a little bit about your philosophy background. What type of philosophy do you teach? How has that affected your writing? It sounds like it has.

Jennifer: My work has been in the area of moral psychology and in the nature of self. In the academic realm, it's really quite abstract and theoretical. That bothered me a lot. It's about the self, so you think that we should be able to relate to that. The work I did before really moving into more writing had to do with the ways in which there can be ambivalence in the self. I edited this anthology called The Messy Self. It was about how we can have these warring factions within and warring desires. We might want something, but we might not want to want it, and all this conflict and ambivalence and fracture. I think it has really affected my work as a writer because especially, for instance, when Róza makes this decision to give her child up for her safety so she'll live -- and yet she carries this shame or guilt. It's inevitable to take it off your shoulders. You go to a family camp, and someone else brought their child along. Maybe I could've made it. I could've made it to that camp with my child. I didn't have to give her up. Then you see at the family camp that maybe some children die because there's danger there too.

There was no exact answer here. Everyone was just doing anything and everything they could, the best decision they could make. Then the daughter will be in the barn and gets upset and makes a loud chirp and then carries this forever thinking, if I hadn’t made that chirp, maybe I'd still be with my mother. My mother sent me away because I was too loud. If I could've been quieter... The kinds of ways in which our minds do this thing where we can carry -- even when I say I was given up so that I could live, my mother gave me away so I could live, sits in the same mind with, if I hadn’t made that chirp, maybe I could've still been there. We do this all time because we can draw walls in our minds. What it is to be a conflicted self? What it is to have self-deception? All these kind of things are an undergird in emotional experiences that I was trying to include in the novel.

Zibby: It's also, what does it even mean to be safe? What does it mean to live? There was one part where she's saying, safe is with my mom. What do you mean keep me safe? I was safe. I was with her. I feel like that's what kids long for. That's what they know. To have all that taken away and say, no, no, now you're going to go with a bunch of strangers to a convent and take away all of my love, but you'll be alive, what five-year-old would take that choice?

Jennifer: Yes, I know. I think it's just so complicated because everyone will do their best and tries to make the life that they're given to make as much sense as possible, but there are these emotional pulls that are so deep and profound. It was also why, as I was writing this and there were children being separated from their parents at the border, I'm thinking to myself, we're going to lose the thread, as we have. There's 540 who can't be put back together with their parents now. If in seventy-five years someone interviews them for their novel and they sit down and say, I'm still in this acute pain because I was separated back then when I was five -- that's what I learned having these interviews with people who have made these beautiful lives for themselves, but the pain of that time, it's endless. It doesn't go away. It's right there under the surface. That kind of emotional complexity is what I really wanted to capture and how difficult it was.

Zibby: You did. You captured it all. All these themes that you bring up are so thought-provoking and speak to a whole generation. What does it mean to have a generation of people in pain growing up? Then the effects on them raising kids. I remember in college I did some report about children of Holocaust survivors and what it meant to grow up as them with parents who had such trauma in their own lives. Then I think about even now which is, again, not the same, but just a period of time where people feel at risk. What does that do? Whether or not to send your kid to homeschool or leave the city or all these decisions parents have to make now, it’s still, what do you do? It's like you have to make your own way again. There are not clear guidelines. Do you trust officials? There's just a lot of [indiscernible/crosstalk] in a way.

Jennifer: Yeah, it's very complicated. I remember interviewing one man who, I went to his home and you see that he has really built this beautiful life. He showed me pictures of his grandchildren's bar mitzvahs. It was all this healed world. Then we sat down. The interviews took quite a long time. I'd be there for five hours or something. By the end -- first of all, we're both in tears. At one point, we were talking. He had been shifted around in these different ways that were very trying as a young child. While we were talking, it's almost like his eyes shuttered over. He just said to me, "If you told me my mother was in the other room, I wouldn't go in there." It's just, there was so much pain, that's all, and longing that went for so long, unmet in this case, longing and then rebuilding something over it, but there's a hole there.

Zibby: What do you think about inherited trauma? I know I was kind of throwing that around. Someone in the chat is asking about it as well. What do you think about it?

Jennifer: I'm no expert on that, but I just feel like it's cellular, probably. That's what I think. I think it's cellular. Also, I think about this as a mom of two children. Both were born deaf. My first one, it was such a surprise. It sounds like it shouldn't be because my mom had hearing loss, but my mother had hearing loss supposedly due to mastoid infections. There was this hidden family tree that had asterisks of deaf people, but I had no idea about it. A call from the hospital and say my daughter failed the test, and my dad's like, "I'm sure it's fluid," that kind of thing. I think that what happens is your whole body goes into a mode of, how are we going to deal with this? I know that my older daughter absorbed so much of our reactivity to her. Whereas my second daughter, by then, I just flung her over my shoulder and kept singing. I knew by then that whether she could hear it or not, she was going to get it. She saw my face. She felt my body. She felt the air. She knew what I was doing. She kind of knew as much without her sound as with it, but I didn't know that the first time. I do think that you can just see. What do they say about the oldest child and the first pancake and all that stuff? [laughs] I think that they do feel your reactivity. They're so sensitive and so smart. There's both the cellular, but there's also the transference, inevitably. We're all doing our best and trying not to and putting on our calm, brave whatever. Of course, they're much smarter than that. They know everything. I can't hide anything in my family. My kids know it all. I think that it's quite real, is what I'll say, inherited one way or another.

Zibby: Yes, the ability of kids to pick up on emotions and yet not pick up their clothes is crazy. [laughs] Tell me a little more about writing this book. You said you didn't grow up wanting to be a writer. Yet here you are with a memoir and children's book and a novel and all of it.

Jennifer: I know. I found it all out when I was forty, that I loved writing.

Zibby: We'll take you. [laughs]

Jennifer: Thank you. That's a thing, the vicissitudes of life. Really, because of Sophia's deafness and then just trying to journal that experience and then learning that I love this -- I love this so much. I love it a lot more than logically constrained analytic philosophy writing. The memoir, I think I really needed to express all those things. What I love about writing so much is that you think you're writing about one thing. Then it all gets turned on its head. When the work is coming out, you realize -- for instance, I thought we were working on whether our children would hear. Ultimately, when I examined all that stuff with my mom and all the strings and etc., it was whether I would hear them. I think that's what this was all about. It was all a big question of whether I could hear, not whether they could. I didn't know that at first. Someone would say, "What are you working on?" I'm like, "It's about raising our daughters in a hearing/speaking world and whether they would --" It's just interesting. There's so much self-discovery. What I love about it is that I'm connected to subconscious things in a way that I never could be if I just went along without sitting down and be quiet and trying to write. I really value it very much and feel so lucky to be doing it. I stopped doing those big, high-powered academic tracks to be on the floor with my kids anyway, and thank god for that, and then got to be writing in between. My process is I write in between. Right now, everyone's home, so between all of that, I try to write. That's been sort of true the whole time as they were growing up. Now they're actually seventeen and twenty, so it's not nearly like it was. Although, they do still want to me to make every meal, it seems like, but they can make their own. [laughs] That's good. It's just been like that. I've been writing in between things and being the on-call audiologist and the on-call etc. all the time, but have managed to do this writing which, to me, is such a gift of self-expression.

