Anna Malaika Tubbs, THE THREE MOTHERS

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

Anna Malaika Tubbs: Thank you for having me. It's really an honor.

Zibby: It's an honor to talk to you. You're such a genius. This book was amazing. Your book is called The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. Can you please tell listeners what this is about? Even though this cover is amazing and the title is amazing, I still think it's about far more than just those women. This is essentially -- you know what? I'll let you do it. [laughter]

Anna: No, you were doing great. I was like, keep going. It's about the mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin were their names. It's also about what they symbolize in terms of black American womanhood throughout an entire century of American history and what they lived to witness, but also what they lived to inspire through not only raising their children, but also through their teachings outside of their families and their communities and in the many ways that they still inspire us today even though so many people don't know their names. It's all about telling their story, taking them from the margins, putting them in the center away from the shadows into the spotlight like they deserved to be all along.

Zibby: That's amazing. You also go back and give us so much rich history of so many places, people, generations. Some of the things, even from something like Deal Island and how that started or the immigration from one country to another, you painted such a picture of history in general. When I was reading it, I was thinking, this is like the textbook -- that sounds negative because textbooks are terrible. Now I feel bad. If you're a textbook writer, I don't mean your book is terrible. How about this? This should be required --

Anna: -- They're not usually as readable. It's a little harder to get through them.

Zibby: Yes. Required reading on the history of black America in general, especially from the lens of women. Still, you have so much information in here. Yet you wove it together in a narrative form to make it highly digestible. I thought that was awesome.

Anna: Thank you. That was a big goal of mine. It was an important one. I wanted it to be a text that people could refer to in terms of learning about American history through this perspective of three black mothers and how that changes the way we view events like the Great Depression, thinking about the Great Migration and actually getting to know participants in it, all of these things that we think about, both of the world wars. There's so many different things that they lived to see, multiple different presidents and the way their policies affected them differently in each of the three cases because of their own access to resources and education. I think it allows you to better understand history. I appreciate you taking note of that.

Zibby: It's great. People are always like, we should rewrite history. You did it. There you go. [laughter]

Anna: Thank you.

Zibby: I like how you threw yourself in the mix. Another way that you made this book so relatable, literally starting by talking about whether or not you're getting your period. I'm like, oh, okay, wait a minute, this book is not what I thought it was going to be. She's open. The author is open and talking to me like a friend. Now she's going to tell me a story and teach me. It's like when a great teacher stands up. Of course, that's probably what you're doing. You're getting your PhD and everything, right? Are you trying to be a professor? What's the goal there?

Anna: It's so interesting when you said that comment about textbooks earlier because I agree in many ways that they can be a little boring, is the only thing. I definitely respect them for what they are. They're such important tools for all of my academic colleagues who do want to be professors right away.

Zibby: Yes. I'm sorry.

Anna: No, but for me, I'm actually not. I'm much more interested in public intellectual work. That's why I wanted to produce a book that was very readable, very accessible while also being a tool that could be used for education, but just in a way that's more fun and that you can connect with. It feels personal. I believe that black feminist theory, gender theory, critical race theory all were meant to help us better understand our world and to survive our world and change it. It wasn't meant to be exclusive or kept within the academy. I am grateful for my time in the academy. I am definitely a nerd. I love my degrees. I loved doing all the research to earn them, but it isn't where I necessarily want to stay for now. I'm much more interested in talking to general audiences about what they think and contributing to current conversations because so much is happening so quickly. Sometimes when you're an academic and you're only talking to other academics, you feel like you're kind of missing out because it takes years to develop certain articles and get them published. Then it's only other academics who are reading them. That's just not currently what I'm interested in doing. Maybe down the line I would become a professor. I love just talking to everybody about what they think. That's what I'm most excited about with the book, seeing what all these different people get from it and what they gain from it.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh, you're going to have the most amazing conversations. There's so much in here. I was hoping I could just read this one point that I particularly loved. It's all the way at the end. I'm sorry. It's part of Our Lives Will Not Be Erased. You said, "I cannot fully express just how much hurt and frustration the erasure and misrecognition of women and mothers, especially black women and mothers, causes me. In my own life, I've experienced others demeaning me and questioning my abilities simply because I am a black woman. How many times have men threatened my sense of safety, hollering at me from their cars? How many times have I heard I was only given an opportunity because of the color of my skin? How many times has another person's looks or comments tried to make me question my worth? I cannot say. There have been too many." I'm reading one more paragraph. I can't stop. Sorry. "I also cannot tell you how many times people have been surprised by my intellect and my successes because they assume I am dumb and that my biggest accomplishment was marrying my husband. My own work has often been hidden behind his, not for lack of his appreciation, but because we still live in a world where women of color are not fully seen." Then you say, "Now that I'm a mother, this erasure takes place on new levels. I have stood at events right next to my husband while he was congratulated on the birth of his son." Then you keep going on and on from there. Wow, that's super powerful stuff right there. That's amazing.

Anna: Thank you. I think so many women relate to it and can feel -- I would love to hear your own experiences of that as well. So often, we're taken for granted, especially moms. It's this weird balance of everyone expecting us to do everything and get everything done. If we don't, then we're blamed for it, but we're never thanked for being the ones who are running the operation in so many different ways. Of course, that's different in different families. In general, women are underappreciated. We see this in the way that we're treated and lack of safety and general toxic masculinity. I think part of it was adding my own personal experience to that so that people understand why this book mattered so much to me, but also to be someone who's saying, I see you. I see all of us who are going through this. I hope that this book can be a part of changing that.

Zibby: Even your dedication, I started getting the chills. Wait, hold on, I have to read this too. Then I'll stop reading.

Anna: No, I love it. This is so fun. [laughter]

Zibby: You said, "This is for all the mamas. You deserve respect, dignity, and recognition. I honor you. I celebrate you. I see you." I don't know if you were talking to me, but I took it.

Anna: Yes, please do.

Zibby: I know this is geared -- well, it's not geared towards black mothers, but it's mostly about getting the facts out into the world so that they are seen in a way that they have not been in the past.

Anna: It truly is for all the mamas, though. I actually define motherhood even more broadly than biological motherhood. Patricia Hill Collins calls mother work the kind of work we do that's caring for others, the way we're bringing others up. Teachers are doing mother work, doctors, nurses, so many of our essential workers. It is definitely a celebration specifically of motherhood, very specifically of black motherhood, but also for all of those that are doing work on behalf of many and who feel unappreciated, feel unseen. It's our time. We need people to give us the appreciation that we deserve. There is nothing that they're going to lose by giving credit where it's due.

Zibby: Ooh, maybe there's some tie-in here with my podcast. It's our time. I love how you say that because that's also what I try to say about listening to this podcast. I don't mean just moms. There are caretakers in so many ways, shape, and form. Not that you even have to be a caretaker, but mom itself, the word, is so limiting, whereas it's such a broad spectrum of people caring for others these days. Content is for whoever wants to ingest it. I believe it'll find the right home.

Anna: I'm excited about that part of the conversation too, just thinking of the different ways and the different mothers. This is especially common in black communities, communities of color, the mothers that you have even outside of your own moms because of this it takes a village to raise a child mentality and practice and tradition that is so beautiful and wonderful. It's very western to do this as an individual journey that everything falls on the one person and that they shouldn't ask for help or they shouldn't admit when something is hard for them. Even when we're having conversations about postpartum depression, so much of that can be avoided or helped and supported if we have more people around that central figure, but also if we just see her. In so many cases, it's going to be a woman who is not seen, who is not given the supports and resources that she needs. We can really change that and make it easier. It's better for our kids and better for society. I'm all about the more you support women, the better society and communities do. I also hope that it contributes to that as well. I have a lot of goals for the book. We'll see how many I accomplish.

Zibby: You should. I believe it will accomplish a lot. Let's talk about these three mothers in particular. You probably know more about these women than anyone, as you spell out so clearly. Even things like the date that they were born is two different dates for certain of the women for their birthdate and just so much conflicting research because they weren’t even deemed worthy of recording in a way. You went and must have torn apart every library and every website looking for everything you uncovered. First, I want to know about your research and how you did that. I really want to know -- maybe, let's talk about this first, if you don't mind. These three women who went through so much and overcame so much, it's unbelievable, yet they produced these leaders. Is there anything as a main takeaway for other mothers if you want to raise a leader and someone who can speak their mind and effect change in society? Is there anything you feel like they did that we can all do?

Anna: Wow. There is so much that I could say to answer that question because, of course, the book is filled with those lessons on how did they do it day to day with all of the challenges that they were facing? I like to celebrate their differences even more than what they had in common because of this notion that we try to categorize black women as if we're all the same. A big part of the book is celebrating how different all three of the mother's approaches were to accomplishing something that in the end, we have these three incredible men despite the many differences in their backgrounds. One thing I think that they all had in common was this combination between both vulnerability and bravery and the way they saw themselves and what they were going to teach their children about themselves and how that allowed their kids to understand humanity better. To break that down a little bit, so often, moms feel that we have to put on this brave face all the time. We can't let our kids see us cry. We can't let them see that we're struggling to do something because we feel like we have to be those superhero moms.

In all three of these cases, they were willing to say, hey, this is difficult for me. Alberta King was constantly worried about Martin Luther King, Jr. going out into the world. That was very real for her. That was her son still. No matter what she wanted him to accomplish, no matter how she had faith in what God's plan was for him, she worried about her baby. We see it with Berdis Baldwin when she loses her own father. She cries in front of her son. She is able to show some of the things that are difficult for her. Louise Little, again, filled with examples of her showing that things could sometimes be very scary. What do you do in those moments where you have sadness, where you have some fear, where you have some worry? You continue to push forward. You ask for help from others. You form communities around you. They all were examples of that balance, vulnerability and strength and being this whole human being that I think allowed all three men to have a really deep understanding. One of the reasons they were all three incredible orators and organizers was they had an understanding of humanity that others did not. I think a big part of that was that their moms were very willing to be honest with them about their own human condition.

Zibby: Okay, I can do that. [laughs]

Anna: It's hard, though. It really is. My son's still really young, so I'm not sure he's going to remember all of my own emotions and my journey of being his mother. I think that honesty is crucial, especially with sons. When they see women in their full humanity in true light, it can make them better human beings.

Zibby: That's great. Nothing like getting some parenting advice here in the midst of --

Anna: -- I want all your parenting advice.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. If your kid has a rash, I will know what it is. I have four kids. I feel like I need to set up shop, a little corner in my pediatrician's office and just be like, why don't you just come through the triage center here? I will let you know what's going on. Then you can leave.

Anna: That is hilarious. That would be actually really effective for hospitals. Just have some moms sitting there ready to talk to new moms.

Zibby: Right? Maybe I should do that. I actually am on the board of something called the Parenting Center at Mount Sinai Medical Center. It's a lot of parent education and all that. I've never thought about just plopping myself down one day and being like, all right, listen. [laughter] Let me tell you how it is.

Anna: He's fine. They're fine. I love that.

Zibby: They're fine. My biggest parenting lesson that I feel like I probably say too much is that you don't have as much influence as you think you have. I think that my kids, each one is born the way that they are. They're all so different. Their genes may be the same, generally, but they're completely different people. I just am here to watch them. With my first kids, I was on top of them. What are you doing? What are you doing? How can I make you better? At this point, I'm just like, look at this. My son's redesigning his room. How about that?

Anna: The creativity, how wonderful. To that point, with these three moms, they had several other kids. We so often only talk about their famous kids, but that's another really cool way to see even how they approached their different kids and their personalities and what they wanted to do with their lives. I think we can gain a little bit from those lessons as well.

Zibby: There was this show that I used to watch. It was only on for one or two seasons. Then it was canceled. Now I'm going to forget the name again. Something like Bob &... It was about when JFK and his brother Bobby were boys. It was trying to show, what did you see in them when they were boys? It was a lot about their mom and how she was raising them. You should try to dig it up.

Anna: I love that. That feels like it's up my alley.

Zibby: It was so good. Oh, it's called Jack & Bobby. I feel like the only person who watched it. I think maybe I was pregnant. There was some reason I was home watching a lot of TV. It's sort of the same theme. What was it in their childhood? That's not exactly what you were doing, but it's always so interesting to look back and see, could this have been the influence? What about this? How did she handle that? Or is it in spite of your parents that you end up becoming a leader?

Anna: That's definitely the case sometimes, for sure.

Zibby: Go back to how you dug up all this information and wrote this book. Your son must be one and half or something at this point?

Anna: Now he's fifteen months.

Zibby: Pretty close.

Anna: Full-on toddler mode. He's just running around and talking and has some declarative statements. We have no idea what he's saying, but he's really emphatic. [laughs] It's a really cute stage.

Zibby: How did you do this whole book at the same time? You must have done a lot of it before. Tell me about that.

Anna: I started the research before we were expecting my son. Started with my PhD program. Definitely, the journey of becoming a mother while moving through the different stages and then having my son while I was editing the book gave me this very rich, deep, personal connection to the three women that I'm really grateful for because motherhood can be an incredibly scary journey as much as it is really exciting. Especially for black women in the United States, seeing what they were able to push through, but also the way they were able to transform their communities to better meet their needs brought me incredible inspiration. In terms of the nitty-gritty of actually finding all of this information around their lives, it was really hard. I say in the book that it was finding a needle in a haystack. Even if you just take one paragraph, you'd have to break it down into almost each sentence that I had to find a different fact in order to complete that one paragraph because information about them was so scattered. Then there were conflicting documents on what one person said versus another scholar versus all of these things. That's what adds to the complexity of their humanity. It's definitely a challenge that I appreciated.

What frustrated me most was how little there was out there because there's so much more about their lives. I hope maybe the families will be more willing to speak about them now. One of the problems -- maybe it's not a problem, but it's a challenge. They wanted to protect their moms. These are three families who had been through so much scrutiny, so much inquisition from different sources, whether that was scholars or journalists, etc. I definitely felt their need to keep this person who was so important in their life guarded from that kind of scrutiny. I am excited, though, now that they're able to see what the product was and what I wanted to do all along that they feel proud of it and they're happy with what I was able to do. Hopefully, that will allow us to hear even more stories about these three women. So much of it was going through all of the men's works first, then anything that people had written about the men. There is so much. It's incredible. Every single year, there's a new book about one of these men, which I find incredibly brave by these writers because what else is there to say? I don't know how brave they are to go in and say, I have a whole new thing about these three men that we've already learned so much about. There's nothing wrong with that. I just hope we can have multiple books about the moms as well and taking them, like I said earlier, from the margins and bring them to the center. If there was just a small mention, I would take that.

I had to really go away from my computer. I had poster boards all over my walls with these really huge timelines. I was filling them in with Post-it Notes. Then I could see where I had really big gaps which actually tended to be towards the beginning of the women's lives before they were married, before a man made their life worth recording, really. Unfortunately, that's kind of how it appeared and what it symbolized when I had this huge gap between maybe they were born this year, but we know for sure they married their husband that year. This is when they had their famous sons. Going back and filling that in with historical context and going really on a deep dive into Grenada's history and Deal Island's history and Atlanta's history, that's how I just filled it all out and took little parts where other people had said -- Maya Angelou had described Berdis Baldwin, so finding her name in one of Maya Angelou's speeches and learning that she was really short and that Maya Angelou had to bend to half her height to kiss her on the forehead. That was how it all came together. Then I called different historians around the country. I was also able to work with some researchers at different sites who helped me find birth certificates and marriage certificates and doctor's notes, even, from some scholars who studied the men and had archives that no one had asked to see before about the moms. They just shared those with me. It was an incredible journey, really difficult, but also a really beautiful one at the same time.

Zibby: Wow, and a fabulous final product. I feel like, and maybe this is already in the works, but shouldn't this be a three-part series on HBO or something like that?

Anna: I would love that. I really would. There's definitely some interest in it. I do have a film and TV agent, so we will see how that goes. The way I picture it is Netflix limited series, maybe two episodes for each mom, and just getting to better understand, again, what we were saying at the beginning, the context of US history. That's the thing that really connects them because all three of these moms never met each other. Their sons would meet each other eventually, which I think is really a beautiful part of the book as well. To see how something might happen nationally and then you get the scene through that mother's life I think would be really beautiful. We'll see what happens.

Zibby: Okay, fine, it won't be three parts. I've now expanded my order to perhaps a six, seven, or eight-part miniseries.

Anna: Even a musical. I think a musical would be beautiful.

Zibby: Musical?

Anna: Yes, like a Hamilton but where the characters are actually people of color. That would be cool.

Zibby: I miss the theater so much these days.

Anna: Me too.

Zibby: Oh, my gosh. I didn't think I would miss it so much.

Anna: Then you can't go. You're like, I want to go so badly.

Zibby: Right? Anyway, wow, that would be really interesting too. So much you could do. I feel like I want to pause life right here for a minute, fast-forward twenty years, and see what you're doing. I feel like you're going to do really amazing things in the world for so many reasons. I'm just really excited to watch how you end up harnessing your intellect and hard work and perspective and empathy, all of it combined to effect change.

Anna: That means the world to me, Zibby. I really appreciate that. Hopefully, we'll have more conversations. Twenty years from now, I'll have another [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Zibby: When you are whatever you want to be, whether you're the president or whatever -- do you have giant aspirations, or not really?

