Elizabeth Vander Leeuw

Listen to this episode here.

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Liz. Thank you so much for coming on "Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight."

Elizabeth Vander Leeuw: Thank you so much for having me, Zibby.

Zibby: It's my pleasure. Let's start by your telling listeners who you are and what you're doing on my podcast. 

Liz: Gosh, what am I doing on your podcast? [laughter] My name is Liz Vander Leeuw. I have a health and wellness business here in Charlotte, North Carolina. I've lived in Charlotte for about four years now. I moved here from DC. I have two daughters, Charlotte and Ellie. They're six and three. They're a handful. I have a husband who's a handful too. I know firsthand the struggle of moms trying to do it all, trying to be it all, and fit health and fit weight loss in as well. I work strictly with moms. I can work with women of all ages. I've worked with a lot of women in their twenties before, but I've found that this is really my niche because I'm in the trenches too. I'm in the thick of it. I know all of the same challenges that my clients are going through. I'm literally going through them too. That's just a little bit of background about me. I got my Integrative Nutrition Certificate, I think six or seven years ago now, from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition.

Zibby: I did that too.

Liz: You did? Awesome. I think that I saw that you used to run Weight Watchers groups and that sort of thing.

Zibby: I did. This was in a past life, but yes, I did all that stuff.

Liz: It was so interesting to me because Weight Watchers now is basically what I learned in school, which is more of a holistic program, your primary foods, your secondary foods. You're taking your entire life into account. It's not just necessarily calories in and calories out. That's basically what I learned in school. I learned every dietary theory out there. I learned that there's really not a one-size-fits-all situation. I don't have a lot of these online programs that some health and wellness professionals will sell where it's like, here's your one program that's going to be six weeks. I'm going to send it to your inbox every week and not check in on you. My programs are very bespoke because every individual is unique. Everybody needs different things, different foods. One man's food is another man's poison. 

Zibby: What has worked for you? Let's go back. How did you become interested in working in this field? What has your own journey with your own body been like? Is that relevant, or was this just a side interest for other reasons?

Liz: Totally relevant. I feel like I had quite the health journey myself. I'll start there which will lead us into why I got into this line of work. My husband and I grew up in New Jersey. We were high school sweethearts. He went to Georgetown University. I went to American University. I wanted to be little miss Elle Woods, politics. That's why I went to DC. That's what I wanted to do. I worked on the Hill for a little while. I worked on a presidential campaign. I worked in PR firms. I did mostly fundraising. Ended up doing a lot of fundraising for nonprofits and education associations. DC was just a rat race. Super fun place to live in your twenties, but stressful rat race. My husband works in finance. There were weeks he worked 120 hours. We weren’t really taking care of ourselves. When I was in college, when I came to American University as an eighteen-year-old, I didn't just gain the freshman fifteen. I gained the freshman fifty. I did not know how to make healthy choices. I was emotionally eating. I'm the only child. I was away from home. I didn't really have the tool set to be on my own yet. I struggled with emotional eating. I struggled with all that weight gain. With that weight gain came lots of really fun things like weight-related issues, thyroid issues, pre-Hashimoto's disease. I was also diagnosed with chronic Epstein-Barr, which is something that I still struggle with today. I decided when my husband put a ring on my finger when I was twenty-two years old right after college, I said, I've got to lose this weight for my wedding. It was not about the health. It was about vanity. I wanted to look perfect in my wedding dress. I lost over sixty pounds in about two years. We got married.

Zibby: Wait, slow down. Hold on. Sorry, I want to hear the end, but I want more details. When you were eating emotionally in college and gaining all that weight and developing associated health issues, what were your habits like? Were you eating fast food? Were you hiding sweets? Was it a combination of a lot of things? What was your eating like prior to that? Had you ever thought about eating? Had it ever been an issue, or you had just always been sort of thin and you didn't have to think about it?

Liz: I never had to think about it. Prior to that, I did ballet from the time I was three until I was eighteen. I was naturally thin. I had a ballerina's body. I didn't really have to think about what I ate. My mom, who always struggled with her weight -- from the time I can remember, she always did. Still does. She would always provide what she thought were healthy options. She wasn't really well-versed in any of that herself. I really just didn't know even what portion control was. When I went to the cafeteria, it was free-for-all. I would just eat whatever I wanted. If I had a particularly stressful day, I'd eat late at night. I remember my roommates and I going to Krispy Kreme in the middle of the night and thinking that that was a good decision. I would never hide food. It never got to that point for me. I was using food as a way to cope with things that I wasn't coping with, if that makes sense.

Zibby: It does make sense. It sounds very familiar. I'm sure a lot of people listening can relate to that. So you gained the weight during college. Then you decide to lose the weight for the wedding, which I'm sure, again, so many people can relate to. That's every bridal magazine. How did you do that? How did you lose all that weight?

Liz: I really did it through mainly exercise. That was something that had been kind of missing from my life in college. I started to exercise every day. It got to the point where orthorexia was setting in. I was so consumed with what I was putting in my body, every calorie, every gram of fat. I went from one end of the spectrum to another end of the spectrum. Neither of those are healthy places to be.

Zibby: For those people who don't know, what's the different between anorexia and orthorexia?

Liz: Anorexia is an eating disorder where you're actually just not eating or you have distorted ways of eating. I was eating. With orthorexia, it's more of, you're focused too much on what you're eating. You're focused too much on the calories in, the calories out. It's not just that you focus on it too much. It can overtake your whole life and your whole brain. That's kind of what was happening for me. It really ended up not being a very healthy situation. I thought I looked great in my wedding dress, but then I just kept taking it further and further. I got down to a double zero. That wasn't healthy either. Sure, I was eating and I was making these great meals for my husband and I, but I certainly wasn't eating enough. I wouldn't say that I had an eating disorder because I have so many friends that have struggled with true eating disorders. This was definitely something that was more emotional and mental going on with me. I had been diagnosed with Epstein-Barr. I'd been diagnosed with all these different issues. Losing the weight certainly helped, but I still had a lot of health-related issues. I also had an immunodeficiency and IGG deficiency. I had a lot going on that I thought, let's just take ahold of this. I have this super stressful life. I don't necessarily like my job. 