Zibby: Writing a novel is not the same. There's one thing where you write with your emotions and to sort out your feelings and even just to chronicle your experience for whoever's benefit and to share with others. There's all these arguments for why your memoir came into the world. I see all of the parallels, of course. Just teaching yourself how to write fiction, that's pretty impressive. Did you take any courses? Did you google "how to write a novel"? What did you do? Most people have several failed novels tucked away in drawers before they come out with something. Was this just your first out-of-the-gate smash hit?

Jennifer: It's my first novel. When I met that lady at the book talk for my memoir, that was in 2010. This thing's been batting around a really long time. While it is my first memoir, maybe someone else would've written -- I mean my first novel. Someone might have written three or four of them in this time. [laughs] I don't know. For me, since I am self-taught, I kind of shot my wad with that PhD in philosophy. I can't really go back and get the MFA, which I would really love to do. I don't see how I can do that. I went to Bread Loaf for a session. I went to Tin House for a session. They're these writing workshops in the world. Had some really wonderful teachers. I just read a lot. That helps. Reading helps you become a good writer.

Zibby: What do you like to read? What are your favorite genres or authors?

Jennifer: I have to say that at different times given whatever I've been trying to write, there are certain reads that have made a huge difference for me. During the course of writing The Yellow Bird Sings, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See was this book I just wanted -- I could've wrapped it around myself with a cloth and carried it around. There's just something about the sentences, the sentence-by-sentence beauty of his writing. The structure of that novel is like that box where the jewel is. It's just a beautiful thing to examine. I've read it many times because I was reading it as a writer, not only as a reader. That was very, very meaningful. There have been a lot of books. Toni Morrison's work, Marilynne Robinson's work, these are writers you read and just are studying how they put that together. How do you incorporate that magical element in that special way? How do you have the ordinary rise to the extraordinary? Marilynne Robinson takes the most ordinary thing. You're reading and you think -- [laughs]. There are writers like that who have been really influential. I remember while I was working on my memoir I kept going back to The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I kept going back to her ex-husband's book, Jonathan Safran Foer's work. There was sort of an experimental quality to it that I was interested in. There was a looseness. I was going from philosophy writing to literature and wanting to stretch. You go to different books at different times for different things. That's how it is for me.

Zibby: It's so funny. When I started my podcast, I had never -- I took a lot of English in school and all of that, but school was a long time ago at this point. As a grown-up, when I've been reading, I wasn't reading, as you said, as a writer. I was just reading and enjoying and whatever. Author after author would say, no, when I take apart the book and I take apart the structure and I analyze this and I analyze the -- I was like, you do? Really? Do you think that the authors intended it that way? It turns out, yes, they did. [laughs] It seems so obvious now, but it's really part of the process. You have to have that whole perspective on the project and the in-depth research, as I guess [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Jennifer: It's interesting too because in the course of writing this novel, I would read the draft just for verbs. Let me just think about the verbs. Are these the best verbs? Are they active? Do they have the power I want them to have or the passivity I want? That kind of thing, and just the verbs. Then I would read just for setting. Do you feel you're in the barn? Do you feel you're in the woods? Can you really feel that with that sound? How do I make this vivid? How do I make it feel this way? There's those ten years. [laughs]

Zibby: Wow, that's great. That's amazing. Good for you, however long it took. Did you ever want to send it out? Did you ever feel like, okay, this is good enough, or did you know you wanted to keep going? Then how did you end up selling it?

Jennifer: No, I never felt it was good enough. I think that's the philosophy training too where it's so critical. I'm trained really critically, sadly. In fact, the beauty of some writing environments I've been in is that they would have this thought where if you hear someone's new writing, you would just say what's working. I was like, that's amazing. We're talking about what's working? I've never even done that before. I always used to talk about what isn't working. It's a beautiful thing. It actually helps you improve greatly. Somehow when you hear what's working, that stuff rises and the other stuff falls. It's a really great thing. It's a much more healthy world for me. I'm so happy to be in it. I worked on it a long time. I ended up sending it -- it was kind of a circuitous route, as many, many publishing routes are. I had had an agent for my memoir. She wasn't sure about this novel. We decided to part ways, so I was un-agented. There was an editor who had passed on my memoir but had written the nicest note. It was the loveliest fail. She thought the writing was beautiful. She loved the story, but she just felt she couldn't make it big enough for her. That was Amy Einhorn who publishes really big books. She loved it, but she couldn't take it. I said, "What about just Amy Einhorn? What if we just sent it to her?" My soon to be ex-agent was like, "I can't. I don't think it's ready," whatever.

I was like, okay, so I sent it myself to Amy. I said, "Look, Amy, you passed on my memoir, but I remember it was such a nice rejection. Would you consider reading it?" She said, "I will read it." She accepted it un-agented and then said, "So now you need to get an agent." Then I said, "If you've accepted my novel, I'm pretty sure I can get one." I did. That's how it happened kind of in a backward way. Obviously, if my ex-agent, had she sent it to Amy, she would've taken it. She didn't, so I sent it myself. Amy and I, we worked on it. It wasn't done yet. I think I had written every single moment of the entire book. What jumps in time now, I had written a lot of that story, the whole New York story. There was a second daughter. She couldn't bond to her. There was all kinds of stuff on the cutting floor. Amy said, "I think the heart of the story's in the barn. I really care about this daughter, not that daughter," that kind of thing. It took shape that way where we really expanded the barn and this journey during the war only and then made a move to the later years.

I do want to say, it's always hard in these conversations because you never know if there are people who haven't read. You don't want to do any spoiling, and I won't. I just want to say that in making a decision about the ending, a lot of it had to do with respecting what I've learned from interviews of reunifications and how complicated they are. My daughter character is five when you're really invested in her life. That's a very simple time compared to being nearly thirty. What that really would be like, to be true to it, to be fair to it, to give honor to the people who struggle with the complexities of finding someone after so many years and having such complicated emotions about it, wanting to make sure to give that honor and not just wrap a big bow around something that's complicated, that leads me to say that in the thing I'm working on now, there's some revisiting of this concept.

Zibby: I was about to ask that, so thank you. Jennifer, what are you working on now?

Jennifer: I started with these two characters that are completely new and different. It's after the war, which I think is important because you know there are people who don't want to even pick up a novel that's set in the Holocaust, which is a fact of this novel. I joke now, I think it should be called post-war. Just so you know, it's post-war. It's right after the war. There's a boy and a girl, a brother and sister. I wanted to explore something I learned from someone I interviewed. She went after the war and she would find Jewish children in Christian settings and transport them to Palestine. That was British Mandate, Palestine at the time. This was also a very complicated thing for each individual child. In terms of rescuing Jews after the war, it makes total sense as a population-management issue. As a human individual-to-individual issue, it was really complicated. I wanted to explore that. One thing that happens is that these children end up in a kibbutz in Israel. There's this violin prodigy. We're going to circle back. You're going to see the middle and end that you don't see here because I really want to do it [indiscernible]. I didn't want to dishonor some real things that I felt were very important to give their space and not tack on a weird second novel on a first one kind of thing.

Zibby: I love that. If anybody has more questions, feel free to put them in the comments. I feel like I tried to weave in most of them already. If there are any more, please feel free. By the way Jennifer, a lot of people are encouraging you to go back and get your MFA.

Jennifer: They are? [laughs] I can't see. Okay, I found the comments now.

Zibby: While we're waiting to see if any more comments come in, with questions I should say, I was wondering if you had any advice for aspiring authors in case there are any out there listening?