Anna: It's so crazy because in many ways, I'm living the dream that I've had for so long. I wanted to write books and travel and speak about them. The travel aspect is definitely being hindered by COVID right now, but that's okay. I'm getting to travel from my living room, which is a lot of fun. I really did just want to produce my writing. I do fiction and nonfiction. My next one is going to be a novel that I'm finishing up and hopefully will be able to pitch this year. Just talking to people about it and getting everybody excited about things that can be complicated and theory that people feel maybe is overwhelming and that pushes them out of the conversation but that actually brings them into a welcoming environment where we can sit and talk about things that are affecting us as a nation. We'll see. Maybe that turns into a TV show at some point. I don't know. I'm excited to see. It's fun. Hopefully, maybe having some more kids. I think that's a huge part of my journey as well. I don't know what the future holds, but I'm really enjoying the moment. This is where I've wanted to be for a long time. I cannot believe the book is now out.

Zibby: So exciting. Enjoy it. I didn't mean to not give this moment its due. I was just curious.

Anna: No, I appreciate that. I'm excited too to see what happens. What about you? Where do you want to be?

Zibby: I just want to keep doing more of what I'm doing. I want to just expand all the things I'm starting. I don't know. I just want to see where it all goes.

Anna: It's such a good position to be in where you're like, I love this. Let's just do more of this on bigger levels, bigger scales.

Zibby: If I could just replicate myself, that would be good. [laughter] Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Anna: Wow, yeah. For me, I always talk about the fact that it was not an easy journey, necessarily. I am young, but I also applied to PhD programs four times. Didn't really find where I wanted to be. Didn't get into all the programs I wanted to get into. It was really sad. Every time I got these rejection letters, I was like, but everyone told me that I had done what I needed to do to make it to the next step. I've done all the work. Then it just was perfect where I ended up and being at Cambridge and having the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and being able to compete my PhD within three years. I had become really obsessed with doing an American PhD program that was going to take me seven years and when I wasn’t getting into those programs, felt really dejected and felt like maybe I was not understanding what I was supposed to be doing with my life. Then now fast-forward to finally getting into a perfect program and having my book out. You just have to really push forward past those rejection letters. There's going to be so many of them. Even if you want to not necessarily -- self-publishing is a different route. If you want to work with an agent and you want to get a book deal, some agents aren't going to work with you. They're not even going to reply to your query letter.

You'll find the ones who believe in you. Then from there, the ball just keeps rolling. It's probably very cliché. I think everybody says this. It's so much easier said when you've accomplished the thing than when you're in the middle of the struggle. Definitely, from somebody who received a lot of rejection letters and who, at times, felt like maybe I wasn't doing what I really in my heart felt I was supposed to be doing, just to keep pushing, but also being understanding with yourself. Then with the novel that I'm hoping to pitch this year, I've been writing it for four years. It's a long, long process. I remember other writers telling me that at the beginning. I didn't really believe them. I was like, sure, you maybe had to wait that long, but I'm going to have this book out so much sooner. I'm on my sixth round of edits. It's getting closer and closer each time, but it is a journey. Just stick with it if you really love it. It's definitely worth it once you're able to show the world your work.

Zibby: Perfect. Great. Anna, thank you so much. Thanks for the coming on the show. Thanks for your amazing book and all of what you have to teach in so many different ways.

Anna: Thank you so much, Zibby. I really appreciate the time.

Zibby: Take care.

Anna: Bye.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Laura Tremaine, SHARE YOUR STUFF. I'LL GO FIRST.

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Laura. I'm so excited to welcome you to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books."

Laura Tremaine: I am so excited to be here, Zibby. Thank you for having me.

Zibby: As I was just saying before the podcast, I feel like I know you because of your amazing podcast and your new book, Share Your Stuff. I'll Go First.: 10 Questions to Take Your Friendships to the Next Level. The best part about this book was all the stuff that you shared, I think. I just wanted to know more and more about you. I was like, forget the questions. Tell me more about Laura. [laughs] Congratulations on the book.

Laura: Thank you very much. I'm super excited, my first book even though I've been writing for all this time. I feel like, finally, I get to have something I hold in my hands that's not just on the internet.

Zibby: That must feel amazing, right?

Laura: It feels amazing. It really does.

Zibby: Tell me about the inspiration for this book. What made you write it? Why did you package it up this way with questions for other people to ask? It has a little self-help component to it in the midst of the memoir, I would say. It's an assortment of bullets at the end and ten funny things or things you wouldn't know about you and then questions you can ask your friends. Tell me about the format choice.

Laura: It's funny because I always pictured and always wanted to write more traditional memoir or at least personal essay. I thought that was the more literary, sophisticated thing that a person should write. I did try to do that. It just felt forced. It felt like I was trying to be a sophisticated writer when actually, everything flowed a whole lot easier when I just did what I really do, which is just share my story and talk the same way that I would if I was talking to an audience on my podcast or on Instagram or something like that. When I changed up my mindset around it and stopped trying to be an essayist and decided to share the way that I am comfortable sharing, it just came out in this format. On my podcast, which is called "10 Things to Tell You," I ask a question every week. Then you're supposed to answer the question. They're often either introspective or you're supposed to take it to a friend and do it as a get-to-know-you conversation starter.

It made sense to structure the book that way. I came up with ten questions that, first of all, I actually wanted to answer, but also ten questions that I felt like come up a lot on my podcast or from my audience that they want to hear more about from me or from their friends or that they want to share about themselves. I came up with these ten questions -- some of them are deep; some of them are not so deep -- and just structured the stories that I wanted to tell within the format of those questions. Instead of trying to make this meaningful, thoughtful, essay, I really just wanted to tell you about this story that happened in my life. It just came out that way. It felt very natural. It felt much more natural. As I've gotten older, I've realized that what seems to flow is what you need to go with instead of trying to be this other thing. That's how I got here.

Zibby: That's amazing. The story that I've actually already retold now twice is when the scary van pulled up at the house when you were inside. You were so scared. The neighbor comes walking down the street. You throw yourself into his arms. Maybe you should tell the story, a synopsis better that I just did, and how that played into your anxiety, which you also talk about in a really impactful way throughout this book starting in the very beginning and coursing through from your hair-pulling to all these things that were manifestations of your anxiety. Then this one moment, I felt like, was the pinnacle of everything you've ever worried about, and the break-in, but we can talk about that after.

Laura: It was a huge moment in my life. I was a super anxious child. I write about that a lot, my childhood anxiety. I talk about that online. I pulled my hair out. I had bald spots. I had a lot of coping mechanisms. Growing up in the eighties in a tiny town in Oklahoma, there was no help to be had. I didn't see a therapist. I was just a little quirky kid. What it really was is I had a lot of anxiety and a lot of ways that that manifested. I was also a latchkey kid. Both of my parents worked. I was at home alone for hours every day after school starting in the second or third grade. We lived out in the country in the middle of nowhere. I would ride the bus home and then be home in the woods for hours. I was a little bit older when this story happened. I put it in the framework of the question. The chapter that this story falls in is, what are you afraid of? I feel like when you ask someone what they're afraid of, what their deepest fear is, who wants to talk about that? Why are we sharing about this? It seems like such a scary thing to talk about. For me, when I talk about things that I'm afraid of, it makes them less scary. The more that I can drag this dark thing into the light, it makes it less scary to me. It takes the power away from it. When I was a little kid and I was at home alone, the creepiest, most after-school special thing happened where a rusty white van pulled into the driveway where I was playing outside. We were out in the country. I just knew it deep inside my soul that there was something not right about it. Spoiler alert, nothing happened. I was not kidnapped, by the way.

Zibby: You're still here. You're here, so it all worked out okay.

Laura: It all worked out. It really did kick off, for an anxious child, the scary thing that happened that I just intuitively felt like was an evil thing. I guess we'll never know because, again, I wasn't kidnapped. It really did kick off a lot of things in me. I became really obsessed with true crime after that. I was young. I was pre-teen, probably, when that happened. Into my teenage years and into my college years, I got really into true crime before that was as popular as it is now. I really got very fearful. It was where my anxiety took a turn. Also, a deeper layer to that story that nothing ever actually happened in, but a deeper layer to that story was I told everyone around me that there was something evil about that van. Again, I was eleven, twelve. I'd been staying home for years. Things had happened. People had rang the doorbell. People had stopped by the house, strangers. I had never felt this kind of deep inner fear. It really bothered me when my parents or my siblings, no one believed me that there was something different about this situation. I felt like in that moment not only did I have a real twist and turn towards -- my fear took a real turn. Also, maybe that's the moment when I kind of became a self-advocate or something. I realized no one is going to believe me just on my word of it, just on my own intuition.

It really changed my life. After that, I stopped staying home alone. I would go to the library after school or other things. I had to make all those adjustments and all those changes myself. I had to be like, okay, if no one's going to believe me that I'm in danger out there in the woods, I'm going to have to take it on. I talked about that story in my family. It's sort of a family lore story. We still joke about it. No one in my family, still to this moment, believes that there was anything wrong with that van. For me, when I sat down to write my book, it was one of these primary stories of my life that I wanted to share. When I'm thinking of the ten stories I want to share in my first book, it was one of the major ones. I think that this happens to a lot of us in our childhood. We have this pivotal moment. Maybe it is a truly tragic moment or something really huge that you can point to. Maybe it's a nothing story like mine. A scary van pulled in. A scary van pulled out. That's the story, but it was a big thing for me. I wanted to share it also as a way to give the reader permission to take those kind of "nothing" stories and say, yeah, this has some weight for me. It doesn't matter if no one ever understands why, but this was a real moment for me.

Zibby: I think that's something just so relatable, when you have any sort of fear or doubt and you can't get people on your side about it or people minimizing the worry, which never helps. I'm so worried about -- oh, you'll be fine. You'll be fine. That makes it worse. That always makes it worse.

Laura: It was a really big deal to me that I wasn't believed. It also sort of set me on this path of listening to my intuition or not. No one used that kind of language with me back then. Really, it is a thing of, you have to trust yourself. If you sense that something is not right here, you have to believe that. You have to go with that.

Zibby: And PS, that's how you got all that time in the library. Perhaps that's why you even wrote this book and why we're on the Zoom together.

Laura: Thank you for connecting all the dots. Thank you. Thank you.

Zibby: Anytime. My pleasure. I also loved all your delving into your past relationships and how each chapter, not every chapter, but many chapters had little scattered Hansel and Gretel-type crumbs of your past relationships from the pastor to coercing your husband to marry you to your first boyfriend, all these broken hearts, everything. I felt like the way you unveiled your relationship history was very -- I almost felt voyeuristic, like, ooh. [laughs] I'm snooping here into her private life. I found it just so entertaining and awesome.

Laura: Thank you for saying that. I will say, that is something I'm, I don't want to say embarrassed about, but I have some vague vulnerabilities that I'm a forty-one-year-old woman, married happily, mom of two, and I am still writing about ex-boyfriends and things like that. I got to the end of the first draft and I was like, did I write too much about my exes? My publisher was like, "Maybe."

Zibby: Did you take some out? Is this the edited-down version?

Laura: Yes. [laughter]

Zibby: I don't know. I really like those parts. I feel like once we're all married and boring and all the rest, it's nice to hear about what the before was. It's similar to how I feel about meeting brothers and sisters of friends I made as grown-ups. Whereas when we're kids, you know everybody's family. It just gives a context to everything else. It gives more context to a person to hear about how they got where they are.

Laura: It does. The same as the white van story being a childhood story, in some ways, those early relationships, your first love or your first heartbreak or the person you almost married but didn't, all of those people, if you're lucky enough to have had such a trail, then they do matter to your life. One really bad heartbreak will probably affect how you interact in your next relationship or whatever. There is a connection to all of these things. After a certain age or after you've been married a certain length of time, you're not supposed to talk about that anymore. You're supposed to think that that is all dumb and young, immature stuff and doesn't really matter. That's just not true. Those relationships meant a lot to my life. They definitely affected the relationships after them, which then of course became a marriage. I don't think you should dwell on them. There's obviously an unhealthy, toxic place you can get to with fixating on past relationships. I have tons of girlfriends, and like you said, I could hear about their exes all day.

Zibby: Right? It's so juicy.

Laura: It's funny. It's interesting. Tell me all the ex stories.

Zibby: Totally. Plus, you include so much about what it feels like to be a transplant in LA and making that into your home and your whole blog, which of course is how you have turned this whole thing into the thing that it is. In fact, I want to hear more about that. You started the blog, Hollywood Housewife. Did I get that right, Hollywood Housewife?

Laura: That is right.

Zibby: By the way, do you know the author Helen Ellis? Do you know who she is? Have you read her work?

Laura: Is she the American Housewife?

Zibby: Yes. She wrote American Housewife and Southern Lady Code and has a new book coming out. I think she's from Kentucky but lives in New York City. I feel like you jumped off from different places and landed on different coasts, but you're both very funny and witty. If I were still doing all my events, I would do one with the two of you because I feel like you'd have such an interesting conversation. Maybe I could just introduce you. I feel like you would be friends.

Laura: I would love that. She has been in my to-read stack for ages because I also sort of felt like maybe we would have something in common. I haven't gotten to her yet, but I will. I think I will.

Zibby: I don't know why I'm plugging another author in the middle of our interview. I'm sorry. I'm just trying to connect you, and not in a negative way.

Laura: No, I love it. I love it.

Zibby: So Hollywood Housewife, you start the blog. How does the blog become the podcast, becomes the book? Tell me that whole story.

Laura: There are a lot of steps in between. I started the blog when my daughter was just a few months old. It was 2010. I'd been reading mommy blogs in the years that I was trying to get pregnant and then while I was pregnant. The internet, not the internet as a whole, but blogs and personal sharing and all of this kind of thing was still a real novelty. I loved it. I've always felt like I was a writer in my soul. This removed all the gatekeepers. There was no publishers. You could just share your stuff online. I was obsessed. I actually started the mommy blog because that's what people were doing. I didn't have a whole lot of interest in actually writing about motherhood. I still don't have a lot of interest in writing about motherhood in general, but that was sort of the avenue for me to be able to write immediately. I started that in 2010. I was able to build a little bit of an audience. A lot of the feedback that I got from people was that they loved reading blogs like I did. They loved reading my blog, but they would never share themselves. They just wanted to read other people's stuff. They wanted me to keep doing it, but they would never.

That's a very strange, backhanded compliment. I think they actually did mean it as a compliment. Actually, what they were saying was they would never be so tacky as to put themselves on the internet. I just kept receiving that message, some version of that message, over and over. Then when social media started, there was all this shame around people posting selfies. I just kept seeing this message of women who liked other people to share, but they could never share themselves. It wasn't because they were deeply insecure or anything. There was all these reasons, these cultural reasons. Maybe there was some insecurity. It felt passive-aggressive. It felt like people needed permission to share. They didn't necessarily want to be on a stage, but they did want to share themselves. They did want to have connection with other people. My time at Hollywood Housewife, writing that particular blog which was very family focused, as my kids got older and I also started to tire of the name and the branding, it didn't really fit. It sort of was meant to be tongue and cheek during the Real Housewives franchise, that boom. Then it started to be like, I'm sort of embarrassed to say this, that this is the name of my blog.

I started to phase that out and decided to close that actual blog. By that time, I was a cohost on a podcast called "Sorta Awesome" which I had kind of done as a favor to a friend, to be honest. I didn't know anything about podcasting, but I was like, fine, whatever. I just loved it. As you might have experienced, I ended up loving using my actual voice. I loved having the good conversations. I had been trying to make this writing go in a more serious way. I'd been trying to use the blog to do that. When I closed the blog and started talking is when I felt like I really found my voice. It then became so much easier for me to write because I didn't have all these hangs-ups about the perfect sentence structure or anything. I felt like when I was actually talking and I was getting a response, I found a groove. I took what I had learned during that mommy blogging time of just seeing how lonely women were on the internet -- they were turning to the internet. They were turning to blogs and then eventually social media to watch women share themselves, but they weren’t actually sharing their own selves. They didn't know how.

I hosted a few of these challenges to get people to share. What I learned -- this is still true to this very moment. If you give people an assignment, if you're like, we're all going to share this thing, we're going to share our favorite reading chair, we're going to share a selfie, we're going to share what we learned this month, whatever, give them any kind of assignment, people will share. They feel a permission when they say, well, I'm participating in this online challenge, so I can share this. Whereas they would never in a million, gillion years just say, hey everybody, this is my favorite reading chair. They just wouldn't do that. If they have this thing that they're participating in, they will do it. They want to do it. I loved that. I'm like, great, I will give you all the prompts. We will do all the prompts if you will share, if it will get you sharing, if it will get all of us sharing. I had done this challenge called 10 Things to Tell You. That's what I called the challenge. It was so successful and made me so happy that then I decided to make that a weekly thing and make that be a podcast because by then I had discovered that I loved podcasting. The podcast was called "10 Things to Tell You." The challenge online that I still do is 10 Things to Tell You. Then when I pitched the book, I pitched it as 10 Things to Tell You, but it became Share Your Stuff. I'll Go First. I like that title better.

Zibby: There you go, or so we're going to tell the publisher. [laughs]

Laura: That's right.

Zibby: I love the title. I would've loved the other title too. It's great. It just totally tells you what type of person the author is and the willingness to be open. Then that's when people want to be open back right away. You go first, we're in.