I started to look into health and wellness programs. IIN really spoke to me. I decided to go back to school. I was working, did that for a couple of years. I got pregnant. It wasn't really a super planned thing. It kind of just happened. I'm working full time. I'm doing this IIN program, this nutrition program, pretty much full time. Now I'm pregnant. I definitely gained the appropriate amount of weight during pregnancy. It was not super hard for me to lose the weight afterwards. I think that I could attribute that to my orthorexia habits. The process of going through IIN, it was just such a healing process me. I was able to shed all of my issues with food and focus on health. It was no longer about dieting. It became a focus on health. Since then, I've had another daughter. Through both pregnancies, I gained the appropriate amount of weight. My second pregnancy, I probably gained too much. I've gotten to the point now where I'm really healthy and happy and balanced in my body. I've been able to sustain that for the past, I'd say, six years now since my first daughter was born. I think that when you become a mom, it has a way of just clearing out all the BS. You prioritize. You can get your head on straight. I think that the process of IIN and also having my first daughter really helped me to heal all of that. It's something that I really enjoy working on with my clients. If you struggle with emotional eating, if you struggle with orthorexia, not only am I trained in all that, but I lived through it. You can break free from it.

Zibby: When did you put the shingle out and start your consulting wellness business?

Liz: I did that after my first daughter was born when we lived in DC. I did that with a few clients for about two years. Most of my clients just wanted to lose the baby weight and wanted to lose the baby weight. It wasn't really focused so much on health and wellness as much as I always tried to direct the train that way. It just seemed like there was a disconnect there. At the same time, I also started working for a website called Unconventional Kitchen, running their back end, helping them. It was a website for moms to go to for healthy habits, healthy recipes, that kind of thing. I [indiscernible] created recipes for them. That was a really fun thing to do with my degree as well. Through that, through working with Unconventional Kitchen, I started to consult for her and then consult for some other clients in the health and wellness industry who I realized didn't necessarily have business acumen. They had the passion to do this, but they didn't necessarily have the business acumen to run a business. I started to do that and kind of got away from the health coaching for about two years. Once we moved to Charlotte, I realized that while I was making a lot more money doing what I was doing with business consulting, it just wasn't feeding me the way that I needed to be fed. I decided once we were back in Charlotte to start with health coaching again. I did have a baby in between there, so I took a little hiatus. I also noticed that in Charlotte, the health and eating habits are very different than what they were in DC. I find that I'm making a little bit of a bigger difference here for people, if that makes sense.

Zibby: That makes sense. What did it feel like for you to have the whiplash effect of having gained fifty pounds and then all of a sudden being a double zero and being in a dressing room? There must have been a moment where you were like, oh, my gosh, look what is going on. Did that happen?

Liz: I don't even think that it's a look-in-the-mirror moment. I think that it's when you look back on photos. I remember looking through -- my husband and I went to Greece on this amazing trip through the Greek Islands. Take me back. [laughter] 

Zibby: Take me with you.

Liz: We got home from that trip, and I would always put together these Shutterfly books because I had time to do it then. 

Zibby: PS, I have my teenage son make my photo albums for the whole family. Once your kids get old enough, I pay him like twenty bucks an album. FYI. I don't know if that's bad parenting or not, but I get my albums done. Helpful tips for people who have photos stacking up. Okay, go ahead.

Liz: A hundred percent. I have not done one since my first daughter was born. I remember looking back on that book after the trip and thinking, who is that? She's really skinny. Maybe she's too skinny. Is that me?

Zibby: Did anyone say anything to you? Did you family or your friends? Did anyone say, maybe you're getting a little too skinny?

Liz: For sure, my parents. Even my husband was like, "You're beautiful no matter what." He has loved me at every single size that I have been. He would say, "You don't need to focus on this as much." For him, it was less about how I looked and more about what I was putting my energy towards. I do remember his grandmother, who's very outspoken, always liked to talk to me about it. [laughs] For sure, people noticed. People reached out. I think it's something that no matter what other people say to you or what other people think, it has to come from yourself to actually do something and change it.

Zibby: Where are you now personally in terms of how you feel about your body and all of that?

Liz: Now that I have two little girls, six-year-old and a three-year-old -- we're in a pandemic, so let's just throw that in. Let's say pandemic aside, I feel awesome. I have felt awesome for the past, I'd say, three years since my second daughter was born. I gained weight during that process. The weight did not come off as quickly the second time. I probably still have some of that weight on me now. I'm one hundred percent okay with it. I love how I look. I love having some curves. I'm always going to have more of a tiny body, but I feel like I look healthy. I feel healthy now. It's so much less about how I look. How I feel is everything. I want every mom to feel as good as I feel. Once you get that feeling of not feeling so exhausted all the time, of not feeling like you have to constantly be focused on your weight and what you're consuming, I think that the whole world opens up to you in a new way. Does that answer your question? Do you want to know what size I am now?

Zibby: I do not. I do not want to know what size you are. I'm happy to know that you feel good and that is the overarching lesson. I'm really interested in this concept of orthorexia because I talk to a lot of women who confess to feeling overwhelmed and completely consumed by what they eat. Now I'm wondering looking back, all I did was count points for years at a time. Was that orthorexia? How would you know? If there's someone listening who thinks, geez, gosh, I cannot stop thinking about my weight, what can they do? What are your three tips for people who may or may not be orthorexic? 

Liz: I think the first tip is to just, I don't want to say own it, but acknowledge that it's there. Give it a name. Just like when you're in therapy for any other situation, you have parts of you. Orthorexia is a part of you, so name that part and know that it's there. I think that it's really important to talk to that part. If that sounds kind of silly or woo-woo, I think it's really important that if you're struggling with anything between orthorexia, anxiety, any of that, you need to talk to that part and let it know that it's not in control of you. You're in control. You drive the bus. That would be a big sign for you. If you feel like, I'm not driving the bus right now, something else is, something else is taking control, I think that would be the biggest wake-up sign for you to realize that maybe there's something worth exploring here. Maybe there's something that we need to heal here.

Zibby: If people want to work with you directly, do you do it virtually or do you have to be in Charlotte?

Liz: Right now, I work with pretty much only people in Charlotte. I have one client in New Jersey. I like to work with people in person, but everything's virtual right now. I can work with anybody anywhere virtually right now. The one thing that I love to do is my fridge and panty makeovers. That, I always feel like I need to be there with you to do it. I can do those virtually too. It's a sad time. I miss being with actual human beings.

Zibby: Ugh, me too. How can people find you?

Liz: You can find me on Instagram, it's @liz.vandy.health.charlotteCLT, or my website which is lizvandyhealthandwellness.com.

Zibby: That was too fast. Liz Vandy, V-A-N-D-Y. Lizvandyhealthand -- spell out and or ampersand? And, A-N-D?

Liz: Spell it out, yeah.

Zibby: Healthandwellness.com.