Jennifer: Yes. My advice is persistence and faith. Just keep going back. Having enough faith that whatever it is you write each day, whether it looks like it has no relationship to the thing you wrote yesterday, whether it doesn't seem like it's very good, I really do believe that the mind is this incredible web and that these things are related and if you give yourself the freedom and the chance in that you keep going and keep persevering, that it's going to show up there. You're going to see it. I've always been really fascinated by how people can take cards of plot, almost, and shuffle them one way and you'd have one story and shuffle them another way and you'd have another story. We just have to understand that our mind connects dots. If you're there putting out your moments, moment, moment, moment, they will relate to each other eventually if we just give ourselves that trust to keep doing it because it does take a lot of work. It takes a real lot of work, but you can do it if you stick with it, I say after ten years. [laughs]

Zibby: Are you still singing?

Jennifer: No, I haven't sung as much. My husband is very upset about it, actually. He's always saying, "Why aren't you singing?" I sing in the shower. There's been some times when I thought of joining some groups around here, but I also get kind of picky. I like to choose what I sing. This is also why sometimes it's hard to be in book groups because you're like, I want to choose what I read, even though if you just go along with it, you find all these amazing things that you wouldn't have. I probably just have to give myself the chance. Maybe after this conversation, I'll get an MFA, join a singing group. [laughs]

Zibby: You have a lot on your to-do list.

Jennifer: I'm inspired.

Zibby: Naomi from the audience is asking if your children read your books.

Jennifer: They do. They read everything. My older daughter actually read my novel in draft several times and had really awesome advice, actually, plot ideas, etc. My younger daughter said she was afraid to read it because if she didn't like it she’d hurt my feelings, so she took her time and then finally read it and said it was good. That made me happy. They do read it either immediately or eventually.

Zibby: Excellent. I think that's all the questions that came in. If anybody has any more questions, please feel free to ask. Just a reminder, you can get a copy of The Yellow Bird Sings here at the link in the comments through the JCC. There it is if anybody wants to buy a copy, which I would highly recommend if you don't already have one. This book is beautiful. Your writing is beautiful. Whatever magic you did analyzing texts and verbs and structure and everything, it worked. It was really great. Congratulations.

Jennifer: Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to talk to you, as I knew it would be. I really appreciate it.

Zibby: Thank you.

Judy: Thank you so much, both Jennifer and Zibby. It was a wonderful, wonderful conversation. In fact, somebody asked the question about, who was the narrator, the person who did the audio?

Jennifer: I love her. Her name is Anna Koval. She's British. I was lucky because Macmillan let me kind of audition a few different audio narrators. I chose her. It was one of her first, maybe her first audiobook. She's been an actress, but she hadn’t done audio narration. I just loved her because she was sensitive, emotionally astute, but also let the language speak for itself. Sometimes you audition someone and it seems so dramatic. You're like, do we really have to add that much drama? I'm not sure. I was really thrilled with her. I thought she was fabulous.

Judy: That came in at the very end. I saw that, and I thought that was a great question. I don't know if people know that you had the opportunity to pick the author. That's so interesting. Thank you both for being here. It was an excellent event. Thank you, everyone at home, for joining us.

Nessa Rapoport, EVENING

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Nessa. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" to discuss your novel, Evening.

Nessa Rapoport: I'm glad to be here. Thanks.

Zibby: First of all, this was such a beautiful book. I loved it. So great. I love your writing style. It's so poetic and just great. I'm a big fan. Then, after I read --

Nessa: -- You can stop now. [laughter]

Zibby: I was going to say after I read it, I started investigating more. I read that it took you twenty-six years, really, thirty years, to work on this book. Tell me the whole story of this book. Maybe also tell a little bit about the memoir you wrote and your first book which I know was a huge success. Give me your whole story.

Nessa: I began this book in 1990. The first chapter came to me in an instant. This has never happened to me as a writer before and certainly not since. I thought, great, this is going to be my easy book. This one's just going to flow out of me. I'm just going to build on that first chapter. I'll be done really soon. For once, writing will not feel as it usually does, like peeling tiny pieces of skin off my body one at a time.

Zibby: That sounds like fun.

Nessa: I would describe my current life as the further humbling of Nessa Rapoport. One instance of that is how long it took me to write Evening. In essence, what happened was I created a setup with a kind of propulsive story. Then I had all these obligations to the story. I had never written a book like this. The opening is, as you know, two sisters, one is grieving for the other. They're in their thirties. Eve, the narrator, has come back from New York to Toronto where her sister died very prematurely. Her sister is the most famous Canadian anchorwoman on TV. She has a devoted husband and two lovely children. Eve is almost deliberately indeterminate. She's endlessly writing a PhD she can't quite finish on British women writers between the wars. She's always lived in tiny rental apartments. She teaches English at a community college to women who come in the evening. Her life drives her older sister, Tam, crazy because Tam is a woosh into the future and Eve is in love with the past, as Tam accuses her.

Throughout the whole book, although Eve has died, Tam is always in her head talking to her and in dialogue with her. In this first chapter, you learn very quickly that these two sisters who have a complex but definitely loving relationship had a stupendous fight two weeks before Tam dies. They never reconciled, which is not only an awful burden for Eve but also against their principles as sisters. As you learn as the book goes on, whenever they had a fight when they were both alive, one would call back into the front door, "I love you. I love you," in case she died in a car accident and never got to reconcile with her sister. So this is bad. Did I know what the fight was about? I did not. That was problem number one, this issue. That thread through the whole book is that, as you know and as readers know, the morning after the funeral, Eve discovers a secret about Tam that upends her view of herself and her future, her sister, her family ecology. I did know what the secret was, but I had no idea how to construct a narrative that would thread that secret through the book and keep you, the reader, engaged as it unfolded. I knew that it didn't matter if you figured it out soon or later.

I think some readers figure it out right away. Some, to my thrill, don't figure it out until the revealing scene. It's not a mystery. It's a novel, so it's okay. If you figure it out early, then you know something Eve doesn't know. That creates its own momentum. If you don't figure it out, then you have the same surprise she has as she encounters it at that moment. That was a real challenge. I was an interior, more Virginia Woolf writer. I started out as a poet. Language matters a lot to me. I felt I had a responsibility to keep this story pushing forward as I shuttle back and forth from present to past in these scenes. I had the great grace to have a mentor named Ted Solotaroff who was a very eminent editor who's no longer alive. Bless his memory. I took him out for coffee early on. I said, "Here's my setup. I don't know how to move forward. I can't figure out how to tell this plot." He said to me, "Plot is character. When you know your characters, you'll know how to do this." That explains most of why it took twenty-six years.

I wanted to tell you, I was not one of these, I love babies, I can't wait to have -- I knew I'd have children. I knew it really mattered to me, but I was not a gushy baby person. I was in quite a bit of shock when I had my first one. I really didn't know how to do anything. The biggest shock was that I couldn't read, that I didn't have time to read. I hadn’t understood that that was my great sanctuary for mental health. When I needed to zone out and get out of my brain, that's what I did. I have three younger sisters. We're four sisters, no brothers. I always say all of us spent our entire motherhood trying to evade our importuning children and get to finish our books. Even on those grounds, I knew I had to talk to you. [laughs]

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I remember literally pumping in the middle of night with my third kid, I have four kids, and having Therese Anne Fowler's book on the table while I held the things. That was my only time to read, was in the middle of the night when I was pumping. Yes, it's crazy. Now even with remote school, I can sit in the rocking chair, I can read a little bit of your book. They can be on Zoom. It's not perfect, but at least you fit it in at some point. Anyway, back to Evening and your wonderful editor who you were talking about and all of that. Now we have this book in front of us that took you all this time and evolved. I read your interview with your daughter, which was so awesome, I think in Glamour.