Laura: Exactly. I hope that it gives people permission. There is a tiny bit of a self-help element to it. I'm not an expert in that. I don't have any degree. I hold all that stuff lightly. I enjoy self-help books and stuff myself. I love them. I love to talk through what I'm learning and how I'm growing. That comes out in the book a lot when I'm trying to encourage people how they can think about this question or this prompt. I also just want to be really clear with everyone that this is no expertise. I'm a self-help hobbyist.

Zibby: When I mentioned self-help in the beginning, I didn't mean to scare anybody that this is a true expert. I hope that you didn't take it -- the stuff with genre these days, there's so much overlap. I feel like anything that can help somebody else I consider sort of self-help.

Laura: Totally. I'm all about self-help. I love all of that stuff. I think this is categorized as self-help or motivation or some kind of thing like that, but a lot of it's my personal story in the book.

Zibby: Personally, I find that a lot more compelling than more research. Research is really interesting as well, but not if you're trying to spark a conversation, perhaps. Do you have more writing aspirations? What's coming next? What's your game plan here? Do you have one?

Laura: I do. This is a two-book deal. I am starting a new book in 2021, sometime. I don't totally know the angle, but it will be in the same genre, I guess we'll say. I do love mixing this personal essay with other nonfiction elements. It's a funny hybrid that seems to have sprung up out of internet culture, speaking directly to the reader but then also sharing personal things. Then like I said, it feels comfortable for me. As I try to hone my writing skills on and on, I do hope that I'm maybe writing something different in ten years. It has been a process to not be embarrassed to be a blogger, to not be embarrassed to be a self-help hobbyist, to get where I am and own it and be like, this is actually my sweet spot this year and where I am right now. Maybe I'll be a serious writer in the future, or maybe this is what my talent is. That's been a process. I think that was a process all through my thirties and as we slide into my forties, to be like, actually, what is prestigious anymore? It's kind of just what connects with people.

Zibby: Only one book a year can win the National Book Award. Let someone else win that book award. In other words, there are authors who, that's their go-to, is that style of writing and the obsession with form and intricacy and sentence and all of that. Let them have that if that's their thing. That might come as easily to them as you speaking from the heart comes to you. Everyone can tell when someone's trying to be something that they're not. This is how I felt in business school. There are people there who are dying to get jobs in marketing. I was like, oh, marketing is a fallback for me. This is how I knew I didn't really want to do that. It's the same kind of thing. The people who really want to write literary fiction can write literary fiction. It doesn't have to be you. That's totally cool. That's my philosophy.

Laura: I'll love to read it.

Zibby: I get it.

Laura: I love to read some really highbrow things. I love it. I feel smart. I'm amazed that people can do it. It's taken me a long time to be like, but I'm not going to do it.

Zibby: That's okay. You wrote a whole book. It's a great book. It makes everybody who reads it want to be your friend. How cool is that?

Laura: I hope so, Zibby. Thank you for saying that. Let's hope so.

Zibby: I think so. Now that I've pinned you as some sort of an expert in some way, what advice do you have to aspiring authors, perhaps aside from don't try to -- well, that was my advice. Don't try to win the National Book Award on the first try. Anyway, go ahead. [laughs]

Laura: I think you should try different avenues to find your voice. I knew I was a writer, but when I was writing -- they say you're supposed to write every day to become a better writer and everything. I did that. I wrote every day on my blog for years and years. Of course, it was an amazing discipline. I did learn a lot in writing for an audience by doing that. I had to take a few years and do something else, which was podcasting, which was using my physical voice. Then when I came back to the actual page, I was a much stronger writer. I don't think that, for aspiring authors, you have to be scared of taking some time to do something else, to try painting, to try singing. You're not losing your writing muscles when you go to try to find yourself or try to find a way to express yourself with a different medium. If writing is really what you want to do, it will come back to you tenfold.

I really worried when I gave up my daily writing habit that I was sort of giving up that dream. It was the complete opposite. I don't want to go on a tangent here, but I tried to get a book deal with my blog and all of that kind of stuff. It didn't go anywhere. I didn't get it. When I closed all of that up and I thought that was the end of a chapter, it was like the opposite was true. I needed to go do this other thing for a couple of years. Then when I came back and I was like, I really want to be a writer, I was shocked at how much more easily it flowed then from just taking the years of the disciple, but then taking the time to do something else. I hope that that makes sense to an aspiring writer because I know that it's scary. I definitely did not know that in the moment. This is me in hindsight, but it's really true.

Zibby: I love that. I totally relate. That's awesome. And relate to how much fun podcasting is and all the benefits. It's a writing-adjacent activity in a way.

Laura: It is. You're still having to express yourself articulately. It is. It's a thing.

Zibby: I'm hoping being articulate is not a prerequisite every day because I'm struggling to string sentences together today, but in general, self-expression and all that. [laughs] Laura, thank you so much. Thanks again for this awesome book, Share Your Stuff. I'll Go First.: 10 Questions to Take Your Friendships to the Next Level. I'm just wishing you all the best. I'm so excited you came on my podcast.

Laura: Thank you. I loved it so much. I love that you're holding it. It makes me so happy. Actually, can I take a picture? Is this too weird?

Zibby: No, I love that.

Laura: I'm just going to look so meta. I'm doing it anyway. Ah, you're so cute! Thank you for having me. This was super fun.

Zibby: This was super fun.

Jordan Thierry and Ben Sand, A KIDS BOOK ABOUT

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Jordan and Ben, to "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." Thanks for doing this interview together.

Ben Sand: Absolutely. Thanks for having us.

Jordan Thierry: Thank you for having us on, Zibby.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Ben, you're the author of A Kids Book About White Privilege, and Jordan, A Kids Book About Systemic Racism, in the new series of kids' books which are fantastic, educational, inspiring, all the rest. First, how did you two end up contributing to this series? Jordan, take it away.

Jordan: I can go first. I know the founder of A Kids Book About, Jelani Memory, from youth. We played basketball together growing up. We had done some work together as adults. He reached out. He wrote A Kids Book About Racism. We had touched base and were thinking about a topic for me to write. Then after the murder of George Floyd, we reconnected and decided that A Kids Book About Systemic Racism would be a really great topic to help people understand why these racial injustices continue to thrive in our society that explain that phenomenon beyond the individual one-on-one racism, as I think a lot of people like to think of racism, but looking at the systems that allow these things to continue.

Zibby: How about you, Ben?

Ben: In a way, similar. Jelani Memory, the CEO of A Kids Book About, is a friend of mine. He and I have been in a conversation now together over a decade really about what we're experiencing and are going to continue to experience in our country and in our culture as white people continue to resist their own exploration on the topic of their ethnicity. What does it mean to be white? While we've been talking about it for quite some time, I think in this particular moment in 2020 and as we look ahead, Jelani feels that this is an incredible pivot that's taking place. Now's the time to make sure that we're having this conversation. He asked, and I said yes.

Zibby: Amazing. Have you guys met before?

Jordan: We haven't.

Zibby: No? Oh, my gosh. Ben, this is Jordan. Jordan, this is Ben.

Jordan: Thank you, Zibby, for bringing us together.

Zibby: [laughs] No problem. I'm surprised that Jelani hasn’t organized some sort of meetup with everybody.

Jordan: It's been crazy. It's been very busy over the last few months. With the pandemic, obviously, we haven't had a chance to do an in-person mixer or anything like that, but hopefully soon.

Zibby: I get it. When you were both writing your books, what were some of the things that you wanted to make sure to include? How did you figure out how to get them into bite-size information for kids? Obviously, writing for adults is way different. What's your experience been like talking to kids? I know, Jordan, you did a whole deep dive on fatherhood, so I know you're familiar with that. Ben, you're part of this contingent, so you're actively organizing people, but what about kids?

Jordan: For me at least, it was really, really challenging and really uncomfortable, somewhat, of a process because this is such a deep issue. There's also just a lot of nuances. Writing a children's book forces you to make a lot of generalizations. That's the one part that I really struggled with, was making the generalizations. Of course, there's exceptions of all of these things. I have to have confidence in the parent or the adult that will be reading with these children and helping contextualize what's in the book and offer some of that nuance themselves based on their own lives and their own family experiences. I just have to trust that process. I haven't gotten too much critique or pushback yet, but I'm steady waiting for it. That was definitely the hard part, was making those generalizations and knowing obviously there's exceptions to all these things. The Kids Book About team, they have this process down pat. They really supported me in being comfortable with that and trying to tell the story and also not shy away from some of the harsh realities. I wasn't sure how to phrase some of those things about genocide, about slavery. I was very grateful that they were not shying away from those things.

Zibby: It is hard to package up genocide in a very -- when other books are about sleeping sheep. Those are the choices at the end of the day. How about you, Ben?

Ben: I have three children, two biological white girls and my son is half Vietnamese, half Mexican. We've been having a conversation about their whiteness for as long as they really can remember. That really was, for me, where this started to percolate as someone that lives in a very multicultural community. The work that I do intentionally engages communities of color. Part of what I was longing for was a method to try to translate our internal family conversation to a conversation that could spread with the world. I live in Portland, Oregon. When George Floyd was murdered and the protests began, of which those protests continue, I think the white kids in my city were seeing these protests and were asking questions about they meant for them. It struck me that there are not a ton of resources out there to talk to white kids about their white privilege in a manner that actually asks them to acknowledge it, to give it up, and to use it for the benefit of others. So much of the narrative around white privilege has been co-opted by a cultural war that's questioning whether or not white privilege even exists. When you ask the question, what does it mean to be white in a moment when we're asking big questions about race? it felt like now was the time to do that. For me, it was a bit of a translation of taking evening pajama conversations and putting them in a book that could be brought to homes across the country.

Zibby: You did it.

Ben: I hope so.

Zibby: Congratulations. Even the format, I feel like this is totally digestible for kids. I have a six and seven-year-old and then two thirteen-year-olds. Although, forget about getting them to do anything. The little guys, I can still read to. The colors, the message, the questioning, it's an engaging versus didactic type of read for kids, which I think is so important. What is really exciting you guys? Is it that this content is getting out there? Is it that you're a part of it? There must be something that made you stop and feel passionate enough about this that you were like, yes, I'm dedicating all this time to writing it and marketing it and getting it out there. What is it for you personally that made you the ones to do this?

Jordan: For me personally, I'm just really excited to be in company with folks like Ben and the other authors. We're all really focused on this really positive message for our young people about love and hope and resistance and change and acceptance. At the end of the day, that's probably what the Kids Book About legacy is going to stand for because all the books to date have been in that vein. I think it's going to have a really positive impact over the long term. I'm also just really excited to be equipping parents and teachers with something to help get these conversations started with their kids and their students.

Ben: Zibby, what's exciting to me about the book and a kids' book about any of these topics that are being discussed, but particularly the topics around race, is it feels that we are pushing conversations with a generation of kids that are going to be in leadership in a really critical moment in our country's history. I imagine that we're looking at a twenty-year arc in this conversation. Some of the elders, some of those generations that have gone before us, are not prepared to have this conversation at scale. We're seeing a polarization as a result of that. There are many leaders that have huge concerns about our inability to have a conversation about race and the wealth gap in our country. As a result of that, the inability to have that conversation, what it's led to is those that are in previous generations rejecting the idea of critical race theory or systemic racism altogether. To be able to make a deposit into a generation of young, white kids to ask these questions in critical moments of their formation, for me, feels like it's a very strategic move for a twenty-year conversation that has to take place with a quickening pace for the days ahead.

Zibby: In twenty, thirty years, we'll be watching the election. They’ll say, it all started when I read this children's book.

Ben: Yeah, that's right. I'm sure that's what it will be.

Zibby: It's going to be that. I had it on my shelf. I kept looking at it. There you go. You never know. I think about different children's books all the time. It's a good time to really get in there. If you can learn a whole new language without even trying that hard, it's a good time to learn a lot of concepts that when you're older, maybe they're too challenging, or not too. I'm not saying anyone should give up. I'm just saying the impressionable brain at the young age is a good time to get positive messages around. Do you think that getting to a place where kids don't see race is where you want things to go? Would your goal be having kids today grow up acknowledging -- when I was growing up, I feel like everybody was like, we don't see race. In all my education and all that, I didn't even realize it was a thing until I was older and people were polarized around it. I grew up in a really diverse education environment and all this stuff. I didn't think twice about it. There's so much focus now on race that I feel like, especially for little kids, they might not have even really noticed it before. Is it better to notice and probe the differences, or it is better to just be like, her skin's a little darker than mine, but I don't know, whatever? Do you understand my question? [laughs]

Ben: Yeah. I'll take a crack at that. Jordan's book really addresses this even uniquely beyond mine. I think it's absolutely essential that we have conversations about the black experience in America and the experience of what it means to be a part of the Latinx community. What we have not done historically is taught white kids about their whiteness and helped them to understand that their whiteness has been rooted in a systemic unearned advantage that they benefit from and have been benefitting from for some time. When we think about race and whiteness in particular, which is what this book is certainly focused on, we won't be able to have a conversation about race that builds bridges until white people learn about their whiteness. I do this a lot. When I talk to white people, I ask them, when was the last time you ever thought about what it means to be white? The vast majority of white people can't answer that question. They're not thinking about their whiteness. They don't understand where the terms came from. They don't understand how deeply rooted the systemic unearned advantage has been. They certainly are uncomfortable with exploring the topics in Jordan's book around slavery and genocide and the laws that were created. From my perspective, we won't be able to move forward until white people understand their whiteness and then begin to wrestle with it in a way that's critical. That means that to understand your whiteness, you have to understand how whiteness has created an adverse effect at a systemic level for people of color in our country. That needs to be named and parsed out carefully in my view. Jordan, what do you think?

Jordan: I agree with everything you said there, Ben. Thank you. For me, this is not about trying to work towards a colorblind society. It's about trying to work towards an inclusive, vibrant society where these inequities and injustices don't exist. The book, for me, is helping encourage young people to take into consideration the history behind the inequities that we see today. That goes not just for race, but I want them to understand that too for gender, for sexuality so we can contextualize these inequities and then work our way backwards to try and address those root causes. If the book helps train that mental framework for young people, then I'll be very, very pleased.

Zibby: As authors in addition to, I would say, advocates and almost history teachers and documentarians and all the other amazing things you guys do, as authors when you sat down to write this book, what did you learn about yourselves in terms of any sort of advice on writing children's books, on getting your messages out? What would you tell someone else who was like, you know what, I want to, A, help this problem, and B, do so through reaching kids? What would you tell them? How can they do a good job?

Ben: I would say the key here is let your life speak. Look back on your life and try to identify that thread that brings you to this point where you have a longing to write, you have a longing to communicate. So much of an author's experience is really about exploring their own identity. For me as a white person and my own white experience being able to write about whiteness and then to want to talk to other white people about this is really a culmination of a journey that I've been on that pivots me to this moment to enter into a new chapter of that journey. It was just as important for me to come to the text looking for my own growth in light of my own journey. Any aspiring authors or anyone that wants to communicate to kids I think needs to also imagine how that topic impacts them and to write from that intimate personal space.

Zibby: I'm feeling like, is there a memoir coming on the heels of this, Ben?

Ben: A Kids Book About...

Zibby: A Kids Book About Ben's Life. Is that in the works as well? [laughs]

Jordan: I agree with everything Ben said there. Picking up on those notes as well, I think people should value their own lived experience. A lot of people just don't. They don't think of their own experiences. Their own stories have value for other people to know and learn from. That's one of the biggest things I'm always pushing for as someone who does documentary work. Share this story because someone is going to benefit from it. That's one thing. Like Ben said, write from that place. Explore your own identity, your own experiences. The other is a more practical, tangible thing. There's a lot of fantastic children's books out there that deal with issues of race, gender, sexuality, culture, but they don't get out there because the children's publishing industry is so rigid. There's just only a few big players. There's a lot of these really fantastic books that just don't have this type of reach. What I'm learning from A Kids Book About, because they’ve created a really valuable pipeline for new kind of content to go directly to consumers instead of having to go through the big players in the children's book publishing industry, the marketing that they're doing is just incredible. With some of our books being included on Oprah's wish list, the kind of reach that that's getting is just -- I never would've imagined for this children's book. Trying to pull from some of the lessons from what A Kids Book About is doing in terms of the marketing and the outreach and not having to go through the big players in the industry, I think people can learn from as well.

Ben: Well said.

Zibby: Yes, great point. Definitely, the advice is get on Oprah's list. I'm going to put that at the top of my list.

Jordan: Easier said than done.

Zibby: That helps. That definitely helps. First, you have to have great content. That's the first stop. Thank you both. I'm glad I could be here to introduce you to each other. Maybe now you guys can go have a nice, interesting, dynamic, thoughtful conversation of your own without me bothering you with my questions. Thank you for contributing to society and trying to help the next generation. That's really admirable of you. Big thumps up as a parent and whatever I am these days, as a person. [laughs] Thanks. It's awesome.

Ben: Thanks for having us on your show.

Jordan: Thank you so much, Zibby.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Jordan: Take care.

Liz Tichenor, THE NIGHT LAKE

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

Liz Tichenor: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Your subtitle is A Young Priest Maps the Topography of Grief. When I saw this whole cover and subtitle and everything, I was like, oh, my gosh, I have to read that. That must be really amazing. It was. Can you please tell listeners basically what it's about, the period of time, and what happened? What made you turn your experience into a book?