Liz: Lizvandyhealthand -- spell it out -- wellness.com. I got to get better at that.

Zibby: In addition to owning orthorexia and everything else, and I know your sweet spot is helping moms, do you have any advice in general for the busy mom who really wants to be healthy and just doesn't have the emotional bandwidth? What you were saying about before you had kids, before you have kids and maybe before you have kids and a job or whatever else you're doing in life, you might have had more mental headspace to focus and make smart choices. I remember before I had kids, I would go through a cookbook and be like, ooh, I could totally make that. I would spend two hours after work. I would make it. It would have three points or something. It would be amazing. I would be so excited. Now I'm like, did I eat? I think I ate today. I don't even have the focus on it sometimes. What are just a few things busy moms who are distracted, or not just moms even, just busy people, even though we're home -- it's not like we're running around as much, necessarily. Even though we're mostly at home, what inspiration and tips can we have for not mindless partaking in some of the habits that maybe we know are not the best but we do them anyway? Then what? 

Liz: Gosh, it's hard. It's so hard right now, especially with the pandemic. I'm trying to normalize pandemic weight gain because it's just a different time. In general for busy people, the first thing I would say is accountability, either working with a coach or just finding someone who's in the same kind of life space as you; if you're a mom, maybe finding another mom who has about the same amount of children and about the same age as your children going through the same struggles. Keep each other accountable. I think that for most of my clients, that's what they want me for. They want me to keep them accountable. I'd say that's numero uno, is just keeping it front of mind but allowing someone else to hold you accountable so that you're not constantly doing it for yourself in your mind. Specifically for moms, I'd say it's the same old kind of adage of put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on everybody else. Moms, we don't have time to take care of ourselves. We're taking care of everybody else before ourselves. I really feel like we just have to reverse that. We have to reverse the mom psychology, that martyr psychology, in order to be able to focus on what we need to focus on. The last thing I'd say if you aren't working with a coach who's well-versed in this or you don't know anything about what this is, I would google intuitive eating so that you can begin to understand how to become a mindful eater and how to be in control of that yourself.

Zibby: Amazing. Wow, so many tips. So much to think about. Thank you for sharing your very personal story and your whole journey and how it's led you to helping other people, which is really beautiful. It's amazing that you've decided to do that and got out of the DC rat race and instead are helping women where they're struggling a lot and making real change. I think that's awesome. PS, I love your sweater. For people listening, I'll put this up on YouTube, probably. You're wearing this gorgeous magenta sweater. Where is that from? I have to maybe find a sweater like that.

Liz: It's Halogen, just the regular Nordstrom Halogen cashmere sweater. They make a million colors of them every year. I saw this color and I was like, I must have.

Zibby: I'm obsessed with that color. It's amazing.

Liz: Thank you.

Zibby: Very uplifting. That was off topic. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. I will be thinking of you. I hope I meet you in person.

Liz: It was so nice to meet you. Bye.

Zibby: Take care. Buh-bye.

Laura Vanderkam, THE NEW CORNER OFFICE

Zibby Owens: Welcome, Laura. Thanks for coming back on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books" after I mistakenly deleted our episode. Thank you. [laughter] 

Laura Vanderkam: Thanks for having me back and not just leaving it in the trash can. I appreciate that.

Zibby: It's so ironic because you're a time management expert, essentially, in addition to other amazing skills. We had this great conversation about using time efficiently and managing our time and all this other stuff. Then I wasted your time completely by having the podcast not record. Anyway, here we are.

Laura: It's fine. Here I was five minutes late to this one because I was using the wrong link. [laughs] 

Zibby: I was literally about to go digging for the time zone. I'm like, really, did I mess this up again? These things happen. Nobody's perfect.

Laura: All good.

Zibby: Thank you. Let's talk about your book, The New Corner Office: How the Most Successful People Work from Home, which basically is almost everybody right now. Give listeners the low-down on what this book really helps people do and how you can empower people to work more successfully from home.

Laura: I wrote this book after I noticed in March that there were a lot of people who were working from home for the first time and suffering through a lot of really terrible Zoom happy hours and that they were probably going to be looking for advice on how to do this long term, to work from home both productively and ambitiously. I cranked this out, got tips on how you can redesign your workdays to take advantage of some of the upsides of working from home, how you can handle a self-directed schedule, how you can stay social and build your network when you're working from home, how you can think big about your career, and how you can take care of yourself at the same time.

Zibby: I want to hear all of those things. Where do we start? How do you stay social and expand your network while at home?

Laura: It is challenging. I think there's a bit of a false view of this, though. I know in the past when people were asking to work from home and negotiating to work from home, that term implying you need to give something up in order to do it, one of the arguments against it was that relationships are best built face to face. Obviously, when you're working from home, you are then not face to with many of your colleagues on those days. Very few places going forward from this are going to be a hundred percent virtual. Most places, it's just going to move the needle a little bit on how often it is acceptable to work from home. Most places will not stay five days a week remote for all of eternity once this is all over. In that sense, if you're going to be working from home two to three days a week and in the office two to three days per week, you don't have a problem with this because you'll just be very social on the days that you are in the office. That will be perfectly fine. 

In the meantime, there are a couple things you can do. You can certainly begin meetings with a little bit of social chit-chat. People are going to do it anyway, so it's good to put it on the agenda for all your meetings. Then it's accounted for, so it doesn't run over. Also, people are expecting it so you don't get that one guy who's always like, we don't have time for this, and cutting it all off before people have actually said what they meant to say. That helps. You can pick up the phone and call people. In our world where we have smartphones in our pockets, very few people use them as actual phones in the sense that you can call someone. If you've been working with somebody for six years, you don't actually have to schedule an appointment at a certain time, trading emails back and forth to be like, would it be acceptable to call you for ten minutes at this moment? You are allowed to pick up the phone and call. That is often the most efficient way. It's very good because then you hear their voice and talk and all that good stuff.

Zibby: I always find myself apologizing if I call.

Laura: How dare I use my phone, to this person who gave me your number. [laughs] 

Zibby: I should've checked with you first to see if it's okay. Also, I feel like if I call certain friends, they’ll think something's wrong.

Laura: [laughs] Oh, yeah. That's true.

Zibby: I'm like the school nurse. It's not emergency.