Nessa: It'll happen to you. I assume your kids aren't quite as old as mine. This is what happens.

Zibby: I hope so. I interviewed my dad on my podcast because he also wrote a book. That was really fun. I'm hoping someone will interview me eventually. [laughs] Tell me what that was like. Also, tell me about having all of this out in the world and how you relate to your family and how this relates to your relationship with your sisters. This is a very sister-heavy book. Tell me a little bit about all of that.

Nessa: I'll start with the sisters. Having sisters is a thing. We are four sisters within six years.

Zibby: Whoa.

Nessa: Yeah, which was a tribute to my mother. Those were the years after the war when atypically, actually, women stayed home and wanted to be home. It was the great retreat from when women were actively participating because men were at war. In Canada, men went to World War II also. My mother had an utterly exceptional mother. As you know from Evening, the grandmother, who is not quite my grandmother -- it really isn't an autobiography, but little tidbits and tendrils entered. There's always a remarkable grandmother in everything that I write. One of my friends says, "It's one of your signature moves." My grandmother was part of that pioneering generation of first doctors, first lawyers. She was born in 1897. She was the first woman and the first Jew to get a PhD in physics from the University of Toronto. She had five children. She was an observant Jew on top of it all. Plus, she was born in Canada which for Canadian Jewry was very unusual because it's a much newer immigration than here. Of course, in response, my mother who has many aptitudes and is still with me at ninety-two wanted to be married and raise children and have a big family which she went on to do. The thing about sisters is, as my friend Francine Klagsbrun noted, your siblings know you longer than anyone if the creator is good and everybody dies in order. Sisters know each other in a very intimate way. Do you have sisters?

Zibby: I have a brother. I've become very close to sisters-in-law, but I don't have a sister.

Nessa: It's different because you know the center of your sisters. You've stood next to each other in the bathroom. You've exchanged makeup. You've inevitably, if not competed, you compare. Because I was the eldest, I didn't have anyone ahead of me. It took me many decades to understand that my sisters coming behind me noticed and paid attention. I noticed and paid attention too because my sisters were almost my peers at a certain point and then, of course, by now really are. They really noticed. We were in this kind of ecology. It's funny. You polarize each other into roles. One of the things I wanted to show in Evening between these two sisters is that on the surface, anybody would assume, and the people who come to this shiva house for mourning do assume, that Eve is jealous of her sister. Her sister has "everything," and Eve is unfinished. In fact, Eve has never been jealous of her sister. She's aware of her sister. She's in awe of her sister, but she's not jealous. By the end, in some ways, you could certainly argue that it turns out Tam was jealous of Eve, which is one of the reasons she makes such sardonic comments about Eve's lifestyle. As I used to say to my children, a secure person doesn't have to talk like that. Eve may seem to have it all, but she's always sort of harping.

Once you release a book into the world, it's no longer yours. Several readers have said to me that they were alarmed by Tam's hostility, that's the world they used, to her sister. I really didn't experience them that way. I experienced them as sisters. One thing that happens with siblings, I think brothers and sisters, is you each adopt a role. Because you want your own identity within a family, you're pretty protective of your role. You don't actually want to be the other person. One of the amusing aspects of the sister issue is -- my mother's one of five. She's the only daughter. My father was one of three boys. Neither of them had sisters. They grew up in the Depression when you defer to authority and you take on responsibility almost prematurely early. They had these four daughters coming of age in the youth culture where being young is adulated and the economy's good and nobody's thinking too much about responsibility. They were totally at a loss. My mother used to say that she worried that we would want each other's boyfriends. Once you're in a family, you never want the boyfriend of the other one. One of the things that's interesting in this novel is there are two other sisters. There's Nana and her very beautiful kind of amoral sister. That sister, Nell, certainly is impinging on Nana's life and, indeed, on the life of anybody she can. The last thing I'll say about your question is I'm very interested in the role of beauty in a large family constellation. There's always someone or some few people who are exceptionally beautiful. The way the family responds to that is fascinating. I learned everything I know sitting around the kitchen table listening to women talk. I think Evening reflects that.

Zibby: Wow. I'm actually jealous of -- I mean, I love my brother. I love my family. I wouldn't change anything. The unique experience you had growing up with three women and what that does to a person's character ongoing and your other relationships, that's just a gift. That's a gift.

Nessa: As you know and I know and I like to say, if you'd like to mythologize it, great, but of course, it's not like that. It's complicated, loving, but complicated.

Zibby: The fact that one sister dies in this book and yours, thank god, are all living, where did that come from? Is this your biggest fear, is that this would happen? Did it stem from other losses? I know you've written a lot about loss.

Nessa: That is a really good question. Because the setup happened to me -- I'm sure you've talked to so many writers. Don't some of them say, I kind of wasn't in control of my characters, they sort of took over?

Zibby: Yes.

Nessa: I did not understand that. As I have said, I found it a little pretentious until it happened to me. I did lose a friend in her thirties to breast cancer, but I know she wasn't in my conscious thought. I think this book is all unconscious. In some ways, that makes it more autobiographical because it's coming from deep places of collected anxieties, as you note, and impressions that I wasn't entirely in charge of. In terms of the grief and the loss, I have had a very blessed life. At this point, I have lost four very close women friends. At the point that I started and wrote that first chapter, I had lost only one. I'm a porous person. The daughter whose interview you read used to say, "Oh, Mom, you and your morose childhood." [laughs] Writers are dark. I think I wrote to alchemize suffering into something better. I'm a very, very not believer in the silver lining of life. I see no point to suffering. I wish none of us had to endure it. Since we do, I feel I'd like to give something back. What do I have? I have wisdom.

To come back to your first question, the single biggest difference between when I started this book and now is not that my sisters characters changed, it's that I got older. Life became more nuanced. I endured losses myself. I had to come to understand that loss is absolutely intrinsic to being alive. Tragedy, not necessarily if you're lucky, but loss, absolutely. The last thing I'll say -- it's evident in this book. I didn't realize it was a main theme until I started talking to people who read it. I do not believe that when someone leaves this world, you necessarily need to end that relationship even if it was fragmented and really not where you wanted it to be. I think we keep growing. I like to say the only physics I know, compared to my grandmother, is that we're always in motion and that energy doesn't die. It just changes form. I believe that love is a galvanizing energy and that you can heal a relationship that was fraught even if the other person isn't there. I think you see that in this novel. The biggest change is not Tam and Eve. I was fascinated by them thirty years ago. I, luckily, remain fascinated by them. The biggest change is Nessa as I had to encounter so much more complexity in life.

Zibby: That's really beautiful. It's true. I feel like knowing that loss is such a fundamental part of life, it's a shame that we don't do more to prepare ourselves or our loved ones for its eventuality. It always blindsides people because we operate under this delusion of invincibility. We don't want to go there and think about it. I wonder what life would be like if we all checked into that every so often and had some sort of mental preparation other than anxiety. I feel like I am always thinking about the worst case to prepare myself.