Liz: I had been moving towards being ordained as a priest for a long time. When it actually came to pass, when it happened, my life was a really different landscape than what I had imagined it would look like at that point. My mom had been sick for a long time. She struggled with alcoholism for many, many years. It was just a couple of months before I was ordained as a priest that she died. She died by suicide. It was just awful and unexpected that it would end that way. Then a few months later, I was ordained. It was an unusual setup in some ways. I had decided to take an extra year in graduate school. I was ordained and then was continuing the academic year studying more. I began my first call splitting my time between a parish and a summer camp and conference center. My second child, a son, was born about maybe three months after I began at that parish. I started and was just getting my feet under me in this new job and not just a new place, but my role in doing that work. You learn everything in school, but it's pretty different when you're actually out trying to do the work and discover how you're going to do that work. I went onto maternity leave.

Then forty days later, our son, Fritz, died suddenly, totally unexpectedly. He'd been this huge healthy -- everybody said, he's so big. Then all of a sudden, I was the parent of a dead baby. There are statistics, but I was young. I was healthy. I don't think I had ever really considered that that would be the shape of my life, and maybe especially because my mom had just died. One of the things that people said to me, wait, but you just went through that. How can you be going through this now? It was not even a year and a half later. When I went back to work, it was maybe a month later after he had died. I was still learning how to do this job. There are a lot of different ways to inhabit it. It hasn’t been that long, really, that women have been ordained. It's still a job, a role, that is so influenced by the many centuries of male-dominated leadership. What I came to see pretty quickly was that I actually couldn't separate my grief and what I was doing there with authentically showing up. Yet my job was to lead people towards hope and to look for how the moral arc of the universe is bending towards justice and where we might find good news together. In some ways, that felt so at odds with the really dark and desperate place where I so often found myself in those days.

As I began sticking my toes in the water a little bit, I discovered the more that I showed up authentically, the more I was honest about where I was wrestling, the more it seemed to work, what I was trying to do in my job. The book is a sort of winding road through that process of grieving these two beloved people, of trying to discover how to survive that. There were times when I wasn't sure I was going to come through on the other end or what that would look like. Then trying to both lead a community and also parent -- my daughter was two and change when our son, Fritz, died. Wrestling, do we do this again? We wanted to raise siblings. How? How do we do that? It's a story of, what is too much? and how we try to rise to that and live through it anyway. To the second part of your question, why I decided to write the book -- I looked it up the other day. I was curious. Brené Brown's book, Daring Greatly, was published about two weeks after my mom died. There was this surge as that got traction. I found that book. A lot of people found that book. There started to be more conversation about this intersection between leading and being vulnerable. It's not something that I saw a whole lot of. I was not taught to preach vulnerably. We're taught to be really careful not to use the congregation as your therapist, and I totally support that. The other adage that I heard which I, to a certain extent, agree with is to preach from your scars not from your wounds. Don't go up there and bleed all over everybody. That makes a lot of sense to me.

It breaks down when you're in the midst of life. Life is happening. All these people knew that my mom had just died by suicide. They knew that I had just lost our baby totally unexpectedly. For me to get up there and unpack our sacred texts or try to point to different ideas leading us forward and not bring myself into it, it felt dishonest. Somehow, to the concern of some more traditional folks, I started doing that. I started being just real and sometimes raw in what I shared. It wasn't for everybody. Not everybody is ready for that. The folks who needed it, the response was really stunning. I remember one day several years ago, someone who's now a friend came to me after hearing one of these and said, "Okay, so when are you going to write that book?" She had been through some really tough stuff too, just a terrifying diagnosis and life unraveling and then coming back together on the other side of that. I couldn't really get away from it. It felt like it needed to come out of me.

Zibby: Wow. This is such a powerful story. How did you maintain your faith in God after everything that happened to you?

Liz: [laughs] It was really hard, honestly. There were some pretty bleak days and seasons. I think some of what made a difference for me was that my faith is not a one-on-one kind of thing. It's not just me, Liz, and God, and we go back and forth and it all depends on that line. I believe that this happens in community. That's a way that I have tried to engage it for as long as I've been part of a faith community. I found my way into the church as a teenager when things at home had gone really sideways. We had briefly plugged in as a family when I was eleven or twelve. Then my parents divorced. Everything sort of unraveled. I went back when I got my driver's license and found this group of people who were ready to show up. I looked rather different then. I had, in various turns, a shaved head and bright green hair. They said, "Welcome. We're so glad you're here. Here, would you like to step up and lead this part? Do you want to come to this class?" It was amazing. That continued for me, especially in college. There was just an amazing crew of folks. We chose to be kin together. We could do this work of seeking, of wrestling really big questions that don't have answers, of trying to discern what to do with our lives. We could do that in community.

Both when my mom died and when Fritz died, those were the people that showed up physically and also finding really creative ways to be with us from across the miles. They showed up again and again and again not with platitudes, not with, God needed another angel and blah, blah, blah, not any of that, but just, we're with you. We're letting our hearts break with you. We're going to stay alongside. How I ultimately held onto my faith was allowing these other people to have that faith on my behalf when I couldn't. There were longs periods of time when I felt like, maybe I want to pray or connect or listen, and I have no idea how to even begin to do that. I don't know what those words would be. I knew that there were other people joining me there who could and would, who were doing that on my behalf. I think that's ultimately how we can make it forward. We take turns. We don't all have to have it figured out or steady every day all the time, but we can carry each other in that. I think that's really what carried me through.

Zibby: Wow. It speaks to the power of community more than really anything. That image you just struck up of your walking through the door and feeling welcomed, I feel like at its core, that is what we are all looking for. Whether it's online or in a church or in a recovery group, Weight Watchers, people are just longing for connection in any way. The fact that yours had the perk of having God attached is --

Liz: -- Bonus.

Zibby: Yeah, bonus group member there. I think that’s beautiful, what you just said about being close to people who can maintain the faith when yours waivered. It's just beautiful. I bet those people, now that you're not necessarily on the other side but in a different place than in the depths of despair, must feel so proud of you that they’ve helped pull you through. I bet you'll turn around and, if you haven't already, you'll be the one pulling them through whatever life throws their way.

Liz: I hope they know that. The key people who show up in this book have read it. I ran it by them. I wonder that sometimes. The ones who are especially generous and loving and just so thoughtful, they're often also the ones who end up being the most humble. I wonder sometimes if they know how critical they were, how much of a difference it made. For me, there were times when I couldn't respond. I couldn't receive it. That was about as much energy as I had. I wonder. Sometimes you send things out into the void. You hope, maybe it'll make a difference. You don't know. I hope they know that.

Zibby: First of all, you can now play them this podcast when it comes out. Second of all, you should set aside half an hour this afternoon and just send a few emails or texts. Just tell them because I bet it'll make their day. Not to give you more work.

Liz: That's good work to do.

Zibby: Good work to do. There were so many parts of this book that were just beyond beautiful. I also loved the whole tradition you had of folding up the notes and then as the book went on, pulling out the little scraps of paper. Can you just explain that a little more and talk about the power of these little thoughts that women in your life had to impart over time?

Liz: Fritz was our second child. We had everything we needed. We did not care about dressing a boy in girl's clothes. It was a baby. Whatever. At this point, we were living at the camp where we were working at Lake Tahoe. It was right on the shore of Lake Tahoe. We were living in a cabin that was, I think it was 340 square feet including the outside shed thingy that was attached. It was very cozy. We also really didn't need more stuff. We did not want a baby shower. One of our neighbors who lived at the camp there just felt like, ritual matters. We need to mark this. We need to celebrate and welcome this baby. No, we don't need to give you more things, but we need to do something. She gathered the women and girls who lived at camp. It was me and my best friend, Lori, who's the chef there, and her two daughters -- I'm not going to get their ages right; they're maybe seven and nine, pretty little still -- and my mother-in-law. We gathered in their home. The sun was setting over Lake Tahoe. Ate all kinds of wonderful food. The girls really sloppily painted my fingernails and my toenails.

What they decided they wanted to give me was not onesies and pacifiers, but their well-wishes and their intentions and their love in the form of these little notes. They were maybe three by two, not even that, two by one, very small pieces of paper. They wrote these wishes for me with the intention that I open them while I was in labor with Fritz and that that would give me strength and encouragement. I'd know they were with me and all that. They gave me them in this little bottle. Fritz was really late, really, really late. We tried, oh, my goodness, everything. I walked so many stairs with that baby trying to get him out. We were in Nevada, the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe where, at least at the time, there was not a whole lot by way of regulations. We were planning a home birth. Alice had been born at home with a midwife also. We came to the very last day that, even in Nevada, they would let us do this. He was twenty days late. As a last-ditch effort, I drank castor oil and the next morning woke up in just roaring labor. He was nine and a half pounds. It was wild. There was no stopping to read notes at that point. I don't know if they even crossed my mind. Then we were in the baby fog, newborn, chasing a toddler, all that.

I don't really remember, but I don't think I really thought about them or noticed them until he died. He died at night. Getting up the next morning, there's light everywhere, and there's no baby. I just thought, how the hell am I going to do this? How do I even do this first day? I saw this bottle, this little green glass bottle sitting on the shelf next to the plates and stuff. I took it down and pulled a note out. I read it. I'm not going to remember. It's in the book, which came when. I decided I was going to open one a day until they ran out. It got me through the first week. Then I strung a thread through them and taped them up in the window. They're totally bleached out now. You can barely read the words anymore. It was just this connective tissue between the life that these beloved women and girls had wished for us and sent towards us and then unfolding in this entirely different way, but trying to trust that the love they offered to me and this child was still there.

Zibby: It's so beautiful. By the way, I think that's a really nice thing to do even for people who have lost someone recently. Maybe this will get you through a week. When you're in that frame of mind, that's basically as far as you can even see. Even that feels insurmountable. For everybody who's like, "What can I do to help somebody who's grieving? What should I say? What should I do?" putting like seven scraps of paper in a box might just be the most helpful thing you can do.

Liz: It's a start to get you through those first days.

Zibby: It's like the jumper cables on a car. It's not going to fix the car, but it'll get you to the shop.

Liz: I love that.

Zibby: Tell me a little more about writing this book. How long did it take you to write it? When did you find the time to do this? Where did you do it? All of it, the process.

Liz: Oh, geez. It had been sort of kicking around, that nagging that doesn't go away. It was December 2017. I emailed a friend who has written many books and said, "Jane, okay, I'm ready, but how do I do this? Where do I even start?" We got together. She said, "How you start is, it's way past the deadline, but I want you to apply for this writing fellowship anyway. Just do it." It felt totally just, fell from the sky gift. I was able to join this writing fellowship. It's this bizarro artist farm thing up between Palo Alto and the sea, this old ranch converted. I went that January in 2018 for five days with maybe ten other writers. I worked through all my old journals and made lists and started writing some of it. Then the shape of the program was that month by month I was supposed to turn in pages and get feedback back, which was so incredibly helpful. Writers who are listening, if there's any way to build some kind of accountability in, month by month or whatever interval, that felt just incredibly helpful to have to put it out. I worked in whatever bits and pockets of time I could find that winter and spring. At that point, I had -- let's see, can I do math? Alice was six. By that point, we had had another child, Sam. He was turning three, so a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. I was working full time.

I remember hearing an author describe her process. Her way in was she had this amazing and elaborate ritual to get ready to write. I don't know what it involves, a particular food and a way of making tea and some exercise and setting her -- it took like two hours, she told us, to get ready. Then at that point, she had invested so much time in getting ready that she was compelled to write. That worked really well for her. Her book is incredible. It is so gorgeous. I was sitting there with a couple other moms listening to her describe this and trying so hard to be gracious and supportive because it was beautiful. It was really clever, frankly, how she worked this out. I was thinking, oh, my goodness, if I had two hours uninterrupted, I could write so much just in that time. I tried various things. I tried making recurring times on my calendar. I tried hard to write five days a week. Sometimes that would be for fifteen minutes. Sometimes I would get an hour. Sometimes I'd get nothing for weeks. It would be really hard to reset, but coming back to it again and again. Then, really, what made it possible was that summer in 2018, I had the gift of a sabbatical. I'd been in my new position for four years at that point. It was just a gift. I spent ten weeks. We traveled to spend time with various people that we love dearly and don't see enough of. My husband, Jessie, would run with the kids in the morning. I would write in the morning. Then we would adventure the rest of the day.

I think especially because I had those chunks of three or four hours each morning and was not trying to produce creative work for my job, it was just gold. It was such amazing time. When we came back at the end of the sabbatical, I had a first draft. Then after that, it was just totally catch as catch can. I took a couple of weeks of vacation to charge through edits. There were a lot of late nights. It was a little over a year ago I got the book deal. There was some more rounds of edits. I had received the tentative schedule of how things were going to be going back and forth. I took a new job around this time last year. In April, we moved just a half hour away, but to a new house. I think it was actually on our moving day that I received the copyedited manuscript back and the request to turn it around in two weeks. [laughs] I think I laughed and cried at the same time. We were just moving. Of course, in the depths of pandemic, there was no school, no childcare at all. I guess I'm not really going to sleep a lot. I wouldn't recommend that as a sustainable practice. Once in a while, that's how it happens. You find the time where you can. You get it done.

Zibby: Two hours uninterrupted for a mom is like striking gold. It's amazing. I hear what you're saying.

Liz: Last weekend, I had two hours. I was only interrupted every seven or eight minutes. Even that, right now, it was the best.

Zibby: Amazing. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors aside from finding two hours of uninterrupted time?

Liz: Yeah, good luck with that. Even ten minutes, take what you can get. What feels most live for me to share or to encourage is to write what you can't not write. If there is something that you really feel you have to put down on paper whether or not anyone else ever reads it, write that. If you understand why it matters, it matters. Find the people who get it. This probably won't surprise you, but there are some people who really did not think this book was a very good idea. It was way too much sharing or way too sad. Who wants to read about a suicide and a dead baby? That's fine. They don't need to read it. I'm okay with that.

Zibby: I do.

Liz: [laughs] That's what I thought. I thought, well, I think most people actually are handed, at some point, loss or grief or confusion that is just beyond them. What do we do with that? Can we talk about that? I'd say try to find the people who understand that and are ready to run with you in bringing it out into the world. They're there. Just ignore the people who aren't ready for it. That's okay.

Zibby: Amazing. Liz, thank you. Thank you for sharing your painful yet inspiring story of survival through the depths of despair and keeping the faith and just all of it. Thank you for your time and for your beautiful book which I truly -- I feel bad saying I enjoyed it because it was so --

Liz: -- No, you can.

Zibby: It was so upsetting too, but it was very meaningful to me and memorable. Thank you.

Liz: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Take care.

Liz: Take care.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Sabaa Tahir, A SKY BEYOND THE STORM

Zibby Owens: I did this Instagram Live with Sabaa Tahir for the Good Morning America Book Club Instagram page, @GMABookClub. You can watch it there, I'm sure it's saved in their Instagram archives, and is also up on my IG TV as well if you want to watch it, plus, of course, YouTube and everywhere else. Here is her bio. Sabaa Tahir is the number-one New York Times best-selling author of the Ember in the Ashes series which has been translated into over thirty-five languages. She grew up in California’s Mojave Desert at her family’s eighteen-room motel. There, she spent her time devouring fantasy novels, raiding her brother’s comic book stash, and playing guitar badly. She began writing An Ember in the Ashes while working nights as a newspaper editor. She likes thunderous indie rock, garish socks, and all things nerd. Sabaa currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. I was really excited to talk to her about the number-four book in her series called A Sky Beyond the Storm. By the way, Sabaa is one of the few Pakistani America authors writing speculative fiction. She brings a unique perspective to the fantasy genre. I really loved talking to her.

Hi.

Sabaa Tahir: Hello. How are you, Zibby?

Zibby: I'm good. How are you?

Sabaa: I'm doing well. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Zibby: Congratulations on book four of the series. So exciting, oh, my gosh.

Sabaa: Thank you. It's very exciting. It's crazy.

Zibby: I read many times over that you said you were not a crier, but that finishing this series made you really cry. Tell me about what that was like.

Sabaa: I think I didn't anticipate how characters start to feel like friends. Especially, I've spent thirteen years with these characters. I started writing this series in 2007. It took me seven years to have the first book published. I just didn't realize that it was going to be so emotional. I sort of compare it to when I was a little girl and I was afraid or nervous or whatever, I'd go hide in the laundry basket. I would sort through my thoughts there and everything. These books and these characters ended up kind of being my adult laundry basket. This is the world where I would hide when everything got to be too much or I just needed an escape. Now my laundry basket's gone, so I'm like, I'm so sad. [laughs]

Zibby: Sabaa, I am going to FedEx you a laundry basket from Amazon. You can have one.

Sabaa: Aw, thank you. Zibby, it's going to need to be really big so that I can fit in it. [laughs]

Zibby: Maybe we could put two over your head. Maybe you just need a laundry room. I don't know, something.

Sabaa: Something. Maybe I just need a laundry room. There you go.

Zibby: So many people depend on characters and story to get them through everything. When it's your own and you're creating it, I imagine that's just a millionfold. What does it feel like to hold the torch as one of the first women Pakistani American fantasy writers and how you got to represent a whole new cross section of people, I should say, in both the protagonist and the villains and every character in your book and the community in which you're writing and how you basically went from feeling bullied in the motel your parents had you living in with eighteen people or something growing up to being a number-one best-selling author? I know that's a big question.