Laura: It's okay. That is true. Although, once you do it more regularly, people get used to it. Definitely if you're managing people and you're working from home, you do need to call your employees frequently so that they don't think they're in trouble every time you call. That's a very important managerial tip here. I'd actually say that one of the ways that working from home can be better for network building is that when you work in an office forty hours a week, a lot of your immediate need for social interaction and for professional networking feels satisfied by the people who you are working with closely. You go to lunch with your colleagues. You go to coffee with your colleagues. You chat with your colleagues. That's great except that the people you work closest with are not the only people in the universe that you probably should be getting to know. When you work from home, it's not so automatic that you would be going to lunch every day with your colleagues. Maybe you find somebody else to go to lunch with or somebody else to call, somebody else to have coffee with as that becomes more that people can do that as we come out of this. Then you could build a broader network when it's not just enforced by the social norms of your immediate office.

Zibby: How do you work from home while your kids are around?

Laura: This is complicated. Before all this happened, one of the most frequent conversations I would have with people who are looking to work from home was the "don't think you can save money on childcare" conversation. Some people would be like, wait, hey, maybe I don't have to pay for it. It's like, no, no, no, you still do. You cannot, long term, be the adult in charge of your young children during the hours you intend to work. Unfortunately, that reality has not changed just because we are in the midst of a pandemic that has thrown many people's childcare arrangements for a giant loop. What do you do? The most obvious thing, if your childcare arrangements are not available or the ones that are available are not acceptable to you, you can trade off with your partner. 

I have a schedule on my blog from a couple months ago that documents how each party can work either twenty-nine or thirty-one hours a week. Of those, twenty-five are pure focused hours. Four to six are probable hours using a combination of naptime and movie time and spouses covering for each other. If you are going to do that, it has to be strictly delineated who is in charge. The party who is in charge not only has to keep the kids safe, you have to keep them out of the other person's home office. That is the nature of the job. That's what you can do. If that's not going to work for your family, maybe there's another adult in a similar situation that you could likewise swap with, if it's a neighbor or another family member that you're willing to enter into the bubble together with. It's challenging. Hopefully, people will come to a place where if they need to, they can also find some sort of paid childcare that they feel they can trust for at least a few hours a week because the honest truth is you will get more done in two hours of focused work while somebody else is dealing with the children than you will in four hours of going back and forth between work and dealing with your kids.

Zibby: Look how focused I am. I have a babysitter in the next room. [laughs] 

Laura: There you go. That's what it's got to be, honestly.

Zibby: Otherwise, they're over my shoulders and popping in and whatever else. Although, sometimes I feel guilty. I'm home. Why do I need a babysitter?

Laura: You should get over that. [laughs] I hear this from people. I think it's just a change in mindset. When you're working from home, you're working. The operative part here is not at home. That just happens to be where you're doing it. You achieved the efficiencies of not commuting to an office. Great. Go you. That doesn't change the fact that you are working and the work still has to get done. If you were not available for intense in-person childcare when you were working at an office, that does not magically change just because you happen to be doing the same work at home.

Zibby: All right, okay. I felt a little guilt ebb, just a little. 

Laura: You see your family a lot. A lot of this is predicated on feeling guilty that you are maybe not seeing your family. I always suggest people try tracking their time if they are feeling that way. There are 168 hours in a week. Even if you are working 40 hours a week, which is a full-time job, if you subtract 40 from 168, you'll notice that there are a lot of hours still there. Even if you subtract your sleeping hours, you'll notice there are still a lot of hours still there. You can subtract housework. You can subtract whatever else you want. There are still a lot of hours. Many people do spend the majority of those with the people they live with. That tends to get rid of some of the guilt.

Zibby: I feel like my kids are experts at using the time that I have designated for sleep. [laughs] 

Laura: They want to interact with you during that time. Yes, exactly.

Zibby: Wait, tell me more. We talked about this last time that I deleted. I was in awe of your extensive time tracking system and how long you've been doing it and how meticulous and detailed. Tell me more about it.

Laura: All your listeners are going to know that I'm a bit of time management freak. I have been tracking my time on weekly spreadsheets since April of 2015.  My spreadsheets have the days of the week across the top, Monday through Sunday, half-hour blocks down the left-hand side, five AM to four thirty AM, so half-hour blocks for five and a half years at this point. I'm not going to bore everybody with a recounting of the five and a half years. The truth is, it's not terribly exact. I tend to check in three to four times a day. For instance, when I sat down at my desk this morning, I noted what I had done since about six PM last night. I will check in probably after this, so maybe one thirty, two PM will be another check-in, another in the evening, and that's it. Then it will be tomorrow morning again when I check in. Each check-in is thirty seconds to a minute. I just write down really quickly what I've done. It's not this big ordeal. It takes about the same amount of time as brushing my teeth. I like to think that a lot of your listeners have also been brushing their teeth quite regularly since April of 2015. [laughs] 

Zibby: That would be nice.

Laura: Yes. It's along that lines. It's just more data that I'm getting from it.

Zibby: What have you done with that data?

Laura: More in the beginning than I do now. In the beginning, I was quite into the analysis of it. I wound up writing an article for The New York Times in 2016 on what I had learned from tracking my time for a year. It was useful because I found some interesting stuff. In my speeches, for years, I've had some laugh lines about people overestimating how many hours they work. I joke about a guy I met at a party who told me he was working 180 hours a week, which is very impressive when you multiple 24 times 7. Everyone laughs about this, ha, ha, ha. Then it turns out when I track my time -- I used to think I worked like fifty hours a week because I had tracked my time here and there over the years. Then I realized in the past I had chosen very specific weeks to track, like those weeks where I worked fifty hours a week because that is what I wanted to see myself as doing. When I track a whole year, of course I can't do that. It turns out the long-term average is a lot closer to forty, which is a different number than fifty, turns out. [laughs] I saw that I was very consistent on sleep. I didn't get the same amount week to week, but over the long haul I tended to get 7.4 hours per day. If I tracked for two months, it would come out to 7.4. If I tracked for six months, a track comes out to 7.4. If I track for two years, it comes out to 7.4. Good to know. These days, it's serving more of a diary function. I haven't really added up the major categories in quite a while. I do love that I can look back over a previous week, any previous week from the past five and a half years, and see what I was doing. When I look at those notes, I tend to be able to reconstruct it in my brain, and so that week is not completely gone. The memory is still there. That has the effect of making time feel a lot more rich and full.

Zibby: When you're tracking it, how much detail are you putting into -- if I were to, say, work today, would I then put "interview Laura Vanderkam"?

Laura: You could if you wanted to. Oftentimes, I just put work. That's the basic email, writing an article, unless it's something that I'm trying to track to see how much time I am devoting to. Sometimes I will put the names of people I am speaking to, like if I'm interviewing or somebody's on my podcast or I'm on their podcast, just partly to have the names. It's the memory. I will remember it more if I say talk with Zibby versus podcast or just work. Sometimes I'll be a little bit more specific, but there's no rules. It's just for my benefit.