Nessa: You're cutting a false deal where it's like an amulet. If I worry about it enough, nothing will happen. It turns out not to be that way. I'm thinking as you're speaking, the strongest indicator of this question is being a parent. When I started out, without even realizing it, I wanted to protect my children from absolutely everything. I'm not of the small children, small problems metaphor. I loved watching my children get older. They're my teachers now. I really learn a lot from my young adult children. I started to realize that it was very important to go to the school of adversity and learn resilience and teach my children that when things happen that were very hard, they had the fortitude to get through it. This was not in my repertoire. As one of my sisters liked to say, the Rapoport women, they get an A+ on the first try or they quit. This is not a good way to live. As a parent, I had to memorize before I really believed it, that understanding. Do you feel that way as you raise your four?

Zibby: I find that the kids who have gone through the most, I feel the -- as with any kids in any family, not to pick out either one, but there's one child who's just had to overcome more stuff than the rest. I feel like that particular child now has a sense of grit. She has something that I couldn't teach. You have to learn it yourself.

Nessa: I'm still learning it. [laughter] The other thing that struck me when you spoke is if you have a childhood as I did that was very interior, addicted to reading, very dramatic inside, being a very intense person, which is genetic, you have the fake understanding that the graph of life will just go up. You're just going to get happier and happier as you get older and older because how could such misery endure as you were so hungry for life and longing for things? There's a lot of true humility about coming of age and understanding that you're going to grow, not quit growing at forty, which is what I had resolved in my thirties. I'm done with this. It's too depleting. You grow until you die if you're lucky. This novel is short, but I tried to show that these people, both Eve who's alive and even Tam, they are always in motion. Their relationship is therefore in motion.

Zibby: It's a comfort to hear what you said about relationships continuing on and love continuing on because I know there's just so much loss these days. To take away that finality of it all is probably one of the most healing things you could say to somebody.

Nessa: You have to get there yourself.

Zibby: I know. You have to get there yourself. There were so many quotes I wanted to read back to you. Of course, I'm not going to be able to find them at the right time. I just want to read at least one example of scenes that I loved. Hold on one second. Oh, I liked this. I like this. I can't say I liked it. It's so sad. When Eve was at Tam's funeral and saying her final goodbyes, you wrote, "People are starting to go, but I cannot turn away from my sister. As if departing from a king, I walk backward from the grave, a solider and an honor guard whose watch is over but who will not relinquish her duties." I can just see that. Those sentences, you can see the cemetery, the walking. It's just amazing. Then this other passage, I loved. This is when Eve and Laurie were having their long-distance relationship back in the day before reuniting at the funeral, which was very juicy. You said, "During Laurie's high school trip to Europe, I was a beggar at the den window pleading with the smug despot of impeded love for the mailman to appear. Only when I gave up did he manifest himself, a potentate in his authority to grant or withhold. However disciplined I tried to be, I could not wait until the letters fell, but opened the door, hand thrust out, speechless." What a way to describe waiting for the mailman. Seriously, this is an exercise in creative writing masterpiece. Tell me about how you honed your craft. How did you learn to write this way?

Nessa: I began as a poet. I went to University of Toronto. Then as soon as I could move to New York City, which I fell in love with, I did. At University of Toronto I won a prize for poetry. I decided then that poetry was too marginal to the culture. I wanted to be more in communion with people. I've written a book of prose poems, as you know. Again, an exhibit here. In addition to the story I had to work out, the other aspect of it, as you said, was language. The last realm of my perfectionism is choosing each word. I jokingly say it's a very bad attribute for parenting. Your children don't care for it when you're a perfectionist. I had to give it up. In one's own work in writing, the only harm is to myself. I wanted to show you, this is the exhibit. This is a thirty-two-page, single-spaced, double-column document of quite literally every word in Evening except for "the" and "and." Going on the basis of my friend Daphne Merkin's aphorism, you can have only one cerulean in a book, so true, I checked every word to make sure it wasn't too proximate. It's a very short novel, and I didn't want to repeat very studded words. I feel that it would be a great diminishment if I did that. Here you have long, long lists by alphabet that sound like this. "Deprived, deranged, deride, descend, desecrated, desire," with how many times they appear and whether I'm satisfied that they're far enough apart that you wouldn't read it and think, didn't she just use that word?

Zibby: Wow. That is amazing. I'm so glad you showed me that. I can't believe that I had not asked that question it would've remained sitting by your side and I wouldn't have known about it. What else do you have over there? [laughs]

Nessa: The only other thing I have is -- my husband is a visual artist. When I first started this book, I was using a computer, but it wasn't really native to us yet. I was still writing some things by hand. This is what it looked like by hand, all these words, before I started typing. He said to me, "I want to frame that. I want to frame that document with how many instances words like light came up in Evening."

Zibby: Gosh, I didn't know it was so intentional. All I could tell was the effect of it. Now seeing the work that went into it and how specific it was, that's really neat. That's also just a really interesting way to analyze anybody's work, how often words come. What does it mean? Which words come more often? I'm sure there's a whole science behind this that I just don't usually do. Very interesting. What's coming next for you now? This one was twenty-six to thirty years in the making. Do you have another one that's been gestating for as long? This is the end? What do you think?

Nessa: I hope it's not the end. I certainly, doing the math and following the actuarial tables, cannot take another thirty years to write a novel. I do want to give a word of encouragement to anybody out there who has a dream of a project that seems as if it's not going to come to fruition. There's a kind of serenity I have from having fulfilled my ambition for this book. Many was the soul who wondered, is Nessa hanging onto this book for its own sake? I wasn't. I knew I would feel that click, and I did. I have these little waves of wondering that could turn into the next book. I have certain experiences that I'm interested in. I, every day, wish it would coalesce into a next project. I was an editor for many years. I used to tell people, when your book comes out, the most important thing you can do is be immersed in another book. I also was thinking yesterday, I just can't force it. I am an excellent procrastinator. I am not in the flow, one of those people that -- I tell everybody else to do this -- sits down, writes every morning, writes badly. I know all the rules, but I don't follow them. I think it's probably a little too early for me given what I gave this book to have something fully born, but I'm playing around. It is play, right?

Zibby: I hope so. It shouldn't only be work. Awesome. Nessa, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing Evening with us, for telling me about your life and the backstory and showing me that amazing document. Now I'm going to go back and read Preparing for Sabbath. This is just such a beautiful book. I love also that you structed it with the days of shiva. I just loved it. Thank you.

Nessa: Thank you for being such a perceptive reader and especially for loving it because that's it, there's nothing better.

Zibby: Thank you. Thank you so much. Hope to stay in touch.

Nessa: Thank you for inviting me.

Zibby: Of course. Buh-bye.

Nessa: Bye.

Jennifer Risher, WE NEED TO TALK

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Jennifer and David, to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." I'm so excited to have both of you here with me today. Thanks for joining.

David Risher: Thanks, Zibby.

Jennifer Risher: Thanks for having us.

Zibby: This is a dual-purpose interview. The two of you, this power couple who now I know the most intimate details of your life because of Jennifer's book -- I'm almost embarrassed. The book is called We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth, but it's really also a memoir about you. It's about your success in life and how things have developed and your relationship and family and struggling with everything from, am I spoiling my daughter by going to Hawaii when she's eight months old? to all these big and small questions in life. Then David is here, A, as your husband and the central character in this book aside from you, and also because he's doing such amazing things, as you both are, for reading worldwide. Lots to discuss. Why don't we start with the book? Jennifer, would you mind just telling listeners who aren't aware and who might not have gotten the full scoop from my brief summary there what your book is about? Also, what made you write this book? What made you write it? Why now?