Sabaa: It is a big question. One thing is I try really hard almost not to think too much about it, not to look too directly at it because it does feel so big sometimes. I think what really helps me is to focus on the art, to focus on the writing because ultimately, it's so important to me to tell these stories for every single one of those young adults from all over the world who send me messages. They're like, thank you for telling this story. I really needed to see myself. I needed to see my family. I needed to see my friends. I really try to focus on that because that allows me to put the art first. I feel like you're only as good as your last book to some degree. It's very important to me that that's my focus. Then I have two little kids. I think that they don't let me focus on anything other than them. [laughs] It's one of those situations where anytime I might be like, I'm really cool, they’ll be like, Mom, you did A, B, or C wrong, or I just dropped everything on the floor and I don't know how to clean it up, or whatever the case may be. It forces me back to down to earth.

I didn't really consider the impact that Ember would have until a couple of years after it was published. I started really seeing people reading it and saying, this is the reason why I'm a writer or this is the reason why I believe I can be a writer. As book four has come out, I have gotten hundreds of those messages. It has blown my mind because I didn't know when I wrote it that that's what it would be. I was just trying to write a story where I could see myself, where my sons would be able to see themselves one day, where my niece and nephew would be able to see themselves one day, and where the problems that people whose ethnicity is from my part of the world, which is Pakistan or South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa -- a lot of these places with the mythology that you see in An Ember in the Ashes and a lot of places that are going through some terrible things right now, I wanted to see that in a story. I hadn’t seen that in a story. I felt very erased. That's why it was important to me to write these. It really has only started sinking in recently.

Zibby: There's certainly nothing like kids to make you feel like you're two inches tall instead of -- [laughs]. In fact, you even wrote the most beautiful dedication that I had read at the beginning of your fourth book. You said, "For my own children, my falcon and my sword, of all the world wherein I dwell, yours is the most beautiful." That is so nice. It just sets such a tone for the poetic, lyrical way you write in general. It hearkens back. I know it takes place five hundred years ago, but it definitely hearkens back to another era and another time of life and is just completely escapist. I feel like particularly now, everyone needs that.

Sabaa: I hope that the book provides an escape. I really hope that it allows people to feel some measure of hope. That's what I need right now. That's the books that I'm turning to, the ones that even if something really harrowing and stressful is happening, there's hope in the book. That matters to me so much. I wanted to give that to my readers. I worked on that. Dedications are always so difficult for me because it's the first thing people read. Some people just skip them. Generally, I think people read dedications. It's the very first thing they see that I've written. This is for my kids, so I was like, this has to feel good when they're twenty-five. Hopefully when they're much older and I'm gone, I want them to be able to open this book and feel that love coming from me. It took me months to actually figure out that dedication. I wrote it. I rewrote it. I read it to my husband. I was like, "Is this good?" He was like, "No, write it again." I read it to my mom. She was like, "I don't know about that." It was a process. I'm glad I got there in the end.

Zibby: You totally got there. Check plus. Loved it. Maybe you should compile all the discarded dedications. Maybe they'd want to see that in twenty-five years too.

Sabaa: I should totally do that. I had one where I was like, "To my falcon and my sword, you're the reason I almost didn't finish this book." Then I was like, ha, ha, ha, I'm not going to put that in.

Zibby: For the people hanging from my ankles who are not letting me do this, do my job, thank you. I did it anyway. [laughter] Do you read fantasy yourself? Are you a huge fantasy fan? How did you learn how to write like this?

Sabaa: I am big, big fantasy fan. I've been reading fantasy since I was ten, eleven. The very first fantasy book I got was The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. It was written in the seventies. It's all dudes. It's a very classic, old-school fantasy. I just loved that book. It took me away from my troubles. I was in middle school at the time. Everyone knows middle school's awful. It was just a wonderful escape. That was really my gateway book into fantasy. Then after that, I started reading a lot more. I found that I really connected to these characters and these places that didn't exist. As I grew older, I got into literature, more literary works, that kind of thing. Actually, that's what I was working on. I was working on a memoir. I was twenty. I don't know what I was going to write about, the motel. My mother was talking to me on the phone. I was complaining yet again about how I was having a difficult time writing this book. I was just doing it in my spare time as I was working.

She was like, "Why don't you write a fantasy? You love fantasy. You read it all the time." As per usual, she was right. I started working on it. Then in terms of training, it was really working at The Washington Post. I was an editor there. I was a copy editor. I worked late at night. I worked on headlines and captions and did the last edit on a story. I learned so much about the building blocks of writing from reading all these incredible reporters at The Washington Post. I always recommend to young writers that if you are struggling with the form, you're struggling with making your sentences beautiful or making them something that you feel like convey what you want to convey, read a newspaper every day for a year. The economy of language and the way that stories are structured that you can learn from a newspaper is so helpful.

Zibby: That’s great advice. I thought you were going to just tell everybody to try to get a job at The Washington Post.

Sabaa: I mean, it's a great place to work. [laughs]

Zibby: That might not be the most easy thing for everybody to do. It's nice to throw it out there as a suggestion. I want to talk a little more about your relationship with your mom because you obviously are very close. You said in one of the interviews I read about you that you were going to kill off one of your characters. She said she wouldn't cook for you anymore if you did that. That's not even passive-aggressive. That's just outright, on the table, controlling. [laughs]

Sabaa: She threw down the gauntlet. We were talking about the book. She's really funny. She'll always try to get me to talk to her about it. She'll be like, "What's going to happen? Who's going to end up together?" She's very invested in these characters. I told her, "I'm thinking about killing this character. These are the reasons why." She just looked at me like I wasn't her child anymore. She was like, "Don't you dare. What are you thinking? No." Then there's this Pakistani bread called paratha which is a deep-fried bread. It's so good. She was like, "I'll never make it for you again." That's a serious threat. That's the rest of my life not having it. I had to capitulate. I was like, okay.

Zibby: Gosh. If I knew deep-fried bread was on the menu as an incentive tool for anything, I think would have to veer in that direction. Now that the book is out, what has this week been like? How are people even responding? I know it's probably too fast for people to read, but you have so many fans from the whole series. Now you have the ending of it. What is it like now that it's out there?

Sabaa: It's a relief in many ways. It feels like sort of a weight off my shoulders. It's out in the world. I can't change it at this point. It is what it is. That's really wonderful. I've had an overwhelmingly positive response. My readers are so sweet. So many of them have actually said something that I think is very selfless as a reader. A lot of them have said, no matter how it ends, no matter what you decided, I want you to know that these books have meant so much to me. That's such a sweet and beautiful thing to say to an author because it really shows faith in my skill as a writer. They're basically saying, hey, we trust you. We trust what you did. I've had a couple of people who were like, how dare you? [laughs] For the most part, it's been overwhelmingly positive.

It's been a weird week, Zibby, because usually I'm traveling. I'm going to bookstores. I'm going to schools. I'm meeting readers. It's really cool. It's something you look forward to almost as a way to acknowledge that the book is done and it's out in the world now. It doesn't belong to you anymore. It's sort of like a weird ritual, I would say. I've kind of turned it into that. That's not happening this week for obvious reasons, but I've still managed to have these events. I have a bunch this week and next week where I'm talking to a friend or a follow writer about the journey and the process and then doing these one-on-one meet and greets after that are really short but really lovely because you just get to talk to readers face to face. That's awesome. We live in time where it could be so much worse. I think that if this was ten years ago, that wouldn't be an option. We would just be like, sorry. Book is out. Find me on Facebook. Tweet at me if you want. That's kind of it. The fact that we could do something like this is really wonderful. I found it to be lifesaving as I go through this week because it's really allowed me to connect to the readers. I love that part of writing. It's one of the best parts.

Zibby: I think it's been lifesaving for so many people for the whole year. What would we have done? Every so often, I'm like, what if it disappears? What if Zoom crashes? It's great because I'm sure hearing from the fans directly is part of the reward in and of itself like you were saying earlier with people writing because of you. At least you still can access them somehow, which is great. I was watching the trailer for your first book. I was like, wait, is this is a trailer for a book, or is this a movie that I didn't know was a movie? Then I was like, why is this not a movie? What is the deal? Is this going to be a movie? What's the story there?

Sabaa: It's going to be something, but I can't say anything about it because the producers will find me and kill me. Maybe they won't kill me, but they won't be very happy. It is in development as something. It's iterated a few times, as fantasies often do in Hollywood. This iteration is one in which I'm more directly involved, which is awesome and I think makes a really big difference to everything about it, being able to make sure that the cast properly reflects the book and being able to make sure that the story properly reflects the nature of the actual book. All of that is really important to me. That's all I can say about it. I'm really hopeful and crossing my fingers. I hope everyone else does too.

Zibby: I won't ask anymore. We'll see. We'll all be just waiting and watching. I'm sure whatever form it takes will be fantastic. What are your writing plans going forward? You finally have put a capstone on this whole collection. This is a lot of pages, and this is still missing the most recent one. What's next? Are you going to start a new series? What's the plan?

Sabaa: I have something coming up. I can't say much about it again because my publishing house this time would yell at me. It is very different from anything I've written before. At the same time, it has the hallmarks of a Sabaa classic book, which is very harrowing and very stressful. [laughs] I will probably be announcing that next year. I'm really excited about it. Then after that, I'm really considering what I want to do. I think there are so many stories left in the world of Ember. I have absolutely left that door open in the hopes that I will be able to return there when I'm ready and when readers are ready for that. We will see. I don't think we've heard the last of these characters.

Zibby: I feel like you should pull that memoir back out. Maybe now with the vantage point of all of these experiences and being a mom yourself, I feel like maybe there's something there.

Sabaa: You might get your wish.

Zibby: Maybe I read your mind. Awesome. You've already given a little bit of advice, which was fantastic, that aspiring authors can read a newspaper every day for a year, which is really so important anyway. I feel like I'm one of the last people who reads paper newspapers. Do you read paper?

Sabaa: I read online mostly, but I do buy the actual physical paper occasionally, not so much anymore. Before, I would try to get it. At least once a month, I try to pick up the papers that are available to me, which is usually The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. I try to just grab a copy and read it. I really think there's something for reading it end to end. I always would find something that I wouldn't anticipate. I feel like when you read it online, unless you're very methodical and going through each section, it's a little bit more difficult to do that. It was such a beautiful ritualistic thing to have your paper with your coffee and read through it, especially on Sunday morning. That’s what I would usually try to do, is grab that Sunday New York Times and just enjoy it.

Zibby: I have to say, I get them every day. I get The Times and The Journal and the New York Post every day. I have to read it. Sometimes they stack up for a week. I'll say to my husband, "Oh, my gosh, did you know this happened?" He's like, "It happened a week ago." I'm like, "Whatever. I'm catching up." I'm with you. I love to read the papers. I think it's great to also just train yourself based on a certain type of writing. What other advice do you have up your sleeve? You don't have to. You already gave great advice, but if you happen to have more writing advice as somebody who can obviously -- how do you keep your focus and just keep churning out words? Do you have days where you sit down and you're like, I really don't feel like doing this or I can't think of anything?

Sabaa: Absolutely. I have days where I don't feel like writing. I have days where everything I write is garbage. I have days where I'm supposed to write, but like I said, I have a family and I have children. That takes precedence. With everything that's happened with COVID, I've actually found that my hours have been significantly cut because I have to educate my kids in the morning. Then my husband will usually take over for a few hours in the afternoon. That has really had a huge impact on my ability to write. Look, I started writing when I was working at The Washington Post. Then I continued writing through the infancy and toddlerhood of two children. I was a stay-at-home mom during that time. I found that I had to write very much as Toni Morrison once described it, in these slices of time. I call them elbows of time. It's not really about getting a ton done at once. It's about just taking any little snippet and finding some way to make it worthwhile in terms of writing. I would talk into my phone. I would be holding my baby. I have a nice big hand, so I'd be holding my baby with a bottle. [laughs] I'd be talking into my phone to dictate part of a story or talking into a recorder way back when to dictate part of a story. I would steal an hour whenever I could to start scribbling and working on it.

For the first couple of years, that's how I wrote. Sometimes I had help, but it wasn't really dependable, regular, and it wasn't a lot. Sometimes it was family. Sometimes it was someone I hired. I just was clawing away at this book. It added up. That's what I would love for writers to know, particularly writers who are parents or who are caretakers or who have really demanding jobs. You don't have to write all day every day to finish a book. If you can write a page a week, then over the course of a few years, you will have a book. Like I said, it took me from, when I started writing it to when I saw [distorted audio] was seven and a half [distorted audio] for An Ember in the Ashes. It's a long time. That's true. I know that a lot of people would love to just write a book in six months and then see it on the shelf. If you don't have a choice, if you really can't quit that job or you can't become a full-time writer, this is a way for you to claw away at it little by little and just get a little bit done. That's really my advice for writers. You don't have to listen to people who are like, you must write every day. You must write for four hours a day. You must have your own room to write. None of those rules apply to you if you don't want them to. Writers write. Ultimately, they can find a way, usually. If you're lucky, you can find a way to write. That's my advice for writers out there.

Zibby: I am ridiculously impressed at the visual of you dictating while dealing with the baby and the bottle. My thoughts were so incoherent at that time. Even if you weren’t holding anything, that you could dictate and it could become -- I feel like when I speak, as is evidenced right now, it doesn't always make sense. When I write, it's clear. I can go back. If it comes out, that's just super impressive.

Sabaa: It never came out well. It was always like, and then my character runs away because they're scared. Later on, I would sit down and be like, how do I turn that into something that I want to read and that doesn't make me want to run away? It's also about iteration. I think a lot of people think that the first version of a book that writers write is perfect. You know what? If you're that author, that's awesome. I am not that author, Zibby. My first drafts are so embarrassing. It's shocking. I think that if people read it, they'd be like, how did you become a writer?

Zibby: I'm sure that’s not true.

Sabaa: You just iterate. It's gets better and better with each iteration. I must have had like fifty drafts of Ember. The first one was something completely different. The last one and the one you see is the work of just little by little making it better, one paragraph, one page, one chapter until the entire book is better.

Zibby: Wow. That's very inspiring. You should also write a children's book, while we're talking about all the things you should do. I feel like you can bring it down to a kid's level, especially just how you want to represent different backgrounds and everything. I feel like you need to have a children's book in the mix at some point.

Sabaa: I would love that. I will now keep note of that and tell my agent.  

Zibby: You get on that. Thank you very much.

Sabaa: Zibby [indiscernible/crosstalk] write a children's book.

Zibby: Just put me in the acknowledgments somewhere. That's all I need. [laughs]

Sabaa: I got you.

Zibby: Sabaa, thank you so much. This was so much fun. My son is going to dive into this whole series. I'm hoping this gets him off the video games for a few hours. Thank you for taking the time to talk and coming on GMA Book Club. This will also be a podcast on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" so my listeners can hear as well. Thanks for chatting and all that great writerly advice. It was awesome.

Sabaa: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. I really appreciate your time. It was wonderful.

Zibby: Thank you. Congrats on your book.

Sabaa: Take care. Thank you. Bye.

Zibby: Bye.

Christie Tate, GROUP

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

Christie Tate: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

Zibby: I am so excited to finally be talking to you. I got this book in the middle or towards the end of the summer. I opened it up. I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover or anything, but I opened this book up this summer, and these are my favorite colors. This is my favorite design. This wins my favorite-cover-ever award just in case you were wondering. [laughs]

Christie: Thank you. I feel super lucky. That was one of the first designs. I thought, this has exceeded all expectation. I love that blue.

Zibby: Amazing, my favorite color. I know your subtitle is How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life, but could you explain a little more in-depth to listeners what Group is about?

Christie: The book opens, and I had just completed my first year of law school. I had gone to the Bursar's office. I got a little index card that told me my class rank was first. I didn't feel any joy. I felt really, really depressed. I started having suicidal thoughts because my life looked really great on paper and obviously my professional future was going to be fine, better than fine, but inside I just was so lonely. I didn't even have that word yet. I had to go to therapy to learn that word. I was isolated. I had no close friends. I'd watch people from college go on girls' trip. I'd be like, how do they do that? People would reach out to me. I didn't know how to reach back. I thought, this is great, I'm just going to die alone. A friend recommended her therapist. I was on a student budget, so I was like, "I can't do therapy." She was like, "It's group, and so it's cheap." I was like, "Okay." I could see something different in her eyes. The memoir is the story of how I went to group and my life was cracked open by the people I met there and the therapist who was the ringleader of all of it.

Zibby: Wow. I loved your descriptions of not only the other people in the group, but Dr. Rosen and how, actually, you had met him. You have been at twelve-step programs for eating disorders for quite some time. In one of your meetings, you had actually had him come, but he was Jonathan R in the group. What did that feel like?

Christie: It was terrifying. When you open the door, I was like, is that the same guy? Between the time I'd made the appointment and then sat in the waiting room and then he opened the door, I decided, this is it, this is the one thing that will save my life. I had my heart set on it. Then he opened the door and I'm like, I know him from twelve-step world. I thought that would be an automatic disqualification. I'm like, well, I won't tell him. Why would he recognize me? There's tons of women and people in these meetings. He didn't recognize me after the first session. Then I started to feel like someday it might trigger him. Then he'd have to kick me out. That would be so embarrassing. It became one of the first tests of, can I tell the truth? Can I risk rejection by saying what I know, which is, I know you from meetings? It seems like you're not supposed to know that about your therapist.