Zibby: I know, but if I were to try and maximize this, if I were to try to do this, I would want to go all in. If I'm going to spend a week tracking my time, I want to do it the right way.

Laura: The right way. Then you might want to be more specific. If you're only going for a week, it's a little bit easier to do that because you're not worried about the sustainability so much.

Zibby: You're trying to make time stand still, essentially. You're trying to capture the most elusive thing on the planet which cannot be captured. What's this about deep down, do you think?

Laura: [laughs] Do you want to psychoanalyze this?

Zibby: Yeah, I do.

Laura: Time passes. Once a second is gone, all the money in the world cannot buy it back. Yet our interactions with time are very different depending on what we do with it. I have found that recording it makes these years that people say pass so quickly feel a little bit more like this rich tapestry as opposed to a slick linoleum floor which is just sliding away. I do have more memories of the past five and a half years than I would have had if I had not been recording it. I'll still die anyway, but I do have this that I can look back on and recall.

Zibby: Do you take pictures?

Laura: I do, like everyone, just a cell phone. I'm taking like ten a day of my toast. [laughs] It's kind of the curse of modern life.

Zibby: I know. That's how I feel like I fill in my memory.

Laura: It's helpful too. Although, to some degree, photos are of particular moments. Then you can go long bits of time that are not particularly memorable, but there are things you could remember of them. I do both. Sometimes it's fun to look back at photos as well. I think that's something we could definitely spend more time doing too. Recently, my older kids and I were looking back through the whole iCloud thing from the past four years. It was amazing to see just how different even they looked in the past four years, let alone their younger siblings who were a baby and then one who didn't exist. Seeing that change is pretty profound to note the passage of time too.

Zibby: I don't know if you can see. I'm in my office in New York. Here, I'm going to just slide this. That bottom shelf is all photo albums. Each one has, I don't know, a thousand.

Laura: Oh, my goodness. Good for you for doing that.

Zibby: This whole shelf is also all photos.

Laura: So many people don't print them up anymore. That's the issue.

Zibby: That was pre-digital. Then starting on that shelf are all my digital albums. I am obsessive about monthly recounting in photos. Maybe I have the same complex as you in a different way. [laughs] 

Laura: That probably has a good high-level view of your time as well. I'm sure if you looked back through it you would see plenty of things that showed daily life then if you're being that good about tracking it.

Zibby: I'm trying, but I don't know. So how did you manage to get a book out this quickly?

Laura: [laughs] Well, you just write. I've written a lot of books, so it kind of flows pretty naturally. I've always been a swift writer. A lot of the material I was covering was stuff I've been writing about for years. I didn't have to entirely reinvent the wheel here. I just wrote down some of the tips I had learned. Then I went and found people who had been working from home and running their own companies or had been working as part of distributed teams for a great many years. They had tips. I could incorporate those as well. It's a short book. It's a quick read. You probably could get through it in less than an hour and a half. It's not War and Peace.

Zibby: We would have to track that, though. Now even reading the book is an hour. You're all over my time tracking then this week. No, I'm kidding. Obviously, I read this a while ago. You have lots of kids yourself. 

Laura: I do.

Zibby: Four kids? Did I make that up?

Laura: Five kids.

Zibby: Five kids, oh, my gosh. A baby is one of them, right? Didn't you just have --

Laura: -- Yes, one of them is a baby.

Zibby: That's like four and a half. 

Laura: Four and a half, sure. [laughs] 

Zibby: I'm kidding. Five kids, and you're doing all this writing. How do you do it? Not to say, how do you balance it all? because it's an annoying question. It sounds like you're strict about, this is when I'm working and this is when I'm not. Then even in the not-working time, managing five different sets of needs is a lot.

Laura: Yeah, it's challenging. Partly, babies are challenging too. This year, I'm doing it with a lot less energy because I'm not sleeping as well as I would certainly hope to be sleeping. That is what it is. Babies are tough. They're worth it, but they're tough. I try to get very clear each week on what needs to happen. I spend some time every Friday looking at the calendar for the upcoming week. I try to record anything that is time-specific or that's coming up. I put it on the calendar so I know it's going to happen. I spend some time on Friday looking at the upcoming weeks seeing what needs to happen to be on track for those things, looking at people's schedules, the kids, the different priorities they're going to have. I make myself a priority list for the next week with my top career things, my top relationship things, top personal things. The goal is to end every week with all of it crossed off, which means that I have to make it very limited. There is a strict winnowing that goes down through there. I look and say, is it possible for all this to happen in the week? 

If I'm trying to bite off more than I can chew, then I need to crunch it down a little bit more so that I can cross it all off. It definitely has been more challenging the past few months, partly because when the kids have all been home, there's just more potential for interruption. I haven't had as much open time and space to be a little bit more flexible of when things happen. To record, I have to make sure everyone's quiet and accounted for. That's been challenging. The good news is the baby's in childcare right now. The five-year-old, we put in a private school that was promising to meet in person and has been. Then the older three started school virtually, but they’ve been, past the first day, relatively self-sufficient. I did a lot of Zoom tech support the first few days. After that, they kind of go and disappear. I know roughly when they’ll come up for their breaks, but I can work around that. The past five weeks have been so much different than the five months before that. I feel sort of like, ahh. [laughs] 

Zibby: Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Laura: I do, which is to write a lot. We can't be too precious about writing. I find that each author who has a lot of good stuff coming up also just has a lot of stuff coming out. They discover cool ideas by trying different things and then seeing what resonates and then writing more about that or by forcing themselves to come up with hundreds of ideas of, say, blog posts per year. Out of those hundred, maybe one or two might be a good idea for a book, for instance. If you were only trying to come up with one or two ideas a year, the odds that those would be really good are minimal. Do a lot of it, as much as you possibly can. Your quality and your ideas and all that will become better through the sheer quantity of output.

Zibby: Love it, a perfectly quantitative awesome. I would expect none less. [laughter] I feel like you did really well on the math part of the SAT.

Laura: Maybe.

Zibby: I'm kidding. And English. Look at you. You're a writer too. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming back on "Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books." You're my only double.

Laura: I'm so thrilled. I'm honored. This is great.

Zibby: I learned new things this time. It was great. Take care. Thank you so much.

Laura: Thanks for having me.

Zibby: My pleasure. Buh-bye.