Jennifer: Zibby, I'm really lucky because when I was twenty-five, I joined Microsoft and I met David. I also got stock that ended up being worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Six years later, Dave and I were married, expecting our first child. Dave had started this job at an unknown startup that was selling books on the internet. He loves books. He wanted to try this thing out. It was Amazon. We were in our early thirties. We had more money than we could wrap our heads around. Wealth surprised me. I didn't find myself in a big, sparkly, private club hanging out and sharing financial secrets. I found myself kind of alone in a strange, silent space where no one talks much about money at all. I felt the resentment of friends. I was worried about raising spoiled, entitled children. I wasn't sure how to give to family members or how to approach philanthropy. No one discusses these things even though most people are new to these challenges. Eight out of ten people with wealth grew up middle class or poor. I was surprised that wealth felt so isolating. Normally, if I have a problem or a question, I turn to friends. If I want to figure out, should my sixteen-year-old have a curfew? I ask everyone I know. I get their ideas. I hear about their experiences. I get advice. Just talking about something like that is helpful because it lets me know my question is normal, that it's shared. The same doesn't happen with money. I couldn't talk to people about having a lot of it. I thought, I'll turn to books. I wanted to find a book, but there were no books.

Zibby: Where is the bookshelf for people who have won the lottery? [laughter] I can't find the book about this.

Jennifer: I needed that book. Actually, I wrote my book because my story is one I'd want to know about if hadn’t happened to me. I also wrote my book for the millions of Americans like me who have more money than they had growing up or they have more money than many of their friends or they have more money than others in their extended family. I'm sharing my story as a way to help other people understand their own. We have this fairy tale idea about wealth in our heads. The reality feels strange and lonely. I'm not trying to show people how to do rich right. I don't have the answer for that. I am offering up this story that hasn’t been told.

Zibby: I feel like you came in, also -- sorry, I hope I didn't interrupt you. You came in with this bias. I feel like your family was particularly, not anti-wealthy, but there was such a judgement attached to spending anything. I feel like you had such a chip on your shoulder. Maybe not everyone coming into wealth is that almost disdainful of it or, I can't enjoy this house or I can't get a connecting flight or whatever it was. I feel like you had a particularly strong background against it. Then when you found yourself in it, you had to do a lot of mental work. It was like cognitive dissonance in a way.

Jennifer: Absolutely. To become something that you're biased against is tricky. I had to really work through that. I do think that we have a very narrow and incomplete view of wealth in our country. We see the stereotypes. We know the Kardashians and the Real Housewives and the men of Wolf of Wall Street. Of course, we've heard of Jeffery Epstein or the parents who illegally try to get their kids into schools that they're not qualified for. We see these stereotypes. I don't think I'm the only one who has this view of what wealth is all about. It doesn't look or feel like what Hollywood sells us. Eight out of ten, like I said, people with wealth grew up middle class or poor, so they are you.

Zibby: I feel like so many people would be like, really, so it's hard for you to be suddenly wealthy? I'm really sorry about that. [laughs] That's why you can't get a normal conversation going about it. It's something that people would really like to have even if there's a bias. It's a woe-is-me problem. Woe is me. Should I go to Aspen or not? These are the tough questions. I think people are very quick to mock it and not understand it. Then there left a big hole for your book, so there you go.

Jennifer: I think there's a reason this book hasn’t been written. It's because of that. I think it's important to start conversations. No matter how much you have in your bank account, if you have parents, if you have a partner or siblings or friends, you probably know that money is uncomfortable to talk about. You probably have faced that awkward money moment or you have some money issues hanging over your head. It's emotional. These emotions are universal. No matter how much you have, we have a lot of fear. It's fear of being rejected, fear of hurting other people's feelings, fear of not measuring up or of sounding unknowledgeable. We all have money shame and money guilt. We all have that money story that starts in childhood.

Zibby: David, I don't want to leave you out here. I have all of Jen's views of her family and her wealth and all this stuff and some of yours. What was this whole experience like for you? Do you share the, let's talk about it, let's let other people in, mission of Jennifer's right now? How do you feel?

David: [laughs] For sure, the answer is yes to that question. I do. My growing up was different. I didn't grow up with a lot of money myself. In fact, I was raised by a single mother. Our big event for the week was going to the library and coming out with a big stack of books. That’s how we explored the world. It obviously has something to do with what I'm doing now. For me, there's probably less emotion, in a sense, tied up. What my mother would say is, we're not poor, we just don't have any money, just a neutral statement. I didn't have this kind of bias coming in. At the same time, I had no preparation for what we've gone through at all. As Jen said, this is the book I would've looked for in the bookstore if it existed. Instead, she had to write it.

Zibby: Wow. By the way, I used to work a company called Idealab. I don't know if you knew it. It was a big deal in 2001 for a hot minute. I had a moment with stock options because I was the twenty-fifth employee. All of a sudden, I was like, oh, my gosh, this is going to be amazing. I'm going to have this huge pile fall into my lap. It didn't happen. When you were saying how people had the stock price in the office, checking all the time, that sort of became the culture of some of the operating companies. Anyway, I don't even know why I bothered sharing that. I want to hear about the new nonprofit and #HalfMyDAF and all these things that you guys are doing to change the world, Worldreader and everything. When did the nonprofit element, giving back, start bubbling up in your lives? How did it come to this?

David: It's something we can probably both talk about. We have maybe a little bit different perspective. Neither one of us really grew up in a family that gave a lot of money away. We didn't have any money to give away. Jen's parents weren’t really wired that way. For us, Jen talks about this, our first philanthropy was our children's school asking us for donations and these sorts of things, which, looking back on it, are fine on-ramps, but it's kind of incremental. It's not really going to get you over the hump. About ten years ago, we decided to spend the year traveling around the world with our children, with our two daughters. We have two daughters. At the time, they were very young. We were their teachers, which is a whole separate experience, just infuriating and fantastic and everything you can imagine. We also spent every afternoon and often entire days or longer working with them doing service work. We taught at a school in China for a couple weeks, taught English there. We helped paint a house and actually helped someone buy a house in Vietnam and so forth. Along the way, we were reading. That's a separate story about Worldreader. I think both of us at that point were looking for a little bit of the next thing. I, in particular, was very much looking for the next thing. I'd been at Amazon for many years. Again, I can tell you the story of the beginning of Amazon separately if you're interested.

Zibby: I would take that. [laughs]

David: You got it.

Zibby: Finish this one.

David: Maybe I'll tell you just the beginning of Worldreader which will help tie a couple threads together. We actually ended the trip in Ecuador. We were at an orphanage. It was a girls' orphanage. Our daughters had volunteered. We had the spent the day working with the young women there. As we were walking towards the exit of the orphanage, the woman who ran the orphanage was looking around. I was too. I saw a building with a big padlock on it. I asked the woman, "What's going on with that?" She said, "That's our library." Here, my ears are perking up because I'm the library kid. I wasn't good at a lot as a kid, but I knew something about the library. I said, "Why is it locked?" She said, "Look, the books take forever to get here. They come by boat. Often, by the time they get here, they're not very interesting because they're out of date or maybe they started out as being someone else's almost trash books type of thing. The girls just aren't very interested in that anymore." I said, "Gosh, that doesn't sound good at all. Can we take a look inside?"