Zibby: I know. This goes back to Lori Gottlieb's book. Do you know that?

Christie: Yeah.

Zibby: She talked in the beginning of that book, as a therapist, of running into a patient at the Starbucks. She was a mess, and that forever altered her relationship with her patient. Now we go to your book where it's sort of similar. You have this view into your therapist that most people do not have, should not perhaps have. I don't know.

Christie: Obviously, I only know what transpired for me. The idea of the blank slate is not quite as blank in my case as it is, I suppose, traditionally.

Zibby: I could so relate to the times in your book where in therapy you were asked to do or say something and you were just so uncomfortable that I could feel you cringing off these pages. You were like, no, no, no, I'm not doing that. I actually can't even say it on this podcast, what they were suggesting that you do. You were like, I could never. Part of the work was opening you up to love and men and not just totally bad-for-you guys.

Christie: Part of what drove me in was I was bereft of all relationships, but it was particularly salient in my relationships with men. I tended to fall for guys who were alcoholic or had very serious depression and didn't have the ability to be in a relationship. Sidenote, I didn't either, but I could just focus on them and say, why don't you love me? I bought you pineapple.

Zibby: [laughs] The reliable pineapple love trick that we all rely on so much.

Christie: It's standard. It's very standard.

Zibby: Very standard. My question about group therapy -- by the way, I've never actually been in group therapy, but I have been in regular therapy. Do you ever get a diagnosis? I know you had three sessions at the beginning. Does everybody get a pull-aside, let's go in the corner, PS, you have OCD, or something like that?

Christie: That is such a great question. How I've seen this play out for me in my groups is people have brought in insurance forms, and you have to put in a code in order to get reimbursed. Everything that is negotiated happens in group. I saw many people come in and say, "I need your signature, Dr. Rosen, on my insurance form," but they want a code. They say to him, "What do I have? What am I?" We would have long discussions, anxiety and depression is a certain code or whatever. I remember I always paid out of pocket because I was -- this is terrible. This is not a part of the book. I'm very, very afraid of forms. I just felt like it was easier. I always knew I had to earn enough money to go to group because I'm so afraid of forms. I remember one time I said -- this was probably year two. I said, "What do I have? Do I have PTSD? Do I have anxiety or depression?" Dr. Rosen said, "Why do you want to know?" I was like, "Well, what's wrong with me? What's my thing? What's my label?" I knew I had an eating disorder, but that was before I even got there. He really discouraged me. I didn't press it super hard because as soon as he said, "Why do you want to know?" I realized my motives weren’t good for me. I wanted to know so then I could be in that box. Then I could go off and do a checklist in a magazine. I have not pressed it. I've not asked for my notes. I can imagine a scenario where if somebody needed to know or wanted to know, it would be discussed in group and they could get that information. It's hard to get information in group without a full discussion, which is something you have to weigh if you really want to go there.

Zibby: Wow. I just could not believe all the stuff that came out in your group and even your unexpected moments with individual members of the group. You were like, wow, I'm not alone anymore, like Marty. It was just so sweet and heartwarming in a way. That's probably mischaracterizing this book which is very emotional, but it's so funny too.

Christie: It's funny. Sessions themselves can be very brutal. That would be my lived experience. Someone confronting me on things I don't want to talk about or that are painful or I start to talk about it and then I misunderstood, that experience is so painful. That's some of the work of intimacy that I have just never done. I was really immature in that way. That's why I was so alone. When I look back, some of the quieter moments with individual group members, in group and outside, they were so filled with love and care. I had just been running from people for so long that I didn't know that people might just rub your back if you're crying or hand you the tissues or offer to come get you. I had kept myself so isolated that those acts of kindness couldn't even penetrate my defenses, essentially.

Zibby: When I met my current husband, by the way, we were walking down to the tennis court and I was upset about something that had happened with my daughter that day. I didn't know him that well. I wasn't looking for a relationship. He put his hand on my back and was like, "Are you okay?" I married him. [laughs]

Christie: Yes, Reader, I Married Him. [laughs]

Zibby: I get the power of those little connections when you feel like you haven't had them in so long and you so need them. He's probably like, what am I even doing here? This is all a big mistake. [laughs] The part of your book during the accident on the beach in Hawaii was, first of all, so well-written and just edge-of-my-seat type of reading, which is always wonderful as a reader, but I'm so sorry for what happened. Are you able to share now? Do you want to keep it quiet?

Christie: I think sharing is probably helpful. I was so young. It was right before my fourteenth birthday. I was from a very modest family in Texas. We weren’t going to be going to Hawaii. There was a friend of mine, and her family had been so welcoming and so loving to me. We went to Hawaii. While we were there, her father drowned in the water of the ocean. For years, I just didn't talk about it, but I thought about it. It's not like I thought about it all the time. Right around the anniversary time, I'd get really emotional and kind of a panicky feeling. I felt like I was never allowed to talk about it because it was a long time ago. I remember saying that was a long time, and it had been eight years. Each year, I had an excuse not to -- it wasn't my dad. I think I had the overriding feeling that I got to go home to my family in Texas. My dad and mom were alive. We were all well. It's almost like that didn't happen to me because it wasn't my father. That's some of the early work I had to do in group to see what the cost was of disavowing the trauma for me and how that might have impacted my ability to attach. I was so out there, like, I'm a recovering bulimic. I had stories I was willing to tell about myself. Then there were these quiet ones that I felt buttoned down about. I think they were, obviously, tripping me up in relationships.

Zibby: Before the accident on the beach, or the drowning, were you able to be more open with people? I know it's such an important age where things would have developed and then didn't. As a child, were you very withdrawn in terms of how you were talking to people? Did anyone notice a shift in you? Did your family or anybody?

Christie: That's a great question. I'm pretty outgoing and extraverted. I did always have friends. From a very young age, I had a lot of shame, shame about my body. I remember that by age five. I wasn't actively bulimic until right before Hawaii, actually. I think timing really matters. The woman that I went -- she was a girl at the time. The family that I went with, she and I tried out for cheerleader together. The winter before, we'd gone skiing. She's lively and hilarious. I was there. Even if I can't quite remember who I was, I know who she was. She wouldn't have picked some morose bump on a log. I remember us laughing. I have snapshot memories of us laughing. I was a good student, but I was also kind of a wisecracker, as you can imagine from the book. I had an irreverent sense of humor that seemed maybe a little more male than female at the time, the way that Texas is coded. I think that it was the beginning of adolescence and the trauma. Probably even without that, I was gearing up for just regular adolescence strife. You add in that, I think it bumped me off the road for quite a while.

Zibby: You say it wasn't your dad, but it's not like you were in the hotel and you found out he drowned. You were on the beach and saw him and had to pull him on the beach and get help. You yourself had almost drowned a second ago. That is hardcore. Everybody's had stuff in their life, but most people have not had to pull a drowning grown man out of the water. That's a lot to hold onto and not talk about. To not feel like you have permission to cope with it is a lot.

Christie: It's funny. I'm sure a lot of people have this experience. Now that I have a daughter who is -- she's not that old yet. As I imagine packing her off to go on a trip with another family and imagine getting the phone call that my parents got, I have much more compassion for myself and carrying that burden. I had the insane idea that I could've prevented it or I should have. That is a lot for a kid to carry. I can see that now that I have kids approaching that age. I'm like, wow, I'm glad I got the help I needed. Let's say that.

Zibby: By the way, do people still go on vacations with other families? Nobody I know does that anymore. Maybe families go together. The idea of sending my kid off on someone else's vacation -- it used to happen all the time. I brought kids all the time. I went on other...

Christie: That's a really funny question. The only instances where I know that in our community is we know some kids who were only children, and they so they may double up for obvious reasons. It's not nearly as prevalent as it was when I was growing up in the eighties.

Zibby: Me too. It was like, who's coming on vacation with us? Each of you take a friend.

Christie: Yeah, the bring-a-friend thing. I would take friends to the exotic location of Forreston, Texas, where my grandparents had a farm. It was super fun. I would take all kinds of friends there. Now it's funny, that's an interesting marker of change in generations.

Zibby: And the idea that I would just not spend my vacation with my child. I am fighting my ex-husband about, how days of the vacation could we each have? To be like, let's just send her with the Jones' over there, I don't know. [laughter]

Christie: I know. It's so funny.

Zibby: Not that there's anything bad. It used to happen all the time. Oh, well. So tell me about the act of writing this book. You sort of alternate between being private and not private. Some of these things, you held close to home. Some, you feel okay with. Now you've let it all out.

Christie: [laughs] When I started the book, I did a first draft. I started the book on November the 9th of 2015. I remember the date because I just did some research about it. I was like, how long have I been living with this book? First drafts are terrible. It was just anecdote. Then my therapist said this. Then I dated this guy. It didn't have any arc or some of the heart and no specificity. There was no scene of me binging on apples. I was very light about the Hawaii situation. It was pretty superficial. I got feedback that it was superficial and I needed to dig deeper. I didn't know how. I didn't know how to revise a novel. I mean, it's not a novel. I didn't know how to revise a whole book length. I ended up in a situation where -- the writer Lidia Yuknavitch, she does a class called Body of the Book. You can workshop in a small group, the first 130 pages of your work. I thought, I'll do that, and then they can tell me what's missing or what am I doing. It was incredibly transformative because they were able to, both Lidia and my workshop mates who were incredible, they would circle something. I vaguely made a comment, like, I binge on apples at night, and then I move on very quickly. Everybody circled it in red pen, like, show us. I was like, show you? Every apple? It felt to me like that would be tedious. Once I went in there, all the places where they said, give us a scene, I started building scenes. I think that's where a new energy came to life. Instead of telling, I was showing what I was like, what happened, and what I'm like now because of this process.

Zibby: In terms of the law career and where you are today -- now, of course, you're an author, which is amazing. What is your daily life like? Tell me about your daughter. I mean it. Now I feel so invested in you with the book.

Christie: I feel really lucky. The great thing about talking about the book now or having it out in the world is every day, I feel grateful. Every day I talk about the book, I touch back to that woman who was first in her class. I clung to that because it's all I had. Now it's so obnoxious to be like, I'm the valedictorian, but literally, it was the only tentpole I had. When I look back, I get to think about who's in my life today. I have two children. I have a husband. It's corona time, so we're all home doing our things in our little corners of the world. I still go to group. I still work full time, so that's that. I am really committed. I get up really early, in the fives. I do writing. I also do meditation just because I don't know how to survive things that are happening in the wider world without a little bit of meditation. Do the writing until the people wake up around me. I get them going. I do my day job. During lunch, I do more writing. That's when I would meet with a writing group.

Then twice a week, I Zoom into my therapy group. What readers will see is the memories of my group and I are very close, and so I'll go on a walk with someone from group or we'll meet for a socially distant coffee. It's a really full experience. The other day, I was complaining to one of the characters in the book, Max, this is a super obnoxious thing, "I'm so busy. I have so much going on." First thing he said was, "Everyone does, so get over yourself." Also, he'll say to me, whenever I complain, he'll say, "This is the life you wanted, remember?" I'm like, oh, yeah. Driving my son to the baseball field or getting my daughter to her outdoor dance class, this is exactly what I wanted. In my minivan and my family and all these people and phone calls to return to people who love me and who want to fill me in, that is exactly what I wanted. Like anybody who has a full life, it's kind of like, what plate am I going to drop today? But it's a privilege to have plates.

Zibby: It's a privilege to have plates. I love it. It's so true. In terms of advice to other people who might want to write a memoir, what would you say?

Christie: I would say read, read, read. Read the memoirs you love. Read them again. This is super advice I'm taking myself right now. I've reread my memoirs that I really love, particularly Claire Dederer's Love and Trouble and Kiese Laymon's Heavy. Every year, I read Lidia Yuknavitch's Chronology of Water. I love those books. They're artists. I want to get inside of what they're doing. I think that the idea that the only part of writing a book is sitting down and writing has not been my experience. I would say reading widely. Also, join a writing group. We're all long distance, my writing group. We've been together almost three or four years. We all live across the country. We're telephonic because this was before everything went Zoom. Now we've got on Zoom. It's free. You have to make the time for it. I learn so much from the women and the way that they push themselves. Some of them are novelists. Some of them are essayists. Some of them are memoirists. Having the community is invaluable, learning from them, getting that every-two-week feedback on my writing. We're going to talk about one of my pieces this afternoon. I still get nervous. Even though it's a first draft and it doesn't need to be great, but just the exercise of putting myself out there, I think that's really invaluable. For years, I wanted a writing group. I didn't know how to get one. What worked for me was I took a couple classes. Then I would ask people in the classes. It doesn't have to be giant. It could be one other person. I just think having company and feedback is really invaluable. I don't know how people do it without it.

Zibby: That's great advice. What are you working on now? What's your piece for today?

Christie: I was trying to a write a piece about -- one of the things that I'm interested in is what's happening to my body right now. There's middle age, of course. There's anxiety. There's upcoming elections and book publications. I've been having this totally random trapezius pain. I didn't even know what the trapezius was until I got the pain. I'm writing about the sensation and what the trapezius means. In woo-woo Eastern medicine, the trapezius, it's the heart of the back or whatever. I'm just exploring what that pain means. I think when it started was when I went to record the audiobook. I was sitting there and I was reading a scene. It was painful when it happened, painful when I wrote it. It was one of these groups that was very intense. I'm alone in the booth. There's this old engineer. I'm talking about my problematic sex life. I'm sweating. I'm alone with this man. I'm reading it into the world. My trapezius just instantly crimped. I've had enough therapy to know that those are all related. I'm interested in thinking about what part of me is still afraid to have my story out there, my truth, my experiences, to get bigger in the world. I think my body is registering my anxiety. It's right now showing up in my trapezius. We'll see if they got any of that in two thousand words I gave them.

Zibby: I think that's so interesting.

Christie: We'll see.

Zibby: I love it. I feel like new aches and pains come every day. I'm like, really? I'm only in my forties. I thought that was a sixties, seventies situation.

Christie: Totally. It's so humbling.

Zibby: Oh, well. [laughs] Thank you. Thanks, Christie. I loved this book. I'm so excited you came on the show. I can't wait to see it come out into the world. I'm just so rooting for you, in your corner, and all that.

Christie: Thank you so much. Thanks for all you do for writers and readers and listeners. It's incredible. It's such a bright light. You are a bright light. I am so happy to be here.

Zibby: Thank you so much. I want to read that essay, by the way. I'm serious. Send it over.

Christie: I definitely will.

Zibby: Okay. Workshop it, and then I want to see it.

Christie: Perfect. All right, see ya.

Zibby: Bye.

Lauren Tarshis, I SURVIVED: THE CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES

Zibby Owens: Hi.

Lauren Tarshis: Hello. It's so nice to see you.

Zibby: You too.

Lauren: Look at your beautiful -- it's like a monk's chamber of books.

Zibby: Yes, it is. Maybe I should shut that door before my son comes in. We're still doing gradual back to school.

Lauren: How old is he?

Zibby: He's five. I also have a seven-year-old and two thirteen-year-olds. He does every other day. Next week, he'll go back for good. What about you? You have four kids too, right?

Lauren: We do, but they're much older. Everyone but our oldest is home. We're sort like a WeWork meets The Waltons. That's the vibe I'm trying to create. My youngest is sixteen. She's able to manage her hybrid schooling pretty independently. I'm thinking of your seven-year-old particularly.

Zibby: They're in school, though. It's crazy. They're doing Zoom in the afternoons. The mornings, at least, they get to go. It's so nice. They get to run around.

Lauren: Where are you?

Zibby: We're in New York City. We just came back.

Lauren: I have to tell you, I love your podcast so much. My book club and I often listen to you. I was so thrilled and honored when Alex told me that I would be talking to you. It was very strangely serendipitous. It had been maybe a couple days after we had just gone wild over Disappearing Earth. We listened to you because we were just fascinated.

Zibby: That was great.

Lauren: In fact, I would love to change the topic of our podcast and just talk about that. I'm sure everyone wants to hear my opinion about Disappearing Earth. [laughter] I had never had the experience -- really, that last line of that book, it physically took my breath away.

Zibby: I get it. I actually listened to that book, which I don't always do. I feel like I was so immersed in it. There's something about listening to books. I can't explain it. Hopefully, you know what I'm talking about.

Lauren: I actually like to toggle between them. It's very decadent. I'll have the hardcover of that and then listen to it, especially for that one because I read on a low level. I need a lot of support. Just having her pronounce all the names and the places, the audio helped me in that way, then going back to the book.

Zibby: What do you mean you read at a low level?

Lauren: Meaning, I was a terrible reader. It's the first thing I tell the children when I go to a school. I didn't read a book until I was fourteen. Obviously, I read fine now, but I do have trouble synthesizing information. Especially when I'm doing research, if I'm reading a real tome with a lot of dates and places and people, the audio really helps. It's quite ironic, shocking that I find myself talking to you when I flash back to my childhood self.

Zibby: I actually tried to reach out to you two years ago when I first started my podcast because my daughter had been reading your Japanese tsunami I Survived book for school. I was reading it with her. We were reading that together. I was like, "This book is amazing." She's like, "Do you think you could interview the author?" I was like, "I don't know. I'll try." I was so new to it.

Lauren: Did you come to me directly, or did you go through Scholastic?