Cecily von Ziegesar, COBBLE HILL

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

Cecily von Ziegesar: Thank you. It's so nice to be here.

Zibby: See, that was so easy. I just asked a question. Not even. I said something. You said something back.

Cecily: I can do this.

Zibby: [laughs] First of all, Cobble Hill is so great. I was so excited to see that you had come out with a new book. It did not disappoint in the slightest. I love your characters and your sense of humor and the whole thing. I just had to say that from the outset. I thoroughly enjoyed it and needed a fun escape that pokes fun at basically everybody. That was awesome. Thank you.

Cecily: Thank you. That's really nice to hear. I'm at that tender stage where I'm terrified about what people are going to think of the book. People are just reading it now. It's always nice to hear good things.

Zibby: Thumbs up. Obviously, you've written the Gossip Girl series. That was smash hit, TV show, fame, whatever. Now how do you go from that and write another book? Tell me how you came up with the idea for Cobble Hill. We'll go from there.

Cecily: It's been a long time. The first Gossip Girl book came out in 2002. It's been a while. There are also many of them and as you said, a TV show. I have actually written a couple of books in between that weren’t really widely read. I kept also getting distracted and pulled away from this idea by other things, also, my kids. Actually, 2002 was when the first Gossip Girl book came out, but also when my first child was born. She's starting at college now. There you go. There's a good marker. Cobble Hill, actually, the germ of the idea came about in many paranoid conversations that I had with my kid's elementary school nurse. After reading the book, you'll discover that there is very definitely a school nurse in the book. She would send out these lice letters. I would just completely freak out. The minute I got the lice letter in my kid's backpack or whatever, I'd be like, they're all over me. They're in the walls. They're everywhere. She was this really nice, lovely person. I would go into her office and start out talking about lice. Then we wound up just chatting about other stuff. I knew I wanted to write a book set in this neighborhood, the neighborhood that I live in. In talking to her, I was like, I have to have lice in my book. [laughs] It was just so ridiculous. It's even more ridiculous now. If only lice were our problem, the only epidemic we were worrying about. It started with that. Then I very definitely extrapolated wildly from there. Another character in the book is a writer. The longer that I worked on this -- I think I've been working on this book on and off for more than five years, which is a really long time for me. The Gossip Girl books, I wrote two a year. The more I worked on it and it moved away from the original "moms in the schoolyard" type of book, it became about writing itself too and make fun of myself with the agonizing that I was doing.

Zibby: When I was reading it, you had this one scene where -- is his name Ray?

Cecily: Roy.

Zibby: Roy, sorry. He's walking around. You're charting the streets. Should I go to this bar? Should I go to this place? Should I go here? Should I go there? I'm like, was she actually doing this? Maybe that was her morning and this was the walk she took and then she sat down and then just wrote that out. [laughs]

Cecily: Actually, no. I've always tried to find other places to write other than home. Right now, I'm in, my daughter who went to college, her bedroom because I don't have an office in our apartment. I don't know how happy she is about this, but her room is now my office.

Zibby: Is she finding this out right now on this podcast?

Cecily: No, the way she found out was I took a -- she didn't have a desk in her room at all. I don't even know how she got through high school without having a desk. She just had this big fuzzy pillow on the floor. She would sit on the pillow and put her laptop in her lap. The first week that she was at college, I took a picture of the fuzzy pillow -- it looks like a dog pillow, it's really gross by now -- out on the sidewalk for the garbage to take away. I was like, "Say bye-bye to your fuzzy pillow."

Zibby: Oh, no. [laughter]

Cecily: I don't think she's too sad. She doesn't mind. Anyway, throughout my writing life, I've been wondering, there are people who work in the park. There are people who work in coffee shops. I'd go to a coffee place and bring my laptop fully intending to get something done. I don't know how people do that. All I do is eavesdrop on other people. I don't get anything done. It's impossible for me to do that. Part of Roy's journey -- it's also just procrastination. He's like, maybe I'll try this. Maybe I'll go here. In the meantime, he's not writing. He's just walking around. I tell everyone, even when you're not writing, you're writing. It's in your head. That is actually very true for me. Once I get going, I feel like I am kind of carrying the whole book in my head. The characters are having conversations. Now I sound like [indiscernible/laughter].

Zibby: I'm hearing all these voices in my head. Turns out I'm a novelist.

Cecily: It is actually true. Maybe you do have to be a little crazy to do that. Once they become fully formed characters, they are talking in your head, or in my head anyway.

Zibby: I loved Peaches, the nurse character, and how when she got to go through -- why am I blanking on everybody's name in this book? -- the musician's hair when he came to sit down [indiscernible] and she was like, "Thank you, god. Thank you, mom. Thank you, everybody who didn't let me drop out of nursing school for this moment right here. It was all worth it." [laughs] I just loved that.

Cecily: She's a terrible flirt. That's part of what I try to do with my writing. I think I did that in Gossip Girl too. You're kind of hearing every thought that every character has. It's that off-camera thing. It adds another dimension to them. You're also seeing how the person they're talking to is seeing them. It all gets very complicated. Part of what I learned that I like to do in writing Gossip Girl was having the idea of that perfect-looking person and then you see how flawed they really are, and insecure. I had a lot of fun with that in Cobble Hill too. Hopefully, it's amusing to hear how insecure -- I think a lot of it was also me wandering around my neighborhood and wondering what all these people are really doing when they go home, these people who don't seem to have nine-to-five jobs like me and who might be sitting on a park bench at eleven o'clock in the morning with their laptop or getting a coffee or just walking around. I became fascinated with what those people really are doing and what their lives were like.

Zibby: I feel like it's human nature, perhaps maybe more novelist nature, to wonder what everybody's thinking and doing. What is everything doing out? I remember working when I actually had a nine-to-five job in marketing before I went to business school. One day, I got the day off. I remember going to the reservoir and thinking, this is the height of luxury that I can go running in the middle of the day. I was like, who are these people? How is everybody else out and about? What are they all doing? How are they all here? Your books are the backstory that everybody's really wondering. You even have your Anna Wintour-ish character who's pretending like she's so busy at work and doing absolutely nothing. You have so many funny characters in different ways. It's just great. You poke fun at everybody from the Latin teacher to the -- it's just awesome. Why not make fun of everybody in a nice, funny, literary way? That's really what you do.