She said, "I think I've lost the key to that place." When she said that, now we're looking at our two daughters. Each of our daughters has a Kindle because of my Amazon background. We use that to read around the world. Every place we went, we would read books that were local books. I just said, this is crazy. One thing led to another, and we started Worldreader with this notion that everyone can be a reader. Readers build a better future. They're healthier. They're more prosperous, more empathy. If we can get a billion people reading someday, this world will be a better place. That's been what I've been focused on these last ten years just as Jen has been focused on for fourteen years, writing this book about money and philanthropy and doing more in the world. It's been a really interesting both parallel path, but then paths which keep crossing in all sorts of fun ways.

Zibby: You must have really great, inspiring conversations at the dinner table about what you guys have been doing during the day. That's pretty awesome. Insider look at the formation of Amazon, I'll take a snippet of that if you're offering it.

David: For sure. All I can say there is -- you were the fiftieth employee at Idealab.

Zibby: Twenty-fifth.

David: Twenty-fifth, so you know what it's like to be part of a company that's still figuring out what it's all about. I was number thirty-seven at Amazon. At the time, it was, as Jen said, a tiny little internet bookstore. We had sold $15.6 million of books in 1996. In 1997, after some conversations with this crazy guy named Jeff Bezos who actually literally called me one day checking the reference of someone who used to work with me when I was at Microsoft -- anyway, joining this company, he had this huge vision of, I want to be the place where you can find and discover anything you want to buy on the internet. That was his early vision. Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll get to a billion dollars by 2000. I just said, look, how could I not do this? It's technology, which I'd grown to love at Microsoft. It's books. There was a bookstore. We could become earth's biggest bookstore. That was our tagline at the time. We could maybe do something that really did change the world.

It was exhausting and crazy. Frankly, we didn't know what we were doing half the time. We almost ran out of money a couple times. Again, it's probably a whole separate podcast. All I can say is that from the outside today, Amazon looks like this incredible machine. I will tell you, when you're employee number thirty-seven and you're literally putting down the train tracks as the train is just barreling down the tracks, it's pretty frightening. Last thing I'll say, my mother, she would call me and she would say, "David, what have you done? Why have you left Microsoft to go to this crazy thing?" The papers would be calling us Amazon.bomb. That was the thing. Anyway, no one knew why I'd made this crazy decision. I just said, "It was kind of about books, kind of about reading, and almost a passion [indiscernible] for me to see if this was going to work." Luckily, it did.

Jennifer: At that time, people weren’t going to their computers to buy things. I was like, oh, my gosh, who's going to go to the computer to buy a book? Then he was going to add music. He was going to add toys. I'm like, no one is going to go to their computer. [laughs] Luckily, someone else had a better vision than I did.

David: Actually, Jen was a huge advocate of my going. We were just about to have our first daughter. It was kind of crazy. People would say, maybe you should just have one child at once, not have a child and a [indiscernible]. It worked out.

Zibby: Wow. That's nuts. What a story. I feel like, though, the startup life and the parenting life, you're probably up at all hours in both cases. It must have been a nice symbiotic relationship.

David: Right. Neither one of us slept for about seven years. It was fine.

Zibby: Who needs sleep? Nobody needs sleep. Jen, in your book, I found it really interesting that interspersed with all of the personal stories and the thought-provoking issues you brought up, you had little pages with discussion questions as if you wanted us to stop and literally -- little conversation starters. All right, I better stop and talk to my husband about what about the parents about Emily's new independent school, what are they doing with each other? and all the rest. Tell me about putting in the questions at each chapter, and not even bullet points which I feel like other books do, but almost like reading book club questions as you go. Tell me about that.

Jennifer: I do want it to be a conversation starter and get people talking about money. I talk about private school auctions and private jets. I talk about the luxuries money can buy. I also really take a look at the human aspects and the emotions that arise. Even though the specifics might be different for people, I think people can relate to my stories. I'm hoping that they can understand their own in a new way. Those questions really are prompts to get people to -- like you reading it with your husband or giving it to your parents or giving it to your sibling or giving it to a good friend. Then it becomes the catalyst for conversation. It makes it easier to start those conversations. I'd love for people to use those questions not only to think about for themselves, but to share and start these many conversations that are so needed, start them happening. I think my book is the ideal book club book. It's not easy. I always tell people, this is really, really uncomfortable. I'm sort of inviting people to get uncomfortable. In a book club, for example, it could be like, let's acknowledge, let's give each other permission to fumble around, to get it wrong, to get messy. That's what we're going to be doing together. If you can create that safe space, it really can bring people closer. I think on the other side of those fears is a real connection, a sense of relief, and then a chance to really learn from each other and collaborate.

Zibby: I have to put you in touch with -- have you heard of Emmanuel Acho? He started something called Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man. He's doing all of that about race. Now he has a book coming out, I think this week, that Oprah is helping publish. He's a big deal. He's only twenty-nine.

Jennifer: Wow.

Zibby: I know. I know. I know. Let's put that annoying fact aside. He literally was saying the same thing. You need to feel a little uncomfortable. You have to have a conversation that gets you out of your comfort zone. That's how we make change. You're doing it about wealth. He's doing it about race. Now we need somebody about uncomfortable gender conversations. I can do a whole panel. [laughs]

David: That's a great idea. There's not a lot of examples of people growing without a little discomfort at some point. There just aren't. That's what Jen's really trying to do, is push you into that zone. Then hopefully on the other side, there's a better connection.

Zibby: It's like working out. It doesn't feel good, necessarily, but afterwards, you feel -- I mean, sometimes, as I hobble around today. Sometimes you feel better. What do the two of you think about how much anti-wealth sentiment there is in the United States right now? I feel like being wealthy is the worst thing you could possibly be. So many, even, politicians and everybody want to take wealth away and redistribute it. What is your view on all that?

Jennifer: I do think it's a huge problem. I think maybe it's the biggest problem our country is facing, this disparity. There's a lot of resentment. I don't think the resentment helps anyone. It doesn't help those who feel it or the people on the other side. When there's a huge and influential segment of the population that isn't talking to each other and who feels attacked by this and isolated, it's not making them empathetic or generous. We need to start closing this gap. Our silence, it has a lot of power. It helps keeps the status quo in place. I'm hoping to get conversations going that can shake things up, help us recognize our own privilege in a new way, help us feel more accountable through conversation, help us collaborate. We have the power to do amazing things and help bring this country together. It's what we need right now, to be united. To shy away from the resentment and the huge disparity I think is not a service to anyone. People are going without housing, without healthcare, without food. There's an education crisis. This is the moment that we need to face this. If we're just going to turn our back or pretend it doesn't exist or accept it, that's not okay with me.

David: Just to add super quickly, just like growth doesn't come without some vulnerability and awkwardness, I don't think change comes through shame. It doesn't work. That's not helpful as a country. It just doesn't work.

Zibby: What do you think about the fact that so many of the people -- I shouldn't say so many. See, I'm having an uncomfortable conversation in my own head. What do you think about the fact that -- if given the choice and you said, do you want a million dollars? most people would be like, sure, hand it over. They're talking on one side about how it shouldn't be that way, but if they were to have that happen to them, they would gratefully accept it, perhaps. Not to get too political, but obviously, there are societal issues. Whose job is it to redistribute that wealth? Is it the individual, or is it from the government? I don't know. What do you think?