Zibby: I think I emailed you on your website or something.

Lauren: Whoa. There was a period of time -- my reader mail is a source -- I try to answer everyone. As I'm getting older, I'm trying to let go of shame and guilt. I'm haunted by it. I expend a large amount of energy. Then still I hear from people, you never wrote me. Anyway, I'm glad you forgave me.

Zibby: At the time, I was so new to it. I didn't know to go to publicists.

Lauren: I would've leapt at the chance had I been focused.

Zibby: All to say, it's so nice to be able to talk to you. I can't believe you were saying you're sort of a slower reader because the amount of research and information and the way you create environments makes everybody feel like they actually lived through all the stories for real. I'm feel like I'm traumatized after I finish reading. [laughs] I'm like, oh, my gosh, I feel like I just survived all this stuff. It's amazing. How do you do it? First of all, how do you pick which I Survived topics? I read somewhere that you had started it for your son, Dylan. On your website you said that. Tell me about starting the whole series and how you now pick which disasters to focus on.

Lauren: Definitely, you're right. The series was inspired by both my experience as a mom of four kids, my boys, who are the older three. The middle two particularly were not interested in reading at all. I was always in that situation that so many parents are of just constantly trying to find books that would light them up -- this will be it! -- and not succeeding. At the same time, for many years, for thirty years, which is a very staggering and now increasingly shocking number, I have worked at Scholastic in the magazine division. In that role, I spend an enormous amount of time with teachers and in classrooms and with kids trying to take topics that are either not engaging inherently or far removed from the lives of our kids, if it's a story about the Civil War or a story about Korea, anything, to try to make those engaging. I found that through the magazine work that anytime I had a real child or a fictional child and put them in the middle of the story, those were the stories that their teachers wrote to me about and kids wanted to know more about. I was actually really surprised that there wasn't already a book series for that age, for that third to fifth grade level, that did that. Of course, there are wonderful narrative nonfiction books written by incredible authors like Deborah Hopkinson and Tonya Bolden and all these amazing authors. There wasn't really anything in that between Magic Tree House and Lightning Thief. There was this gap for my sons. I think the hybrid experience, for me, of being the parent and the author/educator gave me that inspiration.

You're right. They are an enormous amount of research because what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to, with a very fine brush stroke, create these vignettes for kids so they really know, what does it smell like inside a tornado, actually? What does it feel like to hold a cannonball? That's the fun part of the research. That does mean that it's not just a linear research path of learning about a topic. A lot of the research is ancillary. I'm going down tributaries hoping that that will unearth some incredible detail. For my California wildfires book, which is unfortunately way too timely at this moment, I was really wanting kids to understand what it was like for a firefighter in a wildfire. What are the sensory experiences that you would have if you had to deploy your fire shelter? You're interviewing people and reading very arcane firefighter blogs and trying to get as close to the sources as you can, which is easier, obviously, for contemporary topics than it would be writing about ancient Rome. That's definitely the most exciting part. Well, the most exciting part is being with kids and talking to you. [laughter] Other than that, being on that treasure hunt for the detail. There's always three or four facts in a book that I want the kids, even if it's not about the topic itself, maybe it's something -- for the California wildfires, I had this whole frame story that the characters, one of them, they run this reptile rescue, which is real thing. People give up their large pet reptiles because they can't take care of them. Then you or I would have a shelter for them, so details about having a large monitor lizard that you're taking care of. That breaks up the background information and all those facts that I really want them to absorb. It's alternating between the boring facts and these sparkling details that distract them from the fact that they're actually learning stuff.

Zibby: It's amazing. You should do this for grown-ups. It's actually just an exercise in empathy, is what you're doing. You're literally putting kids in other people's shoes. You're using it in historical context. It's really a gift. How can you imagine what life is like for someone else going through something hard? Yet you're also teaching them. I feel like the main gift is the empathy piece. It's almost like memoir for kids.

Lauren: You're inspiring me. I'm going to cling to your words. I'm going to put them in my heart and my brain. They will be there with me all day. Sometimes it feels like almost a ridiculous amount of work. Luckily, my editor and the people who I work with, they do understand. These books, looking at these little paperbacks, you'd think that they could be, especially now that I've written twenty, that they would just be so easy. They are quite torturous. When I'm about to get into that heavy deadline mode with my family, everyone's like, all right. I'll say to my husband, "I think this one's going to be easier." He's like, "Okay. You say that before every single one, but I think you're wrong. It's going to be horrible." [laughs]

Zibby: How long does it take? How long do you research? Then how long does the writing take and all of it?

Lauren: Because I have very kind and understanding, my editor, Katie, and the whole team, I have generally gotten away with writing all the way up to the very last second. They have wanted two a year up until now. That means six months for each one. It became too much for me. The minute I finished one, I would have a week. Then I would just have to completely shed Revolutionary War and plunge into World War II. Then the joy of it kind of started to go away for me, to be honest. I don't want to sound like one of those people, like, it's such a joy, all that. Look, the experience of being able to talk to you and hear you respond to this work that I've done in the way that you do, I just feel tickled by it constantly. I found myself around maybe book fifteen, sixteen, really feeling like I just couldn't keep this up. Fortunately, they had the very genius idea of creating a line of graphic novels based on I Survived. I'm a little bit involved. They were incredibly kind about, I approve things. There's this incredible author named Georgia Ball. She's a scriptwriter for graphic novels. She somehow interprets my stories in this really lyrical way. The team just does a beautiful job. I get to watch and then weigh in on the history and all of that.

That now has enabled us to create an annual schedule that leaves more breathing room. It's really six months. Researching, one of the problems now is, with COVID, I'm not able to travel. Except for Japan and the bottom of the North Atlantic to see the Titanic, I've gone everywhere for the books. I do feel like that's a super important thing. I like to take video there because I like to be able to show the kids what it would've been like for the characters and for them to walk in the character's shoes. Often, the stories then give birth to nonfiction articles that appear in the magazine Storyworks which is this beautiful labor of love that I create with a team at Scholastic. It's this ELA magazine. I'll send you Storyworks, the second-grade version which is so adorable, for your seven-year-old. The work I do on I Survived, actually, many different sprouts come from it that end up blooming in different places.

Zibby: I'm sure you have thought of this, but I bet there are a lot of people who would jump at the chance to help you do your research and speed along the process of these books. Do you feel like it's hard to outsource that?

Lauren: I would love it. The problem is, it goes back to what we talked about earlier. I've learn to create the character, for the most part, that's the first thing I do now. That's something I learned from my editor, Katie, who's only been doing the books the past three or four. She's really helped me understand that I used to discover the character during the writing and then have to go back and research to create additional experiences for my character to have these epiphanies or opportunities for growth. She was like, "That is not [indiscernible]. You have to figure out the character." It's like 101. I'm sure this is what your thirteen-year-old [indiscernible] writing the character's journey. That is something that now I do. I really try to figure that out beforehand after a little bit of research, just understanding basically the trajectory of the book. Then all of that great stuff, really, I discover it accidentally. Sometimes what I discover in research -- I spent several days just researching helicopters for the wildfire story. I learned that the ones that many of the firefighters have loved the most are these old Hueys from the Vietnam War. That's the kind of thing that a researcher -- that became the little chapter head spots, those helicopters. They led me into this whole incredible world of magazine articles and blog posts by helicopter pilots, the people who are now in Oregon. That helped me create these two characters. One particular in the book, one of the firefighters is this woman who is just very badass who's the best helicopter pilot in their Cal Fire district.

Zibby: I know the forest fires now are raging again. It's unthinkable that your book would be coming out and be this timely. I know you mentioned it. How are you, to say leveraging it sounds totally crude and commercial, but how are you getting the word out? People are really suffering right now and could probably use this experience. I feel like you should be airdropping books of them to California or something. I don't know.

Lauren: I don't know. It's a really good question. The story of that book, it had a very wonderful emotional component which is that one of the things that happens to me as the author of this series but also in my role at the magazines is that people do reach out to me directly in the aftermath of disasters. This lovely woman named Holly Fisher wrote to me four days after the town of Paradise burned down. She had grown up there. Her son, Lucas, reads my books. She just wrote me this beautiful email. "You might have heard about the fire that destroyed my town of Paradise. The fire is still burning. I think that you should come here. You'd have many people who would want to share their stories." We got in touch. There were other people who had written to me from those areas. A few months later, three of the four kids and my husband and I went to Paradise. We met Holly and her husband, Josh, who's a firefighter who helped save people in a parking lot, unbelievable. They took us around the ruins of the town. Then we went back in the summer to see how things were.

I wrote an article about it for the magazine. We created a video. I wasn't really intending to write an I Survived book about it, but a lot of the kids said to me, "Are you going to write about this?" Then I thought, I learned so much when I was there. I do think it's a very important climate story. It's a story, also, about our relationship with nature. Not all of it is climate. A huge part of it is, but it's also how we have this interesting -- I don't know if you remember the book The Big Burn. I think it was Tim Egan. He writes about, that was the biggest wildfire in American history. I think it was 1910 if I'm not mistaken. That fire in the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho and Montana, it gave rise to the whole fire suppression policy of we're going to put out every fire because it was so terrifying. It made sense, but people didn't understand how important regular fires were to forest health and preventing the overload of dead trees and brush that is fueling -- we could talk for a long time about this. I decided that it would be worthwhile to do.

I don't want to be tweeting about my wildfire book every day now that the wildfire is burning. I'm in touch with Holly every day because they're in Paradise. Their house did survive. Nothing else in their neighborhood did. She's very involved in trying to rebuild Paradise. It's tricky. I know that the people of Paradise and those towns want people to know what happened to them and to share and these people fighting the fires, all of that. I really want this to be about honoring them. I don't think it's appropriate, frankly, for someone -- even though the fire book has a very happy ending, of course, and it's a story of resilience like all of them, I keep thinking, if I was a parent in Oregon right now, would this be the book I'd want my kid reading? Maybe not. So later when they can really connect and for people elsewhere to empathize and to really want to engage and help people. In the back, there's stuff on what you can do. That is super important.

Zibby: Totally. I sat down, I tried to read it to my two little guys who, as I mentioned, are five and seven. I started reading it and they're like, "This is a fire. This is so scary." I was like, okay, I'm going to save this for my older kids. You're too young. Sorry. [laughs]

Lauren: It's true. My daughter did not read my books. She was too scared. These are books that are for certain kids who are not going to overidentify. I hear you. I don't recommend them for very young kids. I'm shocked, I'll get letters from parents like, "We just read the 9/11 book together to our kindergarten." I'm like, I don't know if...

Zibby: Have you ever thought about writing an adult version? It would have to repackaged. There are a lot of grown-ups who could benefit from learning about the wildfires right now or learning about all these scenes. A lot of grown-ups have such short attention spans now that almost -- not that reading your younger kids' books couldn't benefit them, but I just feel like parents might be reluctant to read them on their own. You have such great information and the sensibility behind them. Not that you need another project. You're overwhelmed as it is. I'm just saying it's a unique skill to be able to take something that happens in the world and make it so relatable immediately that I feel like the world could really use, even for grown-ups. That's all.

Lauren: That's definitely my favorite genre, the great narrative nonfiction writers. There's so many of them. Is it William Langewiesche? I can never pronounce his name. William Langewiesche, he writes for The Atlantic. He wrote The Looming Tower. Tim Egan, there are just so many amazing authors who are doing this. I read all of their books. I think, oh, my gosh, it would be a dream to be able to spend a couple of years. Even, there was this great book -- I'm showing my age. I have zero short-term memory anymore. It's quite a problem. Although, people seem to be fairly indulgent. There's a great book I recommend which is the kind of book I would love to write called This is Chance! Have you heard of this?

Zibby: No.

Lauren: About the Alaska earthquake. It just came out this past year. It's so wonderful. It's this 1962 earthquake that happened in Alaska right when Alaska was getting on solid ground as a state and Anchorage was growing. Just pulls in all these wonderful tangents about Alaska, about the time period, and about this woman, Genie Chance, who was the weatherwoman and brought people hope and calm in the aftermath of this completely devastating earthquake and tsunami in Alaska, so the idea of bringing to life a little-known event but also illuminating this large chapter of our history. Of course, there are all sorts of insights that are applicable to us today. Maybe I will.

Zibby: If you were going to write an I Survived about something really awful from your own life, what would that be about?

Lauren: Oh, boy. That's a great question. No one's ever asked me that. For my own life, I'm fortunate that I -- as I always tell the kids, they're always like, "Did you live through any of those disasters?" I always say, "I've seen a tornado from a distance. I've been through a bunch of hurricanes here on the East Coast. I've been in an earthquake. It was in California, but it wasn't a huge one." I've never felt that my life has been in danger because of an event like the way my characters are, but I have been through -- one of our sons had an illness that lasted a few years. He's great. Fortunately, it was not this dire thing like many people experience. The experience of your life shattering apart, which is what so many people are experiencing at this moment, whether it's because of COVID directly or because of the economic collapse or because of now these fires, that's something that I, fortunately, have not even been through. Of course, it's what we all know. I think that's what keeps me writing these stories in a lot of way. We think we have all this control.

That's what I've learned over and over, these two big lessons. We think we have a lot of control and that we can, by being really careful or planning in advance or disciplined or good, that we can forestall something, but we can't. The other piece, the flip side, which is why I keep doing it because if you only focus on that first part it gets very grim, is that I am really -- honestly, talking to Holly Fisher from Paradise, I hang up the phone with her and I just feel so stronger. People go through those shattering events and you see, whether it's looking at what happened during the Holocaust or what happened during the Chicago fire or in Paradise, people find the strength. They go through a grieving process. It's really hard. It's not quick. For some people, it's terrible and agonizing and lengthy. People, for the most part, do find the strength somehow to go on and feel joyful again.

I'm sitting here, I'm in this beautiful office of mine, it used to be my mother-in-law's apartment, which is connected to our house. She died at the age of ninety-seven a couple years ago. She lived with us for ten years. She was a survivor of World War I and a refuge. She just had a life that you cannot even -- that should be a book. My one regret is that I didn't write her story because I didn't think she wanted me to. It wasn't until the very end that it was clear that she would've liked that. She was going to write it herself. I would wake up sometimes. She was a real night owl. She would stay up until two in the morning. She lived for many years in the Jewish ghetto of Shanghai during World War II and lost people in the Holocaust and all that. I would get up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water or if one of my kids needed me, and I'd hear this noise coming from here. It was her on the phone with her friend Hilda in Rome laughing, this joyful -- I would think, after all you've been through, there's still a lot of joy. I don't know how I got started on that, Zibby.

Zibby: That's a great story to share. That's what life is all about, I survived.

Lauren: What really gives me a lot of satisfaction, you can imagine, is when I hear from kids who are going through difficult things. They write to me or their parents write to me and they say that the books -- somehow, kids who've been through difficult events find they connect with my characters. It's not a trauma to read. It's not triggering them, but it's actually bolstering them in some way. I think of course, every person reacts differently. It's a constant lesson through all the research.

Zibby: That's an inspiring takeaway. It's just super inspiring, and especially now. It's what people need. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Lauren: Yes. I don't know what you think. Another time, we'll have to talk because I'm curious on your take after speaking to so many authors. I don't consider myself a Julia Phillips-like literary novelist, Alice Monroe, my heroes. I really think of myself as a storyteller who is constantly working on her craft. I do embroidery. Here's my latest embroidery sampler that I did. It's very analogous. You learn these different stiches. You practice them. You notice one. In Julia's book or in one of the Alice novels, I'll see this amazing -- look at this sentence. I'll write it down and study it. I think that writing is something that, it can be learned. People improve. Writing a few books that are bad and unpublishable is really part of that journey. That's the advice. You have to start writing your bad books and looking at those as part of the learning process.

Zibby: I have heard from so many people, and it seems to me that the magic number is three. You have to write three novels before -- the third one might sell, but the first two, you should just say -- even though you think these are going to be the great American novel, it's okay if they don't sell at the end. Most people have to write two full novels before they sell one. That's just my anecdotal [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Lauren: I think you're totally right. I also think the other piece of it is that -- maybe it's different now because the world of writing and writers has changed so much over the past twenty years. It's hard to make a living as a writer. I think the idea of taking it on and not being as obsessed with becoming a best seller, saying, this is something I want to do, this is something I'm going to do, that was sort of my -- I wrote a really terrible first novel that I sent out beautifully bound from Kinkos with a spiral and imagining the movie rights. Maybe they’ll ask me to do a cameo. It was terrible. My dad, who is a writer -- he was a freelance writer when I was growing up. He worked for magazines, very scrappy when you could make a sort of living as a freelance writer. My mom was a teacher, and that helped. My dad loved what he did. He did all nonfiction. I remember when I proudly told him I was writing this novel and that I was very stressed, I wanted to finish it -- my dad's the nicest guy in the whole world. He never says a mean word. He looked at me and he goes, "No one is waiting for your novel." [laughs] It was actually, no one cares if you finish it. So take your time and make it good. My two pieces of advice: feel great and excited about the books that you might consider bad; and then, it is an ongoing learning process. That's what makes it satisfying.

Zibby: Amazing. Lauren, our time is up because I try to keep my show to thirty minutes, but I feel like I could sit here and chat books with you all day. I hope that sometime we can get together or something.

Lauren: I would love it.

Zibby: I want to hear what your book club is reading and all the rest.