Cecily: It's funny because the teenagers are -- there are two main teenager characters as well, and they're the more serious characters in a way. That was something that I maybe have discovered in my middle age. Just because you're a grown-up doesn't mean you act like one. Sometimes the teenagers are a little bit more responsible. I have so much sympathy for my kids. I'm still in my bathrobe with my cup of coffee. It's seven o'clock in the morning. They're completely dressed. My daughter's eyelashes would be curled. They're facing the day and doing so much. I'm like, bye, I'm just going to go write a book in my bathrobe. A lot of it came out of that, just realizing how much shit they have going on in their lives. Also, there's so much that you deal with in high school that if you're in your little neighborhood adult bubble, you don't necessarily have to deal with that at all. There's a lot of that in the book too, almost that the teenagers are dealing with what's happening in the world around them more than the adults are.

Zibby: Did you ever actually debate faking MS yourself so that you could stay in bed all day?

Cecily: Oh, my god. Mandy's actually one of my favorite characters because she -- it's funny. At first, I was worried, are people just going to hate her because she's so indulgent and she's just staying in bed all day? Then I became so envious of her. Why not? [laughs] Why not just take a little time and stay in bed? I feel like it's sort of a brave thing to do somehow. She gets through it. She actually grows throughout the story. She's kind of moving on. It was just something she needed to do. I have a couple friends who have MS. When they were talking about their symptoms -- [laughs]. This is so twisted of me. I was like, this is the perfect disease to fake, just be like, I think I need to take it easy right now. This is just the way my completely crazy brain works. I had this idea while talking to my friend from college who has MS and just went with it. I guess I can ask you. When you read about it, were you like, oh, god, she's so lazy, or were you like, that takes a certain degree of courage to just be like, I'm staying in bed?

Zibby: At first, I was like, I wonder what's wrong with her. Is she depressed? What's going on? First, you hear about it from her husband. Then I felt sorry. Then I was like, oh, no, this poor woman. Then you find out that, actually, she's faking it. I was like, I cannot believe that she's faking it. [laughs]

Cecily: Spoiler alert. Did you know the whole time she's faking it? I love how I wrote the book and I can't remember.

Zibby: I feel like that was all very early. Did I ruin it?

Cecily: You totally didn't ruin it.

Zibby: It's all very early in the book.

Cecily: You see her process of googling what the symptoms are.

Zibby: I wonder if there will be an outbreak of other moms being like, you know what, I don't want to take my kid to school anymore. I'm just staying in bed. You put the bed in the living room. I feel like actually what it is, it's every crazy stressed-out mother's fantasy, is basically what you wrote. It's like, you know what, I've had enough. That's it. I'm just not going to do that anymore. Let's see what happens.

Cecily: Some of Mandy -- no, probably all of her behavior came from that moment where I'm saying goodbye to my family in the morning and it's just me and the dog. Then I'm like, what if I just took to my bed and they came home from school and work or whatever and I was just in bed? How crazy would that be? Instead of doing it, I wrote it.

Zibby: There we go. Why not? Cecily, how did you get into writing to begin with? Maybe it's just a natural outgrowth of what goes on in your head. How did you start the Gossip Girl series? How did you become a published author? How did it begin?

Cecily: Oh, boy. Going way back, in high school, English was my favorite class. I had this wonderful teacher named Christine Schutt. She's actually a published author. She really encouraged me to begin with when I was a teenager to write outside of class. In my head, I always had this idea that it was the only thing that I was really good at. In college, I was an English major. I took all the creative writing classes that they offered. I actually did both poetry and fiction. For my senior thesis, I published a collection of short stories and poetry. It's actually funny. I don't really write poems, but then when I'm writing a book -- Dan in Gossip Girl, in the books, is a poet. He writes poetry. Then Stuart in Cobble Hill is a musician. That's not poetry, but I did have fun with his little one-line rhymes. I started a master's, an MFA in fiction writing, but I didn't actually finish. Maybe I could go back. I just did a year. I felt like I wanted to be living in the world and not in school anymore.

My first job was actually in publishing in England working for a children's book publisher. My husband is English. We met over here. Then I went over there to live with him and got married over there. Hence, Roy is British in Cobble Hill. This is how I know so much about English people. Half of my family is English. While I was living in England in my early twenties at that job, it was this weird -- I feel like a lot of people have encountered this. I had this editorial assistant job. I didn't really have enough to do, and so I would start writing my own stuff. I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. None of that was ever published. It's all on floppy disk. [laughter] What do you do with those? Anyway, then we moved to New York. I got a job with a company called 17th Street Productions which then was acquired by Alloy Entertainment. They were a very unusual company. It was a book production company which meant that they came up with ideas for series, mostly young adult series. The editors were really in charge of the content and what the series would be. That was my job. Then they would outsource the writing and hire writers who didn't get to use their own names. One of the most well-known series that they had done before I got there was Sweet Valley High.

I was hired to work on a horse series, because I grew up riding horses, called Thoroughbred. It was about horse racing. It was such a big series. I think we published one book a month or something. It was crazy. I was insanely busy. I had to come up with the plotlines for the stories. I'm going on and on. The company wanted to develop and produce more authentic fiction. They worked with all the big publishing houses. One of the series that one of my colleagues came up while we were there was The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. At the same time, another colleague of mine, after reading a newspaper article about a girl who had exposed everyone in her class, some sort of scandal through instant messaging, he came up with this title, Gossip Girl. The title was not mine. Then in the development process, I was assigned this to come up with the characters. I just went completely crazy. I was like, I don't want this to be like anything we've ever done before. I don't want it to be in this weird made-up place like Sweet Valley High. I grew up in Manhattan. It's going to be about Manhattan teenagers. I came up with the whole cast of characters. I wrote the introduction. They sent it out to publishers.

This one editor, Cindy Eagan at Little Brown, read it and was like, "This is amazing. This sounds exactly like the people that I went to boarding school with. I want to come and talk to you about publishing this." She asked in the meeting, "Who wrote this proposal?" I was like, "I did." I was still kind of a junior person there. She was like, "You're writing the books." My boss was like, "We don't usually do that." She was like, "No, she's writing the books." She was really my champion. They gave me a shot at writing the first book. She insisted that it have my name on it. To make a long story short, by the time this third book was coming out, it was on the best-seller list before it even was published because people were preordering it. I quit my job and was just writing Gossip Girl full time while also nursing my newborn baby. It's funny because the other thing that -- as Gossip Girl became more and more popular pretty early on, because I literally gave birth to my daughter and the first book came out at the same time and the second book came out six months later, the publisher at Little Brown had told people, "She can't travel right now," because I'd just given birth. Somehow, it got in the system that Cecily von Ziegesar doesn't travel. Years later people would be like, "I know you don't travel, but..." I felt like I had this weird reputation or something. I was like, "What do you mean I don't travel? I'll go anywhere." I'm a travel [indiscernible]. I love to travel. It was all just because of the weird timing of that first book that there was this idea that I never travel. Then the word got out I'm going to Brazil. I'll go anywhere. If you want me, I'll go.