Jennifer: I think philanthropy's wonderful. I think we should all be filling that responsibility, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to happen. It needs to happen at a governmental level, policy level. We need healthcare for all. We need to ensure that there's a strong social safety net for people. I don't want to live in a society where people are living on the street. That’s a disaster to me. We need a huge structural change. I'm very thankful for our new leaders.

Zibby: Me too. I'm very excited. I'll air this later, but we're talking now right after this historic, exciting weekend. I feel like I've been bouncing around my house or something. Just so much optimism right now, so much excitement. I'm so ready for it, which is great. Wait, there was something I wanted to ask about wealth. Oh, I wanted to know how you're handling your daughters at this point. In order to not spoil them, today, what is your approach to parenting without spoiling? What are the rules?

Jennifer: The groundwork's already been laid. I think it happens early. I don't think it's a conversation. It's living your values day to day, week to week. They're watching you. Kids see how you interact with other people. They see how you make decisions, what you prioritize. Even just thinking about going into the grocery store with your kids, what do you do when someone cuts you off and takes the parking spot? How do you react? Are you deserving of that parking spot? Do you accept, maybe they're in a rush, let's find another one, it's okay? Going into the grocery store, it's an opportunity to show your values. Are you choosing things because of the value they have or the price? How do you make decisions? How do you make choices? That's an opportunity for teaching your kids too. When you go to the meat counter, how do you interact with the man on the other side? Are you gracious? Are you thankful? Same with checking out. All these small details add up. I think that's what kids really -- how they learn is through watching us. It's about not only values, but our attitude. A sense of gratitude is really important. Even if you're traveling to amazing places, if you don't take things for granted, if you show appreciation, all these things are important. You need to walk the walk, and your kids will learn from that.

Zibby: How about entrepreneurial ways versus not? Are you trying to imbue that as something that's -- maybe just by modeling your kids absorb this. Being a Silicon Valley family, perhaps it just goes without saying. What do you think about entrepreneurship in the family?

Jennifer: I want both of our daughters to find themselves and follow their own path and figure out what's right for them. We're modeling what's right for each of us and as a couple. Now they're in their early twenties. This is their moment to find their own path and find their own passions and find out where they can make their impact and difference in the world. I want to support them to be their best selves.

Zibby: Just putting my own two cents into your parenting, I think that even though they're in their twenties, there's still a lot of parenting left in terms of --

Jennifer: -- Oh, yeah.

David: There is.

Zibby: Especially in terms of the financial side of life. I think back to my twenties. I feel like my parents were like, okay, she's good. She knows. We can't spoil her. She's off on her own. Now that I'm in my forties, I'm ready to go. [laughs] I don't think I was in my twenties, necessarily.

Jennifer: No. I realize this more and more. Especially, this is where the wealth gets layered on. I'm reading a really wonderful book by James Grubman called Strangers in Paradise. It really talks about the stereotypes of wealth and the attitudes that we both brought to wealth, which is middle-class attitudes. Those served us well, but now we have to think about how to use our wealth in society and with our kids. It's more inclusive. It's more interdependent. It's starting those conversations. We have started to have family conversations and talk about our values and our mission as a family who has this incredible resource. How do we make sure we harness that for good in the world and that our children buy into the philosophy that we're doing this as a family? That is a piece that, it's in process right now. It's a big question, and a big question for anyone who's come into more money than they had growing up. The big worry, of course, is initially, am I going to spoil my kids? Are they going to be entitled? Are they going to be ambitious and motivated? I feel like we've checked that box, but then there's this whole new, how are they going to be as people, as stewards of wealth in the world?

David: Sometimes it's just better to be lucky than smart. The fact that we started Worldreader ten years ago -- at that point, they were in fourth and sixth grade or fifth and seventh grade. They were young at the time. I think that's right. They’ve had ten years to watch how to steward not just the wealth side, but how you spend your life side of things. Sometimes people ask me about philanthropy and rolling up your sleeves and starting a nonprofit. My basic advice is, do it, and do it earlier than you think you should. Just get into it. First of all, it takes some time to get halfway good at it. Here we are ten years later, and it still feels like a work-in-process, for me at least. Also, it gives your kids and your whole family a way to experience it over a long period of time. As Jen was saying, it's not just about that. People want to diminish these sorts of things as a one -- what does the talk look like with your kids about money? It's not like that. It's years of experience and watching and absorbing. I agree. Our older daughter, actually, was just up here for dinner a couple days ago. She actually brought up wealth herself and the relationship that she has with her boyfriend and so forth. She's twenty-three, so it's still happening.

Zibby: That's a whole nother thing. That's another podcast. [laughs] What advice would you both have both to aspiring authors having written this book -- I'm sorry we didn't talk a lot about your process. I'm interested in all that. Next podcast. Advice to aspiring authors and then advice to people who really want to use their wealth for good, both.

Jennifer: Aspiring authors, have a lot of tenacity. Keep going. I really enjoyed the process of writing. I found it fascinating as a puzzle. How was I going to piece all these pieces together? How was I going to talk about money in a way that wasn't off-putting or offensive? I had those pieces to wrestle with. I have been rejected so many times. Believing in yourself, believing in the process, and just keep going. You can do it.

David: That's good advice. [laughs]

Jennifer: It took me many, many years, so I'm very happy to have it out in the world.

David: On the putting money to work for good, I would say it really starts with looking in the mirror and thinking to yourself, what do I really care about? It's so easy to get confused. People ask you, if you have money -- even if you don't have money, people ask you for things all the time. You have to remember that's a difference sometimes between what they want and what you want. If it comes to doing this sort of work -- Worldreader now, as I say, we're ten years old. We've reached fifteen million kids. We're using technology and local books all around the world. Actually, today -- this is fun. I know the podcast will air in the future. Today, Monday, November 9th, is the day we're announcing that after ten years, we're finally bringing our program to the United States to help vulnerable communities here in the United States. That's going to have huge ripple effects on the organization. It's hard work. It's hard. Running a nonprofit is not easy, and doing good in the world, whatever that looks like for you. These are big problems, the problem of literacy, the problem with the environment, the problem with, pick your favorite. You better care about it a lot. If you don't care about it a lot, you'll give up too fast. If you give up too fast, you'll get nothing done.

Zibby: That is true. Nobody ever won the race they didn't go on, or whatever that expression is. Thank you both so much. I really appreciated hearing your story from the proposal at dinner to now. Thanks for letting the rest of the world in on your lives and trying to help others in the many ways you do. If people want to support Worldreader, David, how would they do that?

David: They go to worldreader.O-R-G, worldreader.org, on your phone or on your computer. Come on in and take a look at what we're doing. We'd love to have all the support we can get. It's the only way we're able to do our work.

Zibby: Amazing. Great. Thank you so much.

Jennifer: Thank you, Zibby. Really enjoyed it.

David: Thank you, Zibby. Super fun.

Zibby: I'll send all the lottery winners your way. You should just put it in the convenience stores. If you win, here's the book.

David: It's the ticket. [laughs]

Zibby: Just a thought, marketing opportunity. Bye.

David: Thanks, Zibby. That was a lot of fun.