Lauren: Your work is so wonderful. I've loved listening to your podcast. I sort of feel like I know you. It's been a huge treat for me to be able to spend time with you. Yes, please stay in touch with me.

Zibby: Thank you, Lauren. I really appreciate it. Have a great day.

Lauren: You too.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Deborah Tannen, FINDING MY FATHER

Zibby Owens: Thanks for coming on my show. I'm excited to talk about your latest book. Would you mind telling listeners what Finding My Father is about? Although, I'll just read the subtitle, and that gives a clue. His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow. Tell us more about the book. What inspired you to write it? Although, you include that in there, so just tell everybody else.

Deborah Tannen: My father was born in a Hasidic household in Warsaw in 1908 and came to the United States when he was twelve. He lived to be ninety-eight. He died two weeks before his ninety-eighth birthday. He, after he retired, was almost obsessed with talking about his past, especially his childhood in Warsaw which he remembered in astonishing detail, but his entire life, really. I would trace two things about this to my wanting to write this book. One is the very personal reason. The other is the broader perspective. The personal reason is that when I was a child, I adored my father. He was the parent that I felt connected to. I felt he understood me. I could ask him anything. He would answer with patience and precision. He loved words and language, as I did. I felt like if I said something to him, he would understand it the way I meant it, whereas my mother I felt often didn't or might get annoyed by what I was saying. But he was absent more than he was present. The way I put it in the introduction is the strongest presence that I felt in the house was his absence. I felt like I was spending my days with my mother missing my father. That really went on pretty much into adulthood. We can talk later about his work life, which is a saga in itself. He was gone far more than he was there. I think that was often true of parents at the time. It was mostly fathers. Now it could be fathers and mothers.

After he retired, his wanting to spend all this time talking about his past meant that if I talked to him about his past, I could spend time with him. I'm kind of a workaholic. Once I decided that I was going to write a book about him, I could spend hours talking to him during the day which I otherwise would never do. I recorded our conversations. Once he realized that I was doing this, he encouraged it. In fact, I found notes in which -- I should say, he saved every piece of paper that came into his life. He left me many, many, many different kinds of documents and letters and notes and memories that he wrote for me. Once he began doing that, I had more and more material that I felt gave me a perspective on the entire century. His life really is like a walking tour through history. He lived in this World War I Jewish community of Warsaw, Hasidic community, before, during, and after World War I. He really captured that community. In the beginning, my thought about the book -- and his too because I have a copy of a letter he wrote to someone back in the early eighties, "Deborah is going to write a book about the Jewish community of Warsaw based on my memories." I was thinking of it that way. Then I realized his entire life reflected these different cataclysmic events of that century.

The Bolshevik Revolution, which had a tremendous effect on his mother's siblings, especially her younger siblings whom he lived with because he had no father -- he was living in his mother's nuclear family, which was grandfather, grandmother, and many, many aunts and uncles, nine that were living there when he was there. I can name fourteen of them and what happened to them, tell you their life stories. A few of them, I do tell in the book. The younger ones were caught up in the Bolshevik Revolution and became passionate communists. The one who influenced him the most, the youngest of all those aunts and uncles, was only six years older than my father was and more like an older sister that he admired. By the time he came to the United States, he told me years later, he already was identified as a communist and an atheist, which he says happened to him, he converted, when he was six following his aunt around. Then his whole experience of work just captures one Jewish immigrant experience. He quit high school at fourteen, went to work in the garment district in New York as so many immigrants did, and yet managed to go to law school at night, become a lawyer. Then it was the Depression, that other cataclysmic event. There's something almost ironic or maybe appropriate, this book coming out in a pandemic, because the fact that he finished law school in the Depression made it impossible for him to then support -- he was the sole support of his mother and sister, having no father. Because of the Depression, he could not work as a lawyer.

When he was fifty, when I was in junior high, he did start to work as a lawyer and established a workmen's compensation firm -- at the time, we said workmen's; now we say workers -- which actually ended up being the largest workers' compensation firm in New York City, which means, he liked to point out, the largest in the world. He did so many different things before he could do that because of the Depression. I think many people today are suffering similar consequences. Their future is so changed and so much more challenging because of the economic situation. I'll make one last comment here. It's so much helped me understand the contrast between his way of looking at the world and his life and relationships between women and men. There's also drama about who he married and why he married my mother and not another woman he might have married. When my father sat down to write about his life, he began by listing all the jobs he had held. To him, that really captured his life. That was the summary of his life, the work that he did. When I thought about his life and when I think about my life, I begin with relationships: who was important in my life, who influenced me, who I loved, how those relationships developed. For him, it was work. I came to understand that, really, family and work were inextricably intertwined in his mind. Family meant obligation to support the people you loved. How you went about doing that was both a summary of his life and also proof of his devotion to the family. It was because of that love that he couldn't go to work as a lawyer and let his family starve or have a difficult time while he built up a practice.

Zibby: Wow. It's amazing because I feel like people in their fifties think it's too late. Somebody in their forties the other day said to me, "I got started. I thought it was too late to write a book." I'm thinking, no, no, no. Look at this. Your dad, even back then, launched a whole new career so late in life. Yet it was only half his life. He still had half to go. It's very encouraging and empowering to think that at any moment, just start following your dream. It's not too late.

Deborah: Yes. In his case, it was opportunity. The brief summary of how it all happened, he did all these different things during the Depression. Then there was a civil service exam he was taking, he said many, many civil service exams. There would be thousands of people taking an exam for a few jobs. Late in the Depression, things were starting to open up. He got the offer to be a prison guard in the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, not the kind of job he thought he was going to consider, but he went, tried it out. He was very happy there. He loved the lifestyle that went along with it. He had always lived in cities, in Warsaw and then in New York City, always in apartments. For the first time, he lived in a house. There was a beautiful yard. Everybody who talked about it, talked about it with such longing when they were no longer there. Everyone in family -- that is, my father, my mother, my sister who was alive at the time, my oldest sister was a little girl at the time -- talked about the beautiful weeping willow tree in the backyard. He was doing very well at it. He was promoted to parole officer very quickly. Then he got an offer based on another exam he had taken, civil service exam, to be an alcohol tax inspector with the treasury department chasing bootleggers. It offered a bit more money. He felt he had to take it because it was all about doing what you had to do to support your family. When he told the warden that he was making this change, the warden was beside himself. "You are doing so well here. You are going to be a warden very soon, in a year." He thought that was ridiculous. He said, "No, there's no way that a Jew will be a warden. There are no Jewish wardens." The warden said, "That's because there were no Jews in the system. Now that there are, of course you'll be promoted."

He didn't believe it. He did not believe it was possible. He made the switch. It turned out that the person who was given his job as parole officer became a warden in a year. That person was Jewish. That realization that he could've had that comfortable life became especially upsetting to him because the job as alcohol tax inspector, the job was okay. He didn't love it. It was all right. The family had moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where nobody was happy. They had no communities they had had in Danbury. That word, Danbury, was like a garden of Eden I heard about my whole life, the wonderful life they had in Danbury, the miserable life they had in Providence. My mother became pregnant with me, so of course I always felt guilty about this, and they moved back to New York. She wanted to have the baby in New York. As a stopgap measure, he took a job in a factory as a cutter. It was supposed to be just a brief time while he became very active in politics. He was no longer a communist. He became disillusioned with communism in 1939 when Stalin made a pact with Hitler. He became active in New York Liberal Party, a party somewhat left of the democrats. He was promised a political appointment within a year. It took thirteen years. Each year was, next year, next election, after the election, wait for the election. That contrast of these thirteen years working in a factory when he could've been a warden and have a comfortable life and his family would've been happier, that always was a shadow over his life and over the family, though he did not give me the sense how much he disliked working in a factory. I did not sense that. He never allowed us to see how unhappy he was. He certainly talked about it after when we had all these conversations.

Zibby: How did it make you feel to hear about how he had been feeling and hiding all that time?

Deborah: I'm grateful to him for that. There was one anecdote he wrote about. He started writing his memories for me as well. There was one he described in something that he wrote. I guess he wrote it in his eighties, but then he retold it in his nineties when we talked face to face. After my mother died, he moved to an assisted living facility where we talked many, many, many hours. He remembered -- this is before he passed the exam and got the job in Danbury, so it was during the Depression -- having no job. He was, every day, looking for work. He always worked, but it would be temporary jobs trying to find something that would work out. He passed his mother sitting outside her apartment. He had supported his mother from the age of fourteen until he got married at the age of twenty-four, so ten years he was sole support. It turned out that she was putting money away all those years. He would keep out a small amount for himself for car fares. She would go through his pockets, if she found it, and take it. She was a piece of work. He passed his mother and asked her if she would lend him five dollars. She not only refused, but began berating him that he was a spendthrift, that he was irresponsible.

He wrote, "Even now when I think about it, I feel like crying." He felt so humiliated by this. I don't think it was so specifically about his mother. I'm sure that was part of it, but that having sacrificed so much to get a law degree, pass the bar -- he was lawyer. He should've been working as a lawyer. Here he was penniless. Then he wrote that he did manage to get a job the next day. He was able to borrow a small amount of money from the bank, which apparently was part of the way he kept things going, he said, "where I had an unblemished record." The thing about the way he wrote about it that really was so fascinating to me and so enlightening, he said he felt so terrible because his situation was financially so bad and he said, "the need to hide it from my family, that I felt that way." I realized, yeah, that's what he did. My first thirteen years of my life when he was working in a factory, he completely hid the negative feelings he had about that. I was shocked when I asked him in one of our conversations when he was ninety-seven. He was alert until the end. "How did you feel about working as a cutter?" He said, "I hated every minute of it." I had no suspicion.

Zibby: I wonder if this has informed all of your work on communication. That's such a central part of what you investigate, is how to ease that communication between all different types of people. Do you think it has something to do with that?

Deborah: Yes, absolutely, on two levels. People ask me, why did I write and how did I know how to write for general audiences? I was trained as an academic. And why did I want to? I always say, I wanted to write a book that my mother could read. Really, it's that I did grow up in that working-class background. My father's friends who were factory workers as he was, my mother's many siblings, some were what we would now call middle class. One person owned a small factory. Others worked in factories. I grew up talking to people who did not have a college education and even a high school education and would not have understood the way I talked to my academic colleagues. Also, really from my father, I got this perspective on language. After people left when we'd sit around and talk and gather, he was the one who would say, "Did you see how she said that and how her expression looked when she said it?" He would draw conclusions from the subtle, subtle wording. I had hired somebody before I began interviewing him. Hired someone somebody told me about that interviewed older people about their histories, about their past. I hired someone to interview both my parents. At one point, she asked my father about his grandfather. "How do you like to remember him?" He said, "Like it or not, I remember him as...," picking up the phrasing that she used. I was amused that he was kind of subtlety questioning it, criticizing it even. He had that sensitivity to language. I think I did pick that up from him.

One last comment about that that I'll tell you. Because he had been raised in this Hasidic background, he had been sent to what was called [indiscernible], the religious school, from the time he was four, all day until he was old enough to go [indiscernible]. Then he had tutors at night and went to secular school during the day. He had this training in Talmud from the time he was studying religious texts from the time he was very small. He hated it. He had so many stories about how much he hated losing his childhood to [indiscernible]. The teacher was cruel, as many of those teachers were. The first academic paper I published, I was still a graduate student, I sent it to my parents. My mother wouldn't read an academic paper, but my father would. He called me. He started by telling me how much he admired it. Then he started how, "The way you pull apart all the meaning of the words and look for the underlying meaning, that reminded me of how I was trained to study Talmud and how we had to look for the meanings." He started getting worked up remembering how much he hated all that. Finally, he got to one point and he said, "I don't know how you can stand it." We burst out laughing. Many linguists, by the way, are Jewish. I think that Talmudic tradition is probably a part of it.

Zibby: Interesting. You included in this book, why you did not write a book about your mother. You kind of poked fun at her gently and how she would talk. Can you speak a little more about your relationship with her?

Deborah: My mother tended to be very unhappy. She would take that out both on my father and on the kids, especially me because I was kind of difficult. I think I inherited some of that tendency to be unhappy, so I was not an easy kid. There was the fact that my mother didn't want a third child, which I always knew. My father did. Apparently, he talked her into leaving it to fate. After one night, she said, "No, I don't really want that," but it was too late. I always knew that. My mother was not contemplative or introspective. She didn't tend to take a step back and ask questions about the way the world is. She wasn't interested in talking about her past. Because I was recording all of these conversations, I actually captured it on tape. At that time, it was a cassette tape. Some of the conversations in the book are transcribed from actual conversations we had. She was often envious that I spent all this time talking to my father. She didn't like it when I was alone with him. She wanted the attention for herself.

One time, she came in and she said, "I'm going to have to think about my past." I said, "Yeah, I want to know about your past." I started asking her a question. I think it went something like, "Do you remember the house you grew up in?" "Yeah, sort of. We had a house." "Do you remember the furniture?" My father gave all these detailed descriptions. "Do you remember dinner?" "Dinner?" "Yeah. Do you remember what dinner was like?" "No. I know there was a table and a chair." "Did you have friends?" Again, my father had these stories about all the other kids he knew and their life stories. "I know I had friends." "Do you remember any particular friends?" "No." Then she would get impatient very quickly. She said, "We came to this country. We always had enough to eat. Really, nothing special. That's it."

Clearly, there's many ways that that's wonderful that she didn't get obsessed with the past. She was very impatient with my father being so obsessed with his past. Apparently, she made a rule in the house, no talking about dead people. [laughter] He always wanted to reminisce about his grandfather and his past. He made fun of himself for it. He said, "She's interested in the present. To me, it isn't real until it's past." I couldn't write a book about my mother because she didn't give me the material. My father gave me these mountains of words, journals that he kept, letters that he kept, notes that he kept, memories he wrote down for me. He learned to use a computer when he was seventy. He learned to use email when he was eighty. He was sending me these long letters that he typed and long emails, so much material to work with, too much in a way. That was part of what took me so long to write it. I do talk about my mother in the book. You're wearing that about mothers and daughters. I have a lot of anecdotes about her there.

Zibby: How long did this book take you to write?

Deborah: From one perspective, it took me forty years. I did write quite a few other books in between. I got quite serious about writing it in the mid-nineties. I actually proposed it to my publisher at that point. I said that I wanted to write a book about public discourse, The Argument Culture, and this book about my father. They said, "If you want to write The Argument Culture, then the other one has to be about relationships." They didn't want the book about my father. I said all right. I wrote The Argument Culture. Then I wrote a book called I Only Say This Because I Love You about adult family relationships. Then that had a book about mothers and daughters, a chapter that people liked very much, so I wrote the book about mothers and daughters. Then my mother passed away while I was writing that book, so that delayed that a bit. I was very close to my mother when she got older. The tensions were no longer there. Then somehow in the mid-nineties, I got quite serious, had all that material, had all those notes, but I did move away from the idea of actually writing it. I got more serious about it around 2012, '13. I had a year; I had a sabbatical. I did come out with a draft at that point, but didn't really start shaping it until a couple of years ago. Again, wrote another book in between, my book about friendship, I Only Say This Because I Love You. In a way, I needed that much distance from my father. It's now fourteen years since he passed away. I guess I was finally ready to bring it all together and shape it.

Zibby: Do you now feel a sense of closure now that it's come out into the world and it's done and it's here?

Deborah: Oh, yeah, understatement of the year. I'm so thrilled that I got it done, that it's published. I promised him I would write it. He was pleased that I was writing it. We talked about it. He sent me things with that in mind. "I hope you have a file for this. Keep these things together in a file." We were very lucky. As I said, he was really healthy until the end. There was just one week. He had a heart attack. He was in the hospital. He seemed to be recovering. Then he had a stroke. After the stroke, he wasn't responsive. The hospice people assured us he could hear. They said, "Talk to him about all the good times you had." I thought, I think I'll tell him what I think he would appreciate hearing. I said, "I promise you I will write the book about you." I'm glad I kept my promise.

Zibby: I'm glad you did too. That's really nice. That's so special. I'm glad you got to tell him. I sort of believe that people know on some level even if they're not with us, which sounds a little woo-woo. I do believe that it's out there and it's acknowledged in some way.

Deborah: I think I do too. Although clearly, he was an atheist, so he didn't literally believe in the afterlife. One of the conversations we had really stuck in my mind. This is when he was ninety-seven. We were talking about how long I would live and how I would like living that old. I said, "I guess I won't know until it happens." He said, "You'll have to tell me when I'm up there. I'll be watching you from up there." I feel in a way that he is.

Zibby: Aw, that's so nice. That's amazing. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Deborah: The advice is pretty much advice that I was told and inspired by many years ago. Just write. Don't wait until you've got it all right. All those notes that I was writing all those years, I did eventually incorporate, not all of them of course. I couldn't, but many of them. If I had waited until I knew what shape the book was going to have, I would never have written it because it was so hard to know what shape it would have until I started writing. Then having all of that material, it was certainly challenging to figure out how to shape it, what to include, what to leave out. Maybe that was the hardest, deciding what to leave out. Having been writing and having all that material to start with I think is what made it possible.

Zibby: That's amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on my show. Thank you for sharing your beautiful stories. I feel so great knowing that I got to hear just a sliver of the backstory of this beautiful love letter to your dad. Thanks.

Deborah: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Zibby: Have a great day.

Deborah: You too.