Zibby: How involved were you, then, with it being adapted as a TV show?

Cecily: That happened -- I don't even remember when the show came out. 2007? Is that right? I can't remember when the show first came out. I wasn't involved in the writing of the show. I met with the creators of the show. I had lunch with Stephanie Savage at the restaurant in Barneys. She's not a native New Yorker. She's actually a Canadian. We walked around the reservoir in Central Park. Then we went to my school. We watched the girls coming out of school. I felt like I needed to take her around the neighborhood where it all happens just to be sure that she -- I think I was being a little crazy because then they wound up doing an incredible job. It was way better than I ever could've imagined. I was so nervous that it was going to be filmed in LA. I didn't know at that point. They were also very generous with me. I was able to go on set anytime. They asked me to do a little cameo in one of the later episodes. I had a line. That was really fun. The show was really amazing. It was really different from the books. It started out with the first book and then completely -- they had to go beyond the timeframe of the books. It was really amazing.

Zibby: Wow. I think I watched probably every episode of Gossip Girl over the years. I have four kids. My daughter is thirteen. She's like, "My friends are talking about this show." I'm like, I don't know. Do I want you watching it?

Cecily: It's funny because my daughter's friends -- I think she was always a little bit nervous about it or something. It was in her life. Because of that, she didn't really pay much attention. Then somebody would find out in middle school, seventh, eighth grade, the same age as your daughter. Then they'd be like, "Oh, my god. Tell your mom I want a --" She’d end up having to bring signed copies of the books to school. Sometimes teachers would ask too. It would just get out in school. She tried to keep it on the low-down a little bit. I think she has pretty much watched all of the episodes of the show. I don't think she's read all the books, though. Maybe later. It'll be her escape from schoolwork.

Zibby: I know you worked on Cobble Hill on and off for five years. Do you have another project that you've already been working on or dabbling in that you think might come next, or you're just not sure what's up after this?

Cecily: I don't want to get anyone too excited because it's not a done deal. I don't really know what my involvement is going to be. I'm trying to, just almost as an experiment at this stage, to adapt Cobble Hill for television. It would be really fun. I think it lends itself very much to a TV show. I wanted to try to take a stab at, this time, writing it myself. The problem so far has been that every single thing that you do when you're writing a book is not what you do when you're writing for television. What I was talking about earlier, all that interior monologue, all that off-camera what she's thinking and what he's thinking when she's talking and all that stuff, you can't do any of that. It's just dialogue. I'm finding it very challenging. I also have this weird impulse to get up and try to act it out myself, just the little things, the stage directions, so that it's not so awkward. It's a fun experiment. I don't know if I give it to somebody, if they're going to be like, yeah, just stick to books. [laughs] We'll see.

Zibby: What advice would you have for aspiring authors?

Cecily: Everyone tells you this, but reading, to me, is more helpful than anything else. I read across all genres. Maybe this is crazy too. There are even little kids' books that I love, picture books. I love the language. It's funny, the cover of Cobble Hill looks a lot like that Richard Scarry book, What Do People Do All Day? There are some lines in that book that I really like. There's a cadence to some kids' books. It is sort of like poetry. Reading for the music of the sentences, to me, is really important. Sometimes I'll just pick up a book that I know really well because I've read it a few times and just read a few lines. Then that gets me going again. I'm also just, I'm a book nerd. I'm guilty of the fact that I'll start -- I'm always reading like five different books at the same time. Do you do that?

Zibby: Yes. I, a hundred percent, do that.

Cecily: I feel like if the authors knew that I was doing that, they'd be like, what are you doing? You're not just reading my book? [laughs] Sometimes it'll just be a magazine or something. To get warmed up somehow, I always need to be reading. The other thing that I do is -- I'm sort of an insomniac, which is part of the reason why staying in bed all day makes sense to me. If you don't sleep, you may as well just be somewhere relaxing. I keep a pen or a pencil and a piece of paper next to my bed. In the middle of the night in the dark I'll just scribble down something. Usually in the morning, I can't read it. Every once in a while, it's worthwhile. It literally might be just a word or something. I do take notes on scraps of paper, napkins, Post-its. I'm always scribbling something down. This isn't good advice. This is just illustrating how crazy I am.

Zibby: I think it's great advice. I think reading is great. I think scribbling things down is great. I think opening up a book and getting inspired just by a couple sentences is awesome. Why not? This is all great advice.

Cecily: The other advice I have is -- I know after years of doing this that my brain doesn't really work that well until three in the afternoon. Some people are morning people. I'm definitely not a morning person. I probably wouldn't keep anything that I -- if I sat down at nine o'clock in the morning and made myself write, it wouldn't be good. I do everything else beforehand. I exercise and I do all the chores that I need to do and read and all that stuff in the first part of the day. Then all of a sudden, I'm ready to go. It has always been a shame for me that three o'clock in the afternoon was when people would start coming back into the house. I'm like, I'm writing. [laughs] I can be working at two o'clock in the morning. Ideally, if I didn't have a family, I would work from probably three in the afternoon until eleven o'clock at night. That doesn't really work when you have other people in the house. It's nice when you can just give yourself the liberty of being like -- you're not going to write for eight hours. It's not like a normal job. What works best me anyway is being like, oh, I'm going to literally just take a couple seconds to scribble this down. Somehow, I manage to piece it all together when I do have that time and my brain is in the right place. Then I'll write twenty pages at a sitting. What I'm trying to say is don't force it. Don't try to force something that isn't happening. Just go take a walk or go running or read something. You can't make yourself be creative.

Zibby: Or wander around Cobble Hill looking for a [indiscernible/crosstalk].

Cecily: Exactly. [laughter]

Zibby: Thank you, Cecily. Thanks so much for coming on my podcast. I know you're not a big podcast person, but you should listen to it because you're a book lover. You might enjoy it.

Cecily: It's so funny. I'm just old-fashioned. I'm just starting to discover podcasts. I'm excited. This is good. Somehow, I thought podcasts were for the people who are wired. [laughs] They're not. They're for everyone. I can do this too.

Zibby: You can experiment with your own. Have a great day. Thanks so much for doing this.

Cecily: Thank you, Zibby. It was really fun.

Zibby: Buh-bye.

Cecily: Bye.